Back in December we blogged about the “State of the Web 2008″ survey that was being conducted by our friends at Web Directions. At last, the results are in, and we thought it would be interesting to see how Gruden stacks up to our colleagues.
Firstly – who responded? There were over 1200 responses of whom almost 20% identified as working for companies with between 10-50 employees – this was the biggest single group and is the category Gruden falls into (with 41 staff members). 25% of respondents identified as working for a Design Agency, which also most accurately describes Gruden.
In terms of operating systems used, Mac OS X 10.5 pipped Windows XP. Gruden has traditionally been a Windows house. Whilst Windows still dominates, over the past 2 years we’ve seen a slow, steady shift towards Macs. Right now, it’s likely that at least one person working on a project spends a good portion of thier time on a Mac. This gives us a balance while ensuring we’re still in touch with most users.
On the browser front the results were even more skewed away from the incumbent with only 4% of respondents using any version of IE as their primary browser. Unsurprisingly Firefox was far and away the dominant choice (60%), followed by Safari (20%). At Gruden most people use Firefox as their main browser, although there are more that 4% using IE7 and one director who swears he’ll never move away from IE6 – “because that’s what users use”. The stats are slowly proving him wrong, but 20% is not a number you can ignore.
In terms of which browser respondents test their work in, there was a much greater spread with IE6, IE7, Firefox and Safari all being targeted by around 80% of developers. Firefox 2 & Opera each got close to 50%. IE8, Google Chrome and Mobile Safari (iPhone) were being targeted by 20-40% of developers. Gruden have been using a system similar to Yahoo’s Graded Browser Support for a number of years with IE6+, Firefox 2+, Opera 8.5+ and recent versions of WebKit (Safari, Google Chrome, Adobe AIR) being our primary targets. WebKit is increasingly becoming a focus for us as it is used as the default rendering engine on iPhone, iPod Touch, Google Android, Palm and Blackberry handsets.
Next in the survey was markup. In this area our approach diverges significantly from the main stream. 70% of respondents said they use some form of XHTML, while at Gruden we prefer to stick with HTML 4. We have long thought that XHTML was a bit like putting lipstick on a pig and that the future direction (XHTML2) was focused on numchuks and jet packs instead of real world problems. We have instead chosen to embrace the inherent piggy-ness of HTML and this view has been partially vindicated with recent efforts on the HTML5 specification. It wouldn’t be at all surprising if the figures swung significantly from XHTML to HTML5 in future editions of this survey.
On the question of validating markup, it was great to see that validation has become standard practice. 36% said they always, 32% said they frequently and 23% said they sometimes validate their markup. It’s a similar story with using tables for layout with only 10% saying (admitting?) that they do. Validation and CSS based layouts have been standard practice at Gruden since we initially got involved with the Web Standards Group back in 2003 – it’s great to see that this approach has really caught on.
The survey goes on to cover a number of other areas including back-end platforms, databases and other stuff that really only interests developers. All in all it was interesting to participate in the survey and to review the results – seeing how things change year to year will probably be even more enlightening.
October 4th, 2009 at 12:31 pm
Recently, I began noticing how upset/angry/annoyed/frustrated I was becoming when I witnessed food wastage.
A couple of things sparked it enough that my attention was ‘in the moment’ rather than ‘after the fact’:
I was helping my brother with some house cleaning, when his work hours increased, and I was unemployed. I was struggling to find money to put food on the table, literally, and here I was helping him by cleaning his kitchen (dishes, etc), and witnessed copious amounts of foods literally being wasted.
The food was perfectly fine – but his habits of storage and his attitude to ‘left-overs’ was resulting in perfectly good food going to waste because it was left out on the benchtop, or not stored properly in the fridge.
I was sickened, because I knew I couldn’t afford to do that and would never do that anyway.
I was going without proper meals during my unemployed stage, while I was witness to his ill-educated and sadly ignorant attitude about the impact of food wastage.
It lead me to be more aware of the impact of wastage, and going through the supermarket and greengrocer brought the impact home even further.
Without doubt there needs to be a much stronger and more enforceable means to severely restrict, reduce, and re-educate people about, the dreadful cost of food wastage across the globe.
From cost of agriculture, and increasing environmental impact, to increasing costs of foods, and even the effects on health.
I want to start or be part of a very decisive action group that brings this entire issue to the forefront.
I would like Australia to be the leader in Food Management.
Let me know where I can participate, where I can find resources and do research to make this a potent educational subject and truly bring this subject up to the plate, so that the very thought of food waste becomes “unpalatable”.
Thanks
Terri