webqem blog

If you thought it was hard to create a web page that looks consistent across the various browsers out there wait until you try creating an HTML email. In order to create an email that is going to work across the various email clients out there, both desktop based clients and web based email, you’re essentially forced to write HTML as if it was still the 90s – tables for layout, spacer images and minimal CSS. Even then you’re not going to get it looking perfect in every client due to many quirks and inconsistencies in the email client’s HTML/CSS support.

With this situation in mind the Email Standards Project has been launched by a group of people involved in the web industry. The project aims to educate web designers and developers about the importance of web standards for email, and to liaise with email client developers to provide assistance and feedback on standards support within their clients. The aim is to improve standards support within email clients, similar to the goals of the Web Standards Project for browsers.

HTML emails aren’t going away, so anything that can be done to make the experience more consistent for readers will benefit the businesses using email marketing, and make it easier for the web designers and developers to create great looking content.

Check out the Email Standards Project site for more information, and help spread the good word!

We have been working with iPrime (the digital arm of regional network Prime Television) over the past year to produce the “world’s first” town-specific, video-based social networking site. canberra.iprime.com.au is based on the premise of “Right here, right now” and provides local users with a one stop shop for all content relevant to Canberra.

iPrime were keen to move away from the traditional portal approach and as such we recommended using the latest technologies including Adobe Flex and Adobe Flash. This allowed us to build a rich, engaging site that users can navigate through seamlessly.

At webqem we have a number of regular cycle commuters, so it was only fitting that we would participate in the National Ride to Work Day. Our new office has all the facilities needed to encourage cycling to work, including a bike rack, lockers and a shower.

On the day, there were five participants (it would have been six if not for an injury), and we rode in to the office in Neutral Bay from Balmoral, Brookvale, Cremorne, Mosman, and Pyrmont.

The webqem bike rack, one bike short of being full.

Unfortunately we were one bike short of filling up the webqem bike rack in the foyer, however since five of the team are regular cycle commuters it’s not the first time the bike rack has seen five bikes on it - so I am expecting it will be full one of these days!

Peter Ryce, Adobe’s Connect product evangelist or “connectionist”, is well known as the presenter of various demonstrations for the Adobe Connect product range. We recently discovered that Peter had done a video interview with well known blogger Robert Scoble on Connect.

Entitled “Demo of Adobe Connect” it runs for almost half an hour. It’s a worthwhile view as Scoble’s interview with Peter Ryce is thorough, giving an excellent insight into the product.

The Flex based insurance gap calculator we developed for MLC was added to the Flex theme showcase site scale nine. The site is a collection of Flex themes and applications that push the design capabilities of Flex past the default theme.

Thanks to Juan from scale nine for including our work.

A new study commissioned by the United Nations has found that most websites fail to meet basic accessibility guidelines. The study found that 78 per cent of sites reviewed used colour combinations of poor contrast, 87 per cent caused pop-up windows to appear without warning and 92 per cent failed to provide keyboard shortcuts. Designing websites that are usable and accessible to a broad range of users has always been a focus at webqem. We design and code all sites to the minimum W3C conformity of ‘A’, which inlcudes XHTML 1.0 Transitional, CSS2 and DOM based scripting.

To read more about accessbility and usability on the web follow the links below.

• Sydney Morning Herald article: Behind closed doors
• W3C Web accessibility guidelines
• International Day of People with Disabilities

On 15 November Google announced that Yahoo and MSN would join Google in supporting a common Sitemap Protocol. Information about the agreement has been placed on a new site at Sitemaps.org

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The Black Dog Institute has a clear vision about how to help as many people as possible using their website - the Bipolar Disorder educational program is an example of how they have put that vision into action. The information supplied by the program is in audiovisual format (Macromedia Breeze presentations) as well as PDF. The power of seeing and hearing from experts in the bipolar disorder field is a corner stone of this program. The institute has gone one step further in their mission to effectively distribute information about biploar disorder by inviting feedback from users. The feedback is collected using a Macromedia Breeze (now Adobe Connect) presentation containing online Quiz questions. The questions are multichoice and freeform text entry. Answers are collected at a statistical level rather than individual.

The whole online Bipolar Education program has also been created on CD for distribution to users in the bush and remote areas.

I’ve seen a little bit of discussion on the Flexcoders mailing list recently regarding saving images created in a flex app to the server. Most of the solutions revolved around using HTTP to get the image from the flash player to the server. This had proved difficult for numerous reason. So I set out to try and find a simpler way. Now knowing that AMF is a binary protocol I figured it must be possible to send the binary image data to the server using Remoting.

And indeed it is. In fact it’s stunningly simple. The actual heavy lifting has already been done for us by Tinic Uro in his Image Encoding classes. All I had to do was capture the image data, encode it using Tinic’s classes and then send it to a ColdFusion CFC via remoting. I’ve put it up as a demo so you can see it in action.

The flex part is standard Remoting so you can look at the code in the download to see that part but the ColdFusion is shown below.

<cffunction name="upload" access="remote" returntype="string">
	<cfargument name="ext" type="string" required="true">
	<cfargument name="img" type="binary" required="true">

	<cfset var name = "image" & dateFormat(now(), "yyyymmdd") &
		timeFormat(now(), "HHmmss") & "." & arguments.ext>

	<cffile action="write" file="#expandPath("..\images\#name#")#"
		output="#img#" addnewline="false" >

	<cfreturn "/images/#name#">
</cffunction>

As you can see the code required in ColdFusion to do a relatively complex task is minimal, it can all be boiled down to two things:

1. Setting the argument type of the image data to binary (I’m not even sure this is required).
2. Using the cffile tag to save that binary data to a file.

See I told you it was simple. Feel free to download the Image Upload Code and try it out for youself.

Despite some people provocatively claiming that blogging is dead (flogged to death by spam blogs, replaced by audio and video blogs, or that it never lived), blogging is alive and kicking as an interactive communications tool and search engine optimisation favourite. (more…)