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Wednesday November 19th, 2008

1.0
PostRank

it's barcamp season...

From the 200ok weblog, 12 hours ago, 0 comments Comment

Hot on the heels of barcampsydney, it's time for Queenslanders to get their barcamp on! BarCampGoldCoast 2 has just been announced. It's being held at Griffith Uni's Gold Coast campus on 29th November 2008. Registrations are open now; head on over and sign up.

They're also looking for sponsors - it's incredibly cheap ($150-300) to sponsor a barcamp, yet it puts your brand in front of some seriously bright people. So it rates very high on the 'bang for your promotional bucks' scale. [/pitch] ;)

Not only but also... word on the street is that there are barcamps coming up for Canberra and Adelaide. Keep an eye on http://barcamp.org/#Australia for details.

Wednesday October 29th, 2008

1.8
PostRank

get your barcamp on

From the 200ok weblog, 21 days ago, 0 comments Comment

BarCampSydney 4 has just been announced for the 15th of November. For details, head on over to BarCampSydney | BarCampSydney 4 - Let’s do it!!.

Tuesday October 7th, 2008

1.0
PostRank

web standards group sydney, 2008.10.07

From the 200ok weblog, 1 month ago, 0 comments Comment

st mary's (2)

The WSG Sydney October 2008 meeting was held at the Australian Museum tonight, at the rather nice 4th floor/balcony venue. These are my notes from the event.

Chris Khalil – Ambient Personalisation

What is ambient personalisation? It's like Homer's ass groove in the couch. He didn't change any settings, he didn't actively change anything. He just used the couch and it slowly conformed to his needs.

It's intuitive and it's set and forget. It should never be groundhog day where you have to redo everything every time you visit. Low barrier to entry – no opt in, no complex tricks to learn.

It's like the site having your footprints. You don't think about it, they just happen.

Why use the ambient approach instead of giving your users all the options and letting them choose? Feedback suggests they think it will be time consuming and too hard. There's a risk of making them feel a bit stupid. They want the effects of personalisation but they don't want to do it.

news.com.au (soon to be relaunched)

News is personal – people might be keen on news and sport but HATE entertainment/gossip. Or they might like entertainment and travel but hate business. Everyone has their own news preferences, likes, dislikes.

Testing showed that users want choice, convenience and control. No matter how strong someone's preferences are, they are likely to change over time.

People like local content. They want to know what's happening in their city, their suburb, even their own street if it can be done.

[My aside: simple newsworthyness values still apply online – local news tends to be more compelling than global news.]

Problem during testing – 90%+ of people didn't know or understand the paradigms of personalisation. They didn't think to click and drag, drag and drop etc. So news.com.au created friendly messages in a handwritten “callout” style to explain things simply. The simpler the better – instructions got down to one word – click, drag, etc. Part of the trick was to make the instructions clearly different from ads.

www.chriskhalil.com

Lachlan Hunt – New Stuff in Web Standards

Talking about new stuff that's actually being implemented in browsers.

Design principles

Include, but not restricted to...

  • Browsers must remain compatible with existing content. New features must degrade gracefully. Don't reinvent the wheel – even if something is proprietary.
  • Pave the cowpaths – look at use cases, what do authors already do and then improve as required. Evolution, not revolution. Solve real problems – ensure the work is relevant.
  • Theoretical purity is not the priority. Users are the top priority.
  • Minimise differences between HTML and XHTML. Allow scripts to work with both if possible.
  • Handle errors – the spec must define what to do when things go wrong.
  • Accessibility – built in, not added on.

What's new?

HTML

  • New structure and semantics. Looked at the class names that people were using repeatedly; hence elements like header, footer, nav, article, aside, footer.
  • Impelementation – there's no native support for these new elements, but you can still style them in most browsers and use a createelement() hack in IE. In other browsers you just use CSS to set the new elements to display block.
  • New multimedia elements – video, audio, canvas.

CSS

  • Transforms: scale, rotate, skew...
  • animations (proposed by apple)... transitions, duration, etc...

DOM

  • Selectors API... Document and element interfaces – eg querySelector()
  • getElementsByClassName() - hooray!
  • Offline web applications – gears-esque.

Development tools

  • HTML5 conformance checker (note that it's more than just a validator). Checks for things like table integrity, not just tag formation.
  • Parsing libraries to reduce reliance on regex hacks.

Q&A

Q: are the screen reader makers involved or buying in?
A: screen readers are less of an issue than the browser vendors, as the screen readers are told about the document by the underlying browser. Eg. what level heading is it? The browser tells the screen reader.
Q: Why did you not add a generic heading, despite adding <section> and other new elements?
A: basically due to degradation. Old browsers can handle <h1> better than <h>.
Q: Why are elements like <section> ok but <h> is not?
A: section and other new tags degrade and act basically the same way as <div> tags.
Q: re: the use of h1 instead of h – what will Google make of that?
A: Google are involved in HTML5 work but they won't reveal exactly where they are up to with HTML5 support (or plans to support it). So, we don't know.

http://lachy.id.au/slides

Monday October 6th, 2008

6.3
PostRank

wds08: the stream

From the 200ok weblog, 1 month ago, 0 comments Comment

What follows is Web Directions South 2008, as seen on my flickr and twitter streams. With some annotations where I felt it was appropriate. I kind of like the picture that emerges :)

Day Zero

this year's badge

Day One

Opening Keynote - Lynne D Johnson: New Media...New Rules

Two notable toy trends: iPhones and little laptops/"netbooks" (Eee PC, Aspire One). In previous years, the trend was "mac laptops as far as the eye can see".

The whole Esquire cover thing... it just blinks, which is annoying. I don't want my magazines to blink at me (I don't want any media to blink at me). I don't particularly want magazines to "update over 30 days" either - if I want that I'll go look at your website.

I forget the precise wording of the question, but it was something about Google's potential dominance of media meaning that Brin and Page's politics would "become our politics". That's just too simplistic - all publications have bias, whether people adopt that bias comes down to how much they think and how much they just absorb.

Derek Featherstone - Accessibility beyond compliance

I should mention that I refer to anyone doing any form of door duty as "doorbitch". It's not a derogatory term and I've done doorbitch duties myself.

But seriously, who denies geeks caffeine? :)

webpage rescue derek featherstone a new meaning for bed and BReakfast markup

This is true. When I describe how users give commands to Dragon Naturally Speaking, I probably do a slight Derek impression.

Grant Young – social media

JS libraries

Jeff Croft

big brother

Jeff made a comment that came across as wanting to ignore accessibility concerns (although he said later that wasn't his intention). It didn't go down so well on the back channel...

Later on, there was some discussion about how many typography rules have been or should be rewritten for the web. Croft did mention the issues around the choice of serif vs. sans-serif, where the rules were essentially reversed online.

August de los Reyes

(I have a degree in Journalism and Philosophy, but work in IT. So... yeah :))

Day One drinks

darling harbour dusk discussion invisible deck hiYAH! badger flasher

Webjam 8

olpc huddle chaals olpc

Day two

Jeff Veen – Designing through data

Yes, it was my 30th on day two. Not a bad way to spend your birthday, really.

jeff veen jeff veen

Link: veen.com/wds08.pdf

Note - connectivity issues ensued.

Jina Bolton – sexy stylesheets

Michael(tm) - HTML5

Miles Eftos – openid, oauth

I should mention the wifi was great given all the restrictions. At some points I strongly suspect there were a few people abusing the network with high-bandwidth stuff (probably photo/video uploads).

Daniel Burka

Surface and afternoon tea

fingertip computing geeks love gelati

Mark Pesce

Before the speech
behind you, mark, behind you! mark turns around

after party

cam likes code. and tunes. excalistraw e. me'n'john standardzilla attacks! you like code? I like code!
chaals gets ready Go Chaals! dancing to rick astley dancing to rick astley me, derek and chaals IMG_0937 arm out photo time thinking michael 99 chaals is a hit with the ladies chaals is a hit with the ladies chaals is a hit with the ladies aree strikes a pose martin me furry ears and a straw

The day after...

Sunday

See also: WDS08 - the notes.

4.8
PostRank

wds08: the notes

From the 200ok weblog, 1 month ago, 0 comments Comment

In the tradition of my "big stonking posts", these are my notes from WDS08 - basically unfiltered for the most part (so, effectively they are "liveblog" in tone). Anything [inside square brackets] is an aside, my own thoughts rather than something the speaker said. I did think about putting these into the stream post, but it was just getting insanely long :)

Day One

Lynne D Johnson: New Media...New Rules

  • Discussing Marshall McLuhan's work – the medium is the message.
  • “print is a dying a breed... it's not dead yet, but it will serve a new purpose...”
  • “What has become of print?”
  • Tom Foremsi – google cheated newspapers by commoditising content
  • Does it matter where you get content from? Shouldn't producers just work out how to get along with new ways to deliver content? - Yes. There are plenty of new ways to make money!
  • Users still trust experts on factual information, so that still means they trust old media sources. They go to friends for reviews of hotels, electronics, etc...
  • But... younger users, 12-24, are starting to trust unknown peers more than experts. They have a totally different approach to media – including the fact they may want to pay for content. They don't care where the content comes from, they just want to aggregate as much as possible.
  • Discussing japanese book market – it's all on mobile phone, including some books written on mobile. Non-book sales also went up while mobile sales grew. [my though – the more people read, the more they buy...]
  • Should print be scared of Google? Well for a start newspapers are about to “get into bed” with google by letting them wear the cost of digitising newspapers.
  • What should newspapers do? Get niche, shorter stories, more stories, in depth coverage of niche content, have a distinct voice, hyperlocalism, mashups with localised content.

Derek Featherstone – accessibility beyond compliance

I was a little late into this session after being barred at the door due to having a coffee in hand. So, I drank it (too fast) and then scurried in...

  • Keyboard users can be really disadvantaged by AJAX because they get sent back to the top of the page all the time – they lose context.
  • Small barriers to general users can be major barriers to other users... but also a small improvement for us can be a massive improvement for others!
  • [2008 and we still have to point out that accessibility is not just about blind people and screen readers...]
  • “Links go places, buttons do stuff.” reason to use buttons and not links for in-page controls. Buttons also focussable by default.
  • “...we're getting a little meta here...” talking about metadata for a book about tagging.
  • Inline editing – you can't get into editing mode on flickr's editable regions. It's mouse-only. So flickr created an edit link, which takes you to another page which is preset to make everything editable. Issues: bad placement, it shouldn't be at the end of the page, after all editing is likely to be one of the first things you want to do. Also the link label is too brief.
  • Technical term: nubbin. Derek likes it because he can say “expose the nubbin”.
  • “oooh, that's evil. Popup windows bad.”
  • Use the principle of proximity: things that are related to each other should be close to each other. Insert info next to relevant location.

Grant Young – social media

  • Social media is conversation – you need to remember that. Imagine ads jumping up between people in the pub...
  • Trust barometer – who do people trust?
  • Control vs influence – what you lose in control you gain in influence.
  • Book recommendation: flipping the funnel, by seth godin
  • Social media buiding blocks: identity, presence, relationsihps, trust, groups, conversations, sharing.

[Is it a buzzword to say you'll “unpack” a term later?]

  • Grant Young having a moment of terror, realising he didn't check what he'd bookmarked on delicious before he took a screenshot...

[Discussing ambient intimacy... noting exactly why I love twitter. It keeps me in contact with friends in a way no other tool has ever managed to do.]

  • Powerhouse photo collection – more hits in 4 weeks on flickr than in the entirre previous year on their own site. Go where the people are!
  • Discussing the power of the Will it Blend? videos – incredibly cheap to make, but reaches an audience as big as a tv audience.
  • My place or yours?
    • If I go to the community will it be appropriate and will I be welcome?
    • But if I set up my own network will people be sufficiently motivated to come and join?
  • “Start small. Fail early, learn often...” lurk in networks before you launch official branded profiles.

[Single biggest thing is if you don't participate you should not attempt to market in that space. Because you don't know how it works.]

  • Doc Searls: the because effect. Make money because of something, not with something.
  • It's not just about eyeballs – it's not how many people you get, it's the quality of the relationship.
  • Second wordle spotted!
  • “I am not a 'target market'”
  • http://zum.io/wds08

Javascript Libraries panel

To be honest I was really just there for the fun of it. I know plenty of serious Javascript hackers and they pretty much agree as follows:

  • Ideally you should learn to write your own Javascript
  • Frameworks have their place
  • If you're going to use a framework, use jQuery. Or at the very least, don't use !#%&ing GWT.

So, that's what I do.

Back at WDS08 however... The sledging in the session was awesome, even if it's a bit scary that the Naked Man In Blue photo keeps turning up.

Jeff Croft - typograhy

  • “it's not about picking a cool font”
  • Book recommendation: The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst
  • Before you can size text on the web, you really need to understand how to size text in general.
    • An em refers to the em square, not the character size.
  • Set up a typographic scale and stick to that scale.
    • Comparison to music – using a note out of the chosen scale will sound wrong; using a font size outside the scale will have the same effect.
  • Discussing the 62.5% font sizing trick, by Richard Rutter. Set your baseline to 1em = 10px, 1.1em = 11px etc. ok except inhertiance messes it up.
  • Croft ultimately goes with px font sizing to make life easier, considers it a classic geek holy war.
  • He also suggests avoiding extreme contrast as it can be a bit hard on the eyes.
  • “The measure” = the length of a single line of text. 45-75 characters is optimal, using 1 char = 2/3 of an em. So, 30-50 ems is a good line length.
  • Strong recommendation to add more leading to your site's body text.
  • Vertical rhythm – basically, set base line height and make sure everything adds up to the same value. Including padding and so on. Double it for h1, etc...
  • Justified text just doesn't work on the web; largely because hyphenation really doesn't work.
  • “Yes, there's a shortage of fonts. Quit bitching about it.”

[So what about the whole back channel anger about his comments on accessibility vs. px sizing? I think the way to think about it is that Jeff Croft may not intend to sound dismissive about accessibility, but he does sound dismissive about accessibility. It was the same thing when his new blog design was launched with extremely low contrast.

The px font sizing thing is a real problem though - we should be able to use px and yes it is a hell of a lot easier. I have had some discussions about this at work and it is very hard to say no to px sizing in a real-world context. Microsoft: get your shit together.]

August de los Reyes - interface/Microsoft Surface

  • Discussing the way humans experience emotion; the role of play in life; and ultimately merging philosophy and IT theory. Emotion and design.
  • NUI – natural user interface, which is the space where the ms surface product sits.
  • Command line -> GUI -> NUI
  • Command line is directed and you use recall for commands. GUI is exploratory and uses recognition. NUI is contextual and uses intuition.
  • Core idea is that work and play are not opposites or mutually exclusive; and there is joy in doing things as well as joy in the results.
  • Three pillars: social, seamless, spatial. Bring people together, blur the lines between the real and virtual/technical, tap into spatial memory and 3D concepts. This should result in strong emotional connections and responses to the interactions around Surface.
  • What comes after NUI? XUI – X ui... something organic?

Day two

Jeff Veen – Designing through data

  • 1974 as the conceptual end of the sixties... hippie values became mainstream.
  • Veen had an epiphany... he saw Pong for the first time, and realised he could control what was on the screen. He could participate instead of just watching!
  • Key concept: Tools for partipation combined with the scale of data.
  • Every minute people upload 13 hours of video to youtube.
  • “the problem with data is it makes me feel dumb.” ...but the truth is when data makes you feel dumb, someone has failed in design to make it understandable.
  • Using the pump vs. deaths example, the soho pump...
  • Harry Beck – designer of the london tube map. The inspiration was to apply circuit board design onto the tube layout.
  • Let people find the story in the data. Provide the tools and let people navigate through it.
  • Wore tshirt to google: “math is easy. Design is hard.” apparently that didn't go down so well...
  • Taking a concept from zeldman – start with the user, but know yourself. Veen tweaks to know yourself, then understand the user.
  • Close the gap between who we are and the people we serve.
  • Homework – read steven johnson's “the ghost map”
  • veen.com/wds08.pdf

Jina Bolton – sexy stylesheets

  • Running through the core stuff... Write it clean, keep it clean. Clarity is beautiful (use descriptive class names etc). Comments are your friend.
  • Cross reference between stylesheets – particularly between IE stylesheets and general stylesheets. /* redefined: ie6.css line 25 */
  • CSS3 ... Has taken a long time...! note that it's broken up into modules, it's not a single spec as such.
  • Backgrounds and borders... one of the most exciting things. Being able to attach multiple images will be awesome....
  • Multi column layout – issue, the columns aren't actual nodes so you can't select them. Jina hopes it gets fixed at some point.
  • Grid layout – float-offsets and using gr (grid units) as measurement unit.

[The lack of css3 selector support has played a massive part in the markup standard i've just created. We had to include classes like odd and even on table rows; and our backend guys created a scheme of positional class names that wouldn't be required if we had nth-child selectors. Browser makers... get on with it!!!]

[My thoughts: We can apply progressive enhancement approaches to CSS, use what's available. It's available in many browsers and we can add all the cruft for IE in conditional stylesheets.]

Michael™ - HTML5

  • What works now? Canvas (only one major browser doesn't support it...), video and audio, validation without js. API for offline web applications. APIs for client side data storage (replacing cookies). Native getElementsByClassName (hoo-fucken-ray).
  • When did this journey really begin? December 1997 – when HTML4 was published as a recommendation. It was really fast, and “that can never happen again” because you need implementations before you can have a recommendation.

[OK, should that still be the way we go? Can't we have a recommendation based on a proof concept implementation in, say, opera or webkit?]

  • Value proposition for HTML5: it makes life better and easier for web developers. It increases interoperability and reduces the need for UA sniffing.
  • So what does html5 consist of? Html5 spec; support for some features in 4 major browser engines; html5 parsing libraries; validator.nu html5 validator.
  • “[the html5 spec is] A wee bit overloaded.”
  • The spec focuses mostly on specifying conformance criteria for browsers. It's not especially aimed at web developers in that sense. But it does also include the info we do need as web developers.
  • If we want the web developers version, we need to make noise about it! Blog about it, get on the html email list.
  • So much of html5 is based on this: the spec shows what authors should do; then tells browser makers what to do when authors do the wrong thing anyway. HTML5 has decided to avoid draconian error handling.
  • “don't get hung up on syntax.” html5 defines html as an abstract language with more than one syntax parsing method.... [?]
  • There's only one standard in-memory way to represent stuff and that's the W3C DOM.
  • Simplify where we can. eg. Most of the doctype is ignored by browsers, which is why they went with <!DOCTYPE html>. You have to set that to avoid “screwed up mode... fucked up mode... what is it lachlan? Ok, quirks mode.”
  • Similarly the character encoding tag is overly complex, so they bring it back to <met charset=”utf-8”>
  • demos: http://www.whatwg.org/demos/2008-sept/

[note to presenters: vim + presentations = bad]

  • As ever, legal shit gets in the way of video. MS and Apple refuse to implement ogg; firefox won't implement proprietary codecs; etc.
  • “ARIA is more of a stopgap than a permanent solution; but it's support – it's a success story.” (paraphrase)
  • Accessibility is built in to [ARIA]. ...it's baked in to the html5

Daniel Burka - usability/digg

Interesting comments about digg users – they can be quite immature, but they asked for real feedback and got it. So he says you should still give your users credit ;)

  • feedback, feedback, feedback - get lots of feedback
  • follow how people actually use your site
  • subtraction is iteration too
  • measurable goals are crucial
  • avoid announcing timelines

slides on slideshare/dburka

book recommendation: “how buildings learn” by stewart brand

Mark Pesce - this, that and the other thing

I've learned that if you're taking lots of notes in one of Mark's keynotes, yr doin it wrong. So although I had the laptop out, it was mostly just for keeping an eye on the back channel. We are hyperconnected after all.

The only notes I wrote were:

  • Key statement: We behave like crowds when we really ought to be organising like communities.
  • With a new idea – ask youself... will it help people think for themselves?

That said, I'm glad I had wifi. Mark had the backchannel up on screen through much of his talk. With freakishly good timing, my tongue-in-cheek tweet popped up:

  • behind you, mark, behind you! #wds08

Mark was steadfastly refusing to look, but the crowd laughed so much I guess he couldn't resist a peek.

See also: WDS08 - the stream.

Monday September 29th, 2008

1.0
PostRank

opera web standards curriculum updated

From the 200ok weblog, 1 month ago, 0 comments Comment

The second batch of articles has been released at the Opera Web Standards Curriculum. This update really gets the curriculum up to a full head of steam - students can now learn everything they need to know to create a valid, accessible, fully styled website. The next update will see the Javascript articles added.

I contributed two articles to this round... styling lists and links; and styling tables. They were chunkier topics than we originally imagined, as it turns out... :)

Anyway, if you haven't checked out the Opera Web Standards Curriculum already, head on over and take a look.

Supporting the Opera Web Standards Curriculum: Learn to build a better Web with Opera

Sunday September 28th, 2008

1.0
PostRank

lgwebnetwork 2008 podcasts are up

From the 200ok weblog, 1 month ago, 0 comments Comment

One of the great things about our industry is being around people who are passionate and motivated. People who take ideas and make them real.

A few weeks ago I was fortunate enough to be part of the first Local Government Web Network conference - We Believe in Community - run by Diana Mounter and Reem Abdelaty.

Colin and I met Diana at Web Directions South 2007. The three of us traded war stories about building developer networks within large organisations - we'd done it at Griffith University, while Diana was working to connect local government web developers across NSW. Anyone who thinks that sort of thing is easy probably hasn't tried it!

It's great to see how well the LGWebNetwork has come together in the past year. We Believe in Community was a slick, professional conference with greate energy amonst the attendees and speakers. I was particularly chuffed to be asked to do the second day's opening keynote.

Photo: me speaking at LGWebNetwork (Photo by Ruth Ellison)

In my talk I discussed some of the lessons learned trying to achieve change in large organisations. I think I also increased sales for the coffee shop outside, after extolling the virtues of espresso as a social networking tool...

You can now listen to podcasts of all the talks via the LGWebNetwork speakers and pressos page (if you're really keen you can go straight to the podcast of my talk).

More about the event:

Photo of the conference swag

I also feel compelled to mention the bright red swag bag was one of the coolest conference bags I've ever received; and the speakers' gift was a knockout - a custom engraved red iPod Shuffle. Talk about the joy of the unexpected! :)

Wednesday September 10th, 2008

5.0
PostRank

adventures in blogger's openid support

From the 200ok weblog, 2 months ago, 0 comments Comment

Webjam 8 is announced. Awesome!

Need to register with OpenID. OK, well I signed up for one of the OpenID services a couple of years ago, but it was the least memorable URL in history and well, I can't even remember which service it was.

I do have a Blogger account though, which I can remember and should work for OpenID now: Blogger in Draft: New feature: Blogger as OpenID provider.

Awesome! My blog already has OpenID meta tags, so I bang in the URL.

Your blog is not supported for use as an OpenID URL. Please check the following: Is your blog externally hosted? OpenID is only supported for blogs hosted on Blogger...

Not awesome. I host my blog on my own domain. But wait! I can delegate to any blogspot-hosted blog: Blogger in Draft: Using Blogger’s OpenID with any URL

OK, so I need to make an extra blog on blogspot just for open ID. Not awesome, but hey it's their infrastructure. Hopefully they'll sort out the problem later anyway and I can delete it.

Add delegation meta tag to my real blog. Republish. Now my real blog is my OpenID URL.

Awesome.

Thursday September 4th, 2008

5.8
PostRank

shiny chromey new things

From the 200ok weblog, 2 months ago, 0 comments Comment

It's not every day a whole new browser comes out. It's even less common for that new browser to make lead story status in mainstream media outlets*. But today both happened as Google released their browser, Chrome.

Initial impressions are that its 'innovative features' are essentially an amalgam of other browsers; plus it uses bits of Safari, Firefox and IE (settings panel) so it's kind of Frankenstein's browser. But no matter what you think of its pedigree it does feel fast.

[*] Chrome's release was top story news at The Australian and news.com.au, for those of you playing at home. It might have been top story on other sites too, I didn't have time to look around. Standard disclaimer: I work for News Digital Media.

how fast is it?

Precisely how fast it is depends on who you ask. Naturally if you ask Google they'll tell you it's the fastest browser that has ever existed; although they tend to just talk about the Javascript engine rather than overall performance. Google's own Javascript benchmark yields the unsurprising result that Chrome is far quicker than the others.

Let's face facts, companies choose whichever benchmark makes their product look best. Other tests show different results:

So the only consistent result is that everything is faster than IE. I'm rather partial to Lifehacker: Speed Testing the Latest Web Browsers, where nobody won across the board :)

So, is Chrome fast? Forget the numbers, everyone says it feels fast and that's pretty much what counts at the end of the day. It's more of an emotional measurement. It's quick. Paint it red.

security and rendering flaws

Along with Webkit's benefits, Chrome also inherited its first security flaw: Serious Security Flaw in Google Chrome - ReadWriteWeb. It's not even listed as a product on Secunia yet..!

Interestingly there are also some rendering inconsistencies: Google Chrome vs Safari 3.1 on Flickr (some CSS properties not working, border-radius not anti-aliased...).

privacy controversy

It really was a big first day for Chrome, with the first privacy concerns blogged within hours: Does Google Have Rights to Everything You Send Through Chrome? - ReadWriteWeb. Matt Cutts responds that all is above board: Preventing paranoia: when does Google Chrome talk to Google.com?

Let's cut to the chase. Google can do whatever it wants with any information you enter or reveal while using their products. There is nothing to stop them. So the real question is not can they do it - yes, they can - but do you trust them not to?

Do you trust Google?

odd name

I have to say the name does seem like an odd choice to me. For anyone who didn't know, the interface elements of a browser are called the 'chrome'. So we could end up having to talk about Chrome's chrome at some point.

More to the point though, chrome is generally shiny but non-functional bling; and 'chroming' is another name for petrol or glue sniffing. Neither association seems like something you'd want with your new product. Interestingly, Wikipedia has already been updated to include a reference to 'chroming' meaning 'to browse with Google Chrome'. I didn't realise things like that became canonised in a day, but hey ;)

I guess it's not like Opera, Firefox or Mozilla are the most immediately obvious names anyway (compare that with Navigator, Explorer, Safari - all related to finding things and travelling around). So who's to judge? :)

Anyway, so far I haven't seen an explanation from Google for the name. No doubt it's out there somewhere. Maybe it was buried somewhere in that cartoon (I haven't been able to get through the whole thing, I have to admit).

a bit of fun

Google threw a lot of geeky fun into Chrome. Options are labelled with things like 'stats for nerds'; entering about:internets into the address bar reveals a fun easter egg; and some of the error messages are a bit... unconventional:

Oh you! Oh snap!

OK, so actually I could have lived without my browser saying 'Aw, snap' to me before I had my coffee ;) I do wonder if this sort of geekyness will put off mainstream users - time will tell I guess.

so why is google doing this?

There's heaps of speculation going around regarding Google's motivation for releasing a browser. After all they don't need to do it, since people are having no trouble finding Google as far as I can tell...

I think the explanation probably goes back to a message that was loud and clear at Google Developer Day (literally, they openly said this): Google wants to be synonymous with everything you do on the web.

They want all their services' names to become verbs, I guess ;) Google it. YouTube it.

Basically Google are in a position that's probably unique: the more people use the web, the more money they make (from their ads). Literally, that's as specific as it needs to get for Google. So long as we're online, they make money. I don't think there are any other companies that can say something quite so broad and still be serious.

the google gloss

We'd had the first 'do we support Chrome?' question before we'd had lunch; and it wasn't just the tech staff that were talking about Chrome. People certainly do notice Google products.

Personally, I don't think Chrome is about to sweep the world and take over the entire browser market (that said, anything's possible). There's a big novelty factor right now, but it's not so fundamentally different from any other browser that you simply can't live without it.

It's fast, it's multi-threaded, it has tabs. Umm, just like most other browsers. Even the Wikipedia entry for Chrome is littered with 'like Opera' and 'like Firefox' references. There's even a 'like IE8' in there.

So it's probably not going to cruel the other 'alternative' browsers from the market. I do think it's a legitimate danger to IE though. It's the only other browser from a company the average punter has actually heard of.

Think about that - a lot of alternative and open source products get smashed by FUD tactics. "They're too small", "how do you know it's made properly" and that sort of crap. But it's harder to get that sort of FUD going over a product from a company as widely recognised as Google.

last thoughts

Google might attract conspiracy theorists as fast as geeks, but nobody thinks they're a flash in the pan. People who wouldn't try an open source product like Firefox might just give Chrome a go (they probably won't even notice Chrome's open source). People who've never heard of Opera won't know where they can already get speed dial and top placement of tabs. Lots of things that geeks think about simply won't matter.

I can see a lot of people trying Chrome even though they've always used IE. Quite a few of them will probably like what they see, too. It's a pretty good browser and it'd certainly be new and shiny after years of IE. That, or people will just stick with whatever they're already using, since habits don't change easily.

One thing is for sure - it's going to be interesting to see what happens next.

Sunday August 31st, 2008

10
PostRank

ie8 not defaulting to ie8 rendering after all

From the 200ok weblog, 2 months ago, 0 comments Comment

A while back, Microsoft stunned the standards world by responding to developer objections and agreeing to have IE8 render like IE8 by default (and yes there are many things in that sentence that should be wrong, but aren't).

Nobody could quite believe that Microsoft would really do something that genuinely supported web standards, especially when they were reluctant to do it.

Sadly the disbelief was justified - Microsoft have now done a backflip on their backflip. IE8 won't always default to rendering in standards mode after all, interoperability principles notwithstanding.

The latest idea is that IE8 will render in IE8/standards mode by default for general web pages; put a "broken page" icon on the toolbar when in IE8/standards mode; default to IE7 mode for intranets; and let the user change the defaults if they want to.

Because that's so much simpler than having IE8 render like IE8 unless explicitly told to do otherwise.

A couple of links if you hadn't heard:

broken page icon?

OK, so technically the broken page icon means "go into compatibility view". It replaces the more accurately-named "Emulate IE7" button from the previous beta. But that's not really what it looks like:

Screenshot of the Compatibility View icon

That looks like "broken page" to me. Which is particularly annoying as it will only be shown when the page is being rendered in standards mode; and it will be placed in the address bar rather than somewhere like the "Tools" menu.

it's all about the intranets

Obviously I am not surprised by this development in the saga. I said last time around that X-UA-Compatible is all about 'not breaking bad web apps' and this just confirms my suspicions.

The only sites that will render in IE7 mode by default are those accessed by local URLs like http://intranet/. Of course if you can access your intranet using both http://intranet/ and http://www.intranet.real.domain/ then you're going to see it in two different rendering modes.

So I guess you're going to have to forward one to the other or set the meta tag/HTTP header with the correct rendering mode. Which begs the question why this change was useful in the first place, if intranet developers still end up having to modify settings somewhere along the line. Why not leave things as they were - get intranet developers to just set X-UA-Compatible and be done with it?

But instead Microsoft decided to modify IE8's rendering mode selection process again.

Ok, so it's just intranets. This isn't so bad, right?

Not quite.

the defaults aren't

The nasty little rider in this latest announcement is the fact that users can now 'apply compatibility view' for all websites:

Screenshot of IE8 beta compatibility view settings panel

That user choice (and display of the broken page icon) can be overridden by developers using the meta tag or HTTP header. That makes sense, since the developer should know for sure if their site will work in IE8 or not.

But... think that through for a moment, and you'll realise we're back to square one. We now have to modify all our sites, all the time, since users can override our chosen rendering mode if we chose the default rendering (that is, we wanted IE8 to render as IE8 like Microsoft promised last time around).

If we build a site that works in IE8 and then leave things to the default, IE8 users with 'display all websites in Compatibility View' selected will see the site rendered like IE7.

Awesome, isn't it?

confusing for users

I really do wonder what the average user is going to make of this.

I can't fathom why Microsoft thinks the average user is going to know when to click the busted browser button. It's essentially asking the user to understand the finer points of standards compliance and rendering modes, when most users still seem barely aware that the blue e icon on their desktop is not actually "the internet".

Average users shouldn't need to select rendering modes! They should be able to just browse, letting developers and browser makers sort out the details.

But if the user is presented with the option at some point I can them going for the "safe" sounding option of enabling "compability view" for all websites. After all... it sounds kind of like a good thing, right? Compatibility is good, yeah?

so where does this leave developers?

Well, we have two options if we want to build sites that work in IE8, in IE8 rendering mode:

  1. Leave things to the defaults, and ignore users who've set IE7 mode to be on all the time.
  2. Explicitly set our sites to render in IE8 mode, even though we did the right thing and shouldn't have to fart around with X-UA-Compatible.

Logically I think most of us will go with Option 2, since you don't want a user to think your site is broken because they're seeing the "broken site" icon; or worse still have the page actually break because the user is applying the wrong rendering mode.

no real surprises

We are back to what Microsoft wanted to do in the first place. We have to specifically choose a rendering mode for IE8, since there's no reliable default under this new model.

But Microsoft can still say that by default an internet page will render in IE8 mode. They can still pay lip service to interoperability, even if they're not really getting into the spirit of the thing.

It's not a hard equation really: Microsoft makes money off intranets, but doesn't make money off web standards. So, they're always going to protect their intranet interests over web standards considerations.

It's a little sad, since for a while there it looked like Microsoft was actually responding to developer feedback. But it's not surprising to find out that you can't trust a multinational corporation to keep a promise it didn't want to make in the first place.

Sunday July 27th, 2008

6.7
PostRank

speaking gigs coming up

From the 200ok weblog, 3 months ago, 0 comments Comment

For those of you who don't obsessively read my sidebar (and my goodness I've no idea how you can be so lax ;)) I have some speaking gigs coming up (including one this coming week!):

Friday July 11th, 2008

1.0
PostRank

adding opera buttons for dragonfly and cache reload

From the 200ok weblog, 4 months ago, 0 comments Comment

Opera has some great features buried in its menus, so I make a couple of buttons to add them to the standard toolbars.

The first one I use is Reload From Cache, which does exactly what it says. It reloads the page entirely from cache, which is really useful when you combine it with the ability to view source in your choice of text editor. You can view source, make some test changes, reload from cache and see if it worked. It's less twitchy than inline editing since it only reloads when you're ready; and it's far less aggravating than trying to do serious edits in a tiny window with no syntax highlighting.

The second is bleeding obvious - a button on your toolbar to load Dragonfly. I'm sure they'll add one as standard once it's out of beta, but who's that patient? :)

So anyway, here are the buttons. Click the links and they'll get added to your custom buttons; then you can drag them onto whichever toolbar you like.

Tuesday July 8th, 2008

1.0
PostRank

opera web standards curriculum

From the 200ok weblog, 4 months ago, 0 comments Comment

I've often been asked if I know of a good, comprehensive set of standards-based web development tutorials. Something to give a student or keen newbie so they can learn the right way to build websites from the ground up, instead of learning outdated techniques they'll just need to replace.

Sadly, I've often been at a bit of a loss. Most of the tutorials I could find out there either taught old methodologies or they jumped straight to an intermediate or advanced level. Or, they simply couldn't cover the entire topic of standards-based web development.

I've also been frustrated at the slow pace of change at many universities, where students are still being taught techniques that are well past their use-by date. Don't get me wrong here. I know academia is not the easy life that popular opinion would have you believe. So I think the industry should do its best to support academics, as they are training the next group of bright young developers.

So with all these things in mind, I was really happy to be one of the authors for the Opera Web Standards Curriculum (WSC). It's a comprehensive resource for students, teachers, corporate trainers and developers. The first 21 articles have just been released; and there are about 30 more in the pipeline to be released soon.

Check it out! I hope you find it useful. Head on over to the WSC homepage or jump straight to the WSC table of contents if you're keen to dive right in. Feedback is welcome, so if you have comments or suggestions get in touch with Chris Mills, the mastermind of the project. There's also a WSC forum if that is more your style.

Supporting the Opera Web Standards Curriculum: Learn to build a better Web with Opera

Sunday June 15th, 2008

1.0
PostRank

wordle meme

From the 200ok weblog, 5 months ago, 0 comments Comment

Meme: Go to your blog/website/whatever. Select-all (ctrl-a) and copy. Then head to Wordle, paste your clipboard into the text area and voila!

wordle tag cloud

Wordle takes a block of text and extracts keywords into a tag cloud. The cool thing is you can drop in any text. A fun exercise for the reader... compare the homepages of your favourite media outlets ;)

Tuesday June 3rd, 2008

5.8
PostRank

the problem with light grey

From the 200ok weblog, 5 months ago, 0 comments Comment

Colour contrast is not just about accessibility for people with poor vision. Recently I've had a great example of contrast issues caused by LCD screens.

My machine at work has problems with light grey. During a site build I once had our designer enquire when I was going to put the background into a column - only to be a bit taken aback when I said there wasn't one.

Me
What background?
Her
Err... the one in the right-hand column. There's a gradient.
Me
No there isn't. Not in the mockup you sent me.
Her
There really is, I'm checking the file now.
Me
*pause while I hit the offending column with magic wand*
Hmmm.
Ummm. OK, it's there, but I can't see it.
Her
You realise that doesn't make sense, right?

Eventually we compared monitors - on hers it was clear as day, on mine it was invisible. I tried tweaking the settings and no combination of brightness and contrast was acceptable (I suspect there's a gamma setting hidden somewhere in the labyrinthine driver settings, but I'm yet to find it). By the time I could see the greys, everything else was looking insane.

In the end, I implemented that gradient flying blind. I knew it was there, Magic Wand could find it. So I cut up the image and we tested on someone else's machine. These days I have a second monitor which shows things a little bit better.

having not learned...

I got caught out again while redeveloping this blog. I decided to put a nice, subtle, light-grey quote mark on the block quotes. It was fine on my home machine. But then I checked the test site on my work machine and did a double-take, thinking the images had broken somehow. The quote just wasn't there.

This is what should have been there. Note the quote mark to the left of the indented blockquote:

Screenshot showing original quote marks in light grey.

This is what I saw:

Screenshot showing a white space - a simulation of what I see on my work screen.

The only way I could tell the images hadn't broken was to take a screen shot and take a stab with my good friend the Magic Wand:

Screenshot showing Photoshop selection that appears to nothing but white within white space.

So in the end I cranked the grey up to a darker grey. It's not quite as aesthetically pleasing, but at least you can see the bugger on most monitors. Even so, it still isn't a fully accessible shade of grey; but it is a decorative image (and the large indent also indicates quotation) so on this occasion I'm living with it.

it's laptops too...

I've been using an old laptop during meetings and it has the same problem. In fact it's not just grey, it's any light colour.

In Gmail, the read/unread background colour difference is invisible. The only way you can tell which emails are unread is the fact they're bold.

This is what I normally see:

Screenshot showing blue and white lines indicating read and unread email.

This is a rough simulation of the laptop screen:

Screenshot with the colours removed, leaving just bold/normal weight text indicating read and unread email.

Lucky Gmail does the bold/normal weight change as well. Remember the checkpoint - do not indicate meaning with colour alone? That's why.

so, always test contrast

None of this should come as a surprise - we know that colour combinations need sufficient contrast for all kinds of reasons. Had I tested my quote marks with the Contrast Analyser I would have picked it up sooner.

But it serves as yet another demonstration that accessibility requirements benefit just about everyone at some stage. Jump onto my workstation or an old laptop and suddenly you have a low-contrast vision impairment.

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