[via Daring Fireball] Apple can hardly avoid controversy these days, and now a brouhaha has developed over a section of their site promoting HTML5 and how the Safari browser is using it.

This is a continuum of the fight Apple has been having with Adobe over rejection of Flash on the iPhone/iPad platform. By emphasizing HTML5 and web standards, Apple is combating the notion presented by Adobe and the legions of Mac-haters out there, who assert that Steve Jobs’ movement away from the very proprietary Flash plugin is actually a movement toward making Apple more proprietary. Uh, yea. Right.

Here’s the rub. The HTML5 section of Apple’s website includes some cool demos, which you can’t view unless you’re using the Safari browser – the site uses a sniffer to warn you off if using a different browser. Critics have cried foul, claiming these demos would have unwitting users believe that only Safari supports HTML5, and furthermore, that Apple may even be taking credit for HTML5, which is an open standard already partly implemented in all the better browsers*

*By all the better browsers, of course, we mean most browsers that aren’t named Microsoft Internet Explorer. Read More…

A plausibly interesting commentary describing how airline Virgin America is in the process of divesting itself from Flash, goes radically south with this little nugget:

But Flash still dominates the web: 98 per cent of PCs have Flash player installed while the vast majority of web content – from simple illustrations to videos on YouTube whose owner Google is one of the largest proponents of HTML 5 – are built using the technology.

Unbelievably stupid paragraph.  The vast majority of Web content is text, and even if limited to imagery, the vast majority of Web content is in JPEG, GIF, or PNG format. Oh, and those videos on YouTube? Not built using Flash either. That’s just the player.

This same hack (Gavin Clarke) also refers to the iPhone as the “Jesus Phone.”  I get it. Because people who like Apple products are almost sort of religious about it. Really clever. What a dick.

National Geographic, long lauded for its excellent mapping, is equally masterful at infographics. Here’s a chart that imparts most of what you need to know about the health care debate.  A lead-in description is here, but hardly necessary. I believe the graph puts our forthcoming, um, historic health care reform in perspective. Looks like we’ve got a long, long way to go. [via Kottke]

I’ve taken part in many Web site redesigns, including a LOT of newspaper site remakes, and the process is often akin to making sausage.  Yesterday I read a post on the subject from Steve Yelvington, and now I’ve got a primer to print out and distribute before my next “group redesign” of a newspaper site.  It’ll be required reading for any participants, and I’ll even have a pop quiz on it before that very first committee meeting.

Yelvington describes how groups, often hindered by unclear roles and misplaced skillsets, twist themselves up into the minutiae of design at the expense of usability discussions.  Worse, the conversation hovers over one element of the site, which he notes with proper sarcasm:

All of this happens around a consideration of just one page — the home page, the Web’s equivalent of the holy Front Page, the focus of all power and glory in any newsroom.

Yes, the home page needs attention in any redesign, but most often it gets all of the attention.  With search, feeds, and viral links now a common way for people to enter your site ‘through the side door,’ focus on the home page need not be excessive.

I may go a step further and require that my newspaper site redesign committees ignore the home page until interior-page content is fully addressed. …Well, okay, maybe best to just start with the pop quiz and then play it by ear.