What is HTML5?

HTML is the coding language that the internet is built on. With this in mind, HTML5 is just an upgrade providing some new tricks and features as well as some judicious trimming of the fat and old outdated code.

It’s clear that HTML5 is bringing more power to the browser, turning it from just a window for the web to a full application environment able to run complex programmes.

This is undeniably a powerful combination, but a lot of people are concerned that browsers are set to become “Jack of all trade” tools, but not really very efficient or stable. For example, could a poorly coded and complex HTML5 website bring your computer grinding to a halt? At this stage, we can’t really find the answer to that one…

Is HTML5 the beginning of the end of Flash?

Steve Jobs and Apple certainly think so! In fact Apple have pinned their colours firmly to the mast over this issue, openly slating Adobe’s Flash software as buggy and poorly developed. Our office has been arguing over this for the past couple of weeks and, although no one died, there was some mild wounding and some very unsportsmanlike behaviour.

The balance of the argument is this:

Flash Good

• Could you really code something like this in HTML5? The day we see it, is the day we’ll all be convinced.
• You can develop really complex applications with gorgeous graphics and interface. It’s excellent at drawing graphics allowing you to scale up from a small widget in the corner of a website to full screen with no real loss in definition.
• Flash is simple to get good results with. You don’t need to be a programming genius to turn out some very acceptable and professional work.
• Flash CS5 (the latest release) also comes packaged with the ability to develop iPhone apps. Sure, you might not be able to view Flash webpages, but Flash is certinly going to lead a boom in the “app” market.
• Flash works on your desktop too – enabling you to build offline applications. (So does HTML5, so this is a 50:50 argument).

Flash Bad

• If you don’t have Flash installed, you aint seeing anything on a Flash website… This is the core of the pro-HTML5 argument. Flash is proprietary software and although it is freely available, many users simply do not have it installed – or even are not allowed to install it: some companies have a no-Flash policy on their office computers.
• Flash is hard to make accessible to screen readers. It’s possible to do so, but it’s not exactly straight forward and quite often doesn’t work.
• If you don’t use the mouse, you can’t do much interesting stuff with Flash. It just doesn’t know what to do if the mouse isn’t moving or clicking! This makes it really hard to use with touch screens such as the iPhone or iPad (Apple and Adobe, of course, failed to come to any agreement about Flash on these devices, so even if Flash worked better without a mouse, you still wouldn’t be able to use Flash apps on your iPhone).

Conclusion

We think that there will be a compromise position, at least for the next few years. HTML5 isn’t mainstream yet. Unless you’ve got one of the latest browsers (such as Firefox 3.6) you’re not even going to be able to use it, and this means that HTML5 is currently inaccessible to the majority of internet users. Adobe have also had a huge kick up the backside, so expect a slew of new features and developments as they fight for their market share.

The bottom line is basic common sense. Developers will need to ask the question “who am I designing for?”.

• If you want to reach the widest audience possible, including phones, then use HTML-5.
• If your audience is tech-savvy and you don’t mind losing a few iPhone users, use Flash.

HTML5 isn’t capable of killing off Flash just yet, and that’s not even a real objective of the HTML5 movement – but it’s going to be an interesting fight to see as browser based computing gains momentum, eating into the raison d’être for Flash in the first place.

Some links

No animals were harmed in the writing of this article, but I did find some great websites! For the HTML5 links, obviously you’ll need a HTML5 compatible browser…

Flash showcase

• Wrangler Blue Bell
• Me InTru 3d (Intel)
• Your voice and your imagination
• Verbatim championship
• WonderWall

HTML5 showcase

• Sketchpad
• CardFlip (for touchscreen phones)
• Ambilight for videos
• Drawing graphs in HTML5

These days, however, an intranet really can be a hub for your company. The intranet portal now closely mirrors employees’ expectations of world wide web functionality. Systems such as Microsoft SharePoint allow users to communicate with each other and collaborate, much as they would using social media tools such as blogging, Facebook and Twitter.

There are a number of capabilities that you can implement relatively easily, with SharePoint in particular making many of them available as standard.

Document sharing

This is the fundamental benefit of a SharePoint intranet and the simplest to set up. Document libraries offer version control features as well as configurable access levels. The Microsoft Office 2007 suite also offers on-the-fly editing of centrally stored documents.

Discussion boards

We’ve all seen discussion boards and forums on the internet, and they can be easily implemented on the corporate intranet. A discussion board can allow a regionally-fragmented team to keep in contact with each other, and to discuss issues or initiatives.

Some discussion boards – particularly in larger companies – may require moderation, but if a user is forced to participate using their real name, then the board is likely to be at least as polite as the actual office in real life.

Blogs

We’re not suggesting that you give everyone in the company their own blog, but employees will appreciate reading short and concise announcements from high-level superiors, especially if a less formal tone is used.

Commenting and rating

Add comments or ratings to your features so that users can give their thoughts and discuss ideas online.

These are measurable indicators to content editors that offer an idea of what visitors find useful and relevant.

Microblogging

Implement a Twitter-like ‘microblog’ on a department sub-site, such as the HR department, to keep staff updated on events in the company. Like blogging, it allows your department managers to communicate with staff quickly and easily, and the shortened nature of the ‘tweets’ makes for a friendly, informal tone.

Profile pages

A fully-fledged profile for every employee would be a bit much for an intranet site but employees would greatly benefit from a visually appealing ‘Who’s Who’ for each department. As well as email addresses and extension numbers, the page might offer employees’ particular skill sets, for example. This would allow for the functionality to search for certain skills or specialties in a group.

And more…

There really is no limit to the functionality you can put on your intranet. Theoretically, if you see it on the world-facing internet, you can build it onto your site. That said, you need to make sure that the functionality you implement is worthwhile: will it improve or add to your business?

SharePoint 2010 looks to be the biggest update in the Microsoft Office family this year, as all communications so far indicate that other Office applications will only undergo minor tweaks.

So what are the big changes for SharePoint?

• SharePoint Server 2010 won’t support Internet Explorer 6, which is sensational in Microsoft terms. Microsoft appear to be responding to pressure to urge users to upgrade to IE7. It is also possible that SharePoint source code will be more standards-compliant at the front-end; these are both good things.
   
• SharePoint Server will be 64-bit only and will require a 64-bit Windows Server 2008 to run. Many businesses will need to spend a lot of money to overhaul their IT infrastructure in order to deploy SharePoint 2010.
   
• Fewer structural changes to sites and architecture will mean a smooth transition for businesses already using MOSS 2007.
   
• The ribbon is present on all SharePoint pages, and can be hidden. If you’ve used Office 2007, you’ll be familiar with the ribbon – it is new menu layout in which commands are arranged in a logical manner through the use of tabs and groups. You can extend the ribbon to include custom functions. In SharePoint 2010, the available commands will vary depending on your access rights on a particular site or page. The upshot of this is that a user will have to click fewer times to get to certain destinations, such as workflow views or the People & Groups settings for a site – pages which currently require quite a lot of navigating.
   
• Alerts in SharePoint 2010 will be far more flexible. There will be more controls governing the frequency and scope of the alerts, but even better will be the ability to customise email alerts with rich XHTML content.
   
• Branding a SharePoint site or sub-site is made easier for developers. Separate CSS files exist for different applications within a site. The upshot of this is that designers will find working with the environment assets more fluid and controlled, and they won’t have to trawl through a long file of style rules.
   
• SharePoint 2010 will provide much better support for large lists. Previously, search servers struggled to correctly index a large list.
   

Of course, these codes contain more than just obscure patterns. Devised in 1994 for industrial use, ‘QR codes’ were employed for tagging boxes as a more information-heavy barcode. For example, the German Post uses them to keep track of packages.

QR codes can be read very quickly with a visual encoding system and may contain up to 50 characters – ideal to store URLs, for example, that could lead to product websites or customer information. In Japan, they are widely used in promotional materials: a whole page ad in a national newspaper might be bought and lined with QR codes, with the correct one linking to a free mobile phone download of a band’s new single.

So why have we not seen this in Europe or the US? Put simply, we lack the necessary technology on our phones. In Japan, where the QR squares have become a staple of pop culture, every cell phone comes with the ability to process these codes. In the west, the iPhone was shipped with a camera that lacks sufficient contrast to even pick out the small black and white squares, and mobile internet outside of the smartphone set is still patchy at best.

So are QR Codes something to bother with outside of Japan? Should marketers engage in QR campaigns? The answer is: Not yet. However, their success in Japan is encouraging, and it shouldn’t be long before we can take advantage of this new technology.

What happened was that, for a couple of hours, Facebook slipped off the top Google rank for the search “Facebook login”. Instead, a blog called ReadWriteWeb (an excellent read, by the way) slipped into first place. Not noticing the change, users simply clicked on the top link anyway and were taken to a ReadWriteWeb article about Facebook, which looked entirely unlike the actual Facebook page.

Logging in to the wrong site

Unfortunately, it got worse. Many users did not notice their mistake, and scrolled down to the only part of the page that looked like a log in area: the comments section. As luck would have it, this offered them the chance to connect with a Facebook account. Which, of course, is exactly what they did.

There are now hundreds of comments on the article, mostly along the lines of “I don’t like the new facebook” and “when can we log in?”. The blog was forced to post a message in the article with the actual Facebook link and instructions on how to use bookmarks.

Not simply user error

It is easy to suggest that this all down to ‘user error’, and there are some very entertaining articles round the internet along these lines. However, there are deeper problems here. Facebook has a propensity to continually redesign their homepage. These users, directed to a page that looked almost entirely unlike Facebook, still entertained the possibility that they were on the site. Facebook, it seems, has lost its familiarity. People don’t expect it to look like anything in particular.

Facebook Connect, too, is a problem. Theoretically, Facebook Connect is a way of only having a single login for multiple sites and blogs… except that people evidently don’t understand how it works or what it does. This is Facebook’s fault. It needs to be better explained.

Dealing with users who are not technically minded

Facebook is not a specialist blog. Its users are not all technically minded – indeed, for many users, Facebook is basically ‘the internet’. The site has been getting gradually more and more complicated, and it seems that now the site is losing track of its core audience.

This was a strange situation, and everyone came out looking more than a little stupid (except, of course, ReadWriteWeb, whose traffic is presumably looking very healthy at the moment). However, we can take a couple of key lessons out of this:

• Changing your home page is fine, but don’t confuse your regular readers with too many big changes. They may simply begin assuming that problems are actual design changes.
• Connectivity with other sites (such as Facebook Connect) is all very well, but it can be confusing – especially when it’s not explained properly to the people who use it. This is something Google could stand to learn as well, with the recent advent of Google Buzz.
• Functionality is great, but only if people understand how it works. If they don’t… is it necessary?
• Search Engine Optimisation works. Facebook effectively lost several hundred users for a couple of hours because a blog’s SEO was better than theirs.
• Think your page is as simple and usable as possible? Think again. It’s not.

Say Yes To The Test is a campaign to inform people about chlamydia, supported by the NHS website. At the time of writing, the Facebook page has been live for around two weeks and has over 36,000 fans. Given that the average Facebook user has 130 friends and that every new sign-up displays on all of a user’s friends’ profiles, the page has potentially reached 4.7 million users.

In fact, the campaign is being aimed at under-25s. A quick spot check of people who have commented on the page shows that they often have well over 130 friends. This is the very definition of a successful viral campaign: a campaign that has grown on the digital equivalent of word-of-mouth.

Campaign success

The real success of the campaign, however, lies with the way the page is being moderated – or, rather, how it isn’t being moderated. The NHS is not applying a heavy hand to comments; I couldn’t see any obvious signs of censorship, and the tone throughout the comments is light and informal.

This has its pros and cons, of course. On the downside, there is a lot of crudity: mostly jesting about virginity and all of the expected commentary from a young audience. On this level, it is questionable how seriously some of the users are taking the campaign. That said, for every rude jibe there is another comment in obvious support of the campaign. In fact, many users’ questions are being answered by other users.

Building a conversation

The NHS has taken an intelligent approach to conversing with the Facebook crowd. Site admins are not responding to every post, but they are answering questions. While these answers are largely informational, they are also tailored responses. The NHS is having a conversation with the users.

Aiding this conversation is the simple nature of the Facebook page. There are no warnings or disclaimers, aside from a page of information and links.

There is always a risk with campaigns like this that they won’t attract a following, or that users will be faced with inaccurate or incomplete information. However, the NHS has made an important step in the right direction.

That’s where the web comes into play. Shocked and dismayed customers are sure to pay attention to the media’s cries of horror, but they will also recognise that they need to pay close attention to the official line by Toyota. They will turn to the internet to find out the logistics of the recall and the way they need to interact with Toyota and its dealers in order to get their cars fixed up. Besides actually fixing cars quickly and efficiently, the web represents Toyota’s best chance to repair some of the damage to its reputation.

The good, the bad and the ugly

We looked at three of Toyota’s websites around the world: UK, US and France. This cursory research shows a patchy – but in some places encouraging – understanding of how the web can play a major role in Toyota’s salvation. The UK site shows the most promise and this is where we’ll focus most.

Toyota UK have set up a recall page (click here for a screengrab) that brings together a collection of information and channels on which customers can follow Toyota’s official line on the matter:

• The core part of the page contains a form inviting customers to enter their vehicle details in order to ascertain whether they will be affected by the recall.
• There’s a big and bold telephone hotline with opening hours clearly indicated.
• They’ve set up an RSS feed from their blog and a link to their Twitter page.
• They’ve taken the trouble to add information about the insurance implications of the recall and a statement about the code of practice for vehicle recalls in Britain.
• The commercial director has published a YouTube video which can be played right off the page and the Managing Director has published a written statement.
• Then there’s an FAQ and various other statements and pieces of information about the recall.

The US Toyota recall page (click here for a screengrab) is a little disappointing in comparison with the UK site. They’ve got all of the information regarding the recall on the site but they have not embraced the diverse channels on which they could reach their customers.

The France Toyota recall page (click here for a screengrab) – the worst pick of the bunch by a long way – merely contains a press release and various links to unrelated pages on their site.

Toyota UK: a model for crisis planning?

Watching how companies react in times of crisis always provides valuable lessons into how to manage reputation. Toyota’s reaction is by no means a text book case – there’s clearly poor coordination between the corporate entity and its local operating companies. However, looking at what they have done on the web in the UK provides a good case study for other companies who are fated to face similar crises in future and – more importantly – for those companies who take crisis planning seriously.

Firstly, in spite of the misleading name, this is not a ‘pad’. You cannot write on it. There is no handwriting recognition, no stylus. Surely one of the key functions of a tablet should be that you can write notes on it and do away with paper pads? A cleverly-designed operating system would help no end in managing pages and pages of scrawled notes by making them searchable, date-stamping them and adding other meta-data. OK, handwriting recognition is still a technology that has a long way to go but Apple didn’t even try to address this.

Apple’s second failing is around synchronisation. Here we are being enticed to buy yet another device to add to our collections of desktops, laptops and smart-phones, yet the iPad lacks any means of synchronising our vast media libraries of photos, videos and music between devices (maybe Apple wants us instead to buy additional copies of our files from the iTunes store?).

Without synchronisation, the user is left scrabbling around with wires, connectors and external hard drives moving Gigabytes of files from one machine to another. It’s all very dull and very frustrating. My wife won’t be happy: she always shouts at me when I spend a Saturday morning copying files.

My third gripe is to do with connectivity. Apple’s days of being the hero underdog are well gone. It is now in the business of abusing its faithful followers by trying to fleece them as much as possible from their hard-earned cash. Selling them expensive Apple branded accessories and clutter so that they can perform simple operations such as attaching a digital camera is the order of the day. Surely a USB attachment would have been a smarter choice than Apple’s proprietary 30-pin adapter?

Let’s hope Google and Dell bring out something that addresses these issues with their new joint venture to build a tablet. My hunch is that they will. Although Google is certainly more evil than it used to be, it’s no match to greedy Apple.

Art by Kelly “Suuqin” Chan – Words by Geoff “NotWelshMan” Scaplehorn

Click here to see another cartoon from us!

There are various dashboarding tools available on the web. These can be effective but are sometimes hard to implement or do not provide the data view that you want to show. To get around this, we build custom dashboards for many of our clients for both intranets and websites.

Click to read more about the various types of dashboards