A comment on comments.
Posted by Mikey McCorry | Posted in Uncategorized | Posted on 05-11-2008
Tags: code, php
0
In the “you learn something new every day” category, comes this. I just found out that when working with php, you can use block commenting (like /*this*/) in the middle of a line of code. For example, if you have something like this:
$debug = 'really cool ';
echo 'This is my '.$debug.'script!';
… you can remove your debug display by commenting it out mid-line like this:
$debug = 'really cool ';
echo 'This is my './*$debug.*/'script!';
Now, this may already be obvious to everyone else, but I thought this was pretty handy to know.
Jeff Veen is truly a brilliant speaker, and having been involved in designing tools such as 
Unfortunately, I didn’t learn much from this session as I thought I might. I think I was expecting it to be more about coming up with inspiration for cool design elements and applying CSS to make it all happen. I love Jina’s designs, so it would have been good to see how her mind works when creating a new masterpiece, but her session was still quite entertaining. Jina opened with the rule of “Write it clean. Keep it clean”. I often fall into this trap of allowing my style sheets to get unruly over time. Later down the road when a redesign comes along, it gets harder to fix it all up later. Comments in your CSS are your friend such as comments at the top of the file defining the website’s colour scheme; a technique I already use. Separate your CSS sections with flags (a comment that begin with an = or something) and add a list of them in a comment block at the top to use as an index. This would help when working on larger sites or when working as part of a team. A good idea is to add a simple comment note to show when styles have been redefined in another CSS file, such as an IE6-specific stylesheet. Jina also talked about some CSS3 coolness such as multiple background images, border images, columns and grid positioning, but this was mostly stuff better explained by Andy Clarke at WDS07. Still, it was great to finally meet Jina, as I’d been following her blog for a while now.
As part of the LGSA and the Local Government Web Network in NSW, Diana’s session related very closely to my day-to-day as she told the story of how when she started working in Local Government, so had to tie up all the loose bits and pieces on the various websites into a streamlined CMS solution, but over time, as stake-holders wanted more out of their websites, and as the CMS gets stretched to its limits, she started looking into some custom-built solutions. Generally stretching the limits of your CMS is a bad idea, so investing in custom solutions can allow you a much more exciting approach as it allows you to build what you want, learn new techniques and generally not be limited by the confines of a CMS. This also enables you to enhance the end-user experience beyond the capabilities of your CMS. Finding the right balance is important.
Daniel Burka is the Creative Director of Digg, and the co-founder of Pownce. Daniel highlighted the need to improve your website over time to prevent it from stagnating. Handling feedback is important: what do people want and why do they want it? Don’t worry about your website getting too big too fast, because having to adapt to scale is a GREAT problem to have. Also, don’t worry about building the most sophisticated system out of the gate. Get it out there and add to it as ne needs are identified. Also removing stuff is iteration too. Try to remove as much as you add. Cameron Moll is a clever dude – Realign, don’t redesign. The Digg commenting system have been changed many times. Digg users love to complain but this should be listened to. Although a comment may be buried, people still click them. They love the shitty comments. The ideal process goes something like: 
Software is not subject to Moore’s Law. It is subject to Murphy’s Law. Productivity software doubles every 20 years rather than 2 years. Javascript is the ideal mash-up language, but due to the browser security model, the web is under attack. It was not designed to be doing any of the things we’re using it for now. It is inherently insecure. The consequences of an attack are horrible, such as loss of trust or money. Doug went over a lot of this during our workshop on Wednesday. 
As with last year, I didn’t take notes from Mark’s brilliant-as-always closing keynote. It’s just too damn hard to take meaningful notes while at the same time trying to take it all in. I suggest you try and find it on YouTube or something, because it was fantastic. Sadly, this was Marks final closing keynote at Web Directions (for a few years at least) to allow him to attend the conference not as a geek-uber-god, but instead as one of us regular, unwashed masses. Good luck with that, Mark. 
Lynne spoke about the decline of the print industry in the face of rising new media. Having worked for a newspaper group for a number of years, I know how big an issue this can get with the traditional print industry. Since the web took off in the mid-nineties, many smaller publishers have always been scared that releasing their product online will eat into their subscriptions and sales, and sadly, not much has changed since then. The newspaper group I used to work for charges a (hefty, IMHO) premium in order to read the newspaper online, which I feel is a big step away from what the web is trying to achieve. Lynne’s presentation highlighted the fact that technology is not-only the medium with which content is distributed, but it can also BE the actual media, as the 
SHITDANGS! Best acronym of the conference. I can’t quite remember what it stands for; something like Super Hot Internet-Type Device And Next Gen Something… I dunno. I’ll look it up later. (Update: see comments) Although the iPhone has Safari, surfing the web with Safari on the iPhone is not always a good experience, taking into account download times and screen resolution. You want your users to get the best experience for their device. Don’t try to force a particular view on your users. You can use a user agent detect and redirect to a mobile version on the homepage, but this should be in it’s own url (eg iphone.domain.com) so the view persists as the user browses around the site. Also, go easy on the animation and transitions. Subtlety works best for these. There are also different interaction models to consider, where using the touch-screen is a lot different than using a mouse. Thumb/finger sizes should allow for a 50x50pixel area for buttons and links. Also, don’t forget you’ve got the full CSS3 support of the WebKit rending engine for nice stuff like rounded corners and drop shadows. At the end, Pete shared some trend statistics of news.com.au’s mobile site compared with the iPhone site, and interestingly, usage actually increased on weekends on the iPhone site in opposite contrast to their main site, highlighting how the iPhone is used differently to traditional mobile devices. 
This was a double-session, however I really wanted to catch Jeff Croft’s presentation, so I only stayed until the half-way point, which is sad because I’d heard that the rest of the session was really good. The panel format is a new concept for Web Direction, but it looks like it was fairly successful so we’ll probably see more of these next year. It started off with a number of mini-presentations, then showed some examples of different Javascript libraries (
Effective typography should be attractive enough to make it want to be read, but it should never get in the way of enabling the reader to read the content clearly. Many supposedly hard-and-fast rules about typography are antiquated. Jeff pointed out the old 62.5% trick for making relative text sizing easier. This involves resetting the base font size to 62.5%, which in most browsers brings it down to around 10 pixels. This makes it easier to develop and maintain relative sizing. eg. 1.6em becomes 16px, 2.4em becomes 24pix, and so on. When it comes to line-length, apparently 30-50ems (40-70 characters or 7 to 12 words per line) is the magic range for easy readability. Finally, Jeff said that fully justified tex on the web is almost always a bad idea, unless you’re awesome like Cameron Moll. A few resources for more information: 
August de los Reyes is the creative director for the Windows Platform Core Innovation team which is working on Microsoft Surface. There was actually a Surface prototype available to play with in between session on the expo floor, which was a bit of fun. The presentation opened with a very impressive promo reel for how Microsoft predicts how surface technology could be used in the future. In fact, the presentation was a little promo-heavy, but this was forgivable due to August’s very insightful ideas and liberal use of humour. I was padded out a little in the middle with an almost three minute clip from an episode of Seinfeld that didn’t have a great deal to do with the rest of the talk. The talk was mostly about being able to predict user interaction models of the future by understanding human patterns and behaviours of the past. A successful user interface ensures that the system output must always be greater than the user input. This is what creates the magic! First we had the CLI, then the GUI. Surface is trying to achieve “NUI” which is a Natural User Interface. The next step should have the user interface as an extension of our selves.