Welcome to the internet home of web designer, developer, pilot person and Cumbria dweller Dave Sparks.

How good will IE9 have to be?

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Microsoft have rolled out an IE9 beta, you can have a look for yourself over at http://www.beautyoftheweb.com/. I can’t haz IE9 as I’m still on Windows XP (I didn’t upgrade to Vista and haven’t got around to Windows 7 yet) so I’ve have to just have a look at the various round ups and reviews (such as this one – IE 9 gets back in the game)

But as I read over the various improvements in the interface, the new support for up and coming standards and the use of hardware acceleration amongst many other advances, one thought stuck in the back of my mind – how good will IE9 have to be to offer a chance of growing it’s market share again? The answer obviously is pretty damn good.

IE will no doubt maintain the majority share of the browser market for a long time given the large number of users who neither know or care which browser they use, or are quite happy to stick with IE out of comfort. The growth of Google Chrome has shown that users are not unwilling to switch their browser if a better alternative is available. But even if IE produced the best browser by a country mile I’m not sure how much it would effect it’s standing as a browser. Could you see web designers and developers recommending it to their clients? Sure there are plenty of fair minded sensible people out there who would hold their hands up and say yes it is a great browser, but it’s become cool to hate Microsoft and IE and to bemoan their problems. There are many for whom IE would have to show something really really special before they would consider doing anything other than picking at it’s faults.

Still we don’t live in a one browser world and it’s nice to see that Microsoft are finally taking up the baton and producing a more modern browser that supports the standards and innovations that designers and developers like me want to see.

A monthly look at Analytics

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It’s a project that I’ve been working on for a while and it’s finally starting to show some information that is hopefully of some use for people.
If you head over to StatShare you can see the first of a monthly round up of analytics from August.
The idea of the project is to allow people to anonymously share their web stats to give us a picture of an “average” website.
If you would be so kind then why not share your web stats with the project? Every site added helps to improve the quality of the final stats we collate.

JQuery val() quirk

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I’ve had a good solid day of coding, probably my first in quite a while. Whilst I was playing round some JQuery I came across a quirk I’ve never noticed before. I call it a quick because it’s certainly not behaviour I’d expect.

When working with some HTML form elements I used the JQuery method val() to set the value of a select box. So as an example here’s a select box and the JQuery to set it.


<select name="DavesSelectBox" id="DavesSelectBox">
<option value="0">Zero</option>
<option value="1">One</option>
</select<


$(DavesSelectBox).val(1);

Now the problem arises when the form is submitted using a normal submit button and post method. I noticed whilst it visually seemed the select box was being set to the value, the posted value didn’t reflect this and posted the original value.

So after some looking around it turns out that if the element has the same name and id then .val() can sometimes be a little problematic. So the quick fix to change the name and id to different values. Strange!

Search Analysis with Google Analytics

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I nearly forgot about linking to this, my first article for a while.

For those who may have noticed I’ve been doing a few Google Analytics articles for Six Revisions and the latest published a few weeks ago looks at the basics of tracking searches on your site and what you can start to glean from the information available in Google Analytics. Click on the image to go and read the article.

What’s going on – new stuff and what’s in progress

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For those unaware I am no longer working full time in web development and instead I’m flying planes around Europe for easyJet. That does not however mean I’m not doing web stuff anymore, I am! I’m pleased to still be involved at Armitage Online and they recently launched two sites that I’d been working on. The first is Leonardsfield House, a website for a Keswick guest house which is based on the nifty little CMS Perch, which is brilliant for straight forward no nonsense CMS needs.

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