By vendor, that constitutes 176 crashes/hangs/‘not-respondings’ of Microsoft software to 21 of Adobe software over the same period. Now, it feels like I’m cheating the numbers here by reporting Windows Problem Reporting itself, because probably 90% of its crashes occur when reporting on Internet Explorer, but hey — these are the numbers Microsoft’s software itself gave me, so who’s complaining?

In case you think this isn’t a fair comparison for reasons of time spent using various programmes, exclude Problem Reporting crashes (though you shouldn’t) and the Microsoft stat comes down to 124. That is, lots.

I can’t think of a day since owning this computer I wouldn’t have used at least one piece of Adobe software, most commonly more. To be fair, Adobe software is more likely to do weird things (like, ya know, refusing to save) causing me to restart the application rather than letting it ‘crash’ per se… but Microsoft’s junk is vastly less likely to give me any sort of warning before flaking out.

These crashes are reported over a three-month period spanning November 26 until January 25.

Vista SP1 continues to be eagerly awaited.

I haven’t had to do any real CSS hacking in IE7 just yet, but was nonetheless surprised to discover that that Peekaboo bug is still hanging around. Thankfully the old faithful height:1%; still instantly resolves it, but… wow. Still lingering after so long?!

I had to call up to find out what browsers they officially supported, only to be told that support was limited to Internet Explorer on Windows, Mac (!!) and Netscape 7+ on both platforms. Firefox “hasn’t been tested”, Safari hasn’t been looked at. I’m not particularly keen on this, but hey, they’re a bank… we all expect them to be a bit backwards.

The application sniffs for a Java Virtual Machine and refuses to load without even providing an error message if one isn’t detected. This wouldn’t be so bad but for the fact that it checks explicitly and exclusively for the Sun virtual machine… so anyone who doesn’t use that platform for whatever reason (licensing, ethical, platform) — even if they have another fully compatible virtual machine — can’t get access.

My solution? Disable Java (not JavaScript) altogether using the Web Developer’s toolbar, then sign in (it doesn’t choke!), wait til you get to the main applet pane, re-enable Java, and press F5. Magic, it works.

There is absolutely no reason or excuse for this behaviour. If this fits into some perverted notion of security, I’m not comfortable having my money there. If it’s the product of an incompetent web team… well… they’re an incompetent web team. Grr.

I called up and asked why it wasn’t working, then explicitly asked for a report to be forwarded to the web team. Please lots of people do this (heh, you don’t even need to be with St George… they didn’t ask me for a name or account number during the phone call!)… this service is unneccessarily stupid at present!

On a plus side, their phone service is good fun. I couldn’t find a support number quickly, so I called the dragondirect number provided on a letter (1300 30 10 20) and when none of the options matched “support”, I just hammered “9” repeatedly. Works on a lot of PBX systems, and it worked there… I got through to a human within 30 seconds, who then put me straight into the queue for web support. Good stuff.

• Font rendering. This is how ClearType should have worked years ago.
• Improved standards compliance. The Sunrise Family site (live) now works with IE7 near-perfectly (i.e. no more or less broken than most other browsers. On par with Firefox, worse than Opera and Safari.) Happy happy happy!
• Zoom. Note this is SEPARATE to font sizing. But it’s still a little broken.
• Homepage tab group isn’t an extension or extra software that needs to be added. Whenever you add a homepage, IE prompts you if you want to make this your ACTUAL homepage or add it to the opening group of tabs. Playing catch-up, sure, but a good feature nonetheless

Against:

• Font rendering. It’d be great if it could intelligently antialias only san-serif fonts, and not process fixed-width or serifed fonts, which it invariably makes “fuzzy” rather than clearer. Also, font rendering seems to be smaller by default, which is both a good thing — it’ll force designers to make their base font sizes bigger — and a bad thing — in that, obviously, those designers that don’t conform will be subjecting users to painfully small text :-(
• Interface. Kudos for thinking outside the square, or whatever, but I reckon people are going to struggle getting used to this. I know I will, but that’s probably because I switch between at least five different browsers daily and expect them to all behave about the same. I get confused when going between Mac and PC, mostly, because the keyboard shortcut bindings change from Apple/Start — I’m using a KVM — and control + [key] change, so Internet Explorer moving anything around is bad for me, unless everyone else follows suit.
• Broken zoom resizes images + elements in HTML fine, but on one of my sites struggles resizing the background on the body (or maybe html?) element. Also, it doesn’t keep (all) centered sites centered once you zoom. This will obviously have to be fixed for the final release, too. I searched their newsgroup and couldn’t find anything so I posted something about it quickly. Vote for it, please :-)

The site

This is the vaguely alluded to website of a few days ago, for Seven Network’s breakfast show (I refuse to describe any such commercial network drivel as “current affairs”!), Sunrise. The Sunrise Family is essentially an incentive/loyalty scheme vaguely akin to Triple M’s (recently-abandoned… doubtless to be re-released in nearly exactly the same form under a different brand) Freq Club and Entertainment Book–style discounts. There might be more later on, but that seems to be about it so far as what’s there right now. And, truth be told, I’m not really sure what else is coming… I’d love to replace Sunrise’s boring ROSwall form with something akin to the infamous Flash Just Letters interactive fridge thingo, though maybe in an add-only type way, which would link in to viewers’ existing Family login (i.e. so they don’t have to enter their name every time, etc.), but that’s just an idea of mine.

The technology

So, the deals.

The interface is using AJAX, presently with inline onClick triggers — because, unfortunately, I’m not quite good enough to make it pull the data from the ID… though, if you view source, I’ve setup the ID’s to have two pieces of data in there. If anyone can tell me how to write an event handler that converts an ID into a string which I can then feed to an onClick handler (and, server-side, explode() using PHP) I’m still very keen to fix that “properly”. The ID’s have two data elements because the Deals interface is designed to add support for multiple states (i.e. localised offers, etc.) in the future. And they’re prefixed by d_ because, obviously, valid identifiers can’t start with a number. D can stand for “deal” or “data”, whatever :-)

As for how the AJAX is pulling down data, I’m just using innerHTML, because it works in pretty much everything and is lots faster and lots simpler than “real” DOM methods, especially here. Observe the “Details” pane on the right of that page, and how there are different numbers of paragraphs of text, different types of data (lists, anchors, etc.), then consider how ridiculous it would be to use DOM scripting there. Euuuuccch. So, I’m not-quite standard but perfectly comfortable about that. I am, however, using HTML 4.01 as the doctype. There is no reason to use XHTML, and I’m not happy to use XHTML and not serve it properly. And, if I serve it properly, it’s too likely to break (parsers spit the dummy when encountering bad XHTML, because tolerance is zero) for a production site. Further, obviously, innerHTML doesn’t work when documents aren’t served/parsed as anything other than text/html.

I’d rather do absolutely awesome HTML 4.01 than valid but mediocre (and ultimately pointless, seeing as it’s not being parsed as XML even) XHTML.

In other nifty technology-related stuff, Yahoo!7’s partnership means (hopefully) that Seven will up the ante in terms of what technologies they’re unfurling. For us, this means taking a step forward and providing syndication services (both Atom and RSS formats) for the deals. For Seven as a whole? Well, maybe they’ll start to get rid of their once-ubiquitous table-based layouts, and (maybe) embrace more of an open broadcasting paradigm in line with their web strategy — assuming Yahoo! are directing that in any way, and/or that Seven’s online team have open minds — I don’t really know and haven’t personally dealt with anyone there, so I’ll just assume they must have a handful of cluey people on board!

The RSS and Atom feeds won’t be available if you’re checking it out on Monday, but it’ll likely be running by the end of the week. For Yahoo! users, this means they can add Sunrise Family Deals to their personalised page (but, seriously, who uses portals? I never understood that whole thing). For everyone else, you should be able to download a feed reader and add the feeds. I’d love to have a page telling people how to do this on the site, but imagine Yahoo! would object. So I’m saying it here: the people that matter know how to do it! (Though, I imagine, the “people that matter” — you, dear reader — aren’t particularly regular Sunrise viewers. Or, like me, never Sunrise viewers. Heh.)

We’ve also implemented a spot of JavaScript to fix text-selection in Internet Explorer. My layout is pretty insane in terms of the sheer quantity of absolutely positioned elements, which broke that functionality in Internet Explorer. One quick question to the WSG mailing list later, someone had provided a JavaScript fix (which we had to edit a little bit to make work properly, because we had problems with flickering elements even with cache enabled).

The eye-candy

I’ve implemented useless (but rather cool) eye-candy on the Deals page in the Details pane whenever a new deal is selected. A variation of the Fade Anything Technique, which is only meant to be pretty. No originality is claimed, we’ve had this technology all millennium.

Accessibility

Disable JavaScript and you lose the fades, and use a little more bandwidth as the entire page reloads for every item you click. In terms of non-visual user agents with JavaScript disabled, I’ve put the “Details” above the list of offers in source-order, and on every reload they only hear “Sunrise Family. Link: Skip to main content” (presuming they select the link) before getting to the actual details, so I’m fairly happy on that front.

Additionally, I’ve got the “header” from Yahoo!7 last in source-order, so anyone with assistive technologies don’t have to skip over that EVERY TIME they change the page. It was a little painful to figure out, not in the least because Yahoo’s supplied universal header isn’t at all nice for sites that are built properly — i.e. with web standards and accessibility in mind — but I much prefer it this way. This is also something we had to achieve silently and without complaining, because, whilst anyone who has a clue about web accessibility will immediately see this is a good idea, marketing people would conceivably think: “But we want people to see our search bar more often!”. Er, no, you don’t achieve anything by pissing off users. No matter, we pulled it off without making any noise about it!

We’re server-side sniffing for Firefox and handing it an “Add Yahoo!7 to the Firefox Search Box” link (which, incidentally, has particularly horrid inline JavaScript — but I don’t care because the only UA it’s being served to can do something useful with it), whilst IE users get a “Make this my homepage” link in its place. Yahoo’s version (which you can see on Seven’s — pure Flash, *obligatory shudder* — Australian Open website, though I think that version (of the header, not the website) might now be deprecated) uses JavaScript for that, but it was fairly obtrusive and, seeing as we have the ability to do that server-side, I’d much rather reduce page weight.

In terms of accessibility generally speaking, I’ve bundled in all the usual goodies such as a skip to main content link, as well as skip to login on the front page, base font size of 100.01%, and relative font sizing throughout… but extensive image replacement techniques mean that the headers are probably sub-optimal in terms of visibility. This one is out of my control, and everyone else in the workplace seems to love small text (even Lyn, who seems to often put on glasses to read things on a screen… go figure!) so I wasn’t going to fight too hard about it. All other text will scale pretty well, with the exception of the deals — because the layout is so tight, it’s only really possible to go up one, maybe two size steps in most browsers.

We’re lacking any explicit accessibility statement, and we’re also lacking access keys. Mostly because I’m convinced access keys are practically useless, and rarely bother to implement them. (On forms, there are never enough buttons for access keys and/or there’s no logical combination available, and everywhere else it sort of seems a bit pointless unless everything has an access key. Where do you draw the line?)

This site is interesting to me because, even though it’s a television audience, I still can’t make assumptions about how people will be browsing. PDA devices, for example, would struggle with our built-for-1024 layout had we done it with tables. For this site, PDA/mobile users are realistic: for example, if someone incidentally is near a Wendy’s store and remembers they might’ve seen something on the Sunrise website but can’t remember the details, they can quickly and painlessly look it up.

Further, the site also has to cater for people with cognitive or motor disabilities. For cognitive disabilities, one thing in our favour is that we’ve provided a short summary of each deal before a more heavy-duty fulltext item. For users with motor disabilities, the entire website should be accessible via tabbing — including the JavaScript-enabled Deals page.

I lost an argument regarding target=“_blank”, but will eventually win this point. A handful of advertisements — including those for intra-network links, such as for the Seven Store — open in new windows, which I am most certainly not a fan of. All external links, however, should have the rel attribute set to external. There is unfortunately no visual cue associated with this. Links I count as my biggest area of defeat in this website, which is pretty good (as in, I’d rather it just be that than something more significant such as iframe usage, enormous usability problem though new windows may present).

Inline JavaScript is completely unrelated to accessibility in light of the way this has been implemented. Admittedly, it would be advantageous to use event handlers in place of inline JavaScript (and we will be thinking that to ourselves as we look at the traffic statistics), but from an accessibility perspective it has very little impact. Standard HREF’s are defined, and caught with Javascript using return false; No functionality is lost. I much prefer this method to scattering iframes throughout the site! At any rate, I’m still trying to resolve this one, accessibility related or not. It’s a matter of personal pride, I suppose.

The Styles and Bugs

The entire design (done in-house by Dacien) is awesome (in my opinion — if I didn’t think it was, I just would have kept quiet about it), but very tight.

So tight, in fact, that I had to set outline:0; on some links to stop Firefox from breaking the layout (1 pixel difference) when a link was active (as they are when you click a deal and it’s caught by JavaScript rather than actually reloading the page — the link remains active), adding a 1 pixel dotted border. Cross browser support is pretty awesome — it should be good in IE back to 5 — Opera, Safari, Konqueror, and even (mostly) IE 5.2 Mac are happy. Firefox deserves special mention: it has so many little (big for this site) things wrong with it that it’s often rather painful to make work properly. In fact, of all browsers mentioned, Firefox 1.0.x (on non-Windows platforms) is the only one whose behaviour I’m definitely not happy with (mostly because I expect better from it, but also because it gets some things horribly wrong).

Such as, for example, the “Meet the Family” page. It works perfectly or near-perfectly in every other browser, but certain Firefox variants on certain platforms render only the first two items in the “Sunrise Team” list(/right column, if you’ll excuse my presentational-speak) on first load… and then renders perfectly if you refresh the page. This is what I meant by my “predictable inadequacy” post of a few days ago. I’m fairly certain it’s something to do with floated list items, but possibly not.

Another bug is (also in Firefox — noticing a trend, anyone? No, I didn’t build for IE. I wrote about 90% of the stylesheet sitting in Firefox 1.5.x using Chris Pederick’s Web Dev extension, and both that browser and Opera operate near-perfectly) Firefox 1.0.x’s penchant for adding scrollbars where they’re not required with overflow:auto (see front page on non-Windows platforms, and the Deals page — lots of style overlap/common classes there, so this is to be expected).

By far the most interesting rendering difference I encountered building a layout this tight was between Internet Explorer/Windows XP with and without Windows Themes enabled. Yes, it does make a difference. Interface widgets shouldn’t really interfere with styles at all, IMO, but they did here. The solution basically entailed shaving off a couple of pixels where required, so I didn’t come up with something particularly innovative for it!

Summary

In all, I’m pretty happy with the site. Seven’s internal Online team apparently noticed/complimented our team on the absence of layout tables, which I (perhaps arrogantly) take with some degree of indifference: people shouldn’t be building sites with tables for that purpose anyway. If we are to be complemented, then it should be on the design (and, as part of that, achieving a design this ‘tight’ with CSS), or on the usability benefits realised by intelligent integration of AJAX, or the development pace (again, partially because of the flexibility CSS gives us), or maybe on lightweight, semantic code as a cost-saving mechanism.

Truth be told, I now believe we may have even gone a little overboard with the tables elimination. If I could do it all again, the Deals page would feature a table instead of a list, and I’d use DOM scripting to insert/delete records rather than replace the “state” part with innerHTML. The markup might gain a (very) little bit of weight, but it’d be worth it. It would, of course, remain semantically sensible and completely accessible. It’d probably be more semantically sensible, actually. I realised a table would work great about two days after I’d finished styling the list, and thought “I’ve put way too much effort into this to pull it now”, but felt like Dave Shea must have after building a “pseudo table” without realising. At least it wasn’t that complex!

Anyway, I’m really interested to hear what people have to say about the site. We’re being plugged every half hour on Sunrise tomorrow morning from 6am, and will be anxiously watching the server to see what, exactly, the effect of promotion on a show with 4 million viewers daily has on bandwidth, etc. I’ve also installed an AWstats tracker to collect aggregate data (as on this site) which we’ll parse later on (assuming the horrible monster that it’s running on, Zeus, outputs normal-ish log files for me! Oh, and it doesn’t support mod_rewrite, but instead has some retarded alternative that seems like a cross between VBA and AppleScript — and fails as much as the latter did in terms of actual ease of use, despite trying to use human language. It’s very dumb.) to figure out how Australia is doing in terms of browsers, operating systems, screen resolutions, JavaScript support, and the like. Should be incredibly interesting stuff, and I can’t wait!

Unfortunately, NetMeeting is too difficult to use, and one end (or both ends… our end I’m 99% sure is working fine as I write this) had routing difficulties because, obviously, NetMeeting doesn’t use some crappy central directory server unless you select the “Microsoft, please steal my information” checkbox. Which, unlike the latest MSN Messenger install, isn’t ticked by default.

PC software makers suck. Earlier this week I… had an encounter with Tori’s laptop, featuring no less than 188 individual specimins of spyware: A new record for me. I started trying to dis-infect but eventually pronounced it vaguely beyond repair. The spyware was such that it was blocking sockets for all applications EXCEPT I.E. (presumably because it can control Internet Explorer infinitely better than it can anything else–more than a couple of sites were blocked, too), so I couldn’t even update the anti-spyware definitions. It’d also broken Windows Update. Yar, this be re-install territory. Caused, probably in no small part, by “ticked by default” junk.

anyway, i’ve been using firefox for like at least a year now cos of all the silly things attached to internet explorer.. actually it was my brother who downloaded it.. but yeh it’s pretty good!

Kim, via email. It’s funny, because I still have to file this post under “Geek”. Time to ditch the categories for freeform tags, methinks!

Dean picked up my post via Technorati, a blog search engine that uses RPC update services to track what people are talking about in real-time. I was suitably impressed by this diligence and apparent desire to hear what the market has to say about their product: could this be the same company whose birth was so marred by a spat of cyber-squatting, in what Dean Jones was reported to have described as a fit of “youthful exuberance”?

Apparently so. Ansearch’s beginnings, though marred by dubious practices¹, received praise from various quarters of the mainstream press — or, at least, those quarters not controlled by News Corp, whose domains had come under threat. However, the Internet community responded quietly, and those voices that were heard were mostly of disdain at Ansearch’s domain practices.

Strangely enough, my original post wasn’t about any of that. I hadn’t heard of Ansearch until I read an article on them in the SMH — an article which reads a little too much like a rehashed press release for my liking: the telltale sign is in the closing sentence “Ansearch is the search engine division of Optum Ltd.” — if it were filed in the Business section of their paper, I’d understand, but it wasn’t.

I wandered over to their site, played around for a bit, and decided their offering was mediocre. In hindsight, it probably didn’t help that I wasn’t shopping for anything in particular — according to a ZDNet article, “In the short term [Ansearch] is focusing very heavily on the commercial end of the market.” — but at that point in time, I also don’t think they’d tuned their listings particularly well, as a search for DashLite turned up my WordPress hack over commercial listings for the actual Dashlite brand I inadvertantly used.

I say “at that point in time”, because it appears to have substantially improved since, as per Jones’ claim: “Much has changed since your first article on us some 6 months ago.”

Much improved, it seems, on several fronts. Their core offering has shaped up nicely, and some facets of my initial complaints regarding accessibility have been met. Their ancillary product offerings seem to have developed nicely: Ansearch CEO Jones claims “Each of [our properties] goes through up to 7 stages ranging from an initial, simple SERP/Directory style page through to a more involved service, mini portal, search tool, etcetera.” He went on to say that these ancillary properties (such as http://www.picsearch.com.au/, http://www.videosearch.com.au/, http://www.thefreedictionary.com.au/ and http://www.messengers.com.au/ amongst several others) are currently being actively separated from the core Ansearch site (he described it as “quarantining”), and the exact direction of a number of these projects would become clear over the coming months, with the appointment of a full time manager of these online properties.

I’m a tad concerned about his description of their strategy with regard to these — he said this would become clear over the months to come, and I’m hanging off two words here: distributed portal. Whilst I can see this as being of value to users (especially for generic, non-brand-specific/legally dubious domains such as jokes.com.au and the ones listed above), it doesn’t seem to fit Ansearch’s core strength as I perceive it: as a commercial portal, and not as another Google. “We are not aiming to be another Google… we don’t have their budget and, to be frank, there are enough people trying to clone them: why build another?”

In fact, Jones suggested that Ansearch’s strengths lie in that it is not the ubiquitous search behemoth, and that its index is “something unique… something faster… [and] against the so called “arms race” of search (my SE has more links than yours etc…)”. I’d agree this is indeed a strength, and also a reason for them not to try and be a portal. Australia already has Yahoo! and NineMSN for domestic portals, and I’m struggling to see what Ansearch will do to differentiate themselves in this: but I’m happy to be surprised!

Ansearch apparently holds an index of only 500,000 websites considered by its metrics to be “most popular”. I argued that this was potentially a bad thing as relevant content might lie outside this realm: for example, this website performs well when people search for reviews of the HP 2610 or information about Apache on Ubuntu linux or ACT files from MP3 players that record audio, but isn’t included in Ansearch’s core index.

Which is perfectly valid, for a commercially-focussed site, I just think they could be missing out a little bit. They can leverage on my content for their advertising impressions and potential clickthroughs, because they have more valuable content showing up in their listing alongside advertised products. If someone reads my HP 2610 review after having found it in Ansearch, and decides they’d like to buy it and remembers having seen a “Buy HP printers!” ad on Ansearch, they’ll most likely click “back”. It’s abstract, behavioural stuff, but valuable nonetheless.

Whether it’s valuable enough for them to bother is another matter. “We spider our own content… something that over time will be done daily,” says Jones. “Having only 500,000 websites will allow us to index sites more often, and as is the case with the ‘site info’ pages, provide far more info on these pages.” Which is a value-add, and worth preserving. If that’s all resources permit, I think they’re doing the right thing as is. Jones openly admits Ansearch’s index of popularity “has a commercial flavour to it” — and rightly so. Given their much-touted gender and age demographic based search feature, this makes sense.

Their index of popularity seems to be fairly slow-moving. “Monthly we add around 20,000 sites… and take out 20,000.” I’d guess this would be the lowest 20,000 that gets shuffled, and this seems to make sense. One has to wonder whether all the higher-ranking pages can have substantially fresh content month after month, but presumably they do — it’s one of the things the SEO experts have always cried from rooftops.

It was interesting to hear Jones speaking about these people, too: amusing, even! Web developers the world over often join in speculation as to what exactly makes search engines tick, such that we can boost our clients (or employers) website’s performance. It seems the reverse is also true: search engines all over the world similarly speculate as to what those horrible developers are doing to screw with their indexes day in and day out!

I don’t say this in jest, and I believe they’re right to complain: “The larger SE’s are having a very tough time coming up with clever ways to index content to counter SEO… only to have SEO’rs quickly find ways around it. Cat and mouse…” I think “counter SEO” was a poor choice of words, given that relevant content should hopefully still be rewarded, but his point stands.

Just as interesting is Ansearch’s strategy to avoid falling prey to dodgy SEO tactics:

By only indexing the root page, we remove almost all SEO trickery. This works in 2 ways. Firstly, people rarely put spam on their home page — that is, doorway pages, link farms, etc. usually reside away from the main index… and, secondly, it deletes multiple results from the same website. It also stops the site owner/webmaster from saying they are relevant to 100 or 1000 keywords or phrases.

Kids, we just found a new argument against clients who love their splash pages!

Content rich front pages aren’t, however, an absolute solution (at least, not in Ansearch’s index). According to Jones, Ansearch’s policy of “ranking sites in true usage popularity, both on and offsite” is “SEO proof… or at the very least, extremely resistant.” I’d agree it’s a powerful metric, but my reservations above still stand.

One caveat of Ansearch’s algorithm that appears potentially exploitable is its failure to exclude content in the from indexing. I don't just speak of standard meta author/keywords data, but of something else.

As highlighted in the screenshot above (click for original page, link may expire), Ansearch’s listing is including content between <style> tags. This presents potential for SEO abuse², as most browsers happily overlook errors in CSS — and <style> tags can be placed towards the top of a document: if we are to believe the SEO myths, increasing their relevance in engines. Of course, it’s entirely possible the content bears no weight at all — but the question of why it is stored in their index at all remains unanswered.

This is another reason to reward websites that use semantic markup properly, though at this stage that would exclude disproportionate amounts of the web, so I understand engines’ hesitance to embark on anything like this. It’s not something a lot of sites use”, says Jones, before continuing “but it will be used more and more in the future.” Well, so much of the web community hopes.

This formed part of Ansearch’s defense for not having embraced semantic markup from the outset. According to Jones, it’s built on a technology developed for a pre-April 2000 (dot com crash) search engine — so that partially excuses the markup at launch time. Jones’ first comment on their failure to use semantic markup was simply that “The majors [Google and Yahoo!] don’t use it” — something I’d dispute the validity of, as Ansearch isn’t a “major” player, and, as has been established, is chasing a fairly different market sector. Their core business is search, but it’s a different breed of search conducted in a different way: and semantic markup and accessibility is a different way. Encouragingly, Jones sees the potential for embracing semantic markup in the future on both technical and commercial grounds: “It makes sense to use it and as it does open us to a wider audience with various devices used to browse our site.”

He didn’t cite the “reduced bandwidth expenditure as a result of lightweight code” reason, presumably because their host, OzHosting/Destra charges only for the link, not for transfers over this, on their dedicated server range.

Irrespective of their reasons, the future of Ansearch in terms of markup is promising:

Our long term goal is to have Ansearch website designed without any tables and heavily styled using the CSS, which eventually will gives us more control on how we present our site to different media types.

Ansearch has gone through several minor enhancements over the past 6 months with the releases of versions 1 to 1.3. We are currently planning a major update for version 2.0 and the issues [of semantic markup and separation of presentation and content] will be addressed.

But as we know, markup isn’t everything: content is what ranks well in search engines erm… content is what draws an audience. Ansearch’s exploration into the development of portal environments is something to be watched with interest over the coming months, as well as its other business aspects, including an advertising network known as Soush that remains slightly enigmatic, and the mysteriously named “Factory” division.

An announcement is expected to be filed with the ASX later this week outlining something of Ansearch’s future direction: At this stage, I’m inclined to believe that the future is a positive one, as Ansearch distances itself from its much-criticised practices at launch, to a diverse range of product offerings that uniquely fulfil the needs of Australian Internet users.

Update: A followup to this has been posted, in response to a criticism that this review was overly technical in nature. Read on!

Notes

¹ Justified with the catch-cry “MSN do it, so we can, too!” — to which the only sensible reply is, “yes, but MSN do it with Internet Explorer, and as soon as you go and write your own web browser, feel free to hijack as many unused pages as you want.“
² I notified Ansearch of this shortly prior to publication in the hope that, if this is indeed an issue, it will be resolved before this post is noticed and widely acted upon. One hopes this potential problem disappears quickly.

Okay, I admit it. This is a shameless procrastination attempt. But now you know how long I have to procrastinate for, so feel sorry for me (and every other year 12 student in NSW). Or something.

Oh, and, as with several things on this website, I’m perfectly aware it displays kind of on top of some text in Internet Explorer. I don’t particularly care. If it annoys you, then using a better web browser will not only fix that problem, but also reduce the probability of spyware, viruses, and other miscellaneous nasties from installing on your computer. As a bonus, you also get nifty things such as tabbed browsing, etc.

^* Well, observant users who aren’t using RSS. Okay, okay, last jibe at the RSS users today!

You can see the printer in that photo — it’s a fair bit smaller than the G85 was (before you go searching — because I know you actually care that much — I’ve only ever fleetingly mentioned that printer on here before. A quick search just turns up a whinge about drivers, from last July.), probably between two thirds and a half its size (in terms of bulk — it has an equivalent footprint, or maybe a bit shallower).

So what’s this thing do? Printing, scanning, faxing. Duh. It also has PictBridge stuff (which I doubt I’ll ever use), memory card slots, an LCD display, and network support.

I’m still uncertain which of the last two is cooler, but I’m leaning towards the network support.

The main control panel is very well planned out, and highly usable.

The LCD screen tilts backwards and forwards (into a recessed area within the printer), and is backlit.

Its viewing angle is pretty mediocre, but it’s good when you’ve got your head in the right place/adjusted the screen properly.

Now that I’ve got the trivial stuff out of the way with lots of pictures, time for some more exciting and slightly-less trivial stuff with even more pictures! The network feature!

Yeah, okay. We’ve all seen a plugged in network cable before. Probably even seen a network cable plugged into a printer before. So why’s this special? To quote Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “Let me count the ways” — okay, so I’m not quite in love with it. (Thank goodness).

For one, this is a dirt cheap consumer printer. Well, probably a little more than dirt cheap. But squarely in the home/SOHO market, so the network support (it does USB, too) is out of the ordinary.

Not only is the presence of a port out of the ordinary, the software side of things is also surprising. HP, of course, have their own “JetDirect” network printer protocol. Which isn’t IPP, and isn’t some crappy Windows share. It’s supported on Unix systems thanks to HP’s co-operation with the open-source community, and on Windows/Mac systems, HP bundle software to deliver this functionality.

Still nothing special? Okay. How about this.

You can not only use this network printer to print, but also to file share and network scan.

Yeah. Cool, huh? Whenever you plug a card into the memory slots, it will appear as a network drive on Windows systems with the HP software installed (with one caveat, but I’ll get to that soon). I’m not sure what happens with Mac computers, but I imagine it’d be similar — we haven’t got any of those here for me to test with, a situation I’m planning to remedy in the near future.

Whilst on the topic of those memory slots, it’s also possible to scan on the device direct to the card, so you don’t even need a computer with drivers for scanning. Also, much in the same way as many consumer scanners have a button you can press to activate scanning on your computer, this device similarly allows you to do that — only you’re given a choice of which network-connected computer to send the scan to!

Scanning needn’t be so complicated, however. The first thing I did after installing cartridges was to setup the network inteface manually to ensure the device had a static IP and couldn’t get lost on the network. In my usual compulsive geek-investigator state, I scanned the ports of that IP (I picked 192.168.0.4, the lowest static IP still available on my network — we also use 192.168.0.101 to 200 for DHCP, but that’s a story for some other time) and discovered that in addition to the JetDirect and Windows file sharing ports, there was also port 80 open.

Score! I thought, as I hadn’t expected anything so civilised as a web interface on this thing.

I loaded up the page, and was greeted with this:

It gives miscellaneous information about the status of the printer, along with links to various other functions. The most important of which is “Scan”.

Clicking through to “Scan”, I’m greeted with a simple enough screen that offers a choice of image type, and document size. One thing that does suck here is that A4 isn’t an option for the document size, so it’s impossible to scan the full size of the plate with the web interface. Standard desktop scanning software has no problems, this is just a usability flaw in the web interface.

You can preview your scan in this page, as shown in this screenshot…

…before progressing to the actual scan.

This next bit had me confused. At first, I thought it just didn’t like Firefox — so I walked over to a Windows computer and gave Internet Explorer a go. Same problem. It said the scan had completed successfully, but I couldn’t see anything. Internet Explorer, however, offered a more intrusive explanation of what had happened, proudly proclaiming that it had blocked a popup window.

So, back to Firefox, I added 192.168.0.4 to the list of allowed popup sites, and all was merry.

The experience has been a mostly positive one, with one exception. Their Windows XP software sucks. That needs some qualification — it only sucks if you’re using it in an environment that has been administered correctly. If you’re Joe-my-computer-is-full-of-spyware-from-running-as-administrator-Smith, then you’re in luck (for once): it’ll work fine. But, if you’ve setup user accounts (as could be expected, even in a small network environment) that aren’t running as Administrator (even the Power User group doesn’t work), then you can’t print or scan or read the contents of flash disks in the printer.

As I write, there is no known solution to the problem, and what I’ve read would suggest that HP are denying such a problem exists. Well, it does, and it isn’t solely because of inept administration.

In all, a good device marred by a few software flaws. If you’re looking for a network printer for a non-XP environment, be that earlier versions of Windows or Mac OS X or a *nix environment, I’d say it’s a great buy. Bonuses are the ability to use the flash card reader on all connected computers, network scanning, and an LCD preview display.

In terms of print quality, the colours are okay, though key (black) isn’t wonderful. I’ve only tested on 60GSM paper, though, so that’s obviously a contributing factor in my judgement. I doubt the quality would be of concern to most users, at any rate. It’s more than adequate for most desktop tasks.

I just filled out my 2005 tax return on Linux, before getting to the final step and discovering it wouldn’t print nor submit electronically (because, apparently, they can’t code and are dependent on Internet Explorer as a connectivity layer — and yet they test for security before allowing you to download the program! Hah!)… but it would save just fine, so I copied my tax file across the network to a Windows computer (resenting all the while having to leave my chair, because I really shouldn’t have had to even leave my browser — In this instance Firefox — if they’d done this properly) and imported, printed, and submitted it electronically without any significant problems.

Note that you can’t import a file from anywhere — you need to actually copy the file into the e-tax folder itself (probably C:\etax2005) before e-tax will let you startup without creating a new file. You’ve also got to enter your TFN again (presumably as a meagre form of security) to get it to open the file.

It annoys me that they don’t even support Mac users natively, instead saying that it will function, if “suitable Windows Emulator software” is installed. That’s so presumptuous I was tempted to fill in the section asking for costs incurred in filing the tax invoice, listing three licences for Windows XP purchased earlier this year (not really, but it’d be a nice revenge :)).

Okay, rant over.

Via Anne’s weblog in a roundabout kind of way.

Absolutely no idea if any of that works in Internet Explorer… if you’re an IE person and it works/doesn’t work, it’d be great to see a comment…

On an unrelated note, lack of posting over this last week has been due to a Crusaders–run study camp at… somewhere without Internet access… Galston-ish. If nothing else, it was good for the habit/schedule of study and talks throughout the week!

Regular programming shall return shortly… although possibly not until after Trial exams in a month or so.

In an attempt to redeem myself in the eyes of my overly neglected PhotoStack installation (it’s only because I haven’t got a scanner at the minute, I promise! I’ve got four rolls of film to scan as soon as I move into permanent accomodation again and get the HP thing back!), I’m not going to post all the images on the front page (goodness, it might even save some bandwidth!) — if you wish to peruse the whole lot, the whole album is online.

My favorites:

As always, if you can be bothered, my comments reside in the ALT text for all images in the gallery (some are more extensive than others), which can be seen (generally) by holding your mouse over the relevant thumbnail/image. This may not work in Internet Explorer, sorry folks. Get Firefox if you want a web browser that’s faster, more secure, and generally does stuff well!

If anyone feels my alternate textual explanations of the images are insufficient (e.g. require contextual knowledge of a visual nature in order to understand comments made, etc.), please feel free to let me know and I’ll do something about it. The contact form is the best way to get in touch.

On the sixteenth of this month, I launched a new photography section on this website. Clearly, this has potential to do crazy things with bandwidth usage, and, to an extent, it did.

Raw numbers. The month before last (September), I used 173.25MB of bandwidth. Whilst October may be one day longer, that alone doesn’t account for the difference in bandwidth usage: I used 327.00 MB this month, up 153.75MB from the previous month — nearly doubling transfers. Meanwhile, the total number of pages served fell, from 21,831 to 19,731 — this isn’t indicative of a fall in visits, however, with an increase from 459 to 583 unique visitors in this same period. Speaking of hits (which I put little weight on), there was a slight increase from 32740 to 36006.

Whilst I don’t have reliable browser statistics for both September and October, there appears to be little change overall — both Firefox and Internet Explorer demonstrate increases between the two months, however the stats package wasn’t properly configured to detect Firefox as Firefox for most of September, so those numbers are far from reliable.

Overall Windows traffic has increased around 10%, which basically means I’m visiting this website less (or, more to the point, that others are visiting it more): to the best of my knowledge, none of “the regulars” run Linux on the desktop.

Search engine referrals are up from 37 hits from Google in September to a (comparatively) enormous 201 hits in October over the same period. Right up there are keywords such as “Skype” and “Freetel” — especially Freetel. That one seems to have attracted some interest, if not in posted comments, then in personal email/contact form communications.

Since switching this website over to WordPress in early September/late August, I’ve increased the number of monthly visits six fold (approximately), and my bandwidth usage by about four. There you have it: WordPress increases your visitors! Hehehehe. It’s conclusive…

Oh, and whoever is continuing to visit this website by the old sc.dalegroup.net or streetcomputing.tk addresses (which I shall NOT link), please wake up and start using my domain name, http://www.joahua.com/. Thankyou. Referrals from an external page which is my own are starting to irritate me.

In the first seventeen hours of this month, I’ve attracted 8 hits from search engines so far: yes, Freetel was at least one of the search terms.

The background property in CSS has the attribute fixed for a reason. Internet Explorer supports this, but fails to interpret it in the same way as every other visual UA on the planet — the background is fixed relative to the element, not the page.

This is specified in the W3C Cascading Style Sheets (Level 1) recommendation (Yes, it is a recommendation, not a standard. If “web standards” people are going to obsess over geek semantics, you’d think they would care a little more about the meaning of real words, as well. Apparently not.), which Internet Explorer claims to have full support for.

That part of the specification appears a little ambiguous on first reading, but seriously, what makes greater logical sense, in terms of the actual applications of the technology?! Keeping in mind this is a recommendation, if there is ambiguity (which is clarified by contextual reading and general understanding of the material at hand), then it is the responsibility of any recommendation implementors to apply their own best-practice policies to this, in order to clarify it.

Best practice at Microsoft, it would seem, encompasses flawed “full” implementations of a technology, with an eye firmly set in the past. Comments such as those made recently at IEBlog excusing these failures anger me, especially given the blatant irrelevance of defences used in relation to poor support of W3C recommendation technology.

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