The other day a couple of surprise packages arrived in the Ephox UK office – our new squishy conference giveaways! The ever popular red sports cars are out and in their place are a cute little Koala and a Kangaroo pair.

It was quickly suggested that we need names for them, so here’s your chance to go down in Ephox history. What should we call them?

From the job description:

We are seeking a Software Developer who is experienced in creating sophisticated, highly interactive, JavaScript applications. Ideally we desire someone that has experience in TinyMCE or has experience working as part of an open source project. The right person will have the ability to work remotely in a highly collaborative manner with virtual teams.

I’m pretty excited about this new opening within Ephox. Lots of great stuff to come out of it hopefully, but in particular helping Ephox to start working better with Open Source communities and developing some awesome stuff with JavaScript. While TinyMCE experience is something we’re particularly keen to have “ready to go” if possible, whoever fills this role is going to become a web content editor expert in general from Tiny to CK, Dojo and of course our personal favourite EditLive!

The position is open regardless of your location in the world, though if you happen to be near Brisbane, Maidenhead or Palo Alto we have nice offices you can come in and work from if you like.

Andrew Shebanow in Open Government and PDF:

The issue at hand is not whether governments should pick HTML or PDF. The issue at hand is whether governments are capable of publishing information at all. Show me an HTML creation tool that creates high quality, standards conformant markup from a Word document or any of the zillions of editing tools that government employees use. Now add in all the tools used by people who submit documents to the government. And all the versions of those tools released in the last 20 years. Now make sure that the HTML/XML works correctly even when the user doesn’t have the right browser or the right fonts installed.

I’ve actually worked with a number of government departments who were looking to move more content online and the content conversion problem is definitely a time consuming and challenging part of the problem. That’s precisely why I wind up getting involved, since EditLive! lets you easily copy and paste content from Word documents and produce clean, compliant XHTML. It can even (optionally) strip out inline formatting and leave just the structure like headings, tables and lists.

Furthermore, EditLive! is actually quite good at making sure the HTML works correctly even when the user doesn’t have the right browser or the right fonts installed, especially when it’s been configured to suit the particular content needs. Even with non-technical business authors this can work very well and is doing so for a significant number of government departments.

That’s not to say it’s the whole solution, there are systems out there where it’s hard to convert the content to HTML and where HTML may not be the best format anyway. Some of those cases may work better with PDF but certainly not all of them. To somehow suggest that PDF is a complete and simple solution to publishing information on the web misses quite a lot of the picture. For example:

• How do web site visitors navigate around and get to that PDF data? How do they search and find it? As much time is spent working out navigation structures as it is converting content.
• How do you expose information from databases with regularly changing information? Wouldn’t a HTML representation be easier to generate than PDF in most of these cases?

Putting information on the web is not simple and no single technology is going to make it simple. PDF definitely has it’s place on the web, but so does HTML and a number of other formats. PDF doesn’t alleviate compatibility concerns, not all users have a recent enough PDF reader, not all PDF embed all the fonts and when they do it makes the download very large etc and not all PDFs are standards compliant. Putting non-web stuff on the web is always a big, challenging project, so review the available technologies carefully and pick the ones that best achieve your goals. Very few companies have success with just dumping a whole heap of PDFs on a web server.

I’ve spent the last couple of weeks in Australia for my baby sister’s wedding and while I was there I worked out of Ephox’s Brisbane office where our engineering team is based. It’s been nearly 18 months since I left there to move over to the UK and this is the first trip back since. What was most striking about the trip is just how awesome the team is down there. Technically speaking they are one of the most talented groups of engineers you’re ever likely to come across and pull off some seriously amazing stuff, but more importantly they are a truly great team.

Engineers are known for being anti-social but you don’t see any of that in the Ephox team – they all get on well, love the work they do and work as a team, not just a group of individuals. Everyone in that team should be seriously proud of the culture they have built up in that team.

For those non-Ephox folk reading this, you too can join the team as Ephox is currently on a serious hiring binge in a number of areas. Check out the jobs page for details.

Every so often while using NetSuite, it pops up and asks me to fill in a quick little survey – basically how likely are you to recommend NetSuite and why? This is annoying when your in a rush but on balance not a bad way for them to ensure their customers are happy.

There’s just one catch – every single time I tell them that I’d never recommend NetSuite and that they should improve product quality, specifically they should handle escaping XML tags correctly. As a company that makes HTML editors, we quite often send and receive emails that talk about HTML tags rather than just including them. Unfortunately, NetSuite for the past 5 years or more has happily messed these emails up and we’ve had to come up with complicated ways to get the original email text back out. We’ve reported this to them on multiple occasions and at one point had to actually put in a XSS exploit to get them to understand how big a problem it was. Over time they’ve shifted where the correct HTML will appear in the system, but never actually fixed it entirely.

So, coming back to the survey – what’s the point of interrupting users to get their feedback when you go and ignore it anyway?