Building for the lowest common denominator and then expanding upward. It sounds like a simple concept but most wed developers just can’t seem to grasp it. Not believing accessibility matters or being so inexperienced that building sites seems to just be a hack fest to make the “design” work in all browsers is the single largest issue with web design now a days.
One example off the top of my head is mtv.com which did a total redesign in flash and had all these crazy bells and whistles, integrated video, movement, etc. Well two months later guess what happened, they redesigned again this time into a fully xhtml compliant site which didn’t have all the movement but was 100x easier to use and you could actually get to it with a cell phone and actually search for text on the page.
Two simple things I always look for when going to sites, first since I don’t have a lot of time to read through pages for information I use the firefox built in find as you type and if it cannot jump right to the word i am looking for ill go someplace else.
The second I don’t use as much but I am sure other people do, phone browser support. I am not talking about iPhone safari support because that is not really developing for the lowest common denominator. I use either a WAP browser of Opera on my phone while out and about if I need to look up information quickly. If I cannot get to your page and get to the information I need I will leave your site and probably never return.
We have a CMS that we built at Wayne State and sometimes page updates need to happen right then. We built it for the lowest common denominator just for that reason. We can get to it on any WAP browser and update any page in the CMS as if we were on a full computer. Without it we would have to rush to a computer just to use some fancy ajax interface, it would be pretty but would it really be worth all the hassle? I think not.
Anthem: Speed > Features Simple > Complex Enhancement > Degradation
Just keep adding features So after some time working with the current release we noticed some areas where improvement was needed. So what did we do? We improved in all the wonderful ways below:
Added a debug.log file to debug a live site in real time, best used with “tail -f”
Added the ErrorMessages() function to summarize a forms errors, similar to Rails.
Added the SetConditions() function so querying for >, <, <=, LIKE and OR’s are all possible now.
Added a Get and Set Folder name functions in the Folder Class.
DisplayList() now uses the options of a field to display in the list.
Questions or Comments? Feel free to leave them in the PHPSimpl Group. There is always someone to help available. By the way we love feature requests, keep them coming.
Everybody Dance! PHPSimpl has reached its 0.8 release! We have been working hard the last few weeks to get PHPSimpl release worthy and the day is finally here! Included in the release are:
SetOption now accepts objects
Compressed the JS and CSS for the calendar
Change the time fields to human readable format
Fixed issue with Save() and display_order
Minor bug fixes
A more robust example
Full documentation for the classes with final API’s
Questions or Comments? Feel free to leave them in the PHPSimpl Group. There is always someone to help available. By the way we love feature requests, keep them coming.
PHPSimpl 0.8.0 is feature complete and is posted on Google Code. The release candidate will be up for about a week and we will not be adding any more features or API changes. We are only concerted with bug fixed and security issues. Please download it if you are interested in giving it a try and let us know what you think. The final will be out in about a week and we are hoping to have a more feature complete example in it.