by Al Morel

Recently, I came across some stats on the use of Content Management Systems that I thought were really eye opening.

The sources of this info is the Wikipedia page on WordPress and the ongoing report of: Usage of content management systems for websites, by W3Techs – World Wide Web Technology Surveys. W3Techs surveys the top one million websites (as ranked by Alesa) on a daily basis and reports on various benchmarks, and use of CMS is one of those.

The first thing that jumped out was that only 13% of all websites employ a CMS. This is truly astounding now that we know all the advantages and cost savings that a CMS can provide.

Of all of the hundreds of CMS platforms out there, WordPress dominates the market with over 55% of the total market. Considering that WordPress was really not developed as a CMS and has evolved as individuals started to use it on their own for this purpose, it is quite amazing.

Here are the stats on the top Content Management Systems:

by Al Morel

The short and sweet answer is not for a while yet, but someday…

As you may, or may not know, IE6 is the bane of existence for web designers and developers. It’s old, weak, and tired, and many sites have stopped supporting it, but somehow, it still lives.

Just in the last few weeks, we’ve found a couple of examples of lasting entrenchment of IE6. In one instance it was physician who wanted to use an eComm that we had created. This person was running IE6 and was using a system maintained by one of the largest medical networks in the state of Massachusetts. As it turned out, IE6 was not the culprit but their own firewall. In another situation it was an mid sized insurance company with about 20 employees.

In some ways, it’s actually a good thing. We test all the sites we build in all the browsers shown in the chart below. It’s not easy getting them all to cooperate together but it certainly separates the web pros from the wannabes.

I found this breakdown of web browsers from this website: w3schools.com. As you can see, IE6 is slowly dying, and if you go to the site you can see the withering, and emergence,  of other browsers over the past few years.

Remember Netscape and AOL?

Browser stats January 2009 to April 2010

by Al Morel

Whenever you can get Microsoft and Apple to agree on anything, you are probably close to a consensus.

Such is the case in the future of Flash and the direction that both of these companies are taking to support HTML5.

Here’s Steve Job’s post on the Apple site and Dean Hachamovitch’s view. (Dean is the czar of Internet Explorer at Microsoft)

Interestingly, there is zero mention of Microsoft’s Silverlight.

So long term, perhaps it’s buh-bye Flash and Silverlight.  Of course, this will take a few years and in the interim, who knows?  Someone will probably come up with a clever work around.

By Dan Rouse

A long, yet interesting and entertaining, article on the past, present and future of web standards. If you spend a large part of your day cursing one web browser or another, you should get a kick out of this.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/03/17.html

The article goes over the long running struggle facing the Internet Explorer developers regarding web standards, especially now with the upcoming release of IE 8. Being one of the first major browsers to gain wide acceptance, many websites were built and tested on early versions of IE. These early versions were forgiving when it came to following the rules in terms of coding the site. In addition, along the way different bugs would crop up that people would simply “code around” to make things work. Now that there is a push for web standards, the IE 8 team must choose their path. Down one path they conform to these standards strictly as many other competing browsers are now doing. Unfortunately, this will result in many websites (even big names like HP according to the article) not working correctly anymore because so many old sites relied on the quirky way IE worked. The other path is either ignoring the standards or trying to balance between them and the old ways.