We love the web ltd.

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The big picture

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 17:43:00 +0000

Photography fans that we are, we like sites with big photos.
They just look so damn classy.

Here's a whole bunch of them.
80 large background websites

Go to China is particularly great if you have a large monitor.
Since we all work on two-screen setups here, it looks pretty fine.

Web designer wall (the site that published the above article) is a pretty useful site, great for tips on obscure style-sheet techniques of the sort that make technical design types salivate and the rest of us somnambulate.

We obsess, so you don't have to.

A whole lotta love

Tue, 11 Nov 2008 10:41:00 +0000

It's promotion time again at We love the web. Well, our first promotional activity in two years, as it happens. We've been making love hearts, and very groovy they look too.



It feels odd making something that exists in the real world though: almost everything we do is digital and so making something physical is unusual for us and not a little fun.



If you want a roll, just drop me a line: make.it.work@welovetheweb.com - you may have to wait a few days, however. They're so popular that the first batch of a few hundred have all gone!

Photo blog is go!

Tue, 07 Oct 2008 14:46:00 +0000

Photography for the win!

www.ph.otography.co.uk

Browser rant

Mon, 15 Sep 2008 20:26:00 +0000

I'm looking back over the first couple of posts and note they are both about browsers. That makes me quite an oddball as most people couldn't give two short stuffs about what they use to look at the web.

Round here, caring about browsers doesn't make me odd. The team here will wildly outgeek me when it comes to browsers and browser-based development tools. I'm way behind them with only three browsers installed on my computer to the average of about seven on any developers' machine.

We care for a simple reason: the browser is our canvas.

If the paint doesn't stick or the colours run or the texture is too rough, yer archetypal artist will get stupendously drunk on cheap vin ordinaire before ripping apart the offending cloth with his bare teeth, jumping up and down on it: then changing his mind and selling the tattered remains for a small fortune.

Sadly, that's not an option, though life round here might be more fun if it were.

What we really care about is making sites that are as good as they can be. This means we pay a lot of attention to the tools that we use. Just like a good artist, we spend a lot of time thinking about the best tool for the job and how to set things up just right so that everything flows. This means installing seven different browsers and any number of special developer tools that reveal to us how the code streams into a page and where the hidden snags are buried. To most people that sounds incredibly geeky, but to us it's what we do.

We're geeks and proud of it.

Many browsers make heavy work

Mon, 15 Sep 2008 15:15:00 +0000

I'd like to take you on a journey, back into time.

The year is 2004 and Internet Explorer version 6 (IE6) has a 98% market share. Web developers don't even hate it, because it's all there is. The collective geek psyche has been so scarred by the horrible piece of junk that was Netscape 4 that we're just grateful we no longer have to develop for it. The geeks we know all have myriad unprintable nicknames for Netscape. Honestly, it is so bad that we welcome a Microsoft monopoly if only we don't have to develop for Netscape any more.

So, for a while at least, life is uncomplicated. If it works in IE6, the client will sign it off.

Fast forward now to the present (complete with imagery of the sun flitting across the sky at high speed, seasons changing and all that H. G. Wells stuff).

Yesterday, for the first time, I heard the words I'd been dreading for a while: 'But it doesn't work on my iPhone.' A buttock-clenching moment for any programmer I think you'll agree, but it made me ponder recent browser developments. It couldn't possibly work, it was a flash site and Apple won't let flash onto the iPhone (yet).

Over the last few years, we've seen the trickle of new browsers become a flood.

2003: Apples release the Safari browser
2004: Mozilla releases Firefox
2006: Microsoft releases Internet Explorer 7
2007: Mozilla releases Firefox v2
2008: Google releases Chrome, Microsoft releases Internet Explorer 8 beta, Mozilla releases firefox 3 and the iPhone (v2) means some people are actually starting to use the web on their mobiles.

Now, in theory, as long as you confirm to web standards, then your pages should work everywhere.

Oddly though, the developer team here get distinctly tetchy every time I say this. Like all computing 'standards', it just doesn't work like that in real life: especially since IE6 doesn't conform to any known standard.

This is bad news for web developers: each new browser is a new thing to test against. Testing that used to take 10 minutes is now an open-ended task as we fix issues in each browser and check that the fixes in one didn't break things in the others. It can take hours. Multi-browser support is now approaching 10-15% of the cost of developing a small website. That's a lot.

We are having to explain to our clients why the same amount of work now costs more than used to. Here's an example: UK.gov recently talked about dropping support for any browser with less than 2% market share. A lot of technical people were grumpy about this, but we tend to adopt the same approach as the government: if less than 2% of the population use it and your clients can download a supported browser for free, do you really want to pay an extra thousand quid to support all those extra browsers? After all, because we build our sites properly - with a clean separation between style and content - it should degrade gracefully. In the worst case, you can always view it without the graphics: the information on the page will still make sense.

Cross-browser compatibility tweaking is entirely non-productive work, but at least the consumer benefits from all this competition in the browser world. Tabbed browsing and RSS news feeds in your browser are the most tangible benefits: both of which are great. There's also the intangible benefit of not having Microsoft own your gateway to the web.

You could say that web developers should view this as a Good Thing because we can charge more. In fact, it's frustrating because we just want to get on with making stuff work and delivering great websites, not piddling around mindlessly trying to make it look the same in Internet Explorer as it does in Firefox.

I'm not arguing for a return to Microsoft dominance here, that was unquestionably a bad thing. It actively held us back from developing great sites. It's more a plea for standards that actually mean something: if a web page is standards compliant, it really should display correctly in all browsers. At the moment it doesn't and that's just annoying for everyone.

Chrome

Mon, 08 Sep 2008 08:39:00 +0000

Google's new browser could change everything about how you use your computer. This isn't really a post about their browser, however, more about who controls your business-critical data.

Chrome is the first browser that really tries to turn Javascript into a language that you can use for serious application development. Ah, that's technical and I've lost a lot of you right there: but it's important.

Google docs, Google's Microsoft Office 'killer' runs on Javascript.

We use Google spreadsheets here at We love the web, mostly for bug-sheets and progress tracking. We love the fact that we no longer have to email people lots of spreadsheets or get them to use an unfamiliar bug-tracking tool: they can update an online spreadsheet that they already know how to use and we get their updates instantly. These work well until they get to a certain size. They then start crashing our web browsers with annoying regularity. So, if Google docs were more reliable they would be a compelling proposition:

Google docs: Free, requires no maintenance, setup in minutes, instant online collaboration
Microsoft Office: several hundred pounds, complex install that requires regular patching and support, rubbish online collaboration

There are only two ways to do instant online collaboration through a browser: the flash plugin and Javascript. The flash plugin is wholly owned by Adobe and Google wouldn't want to be in hock to Adobe for a key plank in their strategy. That leaves Javascript.

Javascript is pretty awful: slow, unreliable, inconsistently implemented across Internet Explorer and Firefox, prone to falling over and not very secure. I've yet to meet a web developer who loves Javascript. You can do some great things with it, but mostly in spite of the language, not because of it.

This is the problem that Google seems to be trying to address with Chrome. It's the only real innovation in the browser for my money: a bullet-proof implementation of Javascript.

Everything else is pretty standard - Chrome is based on webkit, the same collection of code that Apple used to make Safari and a lot of the interface tweaks owe their inspiration to (have been copied from) an obscure, but well-regarded browser called Opera.

So, if Google docs would only work reliably then Microsoft really could become irrelevant: No longer would you fire up Word, Outlook and Excel when you got into the office: gMail and Google docs. would take over. Chrome is the tool that allows this to happen.

Hooray, you've saved hundreds of pounds per person in not buying Office!

Of course, there is a downside.

All your important business information would be held and maintained by someone else. Microsoft Office just provides the applications in which you work: you store your own data. Google Docs are stored, indexed and ultimately owned by Google.

Within days of Chrome's release, there was a right hoo-haa in the technical press when it was discovered that Google had put a term into the license whereby you granted a permanent and irrevocable license to Google to use, reproduce and distribute anything you uploaded through Chrome: photos, spreadsheet data; everything.

It was quickly removed, with an 'oops' style apology from Google, but that it was even there in the first place is worrying: that they ever thought this was reasonable. I don't trust anyone outside my accounts team with my financial information. Do you?

It's the same old story really: there's always a catch to 'free'. We use Google docs, and will continue to do so for lightweight online collaboration, but never for really important stuff. Think hard before you start entrusting business critical data to a third party. You never know where it could end up.






Note: There are various free office suites that work like Microsoft Office - the most famous is called Open Office, but there seems to be real resistance to it in business, possibly because many business people are nervous about an entirely free application suite that underpins the daily running of their business and isn't supported by a large company.