Synapsys Blog - Technical

Adobe Reader Speed up

Most offices use Adobe Acrobat Reader in some version or another, for many purposes. For my work in Synapsys, I use Reader 7.0 every day, and often find the program loading speed and file opening speed to be quite slow – very frustrating! Based on an article in the April 2005 edition of PC Authority magazine (page 61), I downloaded the FREE Adobe Reader Speed Up 1.32 software (NOTE: The program is not affiliated with Adobe Systems in any way). The article was correct in it's analysis of the product, it is easy to install, and yes, “it does something you didn't know needed doing”. After installing the program, Reader opened up very speedily, and files that used to take several seconds to open, now open up immediately. Great!! I would recommend the installation of this program to anyone who uses Reader regularly. For more information refer to the article. Download from here.

Browser Wars II

The browser wars of the 1990s may be over but a second, underground, revolution is on its way that may alter the browser market from the inside out. As the importance of web standards and the potential cost of past laxness looms dark on the horizon, a dozing Microsoft may find itself playing catch-up while newcomer Firefox enjoys a welcome boost.

Many of you will remember the 'browser wars' of the mid to late '90s. Back in 1997 Netscape Navigator had more than 70% market share, and Microsoft's Internet Explorer was a minnow with less than 20%. At the time, the differing standards used by the available browsers (affecting CSS support and Javascript implementation, for example) meant making Internet content was a genuine headache. The fact that a given page worked well in one browser was in no way a guarantee that it would work identically in another.

Following the introduction of Internet Explorer 4.0 in 1997, Microsoft's browser began to surge ahead in popularity (not least because it was given away free with Windows 98, although it was also in many ways a far superior product than any of the alternatives) while once top-dog Netscape floundered and eventually fell.

While various anti-trust and regulatory bodies were rightly disturbed by the tactics employed by Microsoft to gain their market dominance, the almost complete market penetration of Internet Explorer made life much easier for the average web developer. If a page worked in Internet Explorer, a satisfactory user experience could be guaranteed for 95% of the page's audience.

While this market dominance was convenient for many, Microsoft's willingness to use its dominance to pressure the competition was the darker flipside of the coin. This came to a head with Microsoft's decision to drop support for Sun Microsystems' Java language. At the time Microsoft's own FrontPage software included Java-based components and Java was, and still is, used by a wide variety of online material. Inevitably this action caused a great deal of indignation in the online community. Many people came to realise that the negative aspects of Microsoft's dominant position greatly outweighed the benefits. At around the same time Microsoft was also becoming increasingly complacent, secure in their position as undisputed king of the browser market, with refinements to their browser becoming ever less frequent, instead focusing on fixes for a seemingly never-ending list of security flaws.

One of the keys to Internet Explorer's success has always been its forgiving nature. Incorrect syntax is usually glossed over, and obvious errors allowed to gracefully degrade without anything more obvious than a small error icon. This benign nature is thanks to the browser's failure to strictly adhere to language protocols such as XHTML, CSS2 and Javascript. This may sound like a good thing, but it isn't.

Pages that are permitted not to follow strict protocols will always have an uncertain future. Will they work in the future with other browsers? What if Microsoft were make their browser's compliance more rigid? Pages would need to be altered in order to function as intended, which would necessitate a large financial outlay for many companies. Not good. More advanced functions, such as those of the CSS2 specification, may also fail to function at all, limiting development possibilities and slowing standards evolution (which naturally go hand-in-hand with the actual use and adoption of these standards). Better to ensure pages meet strict requirements now, ensuring that they will work in the future regardless of browser. However, in order to do this a browser is required that actually follows all the rules.

Enter Mozilla's Firefox. Firefox is a collaborative effort designed to tightly comply with the major web standards, as mandated by the World Wide Web Consortium/W3C (www.w3c.com). Although only in its first full release version (an infant in software terms), Firefox is already recognised as technically superior to Internet Explorer 6.0 (not to mention significantly faster), and is essential equipment for any web developer, whether working primarily for Internet Explorer users or not. Because of Firefox's rendering (and usability; one word: 'tabs') superiority, it has become the browser of choice among developers and is quickly gaining market share. Over 50 million downloads of the Firefox 1.0 browser were recorded in the six months following its introduction in November 2004, backed by a swelling underground support movement.

Since Firefox's introduction, Internet Explorer's market share has dropped to below 87%, while Firefox commands nearly 9% and continues to grow at an impressive rate. At first glance this may not seem very impressive, but these numbers have certainly attracted Microsoft's attention. Microsoft had originally intended to wait until the introduction of their next-generation 'Longhorn' operating system (ETA, 2006-ish) before releasing a newer version of Internet Explorer, but have changed their tune, stating that Internet Explorer 7.0 will be released sometime in the fourth quarter of 2005. It is rumoured to have enhanced functionality, including tabbing, and greater (although not complete) adherence to the major web standards. Unsurprisingly, it will also tightly integrate with Microsoft's upcoming spyware software and many of the security enhancement introduced with XP SP2. We may well be on the verge of 'browser wars II'.

Regardless of the outcome of this pending face-off, the growing acceptance of web standards among the online community makes development of rigid pages not only desirable but essential. Failure to do so will cost you and your company money when you find yourself forced to recreate pages that have already been made once before. The relaxed approach to standards is fast becoming as obsolete as the horse and buggy.

Avoiding the Spam trap.

Email spam is an issue for business; it can take up man hours and time, which cost the company money.

One method spammers use to get your email is when you join a site you are required to submit an email address, some of these sites sell their email list to spammers.

The other method is spam bots or email harvesters. These are similar to search engine spiders in that they crawl the web looking for websites, but instead of looking for content and listing your website on a search engine, they are programmed to look for email address and send them back to the spammer’s server. This is what we will look at today.

The Catch-22 is your business needs to be easily contacted from your website; a contact page and/or email address is required. Making it hard for someone to contact you creates an unfriendly user experience and you will lose potential customers, but putting your email out there makes it a target for spammers. That's quite a catch, that Catch-22.... Read on.....

There are a few ways to combat the email harvesting bots and reduce the possibility of ending up on a spam list.

1. Use a contact form on your contact page.
Use a script that doesn’t require the recipients email address to be in the form (you may not see it, but it is there in the code for the spam bots to see).
Also, if you are using a common script such as formmail.cgi make sure it is set up to only accept requests from your server or it could be hijacked by a spammer and used to send out bulk emails using your account.

2. Confuse or block spam bots.
This can be done several ways using various script languages.
The spam bots scan the HTML code behind the page for email addresses; you can use script to hide the email address in the code but still display properly for a human.

JavaScript can be used to confuse some spam bots by breaking up the email address into parts or switching charaters and then writing it to the page (remember the spam bot will see the JavaScript code, not the result of the code)
Even better would be to not put the JavaScript directly into your page but to link to it as a .js include file. This method is independent of what platform you use to host you website.

The next method is to use server side scripts to detect the spam bots and block them. They can also be used to the same effect as the JavaScript method, a combination of both would be best just incase a new bot slips through undetected.
There are free scripts available for PHP and ASP with updated list of known spam bots and email harvesters from the links below.
You can even fight the spammers by poisoning their harvest with fake emails, just make sure you use a robot.txt on your server to block legitimate search engine spiders from crawling it.

A very good anti spam site fill of helpful links and information: http://spamlinks.net/spambots.htm

Some anti-spam measures to fight SPAM: http://www.kloth.net/internet/spam/

The Web Robots Pages: http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/robots.html

Web Development 101

Several years ago web development was a boutique industry with technical skills a necessity. As the years have gone by, the skills needed for basic web development have slowly diminished to the point that, today, almost anyone can create a complete website in a matter of hours. Simple WYSIWYG authoring tools, such as Dreamweaver and FrontPage, with their standardised interfaces are often no less usable than software people use on a daily basis (Word, for example) making the transition a painless one.

This evolution has opened the Internet up to a degree once thought impossible. The downside to this explosion is the growing number of sites that prove impossible or painfully difficult to navigate due to poor layout, flawed navigation, colour and formatting choices. To prevent these visual nightmares, here are a few basic tips for new web developers.

Fonts. Use a standard font such as Arial or Verdana. You may have a font on your computer that you've grown attached to, but there's no guarantee that users of your website will have the same font installed on their computers, making the resulting page they will see entirely unpredictable.

Use a font colour that contrasts well against your page background: black on white is always a safe choice. If the font and background colours are too similar, people will have difficulty reading your text. Neon fonts are a definite no-no.

Avoid italicised fonts as they are much harder to read, and try not to use more than two or three font sizes on the same block of text. Pages with many different font sizes make a site more difficult to read and visually chaotic (unless, of course, this is the effect you're looking for!).

Backgrounds. Neutral colours are best; yes, boring perhaps, but bright colours can be overbearing and reduce the legibility of text. Some browsers also refresh the page more slowly as you scroll down a page, which combined with a bright background may produce a flashing light-show that will have your users flying into epileptic fits en masse! Not really, but you get my drift. Oh, and if you decide to use a background image, don't watermark it, as this can be distracting when scrolling down long pages.

Navigation. Found a nice Flash or Java manu system have you? Feel free to use it, but make sure it isn't the only means of navigating your site. Many users won't have the plug-ins necessary to utilise them and will be faced by empty grey blocks rather than buttons. Put standard HTML links on the page just in case. Make sure that whetever primary navigation system you use remains the same on every page.

If the navigation layout changes on different pages you will have your users tearing their hair out in frustration. Lastly, bear in mind natural human interactions with the page. In most Western cultures people's eyes will be drawn to the top left-hand corner of the screen and then right, along the top of the screen. Your main navigation should ideally be near where they look first on your page.

Images. Always use an appropriate image compression format. If you're compressing an image with large blocks of the same colour (such as logos and most navigation buttons) use something like GIF. If you're compressing a photograph or complex image with lots of gradients, textures and highlights use JPEG. Using the wrong format will increase the file size dramatically. And try not to put more than 100KB of images on the same page; any more can cause aggravation for dial-up users (of which there are still many).

Finally, and this is a biggy, don't re-size an image on your page using the HTML size tags. If you shrink the oscreen size of a large image on your page (in pixels), the actual file size (in KB) still remains the same. This means that a very small image on your page may still take a very long time to download. Use something like Photoshop (or even Paint) to re-size the image instead, thereby preventing the need for me to throw things at my monitor and swear profusely when visiting your site. And don't increase the size of an image using the same tags. This will cause pixellation of the image, making it look grainy and jagged.

Contact pages. If you decide to put up a contact page, be cautious about plastering your email address on it. Trust me, it will be an unwelcome surprise when the spam starts rolling in. If you are able, use a contact form, or conceal your email address from spiders (those programmes that trawl through websites for content) using Javascript. Think about creating an email address specifically for the site; one that you can abandon if things go haywire.

General Usability. Try to maintain standardisation across your pages. This may mean spending some time coming up with a page template at the outset, but it will make things considerably easier for you and your site's users down the track. If you're coming from a print background remember to think broadly in squares and rectangles when designing a page. Circles and curves may look nice, but they're difficult to implement.

Consider the screen resolution of your users. Most people will be using a screen resolution of 1024x768 (pixels, width by height) or above, but there are still quite a few using 800x600 or less. If your page is wider than 750 pixels these users will be forced to scroll sideways to view the full width of the page. It's up to you to decide what compromises you make to accommodate varying resolutions, but try to avoid extremely wide tables or images as a rule.

If you use links, make sure they're clearly identified as links (underlined, for example) and make sure you don't use the same format for plain text (I hate it when people underline text on a site but it isn't a link, but that may just be me!)

Finally, remember that these are just guidelines. Many of them may be broken under the right circumstances with great results. Guidelines are a useful tool, but web development is as much an act of artistic creativity than a purely technical one! Now fly! Be free, my little grasshopper!

Search Engine Optimisation vs User Optimisation

You may have heard of the term Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and why you need it to get thousands flocking to your website. There are companies that specialise in this field and will claim to put you in the top 10 search results of the major 3 search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN).

But there is one thing that will beat any SEO code tweaking voodoo magic and 'pay per click' add campaigns hands down everytime. Something search engines love, and people love – Content.
On the internet content is king, the internet is about sharing information. If you have a website packed with good, relevant informative content, then they will come, the search engine bots and the humans.

Many web development companies select and develop content based on the users and the visual appearance they want to convey. They tend to see site optimisation as something that happens after the site is build. This is a trap.