As you may or may not know, along with my full time job I do freelance design work on the side. My company name is “Devilbox Design. Recently in a push to get some more business I finished my website. I do all my development on the macintosh platform so I was not able to view the resulting site in Microsoft Internet Explorer version 6 or 7.

In the area of web design there are a set of standards that have be developed that make design and usability easier. These are simply referred to as “Web Standards“. Most browsers (ie. Firefox and its siblings, Safari) are standards compliant browsers and what you design looks the way it should in those browsers. These browsers are free, and are just waiting for you to download. But being that the majority of computers are Windows based pc’s and Internet Explorer comes built in most people will not view a website built on “Web Standards” they way it was designed to be seen.

That is unless the designer takes extra time to make special “hacks” and add special code to their site so Internet Explorer will display it correctly. But why should a designer have to design his/her site twice? They shouldn’t that’s what makes standards so great.

This became apparent to me again as I was working on my website. I built the entire site using a Cascading Style Sheet or CSS, which is a standards way of building a site. In a CSS layout, imagine everything on the page to be floating in it’s own little box. You tell each box where to sit on the page in relation to the other boxes and they stay there. It’s extremely nice to design this way because if you want to change the look of the site you can just move pieces around and reconfigure the look. Site was done, and looked good in Safari and Firefox browsers. I began to publish the website and traffic began to visit, then I remembered about Internet Explorer’s shortcomings in the “Web Standards” arena. I had some friends view the site from there Windows PC’s and send me screen shots. The result was a deluge of sweat and tears. Microsoft had decimated my newly created site.

After about a week of recovery I decided to sit back down at my computer and rebuild the site in a “Table Based” layout. In this technique imagine the website like an excel spreadsheet and you put an image in each cell, even the blank ones need a transparent GIF file to keep the table in shape. It’s a lot of extra work but it should solve the problem because Internet Explorer doesn’t have to understand how/where to float the images. They are all stuck to a grid and can’t be moved.

Site gets rebuilt and I check in Safari and Firefox, and both look good. I check in Internet Explorer 7 and 2 of the 3 pages display correctly. My portfolio page has some issues still and I don’t know what else to do. I haven’t had a chance to view the site in Internet Explorer 6 yet, I’m sure it’s better than is was before but I’m guessing there are still some problems.

Web standards have been apart of the web for several years now and Microsoft has had ample time to make their browser compatible. There was talk that version 7 would be and web designers everywhere were rejoicing but that didn’t happen. Now I hear mention of version 8 coming, it is currently in a private beta testing stage of development. Even if IE 8 is fully compliant with “Web Standards” the adoption curve for new technology is so slow that designers will have to continue making adjustments to their sites for years to come. IE 7 has been out for over a year now and still about 50% of people still use version 6 (it’s a free update).

So I plead with you as web users to use a standards compliant browser and to keep it up to date for both our sakes. If Microsoft read this blog I would plead with them to stop being so lazy and slow, but they don’t so I won’t.

Here are a couple of projects working on some of the issues brought up in my previous post on social networks.

Googles Open Social

The web is more interesting when you can build apps that easily interact with your friends and colleagues. But with the trend towards more social applications also comes a growing list of site-specific APIs that developers must learn.

OpenSocial provides a common set of APIs for social applications across multiple websites. With standard JavaScript and HTML, developers can create apps that access a social network’s friends and update feeds.

Common APIs mean you have less to learn to build for multiple websites. OpenSocial is currently being developed by Google in conjunction with members of the web community. The ultimate goal is for any social website to be able to implement the APIs and host 3rd party social applications. There are many websites implementing OpenSocial, including Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING.

In order for developers to get started immediately, Orkut has opened a limited sandbox that you can use to start building apps using the OpenSocial APIs.

Data Portability

As users, our identity, photos, videos and other forms of personal data should be discoverable by, and shared between our chosen (and trusted) tools or vendors. We need a DHCP for Identity. A distributed File System for data. The technologies already exist, we simply need a complete reference design to put the pieces together.

To put all existing technologies and initiatives in context to create a reference design for end-to-end Data Portability. To promote that design to the developer, vendor and end-user community.