Software Blog  RSS News Feed  What's This? Select a topic from the list below. Topics are ordered by date with the eight most recent at the top. Show All Articles July 19th 2010
iPhone App Development
We are moving on from AJAX applications to the development of iPhone apps (and apps for other smartphone platforms). There are many challenges in making this move, some of which are described here. July 18th 2009
Facebook Security Issues
Facebook has serious problems with its attitude to privacy, so much so that they appear to be in breach of Canadian privacy laws. Any action by the Canadian government will however be limited to just a small part of the wider problem. Facebook has to go much, much further. This article makes some suggestions on how I think they should clean up their act. July 5th 2009
Multi-Language Support
Translations of complete web pages have come a long way from the early days of Babelfish, although they still leave a lot to be desired. But what if you only need to translate individual phrases? Should you construct the phrase in English and then use Google Translate or do we need to do something more sophisticated? November 4th 2007
Working From Home
Working from home is becoming easier and easier as computers, the internet and mobile phones become more sophisticated. Why then don't more people (and more companies) embrace it? July 8th 2007
Using AJAX In Practice
AJAX is a powerful programming tool that is without doubt the future of the internet. However, until the search engine and browser developers catch up with the new reality, there are a few gotcha's you need to be aware of. April 22nd 2007
Web Design Trends
Web pages are moving away from fancy graphics to dynamic interactive sites with added value for users. To develop such pages, web developers need to be able to program in a variety of different languages. If you can't program, there soon won't be a place for you in the web development industry. March 19th 2007
More On Mobile Devices
Mobile devices become smaller and more multi-functional with fewer buttons and bigger, touch sensitive screens. Those of us with limited short range vision should be getting worried by these developments. Perhaps the science of haptics wil be our saviour. February 25th 2007
Censorship On The Internet
Some censorship of the internet is necessary. I fully support the removal of child pornography for example. But insiduous censorship by special interests is slowly creeping over the internet and eroding free speech. These special interests include web site owners who censor forum posts and business owners who deliberately remove competitors ads from public listings. |
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GET WITH THE PROGRAM |
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Web pages are moving away from fancy graphics to dynamic interaction. A few years ago, if you didn’t have a nice looking web site with animated graphics, it wouldn’t get much attention. Now, if you don’t have good dynamic content, functionality and user added value you won’t get noticed. This trend seems to have started when Google launched their minimalist search site with no graphics and great functionality. They have since been successfully followed by no frills sites like Craig’s List and its imitators and by many others. That’s not to say good design isn’t important. A web site still needs to have a good flow and ease of navigation so that viewers are encouraged to dig deeper. It’s just that fancy graphics with gratuitous animation are no longer the attention grabbers they once were.
This is part of the movement towards what some are calling Web 2.0. Web 2.0 is poorly defined but is generally used as a label to indicate a new phase for the internet. On line dynamic functionality is a large part of that phase. This trend towards dynamism is going to change the web design industry and the workers within it. In short, if you don’t know how to program, you can’t develop dynamic web sites. Whilst it is possible to stitch together pieces of work done by others without knowing much about programming, to develop something new, you need vision to design it and a programmer to implement it.
Like many computer technologies that have evolved over the years, internet programming is a mess of different languages, concepts and tools all competing for a programmer’s attention. Microsoft push their .NET technologies, implemented via C#, Visual Basic and other languages. Alongside this there are various open source languages such as PHP. All the possible languages have their advocates, advantages and disadvantages but what they all have in common is that their syntaxes are all very similar. If you learn one language, converting from one another is a fairly straightforward task.
Much of the functionality of internet programming resides on the server, the computer from which web pages are sent. Server side programs can interact with databases and do lots of other interesting things. All the server side programming tools simply generate HTML code (in its various forms) that is the actual web page downloaded to your browser. HTML is an even bigger mess than the programming languages. It displays differently on the various web browsers and has numerous quirks to trip up the unwary. Learning HTML and its companion CSS in detail is at least as hard as learning a server side programming language. Hopefully, HTML will soon be replaced by a much better, more structured environment that will simplify web programming considerably. Client side functionality, on the viewer’s computer, is provided by JavaScript, ActiveX controls, Flash and others, all of which also require programming skills.
So, if you want to build web pages for Web 2.0, you would be well advised to “Get with the program”. Learn how to program on both the server and client sides and get started on implementing your own ideas for dynamic, interactive web tools.
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| Comment by SEO on February 5th 2008 | | | I found your site on technorati and read a few of your other posts. Keep up the good work. I just added your RSS feed to my Google News Reader. Looking forward to reading more from you.
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