What goes around comes around

I left school at 16 to become a professional racing driver. That led me briefly into a career as a mechanic where I realised that the job, like most involving manual labour, was being superseded my computers. Realising that’s where both the future and the money was, I went for a career in IT which lead me to the internet industry, which opened the door to other businesses and also into the world of amateur journalism, which lead me straight back to racing where I am now a paid racing driver.

It’s a similar story for the godfather of Datapartners, Peter Banks. He set out to become a rock star and tore up the US charts before his band split up. After this, he moved into the recording studio he’d built which led to him spending more time using computerised equipment. This led to forming a computer company, which in turn evolved into an Internet business, which then re-ignited interest in his band and resulted in them reforming. So, as with my racing, the circle completed.

This brings me speedily rock ‘n rolling neatly onto the subject of website evolution.

You see when websites first appeared they mainly consisted of text on a page and maybe a couple of images. Soon, however, they started getting more advanced. Animated gifs became all the rage because people could have logos that spun around, Flash came on the scene and suddenly everybody wanted a website built entirely in Flash. Sound became the “it” thing and people started wanting pointless sound effects whenever someone rolled over their flashy button. Javascript started allowing sites to have quirky things like those wonderful dropdown menu bars that became so popular in 2001.

With the rise of the Google Empire, Search Engine Optimization companies started springing up everywhere trying to make money off the back of Google. First they told us not to use animation on a site because it distracted the visitor. Sound effects became a taboo because they caused pages to take an eternity to load. Then they told us that Javascript was bad and Google would smack our bottoms if we used it. They then told us that Google would not be able to see any sites that were built in flash. Then they told us not to use font tags and tables and instead start building sites completely using text and formatted using stylesheets.

So what we have now are websites that are mainly just text on a page and a few images. In other words, websites are back to what they were in the first place. The only difference is that they look a bit nicer.

So there you have it. The evolutionary cycle of life will always come full circle. Perhaps that’s why the majority of the inhabitants of this country are degenerating into apes who can only communicate using grunts and whistles. Nevertheless, one thing is absolutely certain: The Internet is a truly magnificent invention and can open doors to endless possibilities.

A plea to all surfers out there

When I started out as a wee trainee web developer back in 2000, nothing fazed me. I was a keen, wide eyed young whippersnapper who was keen to prove his worth.

Back then, the main challenge when designing and coding a website was getting it to work in both Internet Explorer and Netscape. At first I saw this as a great challenge. However, the keenness soon wore off and before long I was joining the rest of the industry in wishing death upon the people at Netscape.

So it was with great joy and much celebration amongst the web community when the general public started to tire of Netscape crashing every 30 seconds and stopped using it altogether. Internet Explorer was brilliant and anybody who wasn’t using it as a browser was an idiot and shouldn’t have been allowed on the Internet – or was a Mac user, which surmounts to the same thing.

Once Microsoft got their monopoly, however, things started to change. Darth Gates and his band of evil software Stormtroopers started releasing new versions of Internet Explorer that were always less reliable and full of more bugs than the previous ones.

Then came along Firefox and Google Chrome. Almost immediately, these two browsers surpassed Internet Explorer in both reliability and usability so needless to say I now use these two instead.

The problem now of course is that I have to get sites to work in Firefox and IE. Firefox is easy. A site will look exactly the same in Firefox as it does in Google Chrome and even Mac’s Safari browser. But IE? Oh dear me no. Not only does the latest version (8 as I write this) render HTML and CSS differently but it also renders it differently in EI7 and IE6. This means I have to effectively make sure a website runs in 6 different types of browser. It is a complete waste of time and energy!

Now personally I view people who are still using IE6 with the same contempt I held for people who used Netscape back in the day and I would recommend to them that they read up on the history of the T-Rex to see what happens to creatures who are not able to adapt.

So what is the point of this rant? Well, frankly, it is to urge all of you to ditch Internet Explorer and switch to Firefox. As well as making my life easier, you will also be able to rid yourself of that annoying clicking sound that it makes every time you open a new link.

iWish Microsoft were this considerate

OK so in the wonderful world of web design we have to make sure that we build websites that work in Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari and at least 3 different versions of Internet Explorer.

For those of you who are not cool enough to own an iPhone and have plumped for the new iPAD, which was released over the weekend, you will be pleased to know that we will now have to start checking that all our websites work well on this new piece of kit too.

Given that Apple are not as stupid as Microsoft and generally don’t completely change their minds on how their Safari browser renders HTML and CSS in different versions, I’m not anticipating too much of a problem because, theoretically, it should be no different to a Safari browser on a Mac or an iPhone.

Anyway, just to check – and to reaffirm they offer better customer satisfaction than those imbeciles at Microsoft, they have launched an iPad Peek to allow you to check what your website will look like on the iPad. Clever eh?

Check the full article on this bit of kit from here.