Notes from a wireframe world

Watch the Euro-elections 2009 for free.

Lets consign IE6 to the dustbin of history, let never have to think about that terrible product again!

It seams to be the whole of the design/developer communities manta at the momentum, but is it really the right one? Can we really forget about IE6 and more the point should we.

Everyone has there own list of reasons why IE6 is the spore of Satan and why we should forgo thinking about it at all, however no matter how hard we wish, there is still more than %20 of the people out there running IE6, think about this for a second, more than one in five visitors to your site is using a web browser most of us would rather we didn’t support.

Well I hear people cry, throes using IE6 need to be educated, told, that it’s a pile of and then they will start using a real browser like firefox or chrome or at least upgrade to IE7/8. However the sad fact is that most of throes people can’t. There not the kind of people who love the blink tag[1]. IE7 became a forced upgrade to windows, so either the IE6 users out there have, by choose refused to upgrade or something is stopping them doing so.

That something is IT management at large companies. No sysadmin worth there salt is going to let users upgrade any bit of software, let-alone something as non-critical as a web browser unless there is a very good reason to do so, and it has been throughly tested to ensure it doesn’t either create any more security holes and doesn’t brake something else, more critical, on the network.

So they are not going to upgrade there users to IE7 (let alone IE8 or firefox) until Microsoft stops supporting it, regardless of how many pop-up boxes you display on websites telling people to upgrade.

So we’re not going to get throes 20% of people to upgrade, so what shall we do? Just ignore them? Well doing so will lose your client 20% of there customers straight-a-way do you really want them coming to you 6 months after a project ends and asking you why all there corporate account suddenly left and went somewhere else?

So do we need to forget nice rounded corners etc? The answer is of course no. however your site should follow the principles of progressive enhancement (or Graceful Degradation, depending on which side your standing) and design your site so it looks good (not the same just good and usable) in less powerful browsers, be that IE6, the iPhone or a screen reader.

Is that really such a huge price to pay? Should we really be spending our time hating a bit of software we have no control over? or should we be spending our time making accessible attractive sites?

P.S. IE7’s just as bad as 6.

PHP (PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor) can and has been used in lots of different ways to generate everything on a website, from HTML to Graphics, to PDF files. However one thing appears to have slipped under the radar of PHP developers and web site designers (maybe because both designers and developers guard there own domains very tightly) is using PHP to generate CSS files.

CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) are used to put a design around the content of a website, however there are a number of problems (mostly due to Microsoft) in their use, different browsers have different levels of adherence to CSS rules etc.

Traditionally designers have either used non-standard tags or other work-a-rounds to design different sheets for different browsers, this of course has increased the design time. However PHP has the functionality to be able to detect what browser is calling it, and so, be able to serve the correct CSS for that browser.

This still doesn’t significantly reduce the overhead in designing for multiple browsers on its own however there nothing to stop someone writing an in-house tool that takes a standard CSS file (written for browser X) and then generate a PHP script (or at least the input for a script) for multiple browsers. This of course will still need testing by human designers and most likely tweaking, but it should reduce the time needed to produce different versions of the same CSS file.

But there are also other tricks PHP can do to aid the design process. Since the whole of the layout process is governed by CSS it can be used to display different images dependent on, for example the time of the day, or month of the year.

I’ve been looking how to use Javascript to move HTML elements around a page, just as iGoogle does with the applet boxes.

I’ve found some intresting stuff at walterzorn.com and if there is an save or load button the layout could be saved/loaded from a MySQL database (or anyother database) with some ease.

This would allow the user to design there screen the way they wanted based on a template which is set-up when the user signs up.