No man is an island

Some time ago i stated that creating pages using transparent pngs will be easier and more feasible in the future now that IE7 is out.

I predicted that IE7 will get about 50% market share compared to about 20% it had back then. Well, all those statistics have to be taken lightly - as it is with statistics. My prediction is off my quite a margin anyway.

“The future exists today. It’s just unevenly distributed.”

So we will have to hang in there until this sadness that IE6 is will grow out of the systems. From what i have seen in the past with other technologies this will take a long time.

The workarounds for transparency issues will remain and we will continue to use those IE filters to get our site to work in that sad thing that IE6 is.

Now that IE finally supports transparency in it’s 7th inception it’s time to look more into website design using transparency in PNGs.

32 Bit images (24 Bit color, 8 Bit transparency channel) allow effects previously hard or even impossible to do on websites. IE5.5 and IE6 in fact supported these transparencies to some degree with AlphaImageLoader. This was painful, had it’s issues when using this on PNGs that were background images of elements and simply didn’t work when ActiveX was deactivated. It also had issues when animating these PNGs for example in a draggable area although that worked ok in IE5.5+ most of the time.

The time for workarounds comes to a close, especially as soon as IE7 becomes the major IE in use out there. Currently it’s 20%+ for IE7 and about 50%+ for IE5.5/IE6. This still leaves a lot of room for improvement but it’s a start. I think IE7 will gain marketshare of about 50% by July 2007. Within a years time IE5.5 and IE6 will only be used by a minority. One issue with IE7 is that it is not and will not be available for Windows 2000. There are still a lot of Windows 2000 installations out there and some die hard resisters to switch to a newer Windows version (I am). But there also are still users out there using NS4 (yes, surprising). The only chance for those visitors i see is simply telling them to upgrade their browser or use an alternative browser that works fine. This may not be possible for every target group but for some websites this approach may work. Either way this will reduce users of your website. You can’t have it all i guess.

With proper use of transparency a lot of fancy designs can be achieved a lot easier than before. Just think of the dreaded drop shadow or even worse the drop shadow on the gradient. This will all work just fine with PNGs. I predict that we will see an uprise of transparent PNG using websites within the next 12 months. It will probably not reach mainstream websites until later but the geekier websites probably alread use it anyway.

Well, i think it went quite fine so far (considering that there were nearly 30 people sitting around me at the start, my god) though i quickly noticed i couldn’t stop talking about pyhton and zope. They inquired me about solutions for versioning, undoable stuff, integrated user authorization, workflows and, and, and. I was originally quite open about what to propose and you may have already guessed it - we ended up talking about ZOPE. One of the final question was if it’s possible to talk to LDAP as a user auth source. Well, yes! Hell yes!

Anyway, another thing i realized is that i know my way around in the zope world and flirted with other frameworks but i should really get some stuff done with them and get my hands dirty.

So i pledge to myself to code a minimal application in every popular python framework (except Zope 2.x which i know quite well)

• Pylons
• Turbogears
• Django
• Quixote

I also stumble upon more and more new python packages that i never heard of before. Each one reads better than the other. I wonder why there are suddenly such a lot of web related packages/frameworks popping up? Well, part of the answer is certainly Ruby On Rails and honestly i think it’s one of the best things to happen to python on the web.

Things to look at as well:

• Paste (should have done that a long time ago. I was aware of that but the last year was nearly exlusively daemon/oracle/python/imaging stuff)
• Routes
• Mochikit
• Kid
• CherryPy
• SQLObject
• Pudge
• Cheetah

Since they want to operate on a lot of binary data as well maybe i should throw cx_bsdiff into the discussion as well (versioning a 460MB movie several time hurts a lot)

Ah…hehe - it was also a big showoff for my shiny new MacBook Pro. I didnt brag to start with or anything. Martin just asked me if i got my new MacBook with me. After my confirmative answer he shouted around “Anyone wanna see an intel based mac notebook?” lol

Tomorrow i’ll visit a local company here in Berlin to present my skills regarding all CMS. Just until yesterday i was extremely confident to just walk in and talk on. Today it’s a totally different story. My god.

I know a LOT about CMS stuff and all the non-technical aspects as well. So where is the problem? I am quite good at speaking in front of other people. Well this time those are real professionals (maybe this is the problem?). There will be no space for dodging around. My thoughts so far are okay but i simply don’t think i can keep talking for 30 min + unless i start talking about Zope, which is okay in that context, but i can’t only talk about zope. I even cannot say a lot about non-python cms. I’m a python guy and that’s it. 30 min QA. I really hope it will be a little more informal and that the audience is relaxed enough to engage in a dialog. I am great in a dialog.

Anyway, lets hope it works out and we like each other. That would give me another customer