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Blogs » Archive for June, 2004
Can You Read Me Now?
Do you remember when all web sites used various sizes of Times or Times New Roman? Then it seemed like Arial became the new rage. And lately, it seems that Verdana is the cool font to use. (I tend to prefer Verdana out of those three.)
As I was clicking around on Michael Bernard’s research (see yesterday’s post), I discovered that he and others have done lots of research on fonts used in web sites, their legibility, communicated “moods,” and even which fonts seemed to work better for older or younger viewers.
Just a few tidbits drawn from the articles:
- People tend not to prefer Times/Times New Roman for aesthetics OR legibility. (Funny that this is the default font used for most word processing programs and web browsers!)
- Arial, Verdana, and Georgia are good. (Tahoma is also quite legible, but may not be on everyone’s system.)
- Older people may think Arial is easier to read.
- Kids like “fun” fonts.
Have fun!
General summary of fonts in web sites
Research on font legibility and evoked emotions
Cobalt Not Dead Yet
eWeek is reporting that use of Sun’s Cobalt OS, released as open source as the hardware line was retired this year, is experiencing an upswing.
The article details NetCraft results showing more than 900,000 sites using the Cobalt OS, up 47,000 since last year.
I used Cobalt servers between 1999 and 2002, and while I had some grievances with the platform, I must admit it was very convenient for mass deployment of web sites and ran reliably.
pkgmaster.com (www.pkgmaster.com), an important site for Cobalt users, provides the latest patches and appears to be staying alive post-Sun Cobalt. There is a link on the main page now which hints of a new enhanced Raq 550 interface system being built, obviously by someone other than Sun.
Express from Web Matrix
Mary Jo Foley makes an excellent analysis, as usual, on the new Express range of editions for Visual Studio 2005 which you can download today.
The phenominal success of Web Matrix being available for free download opened ASP.NET up for all with an easy to use editor. Will these Express editions do the same? Download and use, and we’ll all see how popular they become :)
Friendster: switch to PHP
Via an anonymous tip off (OK Simon) – Friendster goes PHP, switching from JSP / Tomcat.
Apparently performance has visibly improved to end users.
Eventually Rasmus’s message of PHP as a Shared Nothing Architecture will sink in…
Web Design Practices
People designing ecommerce sites: Have you seen webdesignpractices.com? This site has been around for a while, but I didn’t come across it until recently while we were kicking around ways to improve the checkout system on our site. (Unfortunately the “ecommerce checkout flow” part of Heidi’s Adkisson’s research isn’t out yet, but I did find the site extremely interesting.)
Adkisson surveyed dozens of major ecommerce sites to try to determine if there was some kind of common practices across these sites that might define some kind of “defacto design standards” (the idea being that if 99% of web sites have a logo in the top left corner that links to the home page, it would be a good idea for you to do that, too, because everyone is used to it). She precurses her findings with the warning that “the data presented on this site are intended to inform design decisions, not dictate them. Common practice does not necessarily equate with best practice—and the relationship between consistency and usability on the Web is remains a lightly researched area.”
On the “user” side, a related study by Michael Bernard specifically looked at placement of ecommerce objects and where people expected them …
Hunt the Linuxtag PHP Presentations
Seems this year’s Linuxtag had a strong PHP showing in the LAMP Area. PHP Magazine has a write up here.
The fun now is playing hunt the presentations: PHP tradition is for speakers to put them online – the question is where?
Here’s three to be going on with;
- Debugging PHP with Xdebug – Derick Rethans
- Large Scale PHP – Rasmus Lerdorf
- eZ publish and performance – Derick again
Web Administration of Firebird
In conjunction with the interview I had with Firebird’s Helen Borrie (http://www.sitepoint.com/article/helen-borrie-project-lead), I wanted to make note of this administration user interface to Firebird.
ibWebAdmin, found at Sourceforge (http://sourceforge.net/projects/ibwebadmin), provides gui access similar to phpMyAdmin for MySQL.
It currently supports databases, tables, domains, generators, triggers, indices, users, csv, browse/edit tables, but the project home page notes there is more to do.
While most database administrators will tell you to learn the command line first, and I agree, it is essential to have a good user interface for administration to encourage experimentation with those on other database platforms.
[Quickie]New Macromedia Product RSS Feeds Available
A series of new RSS feeds are available from the Macromedia site for updating you on product updates, TechNotes and security bulletins. The list encompasses the majority of the MM product range, apart from HomeSite (which I assume active development has ceased on), and is a long overdue and much welcome addition to MM’s RSS feeds.
Feed List and Information can be found here
Separate but equal?
Manchester United football team have come under fire recently over the accessible version of their website, which offers all manner accessibility widgets but doesn’t contain nearly as much content as their regular site. SitePoint’s Trenton Moss first raised the issue, and has included it as an example in his latest article as well. Accessify also have coverage, and Matt May from the W3C has weighed in as well with an outstanding tirade against this form of bad accessibility practise.
From the above, it should be abundantly clear that separate “accessible” versions of content-driven sites are frowned upon by accessibility experts. However, does the same thing apply to web applications? A great example is Gmail, Google’s new webmail service. Gmail is one of the slickest web applications I’ve ever used, thanks to extensive reliance on JavaScript for everything from loading additional page information without a full refresh to keyboard shortcuts for almost every common operation. Unfortunately, the slick interface comes at a high price: the site breaks nearly every accessibility rule in the book.
Would it make sense for Google to provide an accessible alternative version of Gmail? As it stands, the service is inaccessible …
Analyse your site
Andy King’s Web Page Analyzer is a smart tool for checking the speed of your site. It can detect whether or not your content is being served using gzip compression, and offers a number of suggestions for performance improvements. The most useful tip I’ve seen it offer is this one about external CSS and JavaScript files:
For external files, try to keep them less than 1160 bytes to fit within one higher-speed TCP-IP packet (or an approximate multiple thereof).
Watch out though: it seems that the analyzer doesn’t currently follow @import links in stylesheets, so it may under-report your included CSS files.
