Mad Web Skills

Not really a workshop per se, but the W3C SIG day where various working groups presented a look into what they were up to, and where they were headed. I’ve had bugger-all to do with W3C and it’s inner workings so I was intrigued as to what they actually did. In retrospect however, I should have went to the Javascript workshop which from all reports was pretty good.

Bert Bos (CSS3) covered some of what Andy Clarke spoke about at his workshop yesterday, echoing some of the more cooler features of the CSS3 specification. He illustrated how the advanced layout and grid positioning modules worked, which is super exciting for designer types. This new methodology, along with the new CSS3 selectors module, makes the selector alias theory I had the other week kinda redundant, as markup will no longer require any reference to where the content fits in the the grid, and also makes selecting specific elements easy, even if they are not marked up with a class or id. Bert also touched on the new advanced background images and borders (especially using images for borders). This really excites me (as much as a W3C spec can, I guess).

David Ratcliffe (GRDDL) spoke on a subject that I have no knowledge of and little interest in. GRDDL stands for Gleaning Resource Descriptions from Dialects of Language which is basically a stupid way of saying “bridging the gap between semantic markups” (but I guess BTGBSM is not a very good acronym). I got lost a few times here, looking off into the distance with circus music playing in my head…

Sofia Celic (WCAG 2.0 Draft) first covered the principles of the new draft for accessibility guidelines. There’s some new terminology used, with Checkpoints now being called Success Criteria. Also, some of these criteria are now worded to include more specific values (such as text-sizing should be resizable to between 50% and 200% without loss of content or functionality). This brought the comment “That’s a load of crap” from one audience member. Apparently these values were not based on any real research, illustrating that perhaps some wording may need to be reviewed. Finally, the new draft has the focus moving away from making content accessible to everyone, now targeting solely people with disabilities. A few hard questions from the audience were met with shrugs.

Anne Cregan (Semantec Web) spoke of a framework for sharing data led by the W3C based on RDF. This session reminded me of a comment I heard yesterday that the W3C is run mainly by academics and researchers and doesn’t really relate to web workers in the field. This is where I realised that I’d perhaps chosen the wrong workshop for today, as the circus music returned to my head. Lots of big words like ontology and axioms. Anne believes that this framework needs a killer app before people will see how cool this stuff is, but I just saw a solution where no problems exist (for me anyway).

Chris Wilson from Microsoft (HTML5 and the HTMLWG)started off with a bit of history about the WHATWG and the HTMLWG, then explained that the HTMLWG operates under the W3C Patent Policy, so Chris spent a bit of time talking about how the open standards the HTMLWG deals with needs to be free from IP complications. HTML5 aims to evolve from HTML4 to better describe the semantics of documents and applications, as well as integrate new UI controls such as datagrids etc. They concentrate on a few main principles: compatibility (graceful degradation, supporting existing content, not reinventing the wheel), utility (solving real problems, media independence, security, design, etc) and interoperability (well defined behaviour, avoiding needless complexity, error handling, etc). Chris also spoke of some of the challenges the group faces such as dealing with the openness of of the group which has over 400 members, so understandably there are problems with tone/politeness as well as evaluating the consensus of a subject.

Renato Iannella (The Policy Aware Web) gave a very political presentation about… *cue circus music* doo doo do-do do doo dooo… Huh? What? Yeah, I kinda lost the plot at the start, but he kinda looks like Eugene Levy, which amused me enough to keep me going to the interesting stuff. His talk was about supporting the varied policy languages to control various infrastructures of web usage. The privacy policies you see everywhere are part of this, but there are so many other areas that need to be supported such as accessibility, DRM, mobile sector, content licensing (eg. creative commons, GPL) etc.

Marcos Caceres (Widgets 1.0 Spec) was interesting enough, as he covered something that I’d never really thought about: standardising widgets (single function application often based on web technologies). A widget engine is the software on which widgets run, be it OSX dashboard, YahooUI, etc. but there is currently no interoperability between widget engines. The Widget 1.0 Spec addresses areas such as packaging up widgets, auto updates, embedding widgets in HTML pages, how they’re coded and rendered.

Dean Jackson (SVG) is an entertaining speaker. His talk was on a topic I’d had very little interest in, but by the end I was sold on the idea. SVG isn’t particularly relative to me at the moment, but it was interesting to see how SVG is in use on the web right now in ways that we might not be aware of, such as routes and polygons in Google Maps. Also SVG comes standard on many mobile devices today, especially 3G devices. Desktop UI’s such as Gnome or KDE use SVG for their icons too which was surprising, so it’s fast becoming a vendor-neutral, open standard for vector graphics. Dean suggested that we all go out and have a go at authoring something in SVG, as it’s simply an XML format. SVG is implemented at the same level as HTML, CSS and Javascript, not by plugin, so it can also be styled by CSS natively by the browser, but unfortunately, as usual, IE falls behind with its non-existent support.

So while my look into the world of W3C and it’s various special interest groups was interesting in parts, I think I’ll stay in the trenches, and leave the groundwork to the boffins.

Technorati Tags: wds07 w3c

I was going to give the live blogging thing a go this year, but due to the lack of wifi here at the Powerhouse Museum, I decided to just take a few notes from Andy’s workshop from time to time, then collate them into something to post at the end of the day. This worked out better actually, as I didn’t particularly feel like having the MacBook out the whole time.

By morning tea break Andy Clarke has just covered the general concepts for today’s workshop. It seemed like a tough crowd in that many attendees were finding it a little difficult to either accept or understand some of Andy’s concepts. He started off talking about an alternative to progressive enhancement, where instead of using dodgy browsers (I’m looking at you, IE6) as a baseline for design, then adding enhancements for newer browsers, Andy suggested that we should aim for the top, using all that CSS 2.1 has to offer (and even CSS 3 in some cases), forgetting the notion that the design should look the same in all browsers. Basically, Andy was suggesting that it was often better to use poorly supported (by IE) CSS rules rather than add extra cruft to your markup to achieve the same effect in IE6.

This is an approach that I’ve taken in a few of my designs, mainly in cases where I’ve over-estimated IE6′s capabilities and have been forced to remove certain design elements, such as using transparent PNGs for glow effects, etc. (eg. See how the Sheppparton Villages website’s content area’s light-bloom effect changes between modern browers and IE6. This is less to do with CSS and more to do with PNG-24 alpha support, but the concept’s the same.)

I guess it’s all about where you set the bar for what you’re willing to let IE6 go without. Some of Andy’s examples were a little more than I would accept (ie. I wouldn’t want anything to look out of place or wonky in IE6), but I agree with the general message that, hey, we’ve got these cool CSS rules we can use to make things look cool. Why wait for people to stop using IE6 before we use them to enhance a design for those using modern browsers. It takes a little lateral thinking, but like Andy, I enjoy the challenge that it brings.

I’m about to head out for a bite to eat and a bit of shopping. In a classic example of awesome preparation, I remembered to bring my camera to Sydney, but forgot a USB cable or a SD card reader.

Technorati Tags: wds07 css

It’s that time of year again when the ol’ weblog gets it’s yearly workout. I arrived in Sydney this afternoon, and after settling into my hotel room (with LCD TV! Yay!), getting all showered up (By the way, WTF? What kind of hotel has the hot tap turn on anti-clockwise, and the cold tap turn on clockwise?), I’m about to venture forth for bite to eat then take a walk to get my bearings to the Powerhouse Museum (the venue for tomorrow’s workshop with Andy Clarke. I’m really looking forward to this conference, as I’m not only a fan of Andy’s work, but also of his way of thinking. He’s very inspiring.

Also as part of the pre-conference buzz-building is all the social network web gizmos that go along with it. I’ve got the Flickr tagged, the Twitter feed, the Technorati tagged, the Facebook group, along with the official website, all bookmarked and open in my Firefox tabs. If I’ve missed anything, let me know

On a similar note, I’m a little saddened that last year’s Web Connections website wasn’t re-jigged for this year’s conference. Although, as illustrated above, there’s no shortage of networking apps linked to the conference, it was handy to have everything in the one place. Perhaps if the Facebook group was utilised a little more… Anyhoo, I’ll be kicking around Sydney throughout the conference, so if you want to catch up, give me a hoy-hoy.

Technorati Tags: wds07

Recently there has been a bit of discussion about the ol’ separation of content and presentation after the release (and subsequent point upgrade release) of Blueprint, a most excellent CSS framework by Olav Bjørkøy (also based on the work of others) for the quick deployment of grid layouts and baseline typography. B

Among the voices heard was Jeff Croft who stood up for the framework, stating that in the real world of commercial web development, it’s less important to adhere strictly to keeping presentational class names out of the markup.

Where web standards and other best practices don’t provide great benefits, find solutions that do.

This, in turn, started a mini-barney in the comments between himself and Jeremy Keith (which has rightly been removed), highlighting that even the web-celebs are having trouble agreeing on the issue.

What I would love to see (and please enlighten me if something like this already exists, or is planned for CSS3) is something like definable style aliases. For example, instead of having the following in your markup:

<div id="header" class="column span-2 append-1">Content...</div>

… we just could use:

<div id="header">Content...</div>

… and then define something like the following in your stylesheet:

#header {
     alias: '.column', '.span-2', '.append-1';
}

This way you could keep the extraneous presentation-related classes out of the mark up and associate them to meaningful identifiers or classes in the stylesheet where they belong. From what I can gather, the problem most people have with the likes of Blueprint is not with having class names based on presentation, but the fact that they get all mixed up with the markup.

I’d love to know what you you think, especially if you know something I don’t.

Technorati Tags: web design, css

That’s right. Apple has shocked-and-awed me by announcing that as of the current version (3 Beta), Safari is now available for download as a native Windows application. Well, when I say native, it still looks like it’s just a screenshot of an OSX app, gun-metal grey chrome and all. I wish it looked a little more like a windows app, especially with the way the Preferences window behaves, but for the first release, I’m quite pleased. Performance is good, and I find the HTML rendering to be very accurate. I don’t quite think I’m ready to switch from Firefox just yet, but it’s great to be able to test for Safari without firing up the Mac.

Technorati Tags: web design, safari