Remember we said HTML was impossible - well maybe not completely impossible...

Joe — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 08:09:00 +0000

Joe: Here is a true account from the development team of what happens when you leave them by themselves for a week, as told by Adam (one of our dev guys). Perhaps we should leave them alone more often...

Adam: So there we were, back from our Christmas holidays and nary a manager in sight. 'Organise yourselves this week' they said, giving the tech team free reign to work together and see what we could come up with. And what a week it turned out to be.

As some of you may know, we've been using scrum to manage SiteMaker development for some time now, so we're used to splitting projects down into week-long chunks of work. But what should we work on for a week? Better back-end services? Finish off the internal media manager?

Being bright-eyed and bushy-tailed after our break, one suggestion shone out like a beacon above all the others:

"Why don't we do the HTML widget when no-one's looking?"

The fact was that over the months and years while we've been repeatedly fending off requests with the simple response "sorry, it's not possible!", the browser landscape had been changing. CSS, IFrames, DOM manipulation had all made their way into the mainstream, so it looked like the scene was set. Deliver something that you lot had been asking for for years, work as a tight-knit team on something cool and give management a huge surprise all in one!

Not so fast

OK, so we hit a (pretty big) wall - there are still unresolved browser issues which mean that it isn't ready for general release.

The problem is that in order to float HTML content over a SiteMaker site, we need to enable a special Flash rendering mode (wmode opaque, for those really interested) if the HTML were to display properly on all our supported browsers. Initially we thought that there would be a huge performance hit associated with this mode, so there was some resistance to the idea, but testing soon showed that our fears were unfounded. We worked on the editing interface, the JavaScript code, the back-end support and the non-Flash accessible version as a team, aiming at a commonly agreed goal for the end of the week. We were on course to get the whole thing done and dusted and released on the unsuspecting world, on spec and on time...

However, there was a more sinister bug hiding in the wings that only reared its head in the wee hours of Friday morning. Bizarrely, if we use the special rendering mode, Flash sees your keyboard as a US keyboard. So for us Brits, " (shift-2) and @ (shift-') are swapped. But there's a whole world out there using SiteMaker and unfortunately breaking it for everyone outside of the USA is not really an option. We can't really tell everyone in France to stop using accented characters, or everyone in Greece or Russia to start using the Latin alphabet.

The future looks brighter

More encouragingly, we found that recent versions of the Flash Player work properly in IE, and that it looks like Firefox should have it fixed 'soon' (the bug was reported in December 2004(!) and appears to have been fixed in December 2008).

So, while we wait for the world to catch up and get this bugfix released and deployed to everyone's computers, we thought that we'd at least let you see our new widget in action, and then see what you think. You can now try out the effect that the wmode setting has on your own computer and see for yourself that, while we're *nearly* there, we have to wait for everyone to upgrade to flash player 10 and for Firefox 3.2 to be released.

The Moonfruit lab

So, while this week has been one of elation tinged with sadness, it did give us the opportunity to start on labs.moonfruit.com - where we hope to share more in-development work with you and hopefully get some feedback.

Please pay us a visit - and see the mythical HTML Snippet widget in action :-)

We will offer some of you the chance to download and use the widget for yourselves, though you have to bear in mind that it doesn't work in all cases yet (only IE 6 or above with Flash player 10). You can apply to join the alpha test on the Moonfruit labs site. See you there."

Joe: So there you have it. Perhaps next time we leave them alone they'll create a perpetual motion machine!

Moonfruit Lounge - Flash

Remember we said HTML was impossible - well maybe not completely impossible...