Archive for November 16th, 2007

EU: Airline Web Sites Must Improve Or Be Closed

Over 200 European Web sites selling airline tickets, including many run by leading airlines, are misleading to consumers and will be shut down if they do not improve, the European Union’s consumer chief said on Wednesday. Consumer Protection Commissioner Meglena Kuneva gave airlines such as Ryanair and the owners of the other travel Web sites four months to “get their act together” or face possible closure of their sites.

I don’t think aireline websites are the only ones out there that are misleading and are far freaking behind. Look at the real estate websites in the states, government web site, school website…. Oh yes, the list goes on. It’s not that expansive to hire a web team on part time to put up a nice and useful website.

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By Simon 2.0 0 Comments
Categories: General

Ten New Things in WebKit 3

Maciej Stachowiak from WebKit just blogged about 10 new things that are coming out with WebKit 3. The contents are very exciting. I can’t wait till i get my hands on the new Mac (which will be here in a couple weeks) and see it on there (things generally looks better on mac, windows safari is great, but not as good as the one on mac).

1. Enhanced Rich Text Editing - woot! This is the first time I see any groups say they are officially supporting all the different RTE. For those of you wonder what that means, it means the rich text editor you use on gmail and so on (including the one i’m using on WordPress) will be greatly enhanced both from functionality and speed with WebKit 3. We get all the buzz about how browsers are improving the memory leak, javascript core engine and so on. Those are important overall, but down to the detailed level, WYSIWYG (RTE) is one of those heavy javascript app that simply not well supported, although works and being really cool.

2. Faster Javascript and DOM - nothing but “Hooray!”

3. Faster Page Loading

4. SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) - SVG is an XML markup language for graphics that allows rich interaction and which can be mixed directly with XHTML.

5. XPath - Finally natively supported by someone.

6. New and Improved XML Technologies - Much more complete and compatible XMLHttpRequest, including support for event listeners, incremental updates for persistent server connections, parsing of more XML MIME types, support for more HTTP methods.

7. Styleable Form Controls - God, it reminds me the pain. Please release it faster so I don’t have to depend on pain killers.

8. Advanced CSS Styling - early implementations of CSS3 (i can’t wait anymore)

9. Reduced Memory Use - Yes. This is wait too important with all the great new features mentioned here. I don’t want to give up stable browsing experiences for cool features, it’s just no intuitive.

10. Web Developer Tools - I love you guys. You heard that, IE team? Now, where the hell is my dev tool on IE? No, IE Dev Toolbar doesn’t cut it. Where’s my error console that makes sense?

WebKit 3 - Web Inspector

WebKit 3 - Drosera - Javascript Debugger

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By Simon 2.0 0 Comments
Categories: Simon 2.0 Tech and Web Interactive

Ajax, Browsers, Running Out of Time

I just stumbled upon this great topic on Ajaxian.com.

The cause should be evident to everyone. We’ve taken what was first called LiveScript — a crufty embedding just good enough to validate a form or two — and we’ve abused it into being the foundation for a whole new kind of application platform. The browsers have just not kept up and the situation will only get worse with the accelerated proliferation of Web 2.0 apps.

Okay, he’s using the big buzz word, “Web 2.0″, but the point is pretty clear. We “discovered” (at least that’s what I like to call) Ajax and evloved into the new web era where web applications are no longer just web applications. Web applications, or the web experiences, have been heavily improved with Ajax coming into play. The result? Hybrid. It’s still the good’ol web content that we know about, but with the secret sauce of Ajax, we achieve great user interface interactions where we no longer break a simple request+response with a page refresh. Sounds cool right? But aren’t we moving too fast? The article puts out a great example:

Now I fear history may be repeating itself. Yesterday, I had Firefox 2 for linux crash 5 times, and IE7 for XP crash 7 times. The cause? Too many fat Ajax applications. Zimbra, the whole Google bestiary of applications, Yahoo Mail, etc.. These are all long running applications that I keep open for most of the day. Then all of a sudden the Browser is gone and I have to relaunch and login all over again.

“That ain’t a great example, it’s pretty common now days” you might say. And yes, that’s exactly why this example is great. Remember back in the days when Ajax hadn’t been heavily implemented? The web and your browsers worked almost perfectly and happily. Many of us have been blinded with all the cool new UIs Ajax has brought onto the table (or web page to be exact).

Ultimately, one of the most important piece for the web today is the in fact the browser itself. Without the browser, Ajax won’t even be here, with crappy browsers, Ajax application will never truely shine. Clearly, the applications have made far ahead of the browsers where it requires far more powerful support from the browsers. It’s like running World of Warcraft on a Pentiumn III computer with 128MB of ram (i highly recommend you don’t run that). Now there is one distinct difference between a desktop application running on an old machine and running a heavy Ajax application on the latest version of the browser. The truth is our machine doesn’t suck and if the Ajax application was written as a desktop application, I gurantee you it would run just fine. If you just happen to run into a browser crash, before you restart your machine, do a process list check and see what’s crashing it. Most of the time you will see your favorite browser hogging up almost 100% of your CPU (even you have a core 2 duo) and a crap load of memory. Think about it, how much memory can a freaking web application really use? Or let me rephrase that, how much resource *should* a freaking web application really use by the definition of the browser?

TIME TO CATCH UP, BROWSERS! YOU ARE NOW THE TURTLE, AND THE APPLICATION IS THE RABBIT!

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By Simon 2.0 0 Comments
Categories: Simon 2.0 Tech and Web Interactive
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