Google has released a free plug-in for Internet Explorer that forces Microsoft’s browser to use Chrome rendering engine, increasing JavaScript performance by almost eight times as much.

The Chrome Frame plug –in (http://code.google.com/chrome/chromeframe ) works on all versions of Internet Explorer from 6 higher, and also allows websites that use HTML 5 to be displayed properly. Web developers have to explicitly choose choose to support the plug-in ability by inserting a Chrome Frame specific tag into the HTML code for their web pages, telling Internet Explorer to load the plug-in .

If the plug-in isn’t found , a message can be displayed telling the user to download Chrome Frame. On pages without the tag, Internet Explorer shouldn’t behave any differently. Google released Chrome Frame so that users still using older web browsers can use web applications that demand the latest technologies. Microsoft isn’t happy about the release and has said that the plug-in could make its browser less secure.

Google is clearly the best general-purpose search engine on the Web

But most people don’t use it to its best advantage. Do you just plug in a keyword or two and hope for the best? That may be the quickest way to search, but with more than 3 billion pages in Google’s index, it’s still a struggle to pare results to a manageable number.

But Google is an remarkably powerful tool that can ease and enhance your Internet exploration. Google’s search options go beyond simple keywords, the Web, and even its own programmers. Let’s look at some of Google’s lesser-known options.

Syntax Search Tricks

Using a special syntax is a way to tell Google that you want to restrict your searches to certain elements or characteristics of Web pages. Google has a fairly complete list of its syntax elements at

www.google.com/help/operators.html

. Here are some advanced operators that can help narrow down your search results.

Intitle: at the beginning of a query word or phrase (intitle:”Three Blind Mice”) restricts your search results to just the titles of Web pages.

Intext: does the opposite of intitle:, searching only the body text, ignoring titles, links, and so forth. Intext: is perfect when what you’re searching for might commonly appear in URLs. If you’re looking for the term HTML, for example, and you don’t want to get results such as

artfantasy.revivalx.com

, you can enter intext:html.

Link: lets you see which pages are linking to your Web page or to another page you’re interested in. For example, try typing in

link:http://www.revivalx.com

Try using site: (which restricts results to top-level domains) with intitle: to find certain types of pages. For example, get scholarly pages about Mark Twain by searching for intitle:”Mark Twain”site:edu. Experiment with mixing various elements; you’ll develop several strategies for finding the stuff you want more effectively. The site: command is very helpful as an alternative to the mediocre search engines built into many sites.

Swiss Army Google

Google has a number of services that can help you accomplish tasks you may never have thought to use Google for. For example, the new calculator feature

(www.google.com/help/features.html#calculator)

lets you do both math and a variety of conversions from the search box. For extra fun, try the query “Answer to life the universe and everything.”

Let Google help you figure out whether you’ve got the right spelling—and the right word—for your search. Enter a misspelled word or phrase into the query box (try “thre blund mise”) and Google may suggest a proper spelling. This doesn’t always succeed; it works best when the word you’re searching for can be found in a dictionary. Once you search for a properly spelled word, look at the results page, which repeats your query. (If you’re searching for “three blind mice,” underneath the search window will appear a statement such as Searched the web for “three blind mice.”) You’ll discover that you can click on each word in your search phrase and get a definition from a dictionary.

What Would Google Do?

There are two ways to add Flash files ( or more correctly, SWF files) to your HTML pages. Firstly, the flash application itself has plenty of Export options, and these are probably the best place to start. The second method allows you to place to start. The code directly into your HTML page. This method is probably more flexible and is suitable for most applications.

The Export techniques do have some advantages , especially for the newcomer. But this technique covers virtually all eventualities and has some advantages of its own. Not at least of these is that it uses a very small amount of standards-complaint code, and requires no browser scripting . It’s also very easy to understand and is great for placing a Flash file just where you want it.

Rather than Export the SWF from Flash, you will simply select Test Movie from the control menu. This creates a file with the same name as your Flash file, but the .swf suffix. Copy this file to the “images” directory of your site.

Next, you’ll need the code. Type this into your HTML page:

<object type=”application/x-shockwave-flash”

Data=”images/portfolio.swf” width=”640” height=”480”>

<param name =”movie” value=”images/portfolio.swf”/>

<img src=”portfolio.jpg” width=”640” height=”480” alt=”Sorry, you can’t view my Flash portfolio.”/>

</object>

Within that block of code you should be able to easily spot the parts you are likely to need to edit, including the name of the SWF as well as it’s pixel dimensions. If you followed the steps to create a simple Flash portfolio then the chances are your HTML will work without any alterations.

As well as embedding the Flash file, the code also includes a regular <img> tag within the <object> tag. You need to create a JPEG or GIF image that will be displayed in the event that the user doesn’t have the Flash plug –in installed. This would normally be a representative still image from the movie.

Finally, edit the alt text for the <img> tag. This is an accessibility requirement to accommodate users who can’t see the replacement image. Don’t forget, this includes search engines such as Google, so make sure the text you enter is good description of the content of the image and the Flash file.

Exporting Flash

Explore Flash’s Edit menu and you’ll see the Publish Settings option . Select this, and in the Formats tab choose Flash and HTML. This will output an HTML page with the code in place to import your movie.

The Flash tab contains options for compression settings and Audio quality. Leave these at the defaults, or experiment with them-especially if you need to get the file size down.

The HTML tab is the most pertinent one for our purposes, and also the most complicated! Luckily , the Template options come with some descriptions next to the selector. It’s good idea to use one of the detection methods on offer, as these will handle those (few) users who do not have the Flash plug-in installed.

Sometimes, of course, you might just want to have the Flash file appear as a small part of an existing web page. In that case, you should be able to use the appropriate Export option, then simply copy the Flash- related code from the page Flash has created, and paste it into your existing HTML page. Alternatively, see the method of embedding Flash in the adding Flash to pages manually technique.

Adobe Flash CS3 Professional Classroom in a Book

If you regularly keep tabs on hot topics in the web industry, chances you’ve run across micro formats , which seem to be on the tip of every Web designer/ developer’s tongue these days.

Because of their amazing power and simplicity, microformats have been the subject of countless articles in online and print publications, conference presentations , panel discussions, and a book by John Allsopp, Microformats:Empowering Your Markup for Web 2.0 (http://microformatique.com/book/), published by Friends of Ed. Although we’ll get a brief primer to the subject, if you are absolutely new to microformats you may want to get yourself up to speed quickly by reading Allsopp’s informative article called “Add Microformats Magic to Your Site”(http://www.thinkvitamin.com /features/design/how-to-use-microformats  ) on the popular web design ezine Vitamin. Brian Suda, a microformats guru, has written another great introductory article on the subject called “Microformats: More Meaning from Your Markup” (http://www.sitepoint.com/article / microformats-meaning-markup) published on Sitepoint.

In a nutshell, microformats can be defined as a series of standardized methods for making up common content using simple, semantic HTML and CSS class names in order to allow machines to read and understand data that might otherwise be intelligible only to humans. Though the heart of microformats is really nothing more than the HTML and CSS that you probably already know, they deliver great potential power and convenience for users and Web applications. Microformats allow content on a website to be ported to other applications with ease, resulting in increased use of the information they describe.

To better understand the value of microformats, consider this scenario . Imagine you’ve built a site to promote a popular band, and have created a page with the complete touring schedule , and write down on paper the time, date , location, and other relevant info for later reference. Many fans misplace the paper of simply forget about the show they were so excited about earlier , they don’t go to the show, and the band misses out on ticket sales.

If the schedule information  had been built to be portable, it could have been quickly downloaded to a PDA, mobile phone, MP3 player, or ported to an online calendar system with the click of a button. This is the magic of microformats, which serves as the API (Application Programming Interface) to the content of your site , providing unprecedented interoperability between platform. When data like a band’s tour schedule is marked up in a standardized format, it’s a piece of cake to make it portable, as computers can then recognize specific types of content that would otherwise be indistinguishable from any other text. Applications could send it to other applications knowing which text is the date, and which text is the event name. When information is packaged in a way that is portable, users can move it to a location where it won’t be lost. This is a perfect illustration of how findability is more than just search engine optimization , it’s about finding the information you want when you want it.

A problem that effects Flash to this day is load performance . Most times, an HTML page and it’s content is downloaded and displayed before a Flash piece has finished downloading, leaving a blank white space in your page. The following techniques “fakes” the initial frame of a Flash piece with a bit HTML/CSS . The actual Flash piece is hidden outside of the web browser’s viewport while downloading its assets. When ready for display, the Flash piece can call a bit of JavaScript, using Flash Player’s External Interface to display  the piece. We use this technique to improve perceived performance when loading our Flash media pod at www.kontain.com

Resources:

This particular implementation  uses the excellent SWF Object library to load and embed our Flash piece. SWF Object is available at www.deconcept.com .

The HTML and the full code can be found on www.webdesignermag.co.uk

<html>

<head>

<script type=”type/javascript” src=”swfobject.js”></script>

<script type=”type/javascript”>

The CSS(CSS code goes here)

The JavaScript(JavaScript code goes here)

Flash and ActionScript: Frame 1

Place “placeholderImage.png” on the stage in the first frame.

Flash and ActionScript: Frame 2 and beyond

By this time, the first frame has been downloaded and is ready for display. Call the “showFlash” JavaScript function from the second frame.

Import flash.externalExternalInterface;

…

ExternalInterface.call(“showFlash”);

Dynamic font

A key area of any style of website is its font headers and other copy elements. Although Flash includes features to embed entire fonts in your library, a little ActionScript 3.0 allows you to select only characters that will be used in your project. This may not be a big deal with smaller fonts but can slow up the loading process if the font contains multiple languages and special graphic characters. Runtime type allows fonts to load only when needed. Characters must be converted to Unicode (example,”A” becomes “U+0041”).

Int, uint Number

Typing in general boosts the speed of AS3 code. When it comes to numerical variable types in Flash, the platform shows some unexpected behavior.

Most developers commonly believe that appropriate use of the “new”(in AS3) int, uint data types will result more optimized code therefore better performance . With other languages this is generally right in practice as well, but it is different with AS3.

In reality unit types perform quite slow and they show quite a fluctuation in each case. Surprisingly , Number types execute quite fast, only a slightly slower than int.

Avoiding uint types everywhere you can, appropriate use of int types and Number types will result better performance in reality.

Ref: http://www.gskinner.com/blog/archives/2006/06/types_in_as3_in.html

Learning ActionScript 3.0: A Beginner’s Guide

5. Fixed Font Size

CSS style sheets unfortunately give websites the power to disable a Web browser’s “change font size” button and specify a fixed font size. About 95% of the time, this fixed size is tiny, reducing readability significantly for most people over the age of 40.

Respect the user’s preferences and let them resize text as needed. Also, specify font sizes in relative terms — not as an absolute number of pixels.

6. Page Titles With Low Search Engine Visibility

Search is the most important way users discover websites. Search is also one of the most important ways users find their way around individual websites. The humble page title is your main tool to attract new visitors from search listings and to help your existing users to locate the specific pages that they need.

The page title is contained within the HTML <title> tag and is almost always used as the clickable headline for listings on search engine result pages (SERP). Search engines typically show the first 66 characters or so of the title, so it’s truly microcontent.

Page titles are also used as the default entry in the Favorites when users bookmark a site. For your homepage, begin the with the company name, followed by a brief description of the site. Don’t start with words like “The” or “Welcome to” unless you want to be alphabetized under “T” or “W.”

For other pages than the homepage, start the title with a few of the most salient information-carrying words that describe the specifics of what users will find on that page. Since the page title is used as the window title in the browser, it’s also used as the label for that window in the taskbar under Windows, meaning that advanced users will move between multiple windows under the guidance of the first one or two words of each page title. If all your page titles start with the same words, you have severely reduced usability for your multi-windowing users.

Taglines on homepages are a related subject: they also need to be short and quickly communicate the purpose of the site.

7. Anything That Looks Like an Advertisement

Selective attention is very powerful, and Web users have learned to stop paying attention to any ads that get in the way of their goal-driven navigation. (The main exception being text-only search-engine ads.)

Unfortunately, users also ignore legitimate design elements that look like prevalent forms of advertising. After all, when you ignore something, you don’t study it in detail to find out what it is.

Therefore, it is best to avoid any designs that look like advertisements. The exact implications of this guideline will vary with new forms of ads; currently follow these rules:

• banner blindness means that users never fixate their eyes on anything that looks like a banner ad due to shape or position on the page
• animation avoidance makes users ignore areas with blinking or flashing text or other aggressive animations
• pop-up purges mean that users close pop-up windoids before they have even fully rendered; sometimes with great viciousness (a sort of getting-back-at-GeoCities triumph).

1. Bad Search

Overly literal search engines reduce usability in that they’re unable to handle typos, plurals, hyphens, and other variants of the query terms. Such search engines are particularly difficult for elderly users, but they hurt everybody.

A related problem is when search engines prioritize results purely on the basis of how many query terms they contain, rather than on each document’s importance. Much better if your search engine calls out “best bets” at the top of the list — especially for important queries, such as the names of your products.

Search is the user’s lifeline when navigation fails. Even though advanced search can sometimes help, simple search usually works best, and search should be presented as a simple box, since that’s what users are looking for.

2. PDF Files for Online Reading

Users hate coming across a PDF file while browsing, because it breaks their flow. Even simple things like printing or saving documents are difficult because standard browser commands don’t work. Layouts are often optimized for a sheet of paper, which rarely matches the size of the user’s browser window. Bye-bye smooth scrolling. Hello tiny fonts.

Worst of all, PDF is an undifferentiated blob of content that’s hard to navigate.

PDF is great for printing and for distributing manuals and other big documents that need to be printed. Reserve it for this purpose and convert any information that needs to be browsed or read on the screen into real web pages.

3. Not Changing the Color of Visited Links

A good grasp of past navigation helps you understand your current location, since it’s the culmination of your journey. Knowing your past and present locations in turn makes it easier to decide where to go next. Links are a key factor in this navigation process. Users can exclude links that proved fruitless in their earlier visits. Conversely, they might revisit links they found helpful in the past.

Most important, knowing which pages they’ve already visited frees users from unintentionally revisiting the same pages over and over again.

These benefits only accrue under one important assumption: that users can tell the difference between visited and unvisited links because the site shows them in different colors. When visited links don’t change color, users exhibit more navigational disorientation in usability testing and unintentionally revisit the same pages repeatedly.

4. Non-Scannable Text

A wall of text is deadly for an interactive experience. Intimidating. Boring. Painful to read.

Write for online, not print. To draw users into the text and support scannability, use well-documented tricks:

• subheads
• bulleted lists
• highlighted keywords
• short paragraphs
• the inverted pyramid
• a simple writing style, and
• de-fluffed language devoid of marketese.

Let’s start with a very common example. When we consider a typical Web page, the logo and the name of an organization are the top of the information hierarchy in our message . We could simply show the logo on the page using an image tag like this:

<img src=”I/logo.gif” alt=”revivalx” width=“200” height=”200”/>

The problem with this approach is that there is no way for search engine which can’t “see” the design of the page-to discern the importance of this information. A search engine can read the text in the alt attribute but assigns a lower rank to the content than it really deserves. A better approach would be to use the <h1> tag, which assigns the highest importance to this content:

<h1> revivalx : community project</h1>

Notice I’ve added a more detailed description of the company rather than the relatively meaningless text in the alt attribute of the first example. The <h1>

Tag allows us to deliver relevant content to search engines while assigning the keywords in the tag the highest rank in the information hierarchy of the page. There’s no need to overstuff the tag-just make your text relevant and meaningful.

Now that we have keyword-rich content at the top of the information hierarchy , we need to use some CSS to show the logo, creating the same visual result as using a less meaningful <img /> tag:

h1{

text –indent:-99999px;

background: url (i/revival.gif) no-repeat center;

width:200px;

height: 200px;

}

I’ve used a general element selector to pinpoint the logo <h1> tag since, logically, we would have only one piece of content that is the most important on the page and deserving  of the tag. The text-indent style property places the text of the tag 9999 pixels to the left, far out of view sighted users, but still visible to search engines. With the text out of the way the background property displays the image in place in place of the text, centering it in the 200px by 200px display area defined by the width and height properties.

Notice that I have renamed the logo image file to include the name of the organization. Search engines can detect keywords in file names, so it’s good idea to briefly such relevant words that may provide more context to the content of the page.

HTML and CSS Web Standards Solutions: A Web Standardistas’ Approach

Web standards help developers by

• Decreasing development time. You’ll avoid redundant code such as <font> by controlling the entire design with external CSS files.
• Decreasing maintenance time. Changes in one external CSS file can affect the entire site.
• Increasing design capabilities. There are a number of advanced design features that CSS is capable of but old school HTML formatting is not.
• Creating cleaner code. XHTML that separates formatting, structure, and behavior is much easier to read and maintain.
• Empowering delivery of the same XHTML content in many formats by using separate style sheets. One XHTML document can be styled for screen, handheld, and print display.
• Creating more stable code. Standards complaint code is likely to work in future version of browsers, and will actually work in legacy browsers as well.

Web standards help businesses by

• Saving money on development costs. Website development  costs can be cut dramatically by decreasing the amount of time it takes developers to build site.
• Saving money on server bandwidth costs. Because structure, formatting, and behavior are kept separate  on standards-complaint sites, the CSS and Java Script will only  need to be downloaded once when the user loads the first page that links to them.
• Helping developers meet deadlines. When developers can build and maintain sites efficiently they are more likely to meet tight deadlines.

Web standards help users by;

• Speeding up the load times. Externalized CSS and Java Script only load once rather than every time a page is loaded.
• Improving accessibility. Disabled users and users on alternate devices will appreciate equal access to Web content.

Developers, businesses , and users all reap the benefits of Web Standards , but there is one even more compelling reason to make the change: Web standards can help optimize your site for search engines and can generate more traffic on your site. Poorly constructed and legacy code can cause problems for search engines when indexing your site.

Designing with Web Standards (3rd Edition)

XHTML is still html but it’s rebuilt XML (Extensible Markup Language) to define its structure. Because XML is a language that can be extended when needed, XHTML will easily accommodate future tags and attributes that he W3C can add as need arises.

If you’re new to a XHTML but are proficient with HTML you’ll find the transition relatively easy. Here are a few of the major changes you should be aware of in other to build a XHTML documents that meet the W3C’s Web standards:

• Separate your page structures your page structure (XHTML) from the formatting (CSS) and behavior (Java Script) by placing each in a separate file. Your XHTML documents can link to and share common external CSS and Java  script files
• Discontinue use of deprecated elements that the W3C no longer supports.For a full listings of deprecated elements visit http://webdesign.about.com/od/htmltags/a/bitags_depctag.htm.
• XHTML code needs to be written in lowercase letters.
• All tags need to be closed (example : close <p> with </p>). Tags that don’t have a closing element need to close  themselves with a space and a forward slash (example:<br/>).
• All documents need to start with a document type definition (DTD) to tell the browser that rules should be followed when rendering the page. Visit http://w3schools.com/xhtml/xhtml_dtd.asp for exampled of XHTML DTDs.
• All image tags must include the alt attribute.
• All special characters must be encoded . Full a full listing visit http://w3schools.com/tags/ref_entities.asp.
• All tags attributes must be written within quotes. Some attributes like checked –used in <input> to check a radio button or checkbox by default were but originally designed to have a value. The XHTML way to write this type of attribute is by setting the value to be the same as the attribute(example:checked =”checked”).

There are some more subtle changes with XHTML but for the most part it looks similar  to HTML .You can test your documents to ensure that you are correctly following the W3C’s guidelines usingthe handly validation tool located at http://validator.w3.org

Learning Web Design: A Beginner’s Guide to (X)HTML, StyleSheets, and Web Graphics