Haiku, Gmail, and Web Standards

Haiku

Does anyone here know what “Haiku” is (…and no, I’m not talking about a 17 syllable Japanese poem)? Haiku is the brand-new name for an open source project that was formerly called “OpenBeOS”.

How many here know what OpenBeOS is? OpenBeOS is a project whose goal is to re-create, from scratch, an open source version of the late BeOS 5. BeOS was a very cool operating system that had many modern-OS features before Windows, Mac OS, or Linux did.

BeOS debuted in the late 90’s as an OS with a 64-bit file system, journaling, protected memory, pre-emptive multitasking, multithreading, and a whole slew of things that we take for granted these days. BeOS was super fast, and ran on both x86 and PowerPC processors.

After BeOS was looked at and passed up by Apple in favor of NeXTStep OS in 1997 (which was the core of Rhapsody, and later the current Mac OS X), Be delved into the “Internet Appliance” market with BeIA. The Internet Appliance market never quite made it into the mainstream consciousness, and in 2001 they sold the company to Palm. Many of the concepts that made BeOS so awesome have found their way into the upcoming Palm OS 6.0 (aka “Cobalt”).

Back to the point, OpenBeOS is trying to recreate the BeOS so it doesn’t die out. Due to trademark reasons (like those that have plagued the Mozilla Foundation), they recently changed their name to “Haiku”, which if you’re familiar with the BeOS (specifically the NetPositive web browser), the name makes sense. They just debuted their new website today.

When I saw it, I immediately thought that it would be awesome to submit to CSS Vault and CSS Beauty, as it’s a very attractive site. However, when I moused-over the image links in the upper right-hand corner, they flickered. “Hmmm… they’re not using Pixy’s Superfast Rollovers? That’s odd. Maybe I should look at their source code…”

I watched in horror as my screen filled up with table tags, invalid HTML 4.01, and more inline styles than I’d seen in quite a while. *sigh* How awful! It’s a perfect layout for web standards too. Grrr… What a waste!

Gmail

I hadn’t noticed this before today because I use Firefox, and it’s never been an issue that’s come up. Today, I needed to fire up a standalone version of IE5/Win, and ended up checking out Gmail in it. Gmail told me I couldn’t log in with my current software. It then proceeded to tell me that I needed to use one of the following web browsers to use it:

• Internet Explorer 5.5+ for Windows
• Netscape 7.1+
• Mozilla 1.4+
• Mozilla Firefox 0.8+
• Safari 1.2.1+

I found that to be very interesting, and actually a very good thing. Since Gmail is a highly-coveted, status-symbol-like service, it may very well make Aunt Ruth upgrade her browser to use Gmail (which will be recommended by her web-savvy nephew). And not only are they modern browsers, but they’re brand-new browsers (kinda)… namely the browsers running the Gecko 1.4 codebase and Safari 1.2. This also means that Mac OS 9 users are out of luck. There are no new browser developments going on for OS9. The latest version of Mozilla for Mac OS 9 was v1.2.1.

Hopefully Google will help make the web world a better place afterall.

Suggesting Improvements to Blockbuster

I downloaded Macromedia Central today. I was browsing the Macromedia website when I came across it, and I thought it looked interesting.

One of the features that they have is a listing of movies playing, and movie times in your area. “That’s awfully useful”, I thought, “but it would be better for me if this information was available as an RSS feed of some sort.

I did a bit of digging around, and looked up some movie and video rental sites, when I decided to visit Blockbuster.com. For those not familiar, Blockbuster is a major retail video chain that rents and sells movies on VHS and DVD. I worked for them back in High School as a front counter guy, but got fired for breaking up with my girlfriend (who was also an employee).

Anyways, I’ve never particularly cared for Blockbuster’s website. It’s never been very useful to me. Nonetheless, I figured I’d go looking for a list of RSS feeds.

Nothing.

So, I hunted around for the “Contact Us” link, and came across a form. This form asked for tons of information, including my name, address, phone number, etc. I hesitated to fill it out because I felt it was unnecessary in order to make a website suggestion. I was about to fill in the information anyways when I looked at the URL and realized that they weren’t using https://. Shocked, at the request for this kind of information without a secure server, I decided to dig through the source code to see if by some freakish chance that the email address was listed. Sure enough, it was.

I fired up Thunderbird, and tapped out the following email:

To Whom It May Concern:

My initial suggestion was to implement RSS feeds into your website, so that those of us who use RSS Readers to check the latest information from the internet might be able to see what the New Releases and Upcoming Releases are. It would be terribly helpful, and I might be more likely to rent or buy movies from you than I am right now. It’s a hassle to try and remember to visit your website to see what’s just coming out, and getting promotional or advertising email is just plain irritating.

But as I went to fill out your contact form, I realized that you guys are asking for some very sensitive information, and you’re not even using a secure server (https://). Being a web designer, I simply looked at the source code in hopes of finding an email address, which I did. Personally, I don’t believe that I should have to give you all of my personally identifyable information to you, just to ask a question or make a comment. Secondly, if you ARE going to REQUIRE it, use a secure server — at the VERY least.

I also find the text on your website more difficult to read than necessary. Luckily, I use the Mozilla browser, so a simple CTRL+[Plus] will raise the text size a bit. Viewing your site in Internet Explorer for Windows, it is impossible to increase the size of the text. This is definitely a usability drawback. Perhaps it would be useful to implement a widget that allows users to switch between your normal stylesheet, and one where the fonts are larger. This allows you to bypass the flaws in IE/Win.

Also, your overall code could use an update too. You’re still using extensive tables for layout purposes. Tables are bandwidth hogs. The onyl reason to keep them would be for Netscape 4.x users, but those are down to a mere 0.4% as of March 2004 statistics. There are more people using Palm’s, PocketPC’s, and WebTV than there are using Netscape 4.x. Switching to either valid HTML 4.01 or XHTML 1.0 Transitional for markup, and using CSS for any and all layout purposes, you’d be able to slash your source code by a good 60-70% (just by eyeballing your source). Do you know how much this will save you in bandwidth costs? I’m sure you get millions of hits per day. This savings could really add up for you.

Another benefit for switching to standards-compliant code would be that users of non-standard devices (including PDA’s, web-enabled cell phones, blind or otherwise disabled users) would still be able to access a text-only or slightly styled page, and your site would be more accessible to these people. I’m sure that they like to spend money at your stores too, and I’m also sure that they care more about being able to access and use the information from your website, rather than being shut-out because they don’t use the same types of browsers or computers that the rest of us do.

I’d like to suggest a few articles that could really help you improve your mindset when it comes to the web, and how that enlightened mindset can truly help your customers:

• The Business Value of Web Standards by Jeffrey Veen
• The Business Benefits of Web Standards by Tristan Nitot
• Buy Standards-Compliant Websites by Dominique Hazaël-Massieux
• Using XHTML/CSS for an Effective SEO Campaign by Brandon Olejniczak

It is not my intention to harass you or belittle your work, but I thought you guys might be able to appreciate some valid customer feedback on the usability of your website. Improvements aren’t a bad thing.

If you’d like to contact me about my suggestions, you can reply to this email. If you don’t care to think about or try to implement my suggestions, that’s obviously up to you. I’d just like to see something better come of Blockbuster, and that’s really what the spirit of this email is really all about. Although I’m not at all affiliated with them, I know that the guys over at Happy Cog (www.happycog.com) are quite skilled at this sort of thing, and even if you were to choose to use your own people for any potential redesign project, these guys are definitely some people you should hire as consultants.

Thank you for your time,

– Ryan Parman

I hope that they don’t think I’m crazy or anything, although they most likely won’t do a thing about it, but that’s probably the worst that can come from this. The best thing would be if they redesigned using XHTML+CSS to the benefit of all of their customers, AND set up RSS feeds so that I can check the new movies.

We’ll see what happens.

Bye, Bye, BuyMusic.com

Do you guys happen to remember BuyMusic.com and all of the fuss from the web standards community this past summer?

Well, according to the guys over at As the Apple Turns, it appears that the BuyMusic.com experiment was a complete and utter failure. Are we suprised? We think not.

I suppose it was a bad idea to lock out users of Mozilla, Opera, Safari, Linux, MacOS, and other technologically advanced groups of people.