Current CSS3, HTML5 Support

The Tool

Last week saw the launch of FindMeByIp.com, a very handy web site that displays a user's current IP address (along with a geographic breakdown to city, if possible), user agent string (browser, version and operating system) and support for CSS3 and HTML5 (read the article about it). It accomplishes this last bit by using the Modernizr JavaScript library to test a series of features in your browser:

• @font-face
• Canvas
• Canvas Text
• HTML5 Audio
• HTML5 Video
• rgba()
• hsla()
• border-image
• border-radius
• box-shadow
• Multiple backgrounds
• opacity
• CSS Animations
• CSS Columns
• CSS Gradients
• CSS Reflections
• CSS 2D Transforms
• CSS 3D Transforms
• CSS Transitions
• Geolocation API

If you are running the Google Chrome for Internet Explorer plug-in, it will show up in your browser user agent string on this page. However, it will also report your Internet Explorer browser as Chrome.

The Results

The site developers ran their own browsers through this tool and that collection of information has been gathered up and posted to provide information on current browser support for the latest standards (or recommendations). Deep Blue Sky, one of the developers of this site, has written up the level of support in all the A-Grade browsers. Yahoo's model outlines A-Grade browsers as "... identified, capable, modern and common" and claims "approximately 96% of our audience enjoys an A-grade experience." This is their codified way of simply saying, "the latest common browsers." If you read my post, Browser Performance Chart, then you'll see the same browsers. The article, Browser support for CSS3 and HTML5, covers the following browsers (the author didn't test against anything other than Windows versions):

• Safari 4 (Win)
• Firefox 3.5 (Win)
• Google Chrome (Win)
• Opera 10 (Win)
• Internet Explorer 6, 7 & 8

The surprise in here is that Safari 4 outshone (outshined? outshinerified?) the others with Google Chrome coming up close behind. Firefox 3.5 was missing some key CSS3 support and Opera 10 was surprisingly lacking in support. As expected, Internet Explorer brings up the rear, lacking in everything but @font-face support (even in IE8) which has actually been there since version 6 (but only for the .eot format).

Personas in Comic Format

For developers, and clients, struggling with the concept of personas, there is a very easy to read primer in the form of a comic over at the ThinkVitamin blog in an article titled "How to Understand Your Users with Personas."

The concept of personas was first introduced in the book The Inmates Are Running the Asylum (1998) as tool for interaction design. In short (very short), personas are intended to help you (or your client) understand the needs of your users — their goals, experience, objectives, perspectives, etc. If I tell you too much, the comic won't really be worth reading, so go read it already.

It's like they're in my head.

Browser Performance Chart

Jacob Gube has posted a handy chart over at Six Revisions titled "Performance Comparison of Major Web Browsers." He tests the current versions of five browsers:

• Mozilla Firefox 3.5
• Google Chrome 3.0
• Microsoft Internet Explorer 8.0
• Opera 10.0
• Apple Safari 4.0

In his tests he used the following performance indicators, tested three times each with an unprimed cache, and averaged the results:

• JavaScript speed
• average CPU usage under stress
• DOM selection
• CSS rendering speed
• page load time
• browser cache performance

When Google Chrome 3 was released in September, Google claimed a 150% increase in JavaScript performance from its previous version but didn't offer comparisons to other browsers. Opera also made improvement claims in its September release of Opera version 10, specifically a "40% faster engine." Those claims are also not made in comparison to other browsers. The overall performance ranking he assigns to the browsers isn't too much of a surprise, with Google Chrome as the best and Internet Explorer 8 as the worst. If he ran as many persistent tabs in Firefox as I do, it might not hold on to the #2 slot so easily. The ranking:

1. Google Chrome 3.0
2. Mozilla Firefox 3.5 (tied with Safari)
3. Safari (tied with Firefox)
4. Apple Safari 4.0
5. Microsoft Internet Explorer 8.0

Use the chart below to link to the full size version. You can also download the raw data in CSV format from the site in case you want to try your own hand at colorful charts.

Developer Discusses Dyslexia and Dyscalculia

Sabrina Dent, a web designer hailing from Ireland, has blogged about her struggle with dyslexia and dyscalculia and web applications today in the post, "Dyslexia, Dyscalculia and Design". For some context, she links to the Wikipedia article on dyscalculia and highlights the bits that apply to her:

• An inability to read a sequence of numbers, or transposing them when repeated, such as turning 56 into 65.
• Problems with differentiating between left and right.
• Difficulty with everyday tasks like checking change and reading analogue clocks.

Sabrina discusses her experience with the examples of login screens (specifically the steps that require more detailed information than a username and password), phone numbers, and booking calendars.

It's a brief post, but it's insightful. As a web designer she understands the motivation for these types of interfaces, but that doesn't mean they are easy for her to use.

Derek Powazek on SEO as Snake Oil

There are many on the web who will recognize the name Derek Powazek. He is the name behind old-school sites such as Fray.com and Kvetch.com (which has apparently been taken over by spam bots) and wrote a book about communities (Design for Community, which mentions me by name, which is awesome). I also had the pleasure to meet him at SXSW back in 2001 and even participate in his Fray Cafe. So when I saw his blog post on SEO that started off with this statement, I was pleased:

Search Engine Optimization is not a legitimate form of marketing. It should not be undertaken by people with brains or souls. If someone charges you for SEO, you have been conned.

What pleases me more is that it echoes a comment I made in my post Verified: Google Ignores Meta Keywords back in September:

Those of us trying to protect our clients from SEO/SEM snake-oil salesmen are happy to finally have an official statement from Google.

Now that I've tooted my horn and compared myself to someone considered one of the top 40 "industry influencers" of 2007 by Folio Magazine, let me get to my point. I've been working on the web since Hot Java was still a browser, was excited when the first beta of Netscape Navigator made its way to world, when Yahoo were a couple of guys in a dorm posting links, when my Jolt Cola web site was included in their index because I asked them to include it, and since then the way people find things on the web has changed dramatically. For the last decade or so the search engine has become more than a convenience, it's a necessary feature of the web, without which we'd be stuck wandering billions of terrible pages of things we don't want to see (many thousand fewer of those pages once GeoCities finally closes down). Because of this, getting your site into the search engine in the top spot has become the holy grail of online marketing, one that far too many people are happy to exploit as an opportunity.

Derek makes two key points in his article

1. The good advice is obvious, the rest doesn’t work.
2. SEO is poisoning the web.

He supports the first point by noting that formatting, structure, summaries, quality links and so on have worked since the beginning and will continue to work. There's no magic there. It's free to read anywhere on the web. For his second point he references all the Google bombing tactics that are employed by bots to spam blogs, comment areas, twitter accounts, parked domains, etc. as well as questionable tactics that exploit loopholes (albeit temporary ones) in a search engine's ranking algorithm.

As of now the article has 180 comments, many of which are optimizers who take umbrage with the blanket statement that SEO is the work of the soulless foulspawn and their dark arts (my words, but I think I summarize his sentiment well enough). After receiving so many comments Derek added a post yesterday, his SEO FAQ, responding to a generalization of many of the questions and comments. He also offers some suggestions, including this one targeted at clients (I just took the first part):

If someone approaches you about optimizing your search engine placement, they're running a scam. Ignore them.

Having said something similar in the past to clients, this is normally where I'd segue into a discussion with my clients about how I've worked hard to ensure Algonquin Studios' content management system, QuantumCMS, adheres to best practices and provides many ways to get quality content into the pages, links, titles, page addresses, meta information (after I tell them Google doesn't use meta data for ranking but they insist because they've been conditioned to think that way) and so on. This is also the part where I remind clients that their help is needed to write that copy, interact with users, customers, partners, industry organizations, etc. to generate quality relationships and references (often in the form of links), and to plan to spend time working on this regularly to keep it fresh and relevant.

I look forward to the time when I won't be spending chunks of my day clearing spambots from my QuantumCMS Community forum, batting down spam email about submissions to 300+ search engines, ignoring bit.lys in unsolicited Twitter @ responses, and generally fighting the after effects of all the black hat SEO enabling we've allowed for years.

Come See Me: November 3

I will be one of the panelists at the Infotech Niagara panel session titled "Maximizing Your Web Presence." It takes place Tuesday, November 3, 2009 at 8:00am at Buffalo Niagara Partnership's conference room, 665 Main Street, Suite 200, Buffalo, New York 14203 (map below). BNP has parking information at their web site.

From Infotech Niagara:

Ok, you have a website, now what?

Join infoTech Niagara for a panel discussion on "Maximizing Your Web Presence." Our panelists bring years of experience in web strategy, web design, search engine optimization, social media, web video and more.

Come learn from the experts what you can do to leverage new and existing technologies to maximize the effectiveness of your web presence.

Panelists include:

• Adrian Roselli, Senior Usability Engineer, Algonquin Studios
• Brett Burnsworth, President, Zoodle Marketing
• Jason Holler, President, Holler Media Productions
• Mike Brennan, Vice President, Noobis, Inc.

Continental Breakfast will be provided.

Cost:
ITN Members: $10
Non-Members: $15
Students: $5

Register online.

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Wait - GeoCities Still Exists?

October 26, 2009 marks the end of an era. GeoCities, the much-maligned free hosting service offered since way back in the early days of the web, is closing down. Like Abe Vigoda, there are many who already thought it had long since fizzled out.

Dating back to 1995, GeoCities provided users with free web hosting accounts using their "neighborhoods" model and was getting over six million monthly page views. In 1997, GeoCities introduced the now infamous ads on its pages and still became the 5th most popular site on the web. At its peak as the 3rd top spot on the web in 1999 (behind AOL and Yahoo), Yahoo paid $3.65 (3.57 according to Wikipedia) billion for GeoCities. That's in billions. Some of us may remember the furor that took place when Yahoo laid claim to all rights over content (copy, images, etc.), which Yahoo eventually reversed. And then there was the dot-com bust. Over time GeoCities became synonymous with terrible, tacky web pages made up of animated graphics, under construction icons, background music, and browser download badges, among other horrors of the bygone days of the web.

Given Yahoo's recent cost-cutting measures it makes sense that the free service would be one of their offerings to go. Yahoo announced the closure on April 23 of this year, but yesterday Yahoo sent out a final notice warning to users explaining that they can move their sites to Yahoo's $4.99/month hosting service and to also warning users that on October 26 they are flat out deleting Geocities. All of it. With no chance of recovery. Period. So there.

Sadly, I don't know what I'll do without some of these GeoCities standbys, which haven't been updated in nearly a decade. That's 10 years. I carry on conversations with IRC bots younger than that.

• The Worst Simpsons Site Ever
• All-Wright Site (1,287,346 hits since 04/03/96)
• Dr. Doo Wop
• Ska*Anarchy
• GeoCities tribute with lots of helpful comments at Reddit

At least we still have Angelfire to deride...