Mad Web Skills

In a post I wrote almost a year ago (and in the ensuing comments), I pondered the possibility of someday being able to define variables natively in a CSS document without the use of server-side scripting.

Well it seems that in their most recent nightly build, WebKit has added support for this.

@variables {
    CorporateLogoBGColor: #fe8d12;
}
div.logoContainer {
    background-color: var(CorporateLogoBGColor);
}

I’m not sure if this is based on any particular official CSS3 recommendation or if its something that WebKit has just grabbed and ran with in the hope of it going mainstream, but its certainly a step in the right direction.

A nice surprise just hit my feed reader. Microsoft has just released the Windows Internet Explorer 8 Readiness Toolkit, a micro-site containing download links for IE8 beta 1 as well as useful information for web developers.

I’m not sure, but I think I’m actually getting really excited about this release. While I haven’t installed the beta yet (I’m working on something at the moment, and I know that it’s going to want to make me restart Windows, and that would totally kill me groove ), the features listed on the site look great. I’m especially looking forward to experimenting with the new Ajax navigation options which enables the back/forward buttons through use of the window.location.hash (as I’d always thought it should).

Firefox is still my browser of choice, however Firefox’s stupid crashes, crappy scrolling performance (especially on pages with lots of Flash) and gargantuan memory consumption (eg. this current firefox.exe process is taking up over 400MB) is starting to annoy me. If IE8 had a flexible addon/extension api, I think there would be a tougher decision to be made.

For those who haven’t been following the recent drama regarding the proposed web standards behaviour in IE8, here’s a re-cap:

• Microsoft announces that IE8 can render the ACID2 test perfectly in IE8. Web devs get excited.
• In the name of “not breaking the web” (read: “not pissing off corporate clients that have spent many thousands of dollars on Microsoft CMS, Sharepoint, .NET controls and other web interfaces”) Microsoft announce a version targeting mechanism that allows web pages to be rendered using the IE version of choice. So far so good, however, by default, IE8 will render nearly all web pages exactly the same as if it were IE7. Standards-savvy developers would have to opt-in to IE8’s standards rendering engine.
• The web development community splits into two; those that believe the default behaviour is wrong and goes against the very nature of building valid, forwards-compatible websites; and those who believe it is in the best interest of the internets, protecting Microsoft’s partners who use thier dodgy web technologies and the vast majority of web designers who still use invalid markup, spacer gifs, layout tables and blink tags.

Now, I fit somewhere in the middle. I believed the default behaviour is wrong, but honestly thought it was not big deal. I understood that Microsoft was protecting their own interests. We’ve been accomodating IE since the dawn of time, so why stop now.

Anyway, none of that matters any more.

In Microsoft’s Interoperability Principles and IE8 on the IEBlog, IE General Manager Dean Hachamovitch has announced:

In light of the Interoperability Principles, as well as feedback from the community, we’re choosing differently. Now, IE8 will show pages requesting “Standards” mode in IE8’s Standards mode. Developers who want their pages shown using IE8’s “IE7 Standards mode” will need to request that explicitly (using the http header/meta tag approach described here).

I actually thought it was kind of silly that folks like Jeremy Keith were jumping up and down about the default behaviour, like they actually thought it was going to do anything about the situation. Trying to pressure Microsoft into doing anything would be like trying to convince an elephant to walk through a doorway. It just doesnt fit.

So, colour me flabbergasted. Kudos to Jeremy and others like him for championing for the cause rather than (like myself) be prepared to just grin and bear it. Also big snaps for Microsoft and the IE Team for actually listening to the developer community and making the right decision.

Who would have guessed that when you remove Garfield from the Garfield comic strips, the result is an even better comic about schizophrenia, bipolor disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life?

The Google StreetView car was recently spotted by a friend of mine driving around here in Shepparton. It was apparently a black sedan, pole camera on the roof, Google magnet logo on the door. It’s unknown whether they’re taking photos of the Shepparton area (which is unlikely, but would be ubercool) or whether it’s just a Google employee borrowing the Google-mobile for the weekend to visit family in the region (more likely, but less interesting), but I’ll be keeping an eye on Google StreetView in the future.

UPDATE: Confirmed! I was out at lunchtime visiting a client and saw the black Google car heading down the main street. What he was doing there, I still don’t know.

The Shepparton Show Me and Show MeBay websites have finally gone live. Mad Web Skills has been responsible for almost every aspect of development for these websites including web design, information architecture, user interface design, database development and php scripting.

The Shepparton Show Me website is running on Mad Web Skills’ own cmsharp content management system, so the client was able to update and manage all website content, including file download areas and photo galleries (with a little help from myself to polish up the content and apply some consistent styling). There’s a few more areas still to be developed for this website over the coming months, including a weblog and secured password-protected areas for committee memebers to use for internal communication.

Shepparton Show MeBay is a promotional website running under the Shepparton Show Me banner for a couple of weeks. It’s an online auction with a difference! Instead of bidding with money, you bid with specially coded Shepparton Show Me Dollars which you can get by shopping locally at participating retailers. Users can then register on the website and redeem these Show Me Dollars into their account balance and use them to bid on some great prizes! (Mad Web Skills is also providing one of the prizes — domain name, web hosting and weblog for one year!)

This is the first time such a promotion has been run by the Shepparton Show Me Committee so it’s a bit experimental. Personally I think it’s a great idea and I hope it really takes off and we see it again soon.

Update: The Shepparton Show Me people like to switch up their marketing every few years or so, so unfortunately my design is no longer online.

Apparently I look a bit like Jonathan Snook.

At Web Directions, it was mentioned to me by no less than three separate people that I kinda look like the man. In fact, the first one of these people came up to me during the morning tea break, shook my hand and said with a big smile “Jonathan Snook, I presume”. I can’t quite remember who said it, or if they were joking or not. Of course, I thought that they were joking, and it kinda threw me back a bit. I think I responded with a weird laugh and a “Yeah right!”.

So if you’re reading this, handshake guy, and you weren’t joking and thought I was Jon Snook, I humbly apologise for acting like a dick. That’s all I wanted to say.

Technorati Tags: snook, wds07

This is being posted 12 months late, and nobody will probably read this, but I thought it would be good to keep if only for my own reference. Here are the notes I took during Web Directions 07, found in some obscure folder on my MacBook. It seems I didn’t take notes for every session, but here is what I did happen to note down.

Andy Clarke – Think like a mountain

Andy’s main topic was the use of comic books as an influence on art such as movies and extending that concept to the web. He used Sin City and Watchmen as an example. I’ve since read the Watchmen graphic novel, so big thanks to Andy for putting me on to that one!

Many comics span the gaps between panels with design elements, as well as varying the size of the panels. Bringing this across to grey-box layouts for the web, large panels can be used not just for large amounts of content, but to add emphasis, as does sparring use of colour. Reiterating his point from his workshop, make use of new CSS technologies; don’t limit yourself to just capabilities to the lowest common denominator (I’m looking at you, IE6).

Finally, Andy officially announced the CSS Eleven, an international group of visual designers and developers who are committed to helping the W3C’s CSS working group to better deliver the tools that are needed to design tomorrow’s web. They planned to deliver two months deliberation on each CSS3 module, then open for public comment via wikis. It sounded good at the time, but I don’t think much came of it at the end. (I’m currently at WDS08 so I might hit up Jeff Croft or Jina Bolton about what’s happening with it at the moment.)

Chris Wilson – Microsoft – Moving the Web Forward

Chris gave quite a defensive talk about the future of the web from a browser vendors point of view (namely IE), addressing some of the criticisms they receive.

Scott Berkun – The myths of innovation

Scott is a captivating speaker who gave a nice motivational talk about innovation, and how that term gets loosely applied. There’s more to innovation than most people realise, and also in many cases origin stories get made up to glamourise the discovery of the idea, the eureka moment, often ignoring much of the hard work involved in reaching that point. He also dissected the anatomy of innovation. Quite interesting.

George Oats – Human Traffic

George is an original team member from Flickr. We made the assumption that George was male, but were surprised that not only was she a she, but she’s also an Aussie. George gave us a history of Flickr, how it started off as a game, before becoming a photo sharing site. She spoke of the rapid growth of their user base, and what this meant to the future of the company. Flickr has been perpetually in beta for so long that they coined the phase “Gamma” meaning “constantly in development”. I love these real-world examples about start-ups, and how they make it big.

Ben Winter-Giles – Managing Agile Projects

I’m not sure what Ben ended up talking about because I left 10 minutes into the session and headed next door. I hate to say it, but he kinda irritated me. First he went on about the Chinese gardens in Darling Harbour, then rambled on about waterfalls, and laptops. Then he compared horses (and the positions of their eyes on their heads) to humans, then monkeys compared to tigers. Then it was dogs… That was enough for me so without further ado…

Aaron Gustafson – Learning to Love Forms

We missed the preliminary, introduction stuff to this session, but it meant we got straight into the good stuff. I get a few handy hints and tips about how to not only style forms to make them look purdey, but also about how to mark them up properly, improve accessibility, and use proper semantics. The handiest bit of knowledge I learned was about being able to style legends easier by wrapping the contents of the legend element in a span set to display: block, then styling the span. Nice!

Mark Mansour – Red Bubble

Another one of these great start-up presentations. Five things you need to create a new application/startup:

1. Good people. Respectable, clever. A balanced attitude between getting things done, and getting things right. A culture of caring about your work.
2. Good tools. Communication tools: Campfire, Wikis. Development tools: Version Control System, Automation tools, Database Re-factoring. Testing tools. Unit testing. Functional testing: Selenium. Continuous Integration. Management Tools. Issues/bug trackng. Storyboarding: put all your tasks (stories) on to physical cards and plan out your “to do”, “doing” and “done” areas, as well as an overflow area for “nice to have” tasks. Use little avatars of team members to show who’s doing what. Documentation.
3. Simple Development Process. Agile, iterative process.
4. Ship it!
5. Fun! Dont mistake seriousness with professionalism. Embrace Ceremonies.

Redbubble used a weekly iteration cycle – Thursday – Wednesday.

Adrian Holovati – Being smart about your data

Adrian Holovati was one of the developers of the Django framework for Python. Serendipity! Desirable discoveries by accident. Using effective click-throughs all over your data is good because it increases stickiness as well as usefulness. In order to make this happen, you have to be smart about your data. Start with structures data, but this is half the battle. It needs to be collected by humans, but once you’ve got it, the rest is a piece of cake. All data has structure, so give your data “the treatment”. Advantages: using permalinks for concepts is great (linking to tags or data views). There are also SEO advantages about having things granular.

Mark Pesce – Mob Rules

I didn’t take any notes during this final closing keynote because Mark Pesce is such a brilliant, captivating speaker. Nothing I say here can adequately cover Mark’s speech, but I’ll briefly and pointlessly try to give you the gist. Mark describes the mob as a kind of big floating cloud. It’s unstoppable. It’s faster and stronger than you, but at the same time, the mob IS us. The network is not the internet, nor is it the wired, the wireless or in fact any infrastructure. People are the network, and the mob gets what it wants. Mark targeted the telcos, advertising and the pharmaceutical industry as areas where the mob will overthrow, giving the example of mesh networking. I think I’ll just stop here, because I’m sure I’m not doing a good job of explaining this. Needless to say, as always, I left Mark’s speech ever invigorated, inspired and motivated to go forth and do great things. Embrace your obsessions – you will be rewarded!

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