July 2009 Archives

By, "AOL Web mail rendering problem," we mean "renders as an empty message." This is what one user discovered earlier today when sending a message. The cause of the problem? HTML comments. Yes, <!-- HTML comments -->.

We've added an instruction to remove all HTML comments before sending any messages in the HTML template files and the readme file that comes with the template package. If you have any templates in Lyris that are based on the e-mail templates, you may want to review them to make sure all HTML comments have been removed. Aside from the instructions to remove comments and related bits in the readme file, the templates are otherwise unchanged and are now considered to be at version 2.1

You can download the templates via http://webdepot.umn.edu/email/downloads.php.

Answer: Partly when the UofM itself no longer uses it heavily!!

Most web developers will complain about IE6 and all the necessary hacks they need to implement to get websites working in it while those same websites work just fine with minimal hacks in other browswers. Many web developers would no longer like to have to develop, code, and test websites with the thought that IE6 is one of the browsers that they need to test against.

Reviewing the statistics on the University's home page for the month of June, we saw an interesting statistic. That statistic was that IE6 use across the UofM home page site jumped in usage from about 18% to 20% of all pageviews. Surely we were reading this wrong as our previous trend was for IE6 usage to be decreasing. But, digging deeper, we found some interesting statistics, which are:

- For people visiting the UofM Home Page who are NOT on the UofM's network, IE6 usage was 13.24%.

- For people visting the UofM Home Page who are on the UofM's network, IE6 usage was 28.7%.

- Overall Internet Explorer usage by people on the UofM's network was 62.02%. Out of the total IE usage (IE6, IE7, IE8), 46.28% of IE users on campus were using IE6. For people not on the UofM network, that number was 24.17%.

So what does this all mean? That users on the UofM network use IE6 more than twice as much as people outside the UofM network. This is not what I was expecting as a web developer. What these numbers tell me is that if I have an audience that is made up of faculty and staff at the UofM, I will want to continue to make sure that all websites are tested against IE6.