“It turns out that Mobile Safari doesn’t support as many embeddable font formats as the desktop version, so Google sends an SVG font version to iPhones, iPads, and iPod touches, or anything pretending to be them. And it looks like Google’s SVG fonts contain only ASCII characters, while the other formats have full character sets.”
Derek Miller, “A weird Safari-Google bug”, June 21, 2010

I haven’t encountered anything like this, but I found it to be an interesting interplay of emerging technologies.

It reminds me of the headaches of different database encoding and WordPress.

‘… Most of the successful versions of HTML have been “retro-specs,” catching up to the world while simultaneously trying to nudge it in the right direction. …

…

That’s not to say that all shipping code wins; after all, … Code is necessary but not sufficient for success. …

…

The ones that win are the ones that ship.’

Mark Pilgrim, “Why do we have an IMG element?“, Nov 2nd, 2009

The article includes fascinating excerpts from some of the leaders in this almost-17-year-old work in progress, HTML.

This could go on for days:

SEO Guy: I do x, y, and z, how is that bad?
Derek Powazek: X, y, and z isn’t SEO, it’s making good websites.

SEO Guys, please change your titles to Good Website Makers. I don’t care why, just do it. Derek Powazek insists.

Posted by Jason Kirk on 12 October 2009 @ 3pm

SEO Blocks by Vishraval. Wikipedia Hosted. PD Licensed.

Derek’s intense, absolute position and lack of a shared language with SEO Experts leads to little opportunity for real discussion between the parties, but at the heart of Derek’s article is a sentiment shared by many web developers: we are extremely frustration that there continues to be a market for search engine manipulation.

This reminds me of Cory Doctorow’s “All Complex Ecosystems Have Parasites“, published 16 March 2005. It makes me think that I’ll happily pay the price of having to put up with SEO Experts, if the alternative is a less flexible and diverse Web.

Quartz by Mikael Hvidtfeldt Christensen. Flickr Hosted

I used to joke that the second feature to write is export. I don’t joke about it any more. Export is the 2nd feature you should implement for your software or web service.

There is nothing that says you care about your customers like making it easy for them to get their content out. Bonus points if you choose an export format that is already popular and well documented.

If you really love your customers, the exported data will be richer than the raw material they originally entered.

That, of course, makes import the 3rd feature to write. Don’t support importing from competing applications until your product is ready, because migrating from another product is already a scary enough situation without finding yourself using a buggy, incomplete product.

There is a clear opportunity for online email providers and social networking sites to limit the damage of phishing and email spam by giving customers tools to regulate the flow of data.

Yesterday, before New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo suing Tagged.com story broke, I cold emailed a member of the Gmail team:

Gmail could help web security a lot by providing:
1. Authentication (OAuth) to Gmail address book making it clear that you were not providing your Gmail passsword to a 3rd party web site.
2. Default level of access only provided names and salted hashes of email addresses from address book (possibly 3rd party web site part of salt)
3. Allow only a limited number of actual email addresses to be requested in a time period. I’m guessing ~30 would be a sweet spot.

That would seem to be one possible solution. If this is not a good solution, I think it’s important for your team to look to tackle the problem described below in another way.

EXPLANATION

[Background information described in my "Tagged.com Spam? Phishing? Nice Guys? My Personal Story"]

I’ve seen similar UI at othe web services, where everyone in your address book is selected by default. I think there is an awesome opportunity for your team to create an experience that works well for your partners and protects your customers from the type of mistake described above and more importantly from malicious sites.

Some of the problems that I think Gmail and other online email address book and social networking sites should at least take partial ownership by:

• Not allowing 3rd party sites to embed login forms. They should use OAuth or a similar approach. (Even on AppEngine — train us well).
  
• Having a really clear experience about what data you are giving access to (how pissed your friends might be), and a way to provide only limited data.
• Providing salted hashes instead of email addresses, so that a person can find their friends on a 3rd party service without having to hand over the actual email addresses of their friends.

I don’t think I read the Google Chrome Operating System announcement until after I sent that email. When I did read the announcement, I thought about how empowering and freeing it will be for our computing to be in the cloud, but I also thought about problems like this one, and how many scary things can happen when you are no longer hold the container(the harddrive in your PC) for your information and data.  There is a lot of design still to be done to create a safe and friendly experience.

I provided some feedback to Mozilla just over a month ago about the Mozilla Firefox Start Page tip of handy tips & tricks (how meta):

“Get the most out of your Firefox! Improve your skills with some handy tips & tricks.”

I’m sure web browser developers share my passion for these web page details, but nothing has changed yet.

As I often see other sites with similar issues, I might as well share this web development tip & trick and other suggestions.

<Title> Tags

First, the <title> field is bad SEO. Says
<title>Mozilla Products | Tips &amp; Tricks</title>
instead of including “Firefox”:
<title>Firefox Tips &amp; Tricks | Mozilla Products </title>

Actually, all the product pages are likely in need of switching the “Mozilla Products” to the end.

This made a big difference for WordPress.com search traffic way back when.

I work with many of our WordPress.com VIP new customers on this issue. Their instinct is to always have their brand or blog name first. But think of which search result you would be more likely to click on? In fact, WordPress historically made it to easy to get this wrong, so in version 2.5 a 3rd parameter ‘seplocation’ was added to wp_title() to make it easier to do it correctly.

So http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/products/ title would become

<title>Firefox Web Browser &amp; Thunderbird Email Client | Mozilla Products</title>
(Plus title case for the win.)

I suggested they give it try and see what happens I’d be surprised if it does not squeeze a little more juice out.

Wow, there are lousy <title> tags all over their sites

http://www.mozilla.org/projects/ title is just <title>Featured Projects</title> Hopefully, David Boswell will have a chance to coax out of someone some work here during the current redesign

Firefox Tips & Tricks

The Manage Your Downloads is an advanced tip? Say what?

“Find it a Flash” intermediate tip reads:

The Find As You Type feature is another handy timesaver. Rather than
using the “find” bar to search for a word on page, just click anywhere
on that page and start typing the word you want. Your cursor will
immediately jump to the first instance of that term.

“You can use it for links, too. For example, instead of moving your
mouse across the page to a “learn more” link, just start typing the
word and when the cursor finds it, press enter.

It does not say that this is disabled by default, and can be enabled at Advanced > Accessibility or any other hint or tip Also, the phrase “on page” feels awkward, maybe “on a page”.

PS. I would not recommend enabling this, because it breaks some web apps that have click to edit.