The End of the World

I hope everything is okay with you, where ever you happen to be and what ever you happen to be doing. We have had several events in the last several days that many folks have hyped to the point that there must be people out there who are surprised to see that the sun came up, this morning.

Health care reform was one of the tenets of president Obama's candidacy. An awful lot of money was spent trying to keep it from happening. When it looked like that wasn't going to work, they just flat-out started telling lies about it, trying to confuse people, because when you are selling something, the confused mind always says "No".

I've never understood that kind of win-at-all-costs politics. If you have to steal an election, what does that say for your ideas and everyone's confidence in them? If you have to lie about reform in order to put people off, isn't it something that really ought to pass? But there you go….

Health care reform passed. And the sun came up the next morning.

A new version of Opera was released. That didn't even scare up the birds. Damnit, I wish that group had that special "It!" -factor that would bring them solidly into double-digits of market share. They are good people, doing good work on a good browser and they deserve better than they have gotten, for it. We are still waiting to see if Apple releases the Opera App for the iPhone and iPad, now.

Which of course brings us to the Apple iPad, which as this is being written is agonizingly only a few teasing hours from its official release. That said, it's already been on Tosh.0 on Comedy Central (they destroyed theirs) and an episode of ABC's Modern Family, last night. It's either going to be the missing link or the world's most expensive drink coaster. Either way, I am betting that the sun will rise again on Sunday, April 4th.

And in the harsh light of this new day, it may be well to look into the pages we have created to make sure that they are iPad ready. This shouldn't take a lot of work, of course, because we have been working on "Future-Proof" pages for a few years now, and the Apple iPad is precisely the kind of future technology we were planning on, even back then.

So the first thing to do is to make sure that your pages validate. The standard hasn't changed appreciably in more than a dozen years, so write to the standard and there should never be any question about how your pages will render in any browser. But there are other concerns.

Apple offer developers an iPad simulator, but Safari on the Apple iPad uses the familiar WebKit engine and displays in a screen just slightly bigger than that of the first Macintosh, back in 1984. Make sure you are using the real estate you have to best effect.

Be wary of plug-ins. Safari has always had limited support, which is why so much of the desktop alternative browser market now belongs to Mozilla Firefox. But Safari on the iPad (just like the iPhone) launches with no support for plug-ins, including the almighty Adobe Flash. If you need to embed audio or video, use the new HTML5 techniques, rather than depending upon plug-ins. On your desktop machine, un-check the Preference in the Security panel to Enable plug-ins and you can simulate the Safari-on-iPad/iPhone experience from a functionality standpoint.

If you have positioned page elements with CSS you may want to adjust those values.

Probably the biggest issue for most of us, though, is that iPad is yet another touch interfaced device. There is no pen involved in using an iPad. There is no keyboard. You drive this machine by means of pointing and touching things with your fingers. So, be mindful of hover-state CSS over links. These aren't going to work, since just like with the iPhone, there is no cursor to boss around with a mouse or keypad. Nothing is going to change, because nothing is recognized as a correct hover state. Also, keep in mind that closely situation links may be trouble for the differently-abled or for the overly-caffeinated. Don't stack links too closely, in other words. iPad does a great job with accessibility, so be sure to use alt= text and title= text when you can.

Apple have wrapped up all of these considerations and others in a Tech Note you will probably want to look over, just to make sure.

Unless you're thinking the sun won't rise, tomorrow.