Archive pour la catégorie ‘Technologie’


It can be overwhelming to understand the production environment of websites, front-end developers, back-end developers, integration, programmings, what’s that? As client, you may be happy to understand a little bit more about the structure behind it.

So you are happy of your new design, what is next?

You just approved the design of your next website, you are happy with what has been done so far. What’s next? well a pretty long process. Upon approbation of the design, front-end developers take these designs and translate it to HTML. This means that your design is taken, decorticated and translated to a programming language. This might look like a simple task, but on the contrary, you need excellent front-end developers to translate your design perfectly.

How Complex?

To translate your design we use 2 languages, HTML and CSS. HTML is the foundation of your website, and CSS is what styles all your website, adds colors and images. It is not all, unfortunately the implementation between browsers (Firefox, Internet Explorer and etc) of those 2 languages differs a bit, it creates the complex task of testing your website to all current browsers to be sure the integration is spot on. The front-end developer needs to be aware of the dependencies of every browsers and be able to turn around problem that could arise.

Front-end developer also optimizes your website the be the fastest possible, trying to use the fastest structure possible and optimizing your design without losing picture quality. This is what we call website integration.

A back-end developer develops features

When those templates are finished, generally a small round table is planned with designers in case front-end developers forgot some styling. When designers are happy with the templates, it’s ready to get implemented in your content management system.

It is the back-end developer’s job to develop all the features you need to be able to manage your website yourself. Like changing the text in a section for example. This is where front-end developers and back-end developers work together to integrate your design with all the website features you need.

Every web creation company should take great pride of doing spot on integration of website design with content management, and we, at w.illi.am/ sure do.

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Ask web developers what they hate most about web technologies, chances are they will say javascript, and for some parts, they are right to do so. But to understand why Javascript is so much hated we need to go back in time. In the early years of Netscape, in 1995.

In the nineties, Netscape was flourishing with between 50% and 80% of the browsers’ market and was in a intense combat with Internet Explorer. A guy at Netscape, named Brendan Eich, was given a difficult task of creating a language to make Netscape interacting more dynamically with websites. And of course they wanted this language the day before they asked it . In the time Brendan had, he did the most he could, and created a versatile language that even script kids could pick up, Javascript, he also created the DOM (Document Object Model) on top of Javascript. Now the difference between Javascript and the DOM is simple. Javascript is the basic language you use to make sentence. But the DOM is what is understanding this sentence and makes it interact with the document the way you asked it.

Microsoft was not going to let that happen

Microsoft was certainly not going to let Netscape have « Javascript » and not them, they decided to reverse engineer and implement it in Internet Explorer. Now problems began. They, very unfortunately, did not do a very good job at this implementation. Which means that for doing one simple operation on Netscape and Internet explorer, you had to code 2 implementation for both of them, because the DOM was not understanding the same sentence for both. In fact javascript, the programming language is mostly fine, the biggest problem is the DOM API, some words means nothing to IE and some other means nothing to Firefox. This is what drives web developers crazy. You have to write code specifically to some browsers because they do not follow standards, you have no choice, Internet Explorer represent 67% of your user base, you have to do an implementation for them.

javascript

You need to understand that this happened in 1995. The web did not had the same needs than today. Now web applications are vastly more complex. Some people had to step up and create cross browser API’s to deal with the DOM, and they did. Which means now you write one line, and some API dispatch the good implementation to each browser. This has make the life of web developers much easier.

There is currently 3 major « all round » Javascript libraries, jQuery, Mootools and Prototype

At w.illi.am, we decided to use the jQuery framework, which is now endorsed by a lot of major players, like Microsoft. Not only this is the most use Javascript framework in the world, this is the one we found the most powerful. Writing Javascript with jQuery enabled us to create more powerful web site than ever before and this tool is one of many that make us confident that we are ready for the future of the web.

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If you think on how the web evolved in recent years it is hard to imagine that your current website run on some technologies that are more than 10 years old.
Since the 90′s era the web has fundamentally changed, there is more and more applications, like Facebook, that run exclusively on the web.
This has brought new needs and challenges, and HTML5 and CSS3 are coming in to give better tools to web developers empowering them to create better and stronger website.

What has changed?

A lot. You know all the cool graphic elements the web 2.0 trend has given us, like rounded corners, gradients and shadows? Well for now, this is all done with images. CSS3 is coming to change the way web developers work with designers. And this is more important than you would think, it is hard to imagine that such, now standard, styles are hard to implement. But don’t forget that we still have to deal with an old and reckless Internet Explorer 6 that still lingers on the web!
All those beautiful images are also demanding more bandwidth and loading time. People want their websites to load fast, if not instantaneously. It is understandable, and CSS3 will bring some help along the way to make your website faster. Overall CSS3 will make it easier for web developers to create and maintain nice graphic elements.

With HTML5, it is more a fundamental change in your website structure that is happening,
It empowers web developers to create more complex applications and alleviate the maintaining cost of these tools. For example, there will be an audio and video tag, which means that the use of Flash will not be necessary anymore for listening to videos! Draggable content will be native, we will have a graphic api (a bit like flash), evolved cookies and much, much more.

Mozilla even recently demonstrated multi-touch screen events thats enable you of controlling your browser with your fingers!

But when?!

Unfortunately this might happen later than sooner. These specifications take a long time to write. This is an open specification,
everyone can participate to the discussion, even you. While of course this is good thing! you can understand how a mess this can create.
But some companies are stepping up like Mozilla and Opera, and are implementing parts of the specifications right now.
And indeed, the shadows and rounded corners are implemented in every browser but Microsoft Internet Explorer.
You can understand how it can make web developers outcry and put us in an unfortunate position
as Microsoft has still roughly 67% of the browsing market.

There is a light in the end

The competition is fierce in the browser market, Internet Explorer is losing a small percentage of it’s market shares every month.
It certainly rings a bell in the Microsoft office, and there is hope that IE9 will bring us a bunch of cool stuff. In the end Microsoft will need to become competitive and implement these technologies, and for you and me, the sooner the better. The future is bright in the WWW and be sure that at w.illi.am we are watching the web community to bring you the best technology possible.

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