I have as much dispute with IE6 as the next guy - there's no denying that it's holding us back and we'd be better off without it - and I fully support non-disruptive evangelism efforts that encourage IE6 users to upgrade to a modern and more secure browser. It's in their best interest after all.

But the notion that IE6 support should be discontinued, or that its users should be blocked, is dangerously misguided and missing the point. IE6 isn't your problem, and you shouldn't even maintain a list of supported browsers in the first place. If you think I'm talking to you, continue reading.

Via Inclusive Web Design For the Future (by Steven Champeon & Nick Finck):

The goal of Web design is not merely to dazzle, but to deliver information to the widest audience possible. Compromise is possible and desirable, but such compromise should not come at the expense of the user, but rather in terms of the native capabilities of the user's choice of device.

As someone that designs and develops online, one of my primary responsibilities is to deliver an accessible user experience. To my users, and not their choice of access. Their media device, operating system, browser, screen resolution or viewport - there's no denying that these factors should be considered when planning a new project, but they shouldn't ever be treated as constraints that place limitations on the interface or experience. They are merely variables that come together in any number of ways for any number of users. And although you can trend and analyse them today, they will undoubtedly change tomorrow, and next week, and month, and year... you get the picture.

If you think IE6 is today's problem, how will you deal with IE7, Firefox 2, Safari 3 or similar browser generations a year from now when they fail at rendering your standards-compliant CSS3? Cry foul like a stuck record from a bygone era and demand that your users upgrade once again to meet your standards? No, I didn't think so.

Then what's the alternative?

So glad you asked - progressive enhancement of course!

Before you point fingers, I'll be the first to admit that I'm not exactly a PE poster boy candidate. Using this site as a quick example - I built it with best intentions just under a year ago, and despite saying then that I'd adopted a PE strategy, there are so many things that I'd do differently today. But in my defence, that's the very nature of designing for the web: a continuous cycle of learning, adapting and growing.

So PE isn't new to me, but adopting it's methodologies into my workflow has taken longer than I'd like, only because it demands changing a system that I've spent a long time refining, and these changes demand free time that I generally don't have. But with every new project, I take another step closer towards PE utopia. I'd say I'm currently bordering on a solid progressive enhancement strategy, while some thinking around the defunct graceful degradation approach still remains.

See Understanding Progressive Enhancement by Aaron Gustafson for an overview of the subtle differences between the two concepts.

Both graceful degradation and progressive enhancement consider how well a site works in a variety of browsers on a variety of devices. The key is where they place their focus and how this affects workflow.

Although I don't appreciate the sweetness offered by the M&M anology, the article does a good job of introducing the two important follow-ups: Progressive Enhancement with CSS and Progressive Enhancement with JavaScript. Definitive reading!

Ultimately, you will need to take the basic principles and adapt them as best you can into your workflow, all within context of course (if you exclusively develop intranets for IE6 then don't bother). For example, the biggest changes that I've made include:

• Adopting a JavaScript library - together with behavioural separation, jQuery provides me with powerful, unobtrusive and accessible methods for manipulating style and content. I swear by it, but I'm careful to not rely on it.
• Resetting my CSS: see Eric Meyer's Reset Reloaded (and Again) as a starting point, or A Killer Collection of Global CSS Reset Styles if you have the time.
• Sizing my layouts and typography using ems - How to Size Text in CSS (by Richard Rutter) is invaluable.
• Using conditional comments to target IE6 and IE7-specific CSS for style compatibility. Familiarise yourself with IE's hasLayout too - adding one simple rule to your conditional CSS will save you a lot of trouble and time.
• DD_belatedPNG - Medicine for your IE6/PNG headache! - the holy grail of PNG support in IE6
• Being comfortable with the idea that despite the above points, my interface designs are secondary to the content that they deliver. They will never render consistently for all users - but then, they won't know the difference anyway.

And there you have it! No more reason to blame IE6 for your laziness or reluctance to adapt. If you're not convinced, have your say in a comment. I'd also love to hear if and how you're using PE in your own work, or any experiences worth sharing.

More reading:

• Pragmatic progressive enhancement  - why you should bother with it (by Christian Heilmann)
• Creating gracefully degrading javascript and enabling progressive enhancement (via Mark Story)
• Progressive enhancement in action (via Nvision)

The Independent Electoral Commission will spend R3 million to fix its broken website as complaints mount.

Wow!

Allow me to first provide an overview of the events leading up to this latest development of absurdity in the IEC website saga, before I add my own thoughts.

In late August, Alistair Otter published an article on Tectonic (a popular open source-related technology site) about how the South African Independent Electoral Commission (IEC)'s website was denying access to visitors not using the Internet Explorer web browser on a Microsoft Windows platform. That in itself was nothing new: in January 2006 I blogged about their site, listed among others, pointing out that exact shortcoming - see State of South African political websites. Ian Gilfillan commented, bringing to my attention that South Africa's political web wasn't any better in 2004 either. However, the focus of that post shifted to the DA in particular, because I successfully compromised the security of their CMS. ;)

To date, over two months later, the IEC have made no discernible effort to correct this flaw. Visitors to http://www.iec.org.za ("www" subdomain required - WHY!?) using any browser other than Internet Explorer will receive this message:

Our server detected that you are using a browser or operating system (e.g. Netscape, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome etc.) which is currently incompatible with our website. The current website is only compatible with Microsoft Internet Explorer V4 (and upward) on the Windows operating system.

In the days that followed Alistair's Tectonic post, Aslam Raffee (chairman of the South African Government OSS working group), Daniel Mashao (the CTO of SITA) and Helen King (Principal Advisor of The Shuttleworth Foundation) laid a complaint with the Human Rights Commission (HRC) against the IEC for excluding non-Internet Explorer users from its website. Aslam has made the full complaint available on this blog.

The latest developments that made headlines today, in response to the HRC complaint, is that the IEC will be spending R3 million to fix their broken website. And when they say broken, they're referring to the fact that it was designed and developed (way back in 1998) using Microsoft's proprietary technologies - so in effect they will be redesigning and redeveloping it to support all their visitors. My response to this news echos what everyone else has said.

On top of that, Karl Fischer - a well-known open source advocate - launched the No Firefox! No Vote! campaign today:

...urging Internet users to email or fax IEC chief information officer Libisi Maphanga, to demand that the organisation make its website available to all users.

LYW Karl. Visit Stop Digital Apartheid to get in on the act.

Raoul Snyman, a fellow web developer, has published An Open Letter to Mr Maphanga, CIO of the IEC.

So where am I going with all of this?

Well, regular readers of this blog will know that in the past, I had a tendency to name and shame the big brand national websites that failed acceptable support for web standards (to the point that I even maintained an "Evangelism list" for a while), in an effort to get them to realise and admit their shortcomings, and as a result make the appropriate changes for the benefit of their users. I doubt it made any difference, but if anything I hope it provided some insight for those who stumbled upon it.

Six years on, with a wide variety of modern web browsers and technologies fighting a new browser war, there sadly still exists an ignorant mindset that internet user's best interests should be disregarded in favour of designing and developing for a specific browser, platform or device. This has got to change.

The IEC have become the new posterchild for the return of the evangelism list.

My resolution is this: a public wiki or blog that shames (in a constructive manner) the local websites that fail an acceptable level of support for W3C web standards (ie. they're browser/platform/device incompatible), accessibility guidelines, and potentially also best practices in web design and development.

Alongside this list, links to local designers and developers who are accredited with providing the relevant services that meet this demand - and are willing to do it for a budget well within R3 million.

And for good measure, a list of sites that showcase the multitude of benefits associated with a standards-compliant, accessible and usable approach to modern web design.

If you like this idea and think it has the potential for good, lets hear your thoughts in the comments below, or you can contact me directly. Thanks.

Well, the Technovated team (who were kept busy with the impressive Kindo) have now put plans into place, and TECH4FRICA 08 is coming to Johannesburg, South Africa on October 3rd!

With speakers such as Joe Stump, the lead developer and architect of digg.com; Andy Budd, the internationally renowned user experience designer and web standards expert; and Stafford Masie, the Google SA Country Manager; the conference promises to be a pioneering and intimate affair, congregating digital elite for the first time in Africa.

Check out the rest of the speakers and the 5-star venue.

Focus areas include:

• Emerging tech in Africa
• Web / web 2.0
• Mobile / wireless innovation and trends
• Startups / technology business opportunities in Africa
• Telecoms / infrastructure growth and trends

Some of the things you can expect to get out of the conference:

• Hear international speakers presenting in Africa
• Hear industry leading African speakers talk about their experiences
• Discuss global web and technology opportunities
• Understand what technologies are making the biggest impact
• Thrash out how the web can play a positive role in the development of Africa
• Create a fun, informative event where everyone can meet and interact with like-minded people

Get involved:

• Join the Facebook group and the Facebook event
• Subscribe on Upcoming
• Stay in touch on Twitter

Unfortunately, it didn't work as well as their users would have liked, and quite a few of them made that very clear. Others left complaints on public service site HelloPeter.com. While technology news site Tectonic gave them a scathing review about their lack of support for web standards, 84% of MyBroadband users voted that they should consider another redesign. Even Wikipedia joined in on the action, claiming Ster-Kinekor had "the slowest loading website in Africa"!

The people spoke, Ster-Kinekor listened, and four months later, they re-redesigned.

Present day. This post is not another review. Our design community and local bloggers provided them with more than enough useful, experienced and free feedback to improve their online presence, and I'm not going to waste my time again since judging by their new site, they're content to continue learning by making their own mistakes. I'm not saying the new site is a mistake, but I wouldn't call it an improvement either. I'll explain why. Here's a snippet from what I wrote last time, which I refrained from expanding on:

With some forward-thinking, Ster-Kinekor could potentially have one of the largest national websites

Consider this. Ster-Kinekor have, according to them, over 1.5 million members in their Movie Club. That's 1.5 million potential website users, if I'm correct in assuming that those members with access to cinema have access to the web too.

I was a Movie Club member for a number of years until late 2003, during which I received regular e-mail updates informing me of the latest releases, competitions and special offers, my points balance, etc. That was great, but it never developed further for whatever reason. But what about today, three years later? With 1.5 million users knocking at their door, the opportunities they're faced with are phenomenal; a web marketer's wet dream. So why are they still treating their website like brochureware? What about this "Movie Club" that they promote so much?

After more than six years online, you'd think they would have progressed from that phase of redesigning every few months in favour of providing their users with long-term practicality and feature-rich services.

Once upon a time...

• My Ster-Kinekor website would recognize me and welcome be back on return visits.
• It would already know my region and closest cinema.
• It would let me buy movie tickets with a few easy clicks, without requiring plugins or having to disable my browser's popup blocker.
• It would let me link to individual pages of the site on my blog, and send page links to my friends and family. These links wouldn't break for the next 5 years.
• I'd be able to customize the site based on my personal preference.
• It would offer me recommendations sent to me by my Movie Club friends, and groups that I'd joined.
• I'd be able to write my own movie reviews, and share them with other members.
• I could meet other members that share similar interest in movies.
• It would show me new release trailers based intuitively on previous movies I'd watched, reviewed, or added to my favourites list.
• It would let me keep a list of movies that I hadn't yet seen, and compare it with those of my friends so that we know which DVD to hire next, or which ones I could buy as gifts through the Ster-Kinekor online shop.
• It would automatically enter me into competitions.
• It would reward me with a free ticket if I'd booked more than 10 in the last 6 months, or referred more than 5 friends to the club.

My Ster-Kinekor site would do all of that and more. What does your Ster-Kinekor site do?

UPDATE [25/09]: Consumers 'being fed a lot of hot air', by Wendy Knowler (IOL)

After a two year labour of love, coffee and coding, Alistair Carruthers unveils South Africa's biggest search engine. Carruthers marries open source technologies like Lucene with Microsoft's proprietary .Net framework for a truly inspiring result.

The local search engine market has quite a history.

The first one I can remember was Ananzi which had a good start in the mid 90's, but lost the plot over the years with it's bloated and irrelevant portal content and ads.

Aardvark originated in early 1997, and was created and maintained by Intekom - previously a wholly owned subsidiary of Telkom SA. Much like Ananzi, it has evolved into nothing more than an ad-infested portal and is now powered by Google South Africa, returning the same results in an uglier package.

Zebra followed, engineered by the powerhouse of synergy that was THOS. It showed promise but was short lived, and has since reappeared as an African Travel search (nice logo).

Funnel is fairly new to the game, having launched 6 months ago. ITWeb gave it an unenthusiastic review in June, and it hasn't improved much since then. It denied rumours a month after launch that it was intentionally blocking rival sites such as News24.com in it's results - since it's partnered with IOL and partly owned by Sales and Marketing Director Leon Lategan - while coming under fire for missing .com links.

ITWeb's review makes a strong point, which also applies to the South African web in general:

While Funnel plays on its "proudly South African vibe", it doesn't offer the local language options that Google does.

Google South Africa supports 4 of our 11 official languages, English excluded - Afrikaans, Sesotho, Zulu & Xhosa.

Back to Jonga... "a South African search engine born out of pure frustration with the lack of SA-relevant results returned by search engines".

I first heard about Jonga earlier this year when it appeared in my referrer logs with a development test URL. I was curious to read that it finally launched ("jonga is launched!" reads their homepage.. heh), and took it for a quick test drive. First impressions today are that it looks good, and is free of advertising, but could use some tweaking beneath the skin.

For starters, it's erratically slow. I searched for jonga and waited 40 seconds for the results, but tried again minutes later and waited for a mere 0.3 seconds.

The name Jonga is derived from the South African Xhosa language, and roughly translates to look or aim, but it too suffers from the English-only syndrome.

The footer reveals a number of further shortcomings, firstly this message which takes us back some years:

This site is designed for Microsoft Internet Explorer v6.00 or greater at a resolution of 1024x768.

And the following claim:

Searching over 22,500,000 web pages and growing.

Funny then, that the link - which searches on ".za", returns only 21,868,749 results, with "Air France Southern Africa" the second result? This made me wonder how sites are ranked.

I performed a seach for "coda" and discovered that sites linking to mine appear higher in the ranks than my site itself, which infact I didn't even find after the 5th page of results. When trying "coda.coza", my site appears under "Results in other target areas" on the side - perhaps because it's hosted on a German server, which shouldn't matter either way.

One final test, I searched for "telkom": 359,703 found in 0.047s.
The first result is indeed Telkom SA Limited, but links to http://www.telkom.co.za/verifyadsl instead of their homepage. Weird. I then tried jumping to the 2000th result by changing the (rather crufty) URI querystring, and received the following amusing page:

Displaying results 2001 to 1000 of 359,703 found in 0.266s

Apologies! - Returned results limit reached.
Jonga does not provide more than 1000 results on a query.

I would never normally click through to the 2000th result, but surely if they're claiming to have that many results then they should all be accessible?

Jonga has a 'search history' drawer, hidden away on the left. I would never use this since Firefox remembers my previous search terms anyway, and it's clumsily implemented - the sliding animation is time consuming and unnecessary.

I like the 'preview' feature link associated with each search result, which reveals a scrolling frame with the result's page embedded. I'm not sure I would use it that often though - I find it easier to simply open the result in a new browser tab with a click of my mouse scroll wheel.

Lastly, http://jonga.co.za doesn't resolve - one of my big pet hates.

In conclusion, Jonga is a welcomed addition to the South African web but it remains to be seen how it evolves over the next year. Share your thoughts with a comment.

UPDATE [06/12]: http://jonga.co.za now resolves, the site was reindexed and footer figures/wording adjusted, and the browser requirement was removed. View Alistair's comment for further clarification on points I raised above.

UPDATE [09/12]: Breaking News! Yahoo! have bought del.icio.us! Search engine + social software web service = new breed.

I visited Windows Live (live.com) today, via /..

What is Windows Live?
Your online world gets better when everything works simply and effortlessly together. That's the basic idea behind Windows Live. So the things you care about - your friends, the latest information, your e-mails, powerful search, your PC files, everything – comes together in one place. This is a brand new Internet experience designed to put you in control. And this is just the beginning – you'll see many more new services in the coming months.

If that means anything to you! You can read their Press Release which better explains this new service, along with the full Live Ideas suite. Depending on which web browser you use however, you may get a different page: Firefox displays a page listing the suite complete with broken images, while in IE you're redirected to this page, complete with a broken 'Try Windows Live now!' link.

I tried a quick test search at Live.com and clicked to view the next page of results, which returned a server error. Since they're misapplying AJAX to perform a "live" search, ie. displaying the results without reloading the page, they're not allowing for bookmarking of results and are also breaking the browser's Back button. Clicking back from the error, the page returned to the default state and I had to repeat the search.

I still heart Mozilla though

Firefox 1.5 was released this morning. One of my favourite additions is the new 'Report Broken Web Site' wizard (in the Help menu) to report web sites that aren't fully compatible with Firefox, for whatever reason - something already present in Safari and Opera. I experienced some issues using it this morning but had better success a while ago. Take that, MSN Music and Musica Digital!

Keep an eye on Spreadfirefox.com for something new to come.

UPDATE: If you're using Firefox, you have to try this config edit referred to as bfcache (Back-Forward Cache). What a difference it makes!

In September last year I had much praise for Flickr.

Now, I'm not so sure.

An increasing number of bugs accompanied by nonsensical workarounds, "database lag" issues, slow connection speeds, Yahoo!'s corporately/greedy buyout (which prompted this) and a lack of personal control are all contributing to a general loss of interest in using Flickr to host photos as a paying customer, despite it's strong appeal with the social networking aspects.

I've never been a fan with hosting personal data on sites other than my own, which probably explains why I don't have a gmail or del.icio.us account either. (that, and because my name was already taken! ;)

This particular bug - Changes have reverted back to old data - has been pestering me for the past few days and despite staff's timely and comprehensive support, there doesn't seem to be any explanation for why my set descriptions and some photos lose their changes over time.

I expect the description of the set in this photo to revert back to what it was before I applied some changes, ie. no link on "atmospheric optical phenomenon" and "South Africa" regressing to "back home".

We'll see...

Also, I've renamed the set to correct the typo: after all these years I just realised it's Crepuscular and not Corpuscular! Thank you wikipedia for unmiseducating me. Damn you stupid web page that contained the mistake and have since disappeared from the net!

It is the third centre of its kind in the world, with the other two in Scotland and India.

Chris Pinkham, managing director of the centre, co-founded South Africa's first internet service provider, UUNET, in 1993. In 2000 he joined Amazon.com in Seattle as director for the network engineering group and later as vice president responsible for worldwide IT systems infrastructure.

The launch of the Amazon centre in Cape Town is "testament to the calibre of the highly-skilled talent pool in South Africa", according to Pinkham.

Source: Mail & Guardian Online

UPDATE [20/07]: Gareth has covered this in more detail, along with posting a link to the site: http://za.amazon.com, and I can't agree with him more:

This also has to send a message to the techies in SA - stop burying your head in the sand and take a look at the rest of the world. Take part, get involved, tell people about your skills, stop thinking the world ends at the Limpopo.

If you're looking, they're hiring!

There's something to be said for web applications like Backpackit in times like these. Although I've never owned a Hotmail or Gmail account simply because I don't feel comfortable with another party hosting my personal data. There are probably some OS solutions available.. any ideas?

These things always seem to happen at the worst of times - I'm extremely busy this month, as indicated by my lack of regular blog updates. It's like when you call someone over to your machine to look at something, and when they get there then the application freezes or the web connections starts to lag horribly, and you feel like an embaressed, incompetent turd.

I picked up tickets to the sold out Green Day gig, on this day next month. Fellow Americans Jimmy Eat World, Taking Back Sunday and Canadian outfit Simple Plan are supporting...phwoaaa!! Couldn't ask for a better lineup. (talking of music, Coxy: did you drop the baton? I never received it... ;)

UPDATE: Useless fact: I just noticed I've only blogged on Thursdays this month. Expect another update on the 26th.

It looks like Microsoft are jumping onto the online music store bandwagon with their MSN Music store, which according to /. should officially launch today with the release of WMP 10. According to the /. article, you can browse the site with Mozilla, however, ActiveX is required for full functionality so IE is required to use the store. But as one reader comments, you can use the Mozilla ActiveX plug-in. Fair enough though, the site lists the minimum hardware and software requirements to play radio or purchase music from MSN so they're well aware of their intended target market. And clearly non-IE or non-Windows users aren't it.

I took the site for a quick spin in Firefox 0.9.3 (side-note: check out the redesigned Mozilla.org - vastly improved, but still area for improvement me thinks. Kudos to those involved!) and have the following feedback to report.

The first thing you'll notice is that their special characters are, well, not special characters. i.e. They're using a Ÿ reference to give Ÿ, but they should be using the proper HTML character entity reference • (unicode) or • (ISO) to give •. Sloppy!

Next is their search box:

Powerful search: Our easy-to-use music search engine will help you find music by artist, album or song title.

By default it contains the text "music search". When you click into this input box, this text disappears. Fine with that. When you click off it without typing anything, it doesn't reappear - removing all indication that this is their search box. I find that majority of sites which use this onfocus/onblur technique never replace the default text. The input box just becomes an ordinary input field with a "go" button alongside - not very helpful. Furthermore, the "go" button isn't clickable. You have to hit your <Enter> key to perform the search.

After performing a search I clicked to visit one of the results, the R.E.M. artist page. "Rate this artist" didn't work; neither do any of the song ratings. The dynamic "Read More..." link, which is supposed to expand their profile, didn't work. I then clicked to view one of their albums, 'Out Of Time'. In the "Listeners Also Liked..." box, the list is supposed to consist of an album title, followed by the artist, and then a new paragraph with a new recommendation. There are no paragraph breaks so it just appears as one big list. And then like /. noted, ActiveX is required for full functionality, so you can't listen to any of the tracks.

So nothing new there, Microsoft aren't doing themselves any favours. But do yourself a favour and check out Windows Media Player 10 - I downloaded the beta version a month or two ago but never got around to installing it. It's a 12mb download - larger than WinAMP 5 and Firefox combined, but I've always used it for video since I find Winamp sluggish in that department so it's an upgrade if anything.