From the monthly archives:

April 2010

HTML5 vs. Adobe Flash

by Bill Cullifer on April 30, 2010

HTML5 vs. Adobe Flash: Where do you stand?

The controversy for the “hearts and minds” of Web professionals heats up as press reports reflect that Steve Jobs goes public with a statement that Adobe’s Flash software has fallen short as a mobile technology. At issue is the public debate between the companies over the program used to create online video. Clearly, the case for HTML5 vs. Adobe Flash is sure to intensify in the weeks and months to come.

The Story Line

Apple has “few joint interests” with Adobe, Mr. Jobs said in a post on Apple’s Web page Thursday, citing six reasons he doesn’t want Flash for mobile devices. He called the program closed and proprietary, saying the decision to bar it from Apple’s devices is based on technology, not business.

Apple’s efforts to convince programmers to adopt other ways to get video to work on Web sites threatens Flash’s dominance. San Jose, Calif.-based Adobe is fighting for the hearts and minds of Web-site developers, many of whom view Apple’s iPhone, iPod Touch and newly released iPad tablet as platforms they can’t ignore.

HTML5, a standard Apple uses instead of Flash, is a “completely open” technology, said Mr. Jobs. HTML5 lets Web developers create graphics and animations without relying on third-party browser plug-ins, such as Flash, he said.

“Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind,” Mr. Jobs said according to press reports.

Adobe highlighted the risks of exclusion from Apple’s iPhone and iPad devices for the first time in a regulatory filing this month, signalling the snub could hurt sales according t the report.

More than 75% of online videos run on Flash, and the software is installed on about 98% of personal computers connected to the Internet, according to Adobe. Flash also runs on more than 800 million mobile phones, manufactured by 19 of the top 20 handset makers — all except Apple.

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Web Professionals’ Day Celebration with Kool and the Gang

by Bill Cullifer on April 29, 2010

Happy Web Professionals’ Day!

That’s right, April 29 is designated as Web Professionals Day. In celebration, I caught up with Kool and the Gang from the 70′s (I think) to help you celebrate.

Make it a good one people!

Why Celebrate Web Professionals Day?

According to IDC, two-thirds of small to medium sized business have their Web Professional in-house, elevating the importance of a company’s Web professional.

“Web Professionals are diverse and provide a great skill set for any organization,” said Bill Cullifer, Executive Director, World Organization of Webmasters, a not-for-profit professional association serving Web professionals worldwide. “Considering the key role the Internet plays in businesses today, these professionals are proving their worth day in and day out.”

It’s a great time to be a Web Professional according to Scott Fegette, Product Manager at Adobe Systems, the company that supports Web Professionals by revolutionizing how the world engages with ideas and information – anytime, anywhere and through any medium.

WOW launched the WebProfessionalsDay.org website specifically to promote Web Professionals Day.

“We believe the Internet is the heart of the new economy,” said Go Daddy CEO and Founder Bob Parsons. “If you are in business these days, you really do need an online presence. Keeping your site up and running with fresh content is what it’s all about, so if you work with a Web professional, why not give them your appreciation?”

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Web Professional Roles and Responsibilities: A Community College Advisory Board Perspective

by Bill Cullifer on April 21, 2010

 
icon for podpress  Riverland Community College : Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

 
icon for podpress  Riverland Web Professional Advisory Board Meeting : Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Web Professional Role and Responsibilities: A Riverland Community College Advisory Board Perspective – Austin, MN

I made a trek to Austin, Minnesota early last week to participate in an education and technology advisory board meeting with a group of local Web professionals and community college principles at Riverland Community College.

For today’s podcast, I’d like to provide the subscribers of the Web professional minute with an overview of that meeting complete with a few of the higher level talking points. I would also like to make you aware of the availability of an Web developer associate degree program at Riverland Community College that is completely online. WOW’s been working with Riverland Community College for a number of years to suggest student learning outcomes that meet best practices and Web standards of today and WOW is really excited about their program.

If you’ve ever wondered about how leading edge colleges prepare for workforce development and improvements to their course programs or if you’re an educator looking for insights on Web professional advisory groups, you owe it to yourself and your students to follow along with this podcast.

Austin, MN Home to the Spam Museum

To get a sense for the physical location of Riverland Community College, the campus is situated a couple of hours drive time from Minneapolis Saint Paul, MN. Austin, MN is home to several well known corporations ranging from the food giant Hormel to the well known Mayo Clinic. In fact, Austin, MN, is home to the makers of SPAM (the food kind from Hormel) and I was fortunate enough to visit the front of the SPAM museum and I am including an image of the building located in the heart of downtown Austin, MN.

Riverland Community College Designated as a WOW Web Professional Academy

In addition to participating in the annual advisory board discussion, I was also in town to present Riverland Community College with a WOW “Web Professional Academy” designation for their associate degree level program that meets WOW’s educational review process. I’m pleased to report that Riverland has signed on as WOW’s newest “Web Professional Academy” for incorporating the appropriate depth and breathe of skills required by the Web developer today including Web standards and today’s best practices into their curriculum. For more information about Riverland Community College Web Developer program, check out their website.

Riverland Community College Web Professional Advisory Board Meeting Discusses the Roles, Responsibilities and the Education and Training Requirements for the Web Professional

The goal of the local advisory board meeting from a Riverland Community College perspective was to collect the necessary feedback from local Web professionals working within small business and the enterprise to enhance their programs to meet the educational requirements for career bound students while meeting the training needs for those already practicing in the space. This valuable educational balancing act is particularly important in an environment of shrinking budgets and fiscal constraints.

Meeting the rigorous requirements of students looking for work in the Web field and those already practicing in the field, is no easy task. I walked away from the event quite impressed with the entire process and the leadership demonstrated at Riverland Community College.

Participants in the roundtable included a balanced mix of educators representing career technical education, academic affairs, workforce development, and training and strategic development as well as several instructors with Web design and development experience.

Also participating was a group of incredibly bright and knowledgeable industry professionals with a diverse set of occupational backgrounds ranging from those working within the enterprise, small business including freelancers.

Most if not all of the participating advisers had several years of experience working in the field with titles ranging from the Web designer, Web developer, programmer, database administrator and a corporate technical and business analyst.

I’m going to post the entire 90 minute audio podcast later in this podcast for those that have the time and the interest in learning more. If you’re as passionate about the Web profession as I am, I think you will find it well worth your time. If you’re a teacher teaching Web topics or a program manager or dean heading up a Web program you owe it to yourself, your school and your community to listen in and learn.

Although the issues raised at Riverland Community College regarding working in the Web space are not unique to Minnesota, the discussion provides a terrific glimpse into the complexity of the Web profession today and the wide range of skills required. It also reflects the challenges faced by educational institutions developing strategies to meet the growing demand for the Web professional workforce with limited budget with limited resources including a a team of instructors doing everything that they can to keep pace.

From a WOW perspective, I enjoyed sitting in on the dialogue because it’s becoming “crystal clear” to me that as profession we’re inching our way to becoming better understood by those that provide education and training at the college level. I also think we’re slowly but surely being recognized for the value we bring to the equation and for the incredibly diverse set of skills that many Web pro’s have mastered from scratch.

We’re realistically years away from being as recognized and supported to other such notable college programs such as nursing but collaboration with organizations such as Riverland Community College will ultimately get us there.

Feedback from the Riverland Community College Web Professional Advisory Board

•the need for a generalist education background is critical for the Web professional
•the need for specialist within the enterprise with broad base of skill to draw from and background including the baseline skills of the generalist
•managers also need a broad understanding of Web topics to mange the process and the various professionals that make up a web team
•a need for strong communication skills for Web professionals
•educators need to structure their programs with a blend of both education and training to meet the needs of students seeking a broad base of skills and practicing professionals that seek intensive training
•the U.S. will continue to face increased global competition including countries such as India and Russia and we need to keep pace
•web design and development requires far more education and training and understanding beyond the use of software tools
•“right brain and left brain” talent is rare but highly sought after and most valuable
•customer service is the differentiators for competing globally
•three career paths discussed the most was that of the Web designer, web developer and Webmaster
•parallels to web professional and the medical professional such as nursing we’re discussed
•tools speed up the process but hiring managers wont hire people without knowing the code behind the tools
•“Jack and Jill” of all trades may not be experts at all things but but they know how to research it to get the job done
•meeting client needs vs own preferences is the key to success
•design is not just about pretty pictures but process and usability and structure
•hiring managers found great value in developers that asked the questions as to why are we doing it this way in the development process
•business skills including presentation and listening skills and the ability to guide clients is in high demand
•the need for a four degrees was also discussed
•educators and students see a need for internships programs to get the experience employers need

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Adobe Systems Flash Player for Mobile Devices Delayed: A Small Business Web Professional Perspective

by Bill Cullifer on April 19, 2010

 
icon for podpress  Adobe Systems Flash Player for Mobile Devices Delayed: A Small Business Web Professional Perspective : Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Adobe Systems Flash Player for Mobile Devices Delayed: A Small Business Web Professional Shares Thoughts

For today’s podcast, I caught up with Alex Von Allman, CEO at BrandMother.com a Web professional firm that specializes in small business. I asked Alex to comment on a Fox Business report of Adobe’s CEO Shantanu Narayen said the mobile Flash Player for Android, Palm, BlackBerry, and Symbian phones is not ready for release. “The second part of this year is when you are going to see Flash on a number of those devices,” according to the Adobe interview.

Alex shares his thoughts on how it affects him personally, his clients and his future plans.

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HTML 5 Update: Interview with Mark DuBois, Professor ICC and invited expert on the W3C HTML 5 working group

by Bill Cullifer on April 15, 2010

 
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HTML 5 Update, Timetable and What you Can Expect

In this four minute interview with Professor Mark DuBois, Instructor at Illinois Central College and WOW’s Director of Education. Mark provides us with an HTML 5 update including what’s the current best practice and what will practicing professionals and those that teach need to know to stay current.

Mark also addresses recommendations for educators that have a need to incorporate current HTML specifications program of studies. Check out today’s Web Pro Minute.

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More on HTML 5

According to Wikipedia, HTML5 is being developed as the next major revision of HTML (HyperText Markup Language), the core markup language of the World Wide Web. The Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG) started work on the specification in June 2004 under the name Web Applications As of March 2010, the specification is in the Draft Standard state at the WHATWG, and in Working Draft state at the W3C.

HTML5 is the proposed next standard for HTML 4.01, XHTML 1.0 and DOM Level 2 HTML. It aims to reduce the need for proprietary plug-in-based rich internet application (RIA) technologies such as Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight, Apache Pivot, and Sun JavaFX.

The ideas behind HTML5 were pioneered in 2004 by the WHATWG; HTML5 incorporates Web Forms 2.0, another WHATWG specification. The HTML5 specification was adopted as the starting point of the work of the new HTML working group of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in 2007. This working group published the First Public Working Draft of the specification on January 22, 2008. The specification is an ongoing work, and is expected to remain so for many years, although parts of HTML5 are going to be finished and implemented in browsers before the whole specification reaches final Recommendation status.[

HTML5 introduces a number of new elements and attributes that reflect typical usage on modern Web sites. Some of them are semantic replacements for common uses of generic block

) and inline () elements, for example (website navigation block) and (usually refer to bottom of web page or to last lines of html code). Other elements provide new functionality through a standardized interface, such as the and [4] elements.

Some deprecated elements from HTML 4.01 have been dropped, including purely presentational elements such as and, whose effects are achieved using Cascading Style Sheets. There is also a renewed emphasis on the importance of DOM scripting in Web behavior.

The HTML5 syntax is no longer based on SGML despite the similarity of its markup. It has, however, been designed to be backward compatible with common parsing of older versions of HTML. It comes with a new introductory line that looks like an SGML document type declaration, , which enables standards-compliant rendering in all browsers that use “DOCTYPE sniffing”.
[edit] New APIs

In addition to specifying markup, HTML5 specifies scripting application programming interfaces (APIs).[6] Existing document object model (DOM) interfaces are extended and de facto features documented. There are also new APIs, such as:

* The canvas element for immediate mode 2D drawing
* Timed media playback
* Offline storage database
* Document editing
* Drag-and-drop
* Cross-document messaging
* Browser history management
* MIME type and protocol handler registration.

Some of the new features are part of HTML5 mainly because there are no volunteers to split HTML5 and maintain separate specifications of these features.
Differences from HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.x

The following is a cursory list of differences and some specific examples.

* New parsing rules oriented towards flexible parsing and compatibility; not based on SGML
* Ability to use inline SVG and MathML in text/html
* New elements – article, aside, audio, canvas, command, details, datalist, dialog, embed, figure, figcaption, footer, header, hgroup, keygen, mark, meter, nav, progress, output, rp, rt, ruby, section, source, summary, time, video
* New types of form controls – dates and times, email, url, search
* New attributes – ping (on a and area), charset (on meta), async (on script)
* Global attributes (that can be applied for every element) – id, tabindex, hidden, data-* (custom data attributes)
* Forms will get support for PUT and DELETE methods too instead of just GET and POST (see Representational State Transfer for use cases)
* Deprecated elements dropped – center, font, frameset, strike

Error handling

An HTML5 (text/html) browser will be flexible in handling incorrect syntax. HTML5 is designed so that old browsers can safely ignore new HTML5 constructs. In contrast to HTML 4.01, the HTML5 specification gives detailed rules for lexing and parsing, with the intent that different compliant browsers will produce the same result in the case of incorrect syntax.
Completion

According to the W3C timetable, it is estimated that HTML5 will reach W3C Recommendation by late 2010. However, the First Public Working Draft estimate was missed by 8 months, and Last Call and Candidate Recommendation were expected to be reached in 2008,[9] but as of April 2010[update] HTML5 is still at Working Draft stage in the W3C. HTML5 has been at Last Call in the WHATWG since October 2009.

Ian Hickson, editor of the HTML5 specification, expects the specification to reach the W3C Candidate Recommendation stage during 2012, and W3C Recommendation in the year 2022 or later. However, many parts of the specification are stable and may be implemented in products:

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Yelp’s Mounting Troubles: Can they be trusted?

by Bill Cullifer on April 8, 2010

Yelp Inc.’s legal challenges continue to pile up, with business around the country weighing in on third class-action lawsuits.

According to press reports the pending class action lawsuits alleges that the San Francisco, CA based website of user reviews and recommendations of top restaurants, shopping, nightlife, extorts companies by manipulating ratings or visibility on the site based on whether or not the businesses pay to advertise.

Jeremy Stoppelman, Yelp’s chief executive, denies the charges—blaming them partly on businesses misunderstandings about Yelp’s rating system and lawyers’ desires to spur litigation.

But the disputes point up a sticky problem for many community-generated Web sites: How to manage user ratings—and build an advertising-supported business—while policing such schemes from abuse.

Yelp, which is five years old, relies on volunteers to review restaurants, stores and other businesses. The company claims more than 26 million visitors a month.

It generates revenue by selling advertising services to businesses, including the ability to add text links on the site and add additional information to the user-generated reviews page.

Since its early days, the company has employed a filtering system that is designed to prevent businesses from distorting ratings by, say, getting employees or friends to post glowing reviews. Mr. Stoppelman attributes the recent complaints to confusion over how that filtering system operates according to the report.

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Net neutrality: Comcast vs. FCC = the end?

by Bill Cullifer on April 7, 2010

A U.S. court has ruled that the FCC lacks the authority to censure Comcast for interfering with subscribers Internet traffic in a decision that could limit the government’s power to police companies’ Web behavior according to press reports.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, in a unanimous decision by a three-judge panel, vacated the Federal Communications Commission’s 2008 order against the largest U.S. cable company.

The ruling is a setback for Internet companies led by Google Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. that want so-called net neutrality rules to keep Internet providers such as Comcast, Verizon Communications Inc. and AT&T Inc. from limiting Web traffic.

The FCC in 2008 censured Comcast for blocking subscribers using peer-to-peer software often used to view videos, a decision hailed by consumer groups as a step toward keeping Web traffic free of obstruction from corporations. Comcast said it delayed some file transfers to alleviate network congestion.

The FCC is taking comments until tomorrow on net neutrality rules that would forbid companies from favoring content they own, and from blocking or slowing rivals’ services.

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