As I hadn’t been to the cinema in such a long time I decided to take my wife and see the first move that was on when we got there. It was Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.

If you don’t know, it’s based on a Broadway musical by Stephen Sondheim. I hadn’t seen any trailers for this movie and I was taken aback when I realised that the movie was a musical too. However, the content is not what you would expect to see in a musical. You don’t often see a film’s genre listed as horror/musical. It is rated 18 in the UK and R in the US. And it is very,very gory.

Johnny Depp stars as Todd, a man scorned by the local judge, played by Alan Rickman. Todd’s “business partner” is Mrs Lovett, played by Helena Bonham Carter. I must says how strikingly similar they are to the puppets that they voice in another Tim Burton film, Corpse Bride. There is also a great appearance by Sacha Baron Cohen.
Mrs Lovett runs a meat pie shop and Todd, being the Demon Barber, slaughters his customers and provides her with the “meat.”

As a musical I thought it worked quite well. Initially it took some getting used to and at first I struggled to hear the words over the epic musical score. As I got used to it I really began to enjoy it. There is definitely more music in the first half of the film though.

It has an inevitable ending. But there is a little bit of romance to finish with too, which makes us think that all the throat slashing is worth it.

Don’t be turned off by this film just because it’s a musical. It is a great film. Some positive points to end on? Well, Nightmare Before Christmas had songs in it. And if that’s not enough of a positive? Cloverfield is out next week.

Introducing the latest WebCards feature: the search cloud. OK, it ’s not a major new feature but I just want to let people know that latest WebCards development news.

If you don’t know what a search cloud is, it is a list of recent search terms with more emphasis given to terms that are searched for more frequently. More popular search terms are shown with a bigger font and less popular terms with a smaller font. They are popular on a lot of the social networking sites, such as last.fm and technorati.

The search cloud can be “dropped in” anywhere you like but I currently have it on the advanced search page.
You can take a look at the latest WebCard feature on the demonstration page. Although the demo is not particularly useable at the monet, you can still use the search feature and you can see how the search cloud changes.

Let me know what you think of it over on the forums.

The W3C has released their working draft of HTML 5.

It is still very much a work in progress but there are some interesting new tags in there, such as the audio and video tags. They have also published an article detaling the differences between HTML 4 and HTML 5.

From a post on Webmaster World.

Businesses are being warned that on 12 February, Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) will automatically update Internet Explorer to version 7, unless they act to prevent the update.

Since October, Windows Genuine Advantage validation has not been required to upgrade to IE7 anS Microsoft announced back then that the automatic update will happen next month.
System administrators who have set WSUS to auto approve Update Rollup packages must disable the auto update feature before 12 February. After then, they must update the package and then switch the auto approve feature back on.

You can read the whole InfoWorld article here.

But what does that mean to us as Webmasters? Good news, that’s what. The sooner Internet Explorer 6 is gone the better. More browsers to support is always bad news, as I made clear on the CSS subject. IE6 was put together in such a way that it had to support standards but also support the hacked-up, non-standard CSS that developers were forced to use to make a page work in IE5. Microsoft couldn’t just release a browser that was fully standardS compliant because many pages had to be written in a non-standard way. It was hard for them to break the cycle, despite them introducing quirks mode into IE.

But IE7 is more standards compliant, and IE8 is even more standards compliant and even passes the Acid2 test. The time will soon come when there will be such thing as “compliant,” not just “IE compliant” or “Firefox compliant.”

However, there is a twist in the story. Microsoft wants us to use a meta tag to trigger proper rendering in IE8:

<meta http-equiv=”X-UA-Compatible” content=”IE=8″ />

To me this is a bad idea. They are in a catch 22 situation. IE used to render in quirks mode if it did not detect a valid DOCTYPE. Now pages are being hacked together due to IE6’s flaws but they do contain a valid DOCTYPE. So they don’t render properly in IE7. Or, more specifically, they render how they should render, but not how they did in IE6. They must break this cycle. If they introduce this meta tag now they will never be able to drop it. (You can read about the decision-making process in an article on A List Apart by Aaron Gustafson, who is a member of the WaSP-Microsoft Task Force )

Perhaps an op-out meta tag would work, I don’t know. But Microsft must not implement this meta tag. It will be a big mistake if they do and they will never be able to drop it. So when IE9 is released these meta tags must be updated. Or should webmasters just sort out their web pages and CSS for one last time and be happy that all the browsers are standards compliant? I doubt that.

The following chart, created with the superb Google Charts API shows the Internet Explorer browser versions on the WebCards website from October 2006 to January 2008.

They have almost a 50-50 share and I expect IE7 to be the most popular browser by next month.

You can read a lot more about this on the post from the IE blog entitled Compatibility and IE8.

The CSS3 working group are looking for feedback on what people want implemented in CSS3.

From the blog post:

The CSSWG plans to discuss its charter at our next face-to-face meeting in March. If groups like CSS3.info, the CSS Eleven, and the WaSP and/or individuals like Jeffrey Zeldman and Eric Meyer could organize a collectively-written list of priorities and submit it to us before then, we could take that into account when writing our charter for 2008+.

I have to say that there are two main things I want from CSS3. The first is CSS columns (although I believe this is currently in the draft). The idea of table-less layout is excellent. The problem is it is too darned complicated to make it work. Web developers simply don’t have time to mess about with positioning of divs and spans. Then of course you have to test it out and implement different versions off CSS on each web browsers. But I digress…

The second thing I want is for it to work on ALL web browsers. Each web browsers must implement CSS in an identical way. No hacks, no complicated ways of hiding CSS from one browser or another. No more “this is needed because IE renders this differently” in the comments. None of this. As a member has posted on Webmaster World:

Come to think about it - if they kept CSS3 the same as CSS2 but got it supported - that would be a really brilliant thing.

The CSS working group is not without its critics, however. Take a look at this blog post before you post your ideas. It seems the CSS Working Group is a bit on the slow side when it comes to getting things done.

You can take a look at css3.info for more information.

Yahoo announced yesterday that it will be supporting the OpenID 2.0 protocol with a public beta starting on 30 January. Not only does this mean that Yahoo’s 248 million users will have access to an internet-wide single login, it also means that other website can have a “log in with your Yahoo ID” button.
It will bring the number of people with OpenID-compatible accounts to 368 million. Other sites that currently use OpenID include AOL, LiveDoor, LiveJournal, Technorati and hosted versions of WordPress.

This is a great step by Yahoo. I cannot be the only one who is sick of having to register on a site every time I want to try out something new. Remembering the passwords is horrendous.

This also opens up some interesting possibilities for WebCards.

Currently, I am very reluctant to add membership services to WebCards. This includes features such as address book, favourites and reminders. This is because a user would have to register for every domain they want to send a Webcard from. If you wanted to send a WebCard from example.com and then send one from somesite.com you would have to register on both sites.
I do not have the resources to operate a central database, so OpenID seems like an ideal solution. It’s one thing having a single login for multiple sites but it is another thing to have a single login for multiple sites and have access to your Yahoo address book from this single login.

Obviously, this is something that will take some time to roll out (I am talking about Yahoo and WebCards here) but it is definitely something to watch. It may now be possible to implement one of the most requested features of WebCards.

What is OpenID
This is taken from the OpenID website:

For geeks, OpenID is an open, decentralized, free framework for user-centric digital identity. OpenID takes advantage of already existing internet technology (URI, HTTP, SSL, Diffie-Hellman) and realizes that people are already creating identities for themselves whether it be at their blog, photostream, profile page, etc. With OpenID you can easily transform one of these existing URIs into an account which can be used at sites which support OpenID logins.

Take a look at the OpenID website for more information.

You can also read the whole Yahoo Press Release.

Back in December, the French appeal court Tribunal de Grande Instance ruled that Amazon.fr was violating the country’s 1981 Lang law with its free shipping offer. This law forbids booksellers from offering discounts of more than 5 percent off the list price. Amazon was ruled as having broken this law if free shipping is factored into the cost of the book.

They were told they would face a daily fine if they didn’t start charging within ten days. This can continue for 30 days (€30,000) and then it will be reviewed by the court. They can increase, decrease, or extend the fine. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said in an email to the site’s customers: “France would be the only country in the world where the free delivery practiced by Amazon would be declared illegal.” Amazon was also ordered to pay €100,000 to a French bookstore union.

The law was originally passed when supermarkets were outselling independent book sellers. It was supposed to mean that customers had access to all kinds of books, not just massively discounted best-sellers.

Amazon say that “are determined to follow every avenue available to us to overturn this law.” They are unikely to succeed as the law has come before the European Court of Justice twice before. On both occasions it has been affirmed. The law is not considered anticompetitive because all book retailers are held to the same standard.

You can read the extended article at the International Herald Tribune website.

Continuing on this week’s theme of website optimisation, I came across an interesting article posted by encyclo on Webmasterworld entitled 26 Steps to a More Accessible Website. The post is superb it lists 26 important steps for improving the accessibility of your website to users who may not have easy access to all your content.

Here are the headings but please read the article for the full explanations:

A. Alt text and alternate content
B. Transcripts of video content
C. “Click here!”, or descriptive link text
D. Space between links
E. No javascript: links
F. Use the lang attribute
G. No gratuitous animation
H. Don’t depend on color
I. Captcha alternatives
J. Labels on forms
K. Accessible Tables
L. Page structure: use meaningful headings
M. Page structure: divide up information blocks
N. Simple language
O. Acronym (and abbr, cite, p, li…)
P. No meta refresh
Q. noscript
R. Relative text size
S. Bigger font sizes!
T. Alternate stylesheets
U. Skip to… links
V. Page size/weight
W. Add a sitemap (HTML not XML)
X. Check in Lynx
Y. User testing and feedback
Z. Accessibility statement

I use many of these on WebCards and on the website. These include relative font sizes, alternative stylesheets, labels on forms, the lang attribute and alt text. Accessibility is one of the main reasons why I will not implement captchas on WebCards. Accessibility is essential, and in the UK is even the law (see the Disability Discrimination Act). This article is great for those who want to make their website more useable.

Yesterday’s post entitled “Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site” has had me thinking about other ways to increase the loading speed of websites. People obsess over optimising SQL queries, caching templates and other more minor things. But what about the more obvious things? What will increase your site’s loading speed more: knocking 5kb off the size of an image, or making an SQL query 8ms faster?

I have trawled the search engines to find some sites with good ideas about how to optimise your website.

The first step is to analyse your website. The tool I most frequently use is Web Page Analyzer from Website Optimization. Enter your URL and it will tell you the total size of the page, the estimated download speeeds on various connections and a list of each different type of object on the page. Under “Analysis and Recommendations” it will tell you where you will need to focus your attentions. Putting mywebcards.net into the tool shows that the page size is far too big. There are apparently too many scripts and too many images. The total page size is 203517 bytes.

Next, read yesterday’s post about speeding up your website and implement the ideas that are relevant to you.

Here are a list of some of the best articles I have found about optimisation. I will list some of the ideas from each one.

The first is an article from Paul Stamatiou. It was published back in June 2006 but the principles still remain the same.

1. Reduce Overall Latency by Reducing HTTP Requests
2. Properly Save Your Images
3. Compression (of CSS, JS and PHP)
4. Avoid JavaScript Where Possible
5. Strip Extraneous PHP/MySQL Calls

Read the full article.

Next is an article from Webcredible - Ten ways to speed up the download time of your web pages. This from even further back - 2004 - but again, the principles are the basic ones that always remain the same.

Here are their suggestions:

1. Lay out your pages with CSS, not tables
2. Don’t use images to display text
3. Call up decorative images through CSS
4. Use contextual selectors
5. Use shorthand CSS properties
6. Minimise white space, line returns and comment tags
7. Use relative call-ups
8. Remove unnecessary META tags and META content
9. Put CSS and JavaScript into external documents
10. Use / at the end of directory links

Read the full article.

Third is an article from Webweaver entitled Formatting Tips To Speed up Your Website. The same ideas are beginning to crop up in each article, but this one features a few new ones.

1. Use CSS For Faster Pages
2. Use External Scripts
3. Remove Anything You Don’t Really Need
4. Avoid Nested Tables
5. Avoid Full Page Tables for Faster Rendering
6. Split Up Long Pages - Multiple Short Pages Load Faster
7. Remove Excess “Whitespace”
8. Keep Your Code Clean
9. Don’t Go Overboard On Images
10. Use Height And Width Tags on Images
11. Correctly choose gif, jpg or png

Read the full article.

The final article is aimed particularly at the server but is also worth a read. It is entitled Don’t just wait for Digg to kill you - be prepared!. It looks at the “Digg effect” and how it can hammer your server. Definitely worth a read.

Also, you should take a look at this book, Web Performance Tuning, 2nd edition for some more great ideas (disclaimer: affiliate link).

Over the next few days I will begin to optimise the WebCards homepage. I will see if I can reduce the page from 203517 bytes to something (well, according to that tool anyway) a little more reasonable. Let me know if you can notice any difference.

Steve Souders at the Yahoo! Developer Network has posted an article called Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site. It is an excellent article that concentrates on speeding up the front end interface to increase speed.

Many efficiency articles concentrate on tweaking database queries or altering loops but Sounders’ research has shown that the front end is where the most significant speed gains can be made. He lists 14 best practices:

• Make Fewer HTTP Requests
• Use a Content Delivery Network
• Add an Expires Header
• Gzip Components
• Put Stylesheets at the Top
• Put Scripts at the Bottom
• Avoid CSS Expressions
• Make JavaScript and CSS External
• Reduce DNS Lookups
• Minify JavaScript
• Avoid Redirects
• Remove Duplicate Scripts
• Configure ETags
• Make Ajax Cacheable

Souders has produced an extension for Firefox called YSlow which integrates with FireBug to give your website a “performance report card” and a list of all the object on the page.

He has compiled his ideas into a book which is also well worth a look at. Some of the ideas here are excellent and they will most certainly be used in WebCards. Take a look and see what ideas you can put into use on your own website.

Please note: the links to the book in this blog post are associate links.