It’s been some time IE6 is around, and it’s numerous bugs made hard times for web developers. It’s the announcement of Google to drop IE6 support from March 1, 2010 that declares the end of this era. But still IE6 has a worldwide market share of 15%.

Google has good commercial reasons encourage IE6’s demise. Their future strategy and web applications depend on newer web technologies such as HTML5 which do not work in older browsers.

Meanwhile Andy Clarke advocates the use of Universal Internet Explorer 6 Css to make your site look exactly the same in IE6 as in any other browser. Let’s just hope that also IE7, which too have many bugs, will go down soon.

Need to learn Oop? You always wanted to attend a programming university course? Here’s the videos of a full courses from Stanford Computer Science Department.

• Programming Methodology course (CS106A) is an Introduction to the engineering of computer applications emphasizing modern software engineering principles: object-oriented design, decomposition, encapsulation, abstraction, and testing. Uses the Java programming language. Emphasis is on good programming style and the built-in facilities of the Java language.
• Programming Abstractions course (CS 106B) is the successor to CS 106A and covers more advanced programming topics such as recursion, algorithmic analysis, and data abstraction. It is taught using the C++ programming language, which is similar to both C and Java.
• Programming Paradigms course (CS107) introduces several programming languages, including C, Assembly, C++, Concurrent Programming, Scheme, and Python. The class aims to teach students how to write code for each of these individual languages and to understand the programming paradigms behind these languages.

I started out doing websites in flash back in the 2000, precisely full flash websites. It was a thrill since the flash development world gives you extreme possibilities to develop dynamic and moving websites.

The flash indexing solution

Then i started worrying about indexing (see swfaddress, deep-linking), and found out about flash deep-linking, a viable solution to full flash website indexing: with flash you can deep-link the webpages trough javascript functions that links flash “states” with # links (see for example the RRD Y13 Y14 websites), index an alternate html page, and redirect the user with .htaccess from html pages to the flash “states”.

The big problem with this solution is that anyway the google indexed pages are without #, but the user’s linked pages are with #, so the urls are different and you loose some pagerank/links with the search engines. I had a big problems in the 2009 because i couldn’t decide how to build websites: to develop with this solutions, or start to develop html websites?

Since i had to study the new version of the flash language actionscript3, and since at the time Jquery and Ajax started to rock the web i decided to start learning html, css, and php, and i’ve been very happy with that decision.

The qualities of html over flash

• With flash you can’t really use the backend to choose the content and lay it out, or at least if you do you have to repeat the procedure on the flash side that gets the data
• The design bounds are very different: with flash you have full creativity over the design elements and movements, with html you have to follow the css rules and the block elements floats, which fulfill the needs of a “magazine” type of website in laying out the content, but give some restrictions if you have to move stuffs
• With flash you don’t have css to do the design job, you have to script it all from actionscript, which is good for animations, but is a limitation if you have a website structures as a grid, and more time consuming
• With html you have 3 layers of complexity to form the data and style it (the backend, the html, the css) each one doing it’s job, while in flash you have only the actionscript, so that becomes very complicated while you advance in the development
• With html development you have the possibility to focus much more on the backend side, since it’s the only level of complexity for formatting the data
• In html you have advertise tool (Adsense, BuySellAds, …), blog tools (Wordpress, Joomla, …) and forum tools that in flash are inexistent

The qualities of flash over html

• With flash you have a much more powerful tool to animate the web page, it’s all scripted with full freedom of actions.
• With flash you deploy once and run everywhere, the flash player is installed on a great slice of user’s machines, see the flash player penetration rate.
• Flash works on every installation the same way, you don’t have the discrepancies of html where every version of internet explorer behaves in a different way.
• In flash the layout is as you want, you aren’t tied on the html and css layout where everything is inside something and you don’t have the freedom to animate the layout.

Conclusion

Overall i’ve to say the two development methods are very different and each one have it’s strengths and drawbacks.
I personal prefer the html one, the only thing that i miss is the freedom of the animation in flash.

Here it’s, my first wordpress website. I have to say wordpress is a great cms, it comes with some nasty functions for the templates, but overall they’re ok once you get the grasp of them.

This website is build using the following techniques:

• Css sprites for the images.
• Menu animated with Jquery, with css on Internet Explorer because the animation was too slow.
• IE 6 update and Universal IE 6 css for Internet Explorer 6 and 7.
• The bulletproof @font-face syntax (still working to make it works on mac), the font is Museo Sans, the program used to convert the font is fontsquirrel’s fontface generator.
• The wordpress plugins i used are WP-PageNavi to add a more advanced paging navigation and WP No Category Base to remove ‘/category’ from the category permalinks, qTranslate for the multilanguage support.

Enjoy.