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You can use the feeds in this mix as the basis for a new mix - create a new mix from this mix.
adactio: Finding the lack of hCards on Basecamp's "People" pages to be indistinguishable from a bug. The page feels broken to me. [New Window]
adactio: Finding the lack of hCards on Basecamp's "People" pages to be indistinguishable from a bug. The page feels broken to me.
Tue, 09 Feb 2010 12:47:20 -0500 adactio: Because @rellyab brought cupcakes right before lunch, @clearleft is now an experiment in delayed gratification. http://www.vimeo.com/5239013 [New Window]
adactio: Because @rellyab brought cupcakes right before lunch, @clearleft is now an experiment in delayed gratification. http://www.vimeo.com/5239013
Tue, 09 Feb 2010 07:39:51 -0500 adactio: @courcelan Yes. [New Window]
adactio: @courcelan Yes.
Tue, 09 Feb 2010 04:24:35 -0500 adactio: @korbinian Does this help? http://huffduffer.com/about [New Window]
adactio: @korbinian Does this help? http://huffduffer.com/about
Mon, 08 Feb 2010 19:44:46 -0500 adactio: Mining the @huffduffer motherlode of http://www.theworld.org/ [New Window]
adactio: Mining the @huffduffer motherlode of http://www.theworld.org/
Mon, 08 Feb 2010 19:22:09 -0500 adactio: @korbinian Man, bist du aber ein fleisiger Huffduffer! Weiter so! [New Window]
adactio: @korbinian Man, bist du aber ein fleisiger Huffduffer! Weiter so!
Mon, 08 Feb 2010 14:19:02 -0500 adactio: Yay! The @huffduffer plug-in for Firefox is now public, rather than "experimental" https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/13448 [New Window]
adactio: Yay! The @huffduffer plug-in for Firefox is now public, rather than "experimental" https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/13448
Mon, 08 Feb 2010 13:02:58 -0500 adactio: @Heilemann I actually liked Avatar a lot but even I thought the music was distractingly awful. [New Window]
adactio: @Heilemann I actually liked Avatar a lot but even I thought the music was distractingly awful.
Mon, 08 Feb 2010 04:33:06 -0500 adactio: Rooting for The Saints ...but probably not enough to stay awake for the whole game. [New Window]
adactio: Rooting for The Saints ...but probably not enough to stay awake for the whole game.
Sun, 07 Feb 2010 20:26:54 -0500 adactio: @nataliedowne Hey, take a look at ten random websites. Your visual design skills are plenty good enough. ;-) [New Window]
adactio: @nataliedowne Hey, take a look at ten random websites. Your visual design skills are plenty good enough. ;-)
Sun, 07 Feb 2010 19:59:56 -0500 adactio: OH: "It's a bit like ants demolishing a biscuit, but in reverse." [New Window]
adactio: OH: "It's a bit like ants demolishing a biscuit, but in reverse."
Sun, 07 Feb 2010 19:59:04 -0500 adactio: @nataliedowne Stop saying you're not a designer. You think about the experience for the end user. You are a designer. [New Window]
adactio: @nataliedowne Stop saying you're not a designer. You think about the experience for the end user. You are a designer.
Sun, 07 Feb 2010 19:49:57 -0500 adactio: Thoroughly enjoyed @geekestlink tonight; particularly hanging out with Quizmaster Steve afterwards. [New Window]
adactio: Thoroughly enjoyed @geekestlink tonight; particularly hanging out with Quizmaster Steve afterwards.
Sun, 07 Feb 2010 19:48:12 -0500 adactio: Heading out to @geekestlink at The Caroline Of Brunswick, suspecting that we might have to split into two teams this week. [New Window]
adactio: Heading out to @geekestlink at The Caroline Of Brunswick, suspecting that we might have to split into two teams this week.
Sun, 07 Feb 2010 14:01:00 -0500 adactio: @beep Make sure to create a copy of your .conf files before upgrading. I wish I had. [New Window]
adactio: @beep Make sure to create a copy of your .conf files before upgrading. I wish I had.
Sun, 07 Feb 2010 11:39:58 -0500 adactio: Hadn't planned to spend my Sunday fixing all the PHP/MySQL/Apache issues created by upgrading to Snow Leopard, but there you go. [New Window]
adactio: Hadn't planned to spend my Sunday fixing all the PHP/MySQL/Apache issues created by upgrading to Snow Leopard, but there you go.
Sun, 07 Feb 2010 11:20:59 -0500 adactio: @guspim Gustavo, I'm "they" and I'd be interested in hearing any constructive criticism you have to offer on the design of @huffduffer. [New Window]
adactio: @guspim Gustavo, I'm "they" and I'd be interested in hearing any constructive criticism you have to offer on the design of @huffduffer.
Sat, 06 Feb 2010 20:37:46 -0500 adactio: @dburka Hunch. Dropbox (not web, but you know what I mean). [New Window]
adactio: @dburka Hunch. Dropbox (not web, but you know what I mean).
Sat, 06 Feb 2010 16:52:38 -0500 adactio: Still waiting for Andrew Keene's dog to make an appearance on BBC's Digital Revolution. [New Window]
adactio: Still waiting for Andrew Keene's dog to make an appearance on BBC's Digital Revolution.
Sat, 06 Feb 2010 15:55:15 -0500 adactio: Getting ready to watch Virtual Revolution with @aleksk (in both senses). [New Window]
adactio: Getting ready to watch Virtual Revolution with @aleksk (in both senses).
Sat, 06 Feb 2010 15:12:21 -0500 Our world may be a giant hologram - space - 15 January 2009 - New Scientist [New Window]
This makes my brain giddy. Dizzying stuff, clearly explained. Axe Cop [New Window]
A web comic written by a 5 year old (illustrated by his father). Andy Ihnatko's Celestial Waste of Bandwidth (BETA) Analog IMDB [New Window]
A medium-zoom view of shifts in publishing. Olia Lialina. A Vernacular web. Indigenous and Barbarians. [New Window]
A wonderful trip down memory lane to the amateur web of the 90s. Talking Animal blug [New Window]
This is the way to do an adaptable liquid layout. Media queries are your friend. Oh, and the content's good too. BBC - My Web My Way - Home [New Window]
A handy accessibility resource from Auntie Beeb. Revised Font Stack | A Way Back [New Window]
A thoroughly researched and well-written look at font stacks, with some practical suggestions and advice. Fontspring | Fonts, fonts and more fonts [New Window]
A store of fonts for sale, many of which have licenses that allow you to use them with @font-face. Daring Fireball with Comments [New Window]
A self-documenting explanation of why John Gruber doesn't have comments on his site. News week, day 1 (Phil Gyfords website) [New Window]
The sad state of online newspapers (the design this time, not the business). The iPad and the web [New Window]
Before Apple launched the iPad, I managed to refrain from adding to the deluge of speculation and rumour. Now that the much-anticipated tablet has been unveiled, I cant resist jotting down my thoughts.Now, this is just my reaction to a piece of technology. I feel a need to clarify that because discourse on the internet has a strange way of getting warped. Someone says I like Italian food, and someone else responds with Why do you hate Mexican food? Someone says I enjoyed watching Avatar, and someone else hears Everyone should enjoy watching Avatar. So bear in mind that this is just my personal reaction. Im not saying that everyone should share my feelings. Twould be a very dull world indeed in which we all felt the same.I didnt watch Steve Jobs unveiling the iPadI was busy learning at a Skillswap eventbut when I was reading up about it afterwards, I thought to myself Im probably going to get an iPadActually, at this point I need to take care of something:Mum, if youre reading this, could you stop now please? Thanks. Love you.Anyway, as I was saying, I thought to myself Im probably going to get an iPad for my mother.Honestly, there isnt much on offer in the iPad that I dont already have in my Macbook. I dont think it is the device for me. But it is most definitely the device for my mother. I dont mean a theoretical persona such as ones mother, I mean my mother.My mother is currently using a G3 Ruby iMac that used to belong to me. When she started using this machine, she had never used a keyboard, much less a computer. I am very, very glad that her first computer was a Mac and that shes never had to deal with the world of pain that is Windows, but even a Mac has a learning curve for someone whos never used a computer before.I remember explaining what the cursor was and how the mouse controlled it. When I said move it up, she lifted up the mouse off the table. Thinking about it, the mouse isnt as straightforward as we think: moving the mouse left and right does map to moving the cursor left and right, but moving the mouse forward and backward maps to moving the cursor up and down. Both the cursor and the mouse move on two-dimensional surfaces but only half the movements of the mouse correspond directly to movements of the cursor.In computer years, a G3 iMac is ancient. Its amazing that it still runs at all. Ive been thinking for a while now about what would make a suitable replacement. A newer iMac would be good but theyre a little pricey for something thats going to be used for web surfing, email, some digital photography and little else. A laptop would be nice. Now that my mother has WiFi, theres no need for her to have to remain in one place to use her computer. But laptops are fiddly things with fiddly trackpads.The iPad strikes me as the Goldilocks solution. Its just right. If the European pricing follows the general Apple conversion rate, the iPad should be pretty darn affordable. It would be nice if it came with an iSight for iChatting; that might well get added in a later version. Web surfing, email and photo browsing are all not just possible, but likely to be pleasurable. Thats because the multitouch control mechanism is likely to feel far more intuitive than either a mouse or a trackpad. (Caveat: I havent used an iPad. Take my opinion, and the opinions of anyone else who hasnt actually used one, with a heaped tablespoon of salt.)So Im probably going to get an iPad, but for someone else. If it came with nothing more than a WiFi connection and a web browser, it would still be a worthwhile device for my mother. In fact, the idea of using a computing device based around a browser is whats driving the Google Chrome OS. Googles vision is one wherein the file system and the hard drive are far less important than the web browser and the web server.Thats why Im slightly mystified about the App Store grumblings. Yes, its a closed system that Apple controls completely. But the same devices that support the App Store also come with a very advanced web browser. Personally, I think that if a device is capable of running HTML, CSS and JavaScript, I dont think it can be described as closed.Dont like the closed nature of the App Store? Dont use it. Use the web instead. Thats the point that PPK was making, albeit a bit stridently. Admittedly, if you want to make money directly from an app, you might have a harder time of it on the web than on the App Store. Make your app distribution bed and lie in it.Ive already seen people on Twitter sharing some ideas for the uses to which the iPad could be put:displaying sheet music on a music stand,showing recipes on a kitchen worktop,playing scrabble, sudoku and crosswords,reading comics,reading magazines a la Mag+,reading books in a way that doesnt involve the silly page-turning visual metaphor built into the iBooks app.All of those are great ideas and all of them can be implemented on the web. Remember that Mobile Safari already has excellent support for canvas, audio, video and offline storage. No App Store required. As Simon St. Laurent puts it, web developers can rule the iPad.I understand the concerns of my fellow geeks who see the read-only nature of the iPad as restrictive compared to the read-write nature of laptop and desktop computers. Rafe Colburn asks Is the iPad the harbinger of doom for personal computing?: I think that its a real possibility that in 10 years, general purpose computers will be seen as being strictly for developers and hobbyists.Alex Payne foresees a tinkerers sunset: The thing that bothers me most about the iPad is this: if I had an iPad rather than a real computer as a kid, Id never be a programmer today. While I understand and to a certain extent, share these forebodings, Im cautiously optimistic that these fears wont be realised. The iPad isnt going to replace laptop or desktop computers; its a different kind of machine for a different kind of user.Frasier Spiers welcomes the glimpse that the iPad offers us of information processing dissolving into behaviour when he writes: If the iPad and its successor devices free these people to focus on what they do best, it will dramatically change peoples perceptions of computing from something to fear to something to engage enthusiastically with. I find it hard to believe that the loss of background processing isnt a price worth paying to have a computer that isnt frightening anymore.Nik agrees: Yes, its an entirely prescriptive way of computing - one that the hackers, tinkerers and geeks will find alien and protest about its lack of openness. But heres the thing: for the people who the iPad is aimed at it really doesnt matter that this experience is prescriptive.I think hes right. The iPad isnt for geeks but I can foresee geeks, like me, buying iPads for members of their family if for no other reason than to reverse the trend of the holiday season becoming the tech support season.Im not usually one for predictions, but I think Ill try my hand at one now. The iPad will be the best-selling device to be purchased as a gift for Christmas 2010.Tagged withappleipad
Sat, 30 Jan 2010 16:43:21 -0500 Web-safe Fonts | Web Typography | Speaking In Styles [New Window]
A very handy list of fonts ranked from "less likely" to "almost certain" to be installed. Romn Corts Pure CSS Coke Can [New Window]
A nifty little CSS experiment. oooooooOOOOOOOooh! [New Window]
Because sometimes a sad trombone just won't do. This is the title of a typical incendiary blog post - Coyote Crossing [New Window]
This is a pithy one-sentence description of a blog post, praising the author's insight. Approval [New Window]
This is the last week during which you can grab a ticket for UX London at the early bird price. From February 1st, the price goes up by a hundred squid (and from April 1st, the price goes up by another hundred squid—no joke).In case you’re wondering whether or not you should go, wonder no more. Just check out the line-up of speakers and imagine three solid days of inspirational talks and hands-on workshops in their company. If attended last year’s event, you know what a great gathering it is. If you didn’t attend last year, talk to someone who did.Of course, it could be that even if you want to go, you still need to convince somebody in your company to send you. Let’s face it, UX London is a very different beast from dConstruct.dConstruct is deliberately low in price and a more rough’n’ready one-day affair. One of the reasons why we try to keep the price of dConstruct down is so that just about anybody can afford to come: freelancers, students, whatever. If that means we can’t afford to feed everyone or hand out goodies, then so be it—everyone fends for themselves at lunchtime and there’s no schwag.The audience for UX London is a bit different. It’s almost exclusively attended by people who have been sent by their company. With one day of presentations and two full days of workshops, and all three days fully catered, the price is, of course, far higher than dConstruct …although if you go to dConstruct and attend both days of workshops beforehand, then it works out at much the same price as UX London’s early bird ticket.Anyway, if you are in that situation—working at a company where you have to convince someone to send you to training events like UX London—Kimberly Blessing has written a guide to getting your conference or training request approved. She shares her three-step strategy:Build a strong case.Request funding.Negotiate!Try before you buy.Strength in numbers.Volunteer.Ask for partial funding.Finally, if you must: send yourself.If you’ve got any other techniques, share them in the comments to Kimberly’s post.Tagged withuxlondonconference
Mon, 25 Jan 2010 05:45:56 -0500 ignore the code: Realism in UI Design [New Window]
Finding the sweet spot between realism and abstraction in interface elements. Rust robot [New Window]
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Sat, 16 Jan 2010 15:32:30 -0500 Rust Cyberman [New Window]
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Sat, 16 Jan 2010 15:32:16 -0500 West Pier [New Window]
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Sat, 16 Jan 2010 15:31:56 -0500 Rust Jesus [New Window]
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Sat, 16 Jan 2010 15:31:45 -0500 Sunrise Cycles [New Window]
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Sat, 16 Jan 2010 15:31:35 -0500 Snap! [New Window]
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Sat, 16 Jan 2010 15:31:22 -0500 Waves crashing [New Window]
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Sat, 16 Jan 2010 15:31:04 -0500 Snap! [New Window]
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Sat, 16 Jan 2010 15:30:47 -0500 Jessica [New Window]
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Sat, 16 Jan 2010 15:30:31 -0500 On the seafront [New Window]
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Sat, 16 Jan 2010 15:30:19 -0500 Ham, egg and chips [New Window]
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Sat, 16 Jan 2010 15:29:56 -0500 Naomi and Dan [New Window]
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Sat, 16 Jan 2010 15:29:39 -0500 Jessica and Relly [New Window]
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Sat, 16 Jan 2010 15:29:21 -0500 Latt [New Window]
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Sat, 16 Jan 2010 15:29:02 -0500 Trajectory [New Window]
Dan came down to Brighton for a visit, so naturally a bunch of us ended up singing in a karaoke pod together.I think Brian Eno is on to something; getting together with a group of friends to holler your lungs out is quite life-affirming. Of course Dan had to ruin it all by being really, really good. The bastard.There was a preponderance of songs with love” in the title because Andy insisted that every instance of that word be substituted for lunch”: Addicted to Lunch, It Must Be Lunch and, best of all, Tainted Lunchdedicated to Paul who couldnt be with us due to probable food poisoning.One of the non-lunch related songs that somebody queued up was The Final Countdown by Europe. This is a crap karaoke song for two reasons:its crap andthe catchiest part of the song is the bit where no-one is singing.However, it is one of the few songs written about generation starships leaving a dying Earth. The only other such song I can think of offhand is After The Goldrush by Neil Young: flying mother natures silver seed to a new home in the sun and let us hope that this is the last time that Neil Young and Europe are ever mentioned together in any kind of context.Something bothered me about the lyrics of The Final Countdown that confronted me on the karaoke screen. Presumably the interstellar ark is heading out of the solar system and yet the narrator tells us this about the plotted course: Were heading for Venus.Really? Surely thats in the completely wrong directiontowards the sun. But then I realised that, although it remains unsaid in the song, the craft is probably going to carry out a gravitational slingshot manoeuvre around our star.Knowing that, I can rest easy or at least, I would be able to rest easy if I didnt have that damn song stuck in my head.Tagged withmusicastrophyics
Sat, 16 Jan 2010 15:00:47 -0500 One point four [New Window]
The latest version of jQuery has been released, just in time for the framework’s fourth birthday. Version 1.4 looks like a speedy improvement on its predecessors.If you have an iPhone or an iPod Touch, be sure to check out this very nifty jQuery reference app. It doesn’t take long to install and, best of all, it doesn’t involve the app store at all—the whole thing is built with HTML, CSS and JavaScript using HTML5’s offline storage. Now, no matter where you are, you’ll always have access to jQuery documentation …as long as the battery in your phone lasts, anyway.
Fri, 15 Jan 2010 05:58:14 -0500 The audio of place [New Window]
Last year, the good people at Web Directions asked me if I would like to write an article for the second issue of their Scroll magazine—an honest-to-goodness dead-tree publication. I told them I would be delighted.The theme of the issue was “place.” I took the word and ran with it, delivering an over-the-top pretentious piece about language, wormholes and virtual worlds. An edited version appeared in the magazine as Disrupting the conceptual metaphors of the web.I’ve published the raw, unedited version here in the articles section under its original title of There Is No There There. I also recorded an audio version, which clocks in at just over eight and a half minutes.There Is No There There on HuffdufferFeel free to huffduff it. Feel free to anything you like with it: it’s licenced under a Creative Commons attribution license.Tagged withaudioarticlescroll
Thu, 14 Jan 2010 19:15:25 -0500 Making Workshops for the Web [New Window]
The latest Clearleft offering is Workshops for the Web. It made sense to move our workshop offerings out of the Clearleft sitewhere they were kind of distracting from the main message of the companyand give them their own home, just like our other events, dConstruct and UX London.As well as the range of workshops that can be booked privately at any time, theres a schedule of upcoming public workshops for 2010:CSS3 Wizardry on January 29th,Copywriting for the Web on March 5th,HTML5 for Web Designers on April 23rd,UX Fundamentals on June 11th andUsability Testing on July 16th.The next workshop, CSS3 Wizardry with Rich and Nat, promises to be packed full of cutting-edge front-end techniques. Book a place if you want to have CSS3 kung-fu injected into your brainstem.Visual DesignIm pretty pleased with how the site turned out. When I began designing it initially, I thought I would give it a sort of Russian constructivist feeling: the title Workshops for the Web made me think of an international workers movement. I started researching political propaganda posters, beginning with the book Revolutionary Tides.Theres also some fantastic propaganda material in The National Archives (and I just love the modern twist of World War Three propaganda posters). I found a treasure trove of images of American working life in the Flickr Commons collection from The Library of Congress. I started gathering these sources together and distilling some of the common components such as bold colours and diagonal lines.This was when Jon was working as an intern at Clearleft. I enlisted his help in brainstorming some ideas and he came up with some great stufflike using Soviet space-race imageryand we played around with proof-of-concept ideas for creating diagonal backgrounds using CSS3 transforms.But it never really came together for me. Much as I loved the Russian constructivist propaganda angle, I ditched it and started from scratch.IAI scribbled down a page description diagram describing what the site needed to communicate in order of importance:The name of the site.A positioning statement.The next workshop.Other upcoming workshops.A list of all workshops available.A way of getting in touch.The hierarchy for an individual workshop page looked pretty similar:The title of the workshop.The date of the workshop.The location of the workshop.The price of the workshop.Details of the workshop.It was clear that the page needed to quickly answer some basic questions: what? where? how much?I started marking up the answers to those questions from top to bottom. Thats when it started to come together. Working with markup and CSS in the browser felt more productive than any of the sketching I had done in Photoshop. I started really sweating the typography to the extent that I decided that even the logotype should be created with live text rather than an image.BuildFrom the start, I knew that I wanted the site to be a self-describing example of the technologies taught in the workshops. The site is built in HTML5, making good use of the new structural elements and the powerful outline algorithm. Marking up an events site with the hCalendar microformat was a no-brainer. There are hCards a-plenty too.CSS3 nth-child selectors came in very handy and media queries are, quite simply, the bees knees when it comes to building a flexible site: just a few declarations allowed me to make sure the liquid layout could be optimised for different ranges of viewport size.Given the audience of the site, I could be fairly certain that Internet Explorer 6 wouldnt be much of a hindrance. As it turns out, everything looks more or less okay even in that crappy browser. It looks different, of course, but then do websites need to look exactly the same in every browser?Right before launch, Paul took a shot at tweaking the visual design, adding a bit more contrast and separation on the homepage with some horizontal banding. Thats a visual element that I had been subconsciously avoiding, probably because its already used on some of our other sites, but once it was added, it helped to emphasise the next upcoming workshopthe main purpose of the homepage.Just because the site is live now doesnt mean that Ill stop working on it. Id like to keep tweaking and evolving it. Maybe Ill finally figure out a way of incorporating some elements of those great propaganda posters.Tagged withclearleftdesignmarkupcss3html5microformatsevents
Wed, 13 Jan 2010 19:00:41 -0500 Workshops for the Web homepage [New Window]
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Wed, 13 Jan 2010 18:41:00 -0500 Workshops for the Web: CSS3 Wizardry [New Window]
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Wed, 13 Jan 2010 18:29:13 -0500 Workshops for the Web homepage [New Window]
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Wed, 13 Jan 2010 18:29:06 -0500 Workshops for the Web [New Window]
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Wed, 13 Jan 2010 18:29:01 -0500 Revolutionary Tides [New Window]
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Wed, 13 Jan 2010 14:18:12 -0500 Solidarno [New Window]
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Wed, 13 Jan 2010 14:17:55 -0500 HTML5 business as usual [New Window]
Its been a strange week in HTML5. The weband Twitter in particularhas been awash with wailing and gnashing of teeth as various people weigh in with their opinions on either the W3C or the WHATWGdepending on which camp theyre inbeing irreversibly broken exactly the kind of ludicrous over-reaction at which the internet excels.This particular round of chicken-littling was caused by the shuffling of some spec components. The W3C HTML Working Group recently decided to split microdata into a separate specification (which I think is fair enough given RDFas similar status). Hixie then removed some other parts of HTML5; a move which was seen as a somewhat petulant reaction to the microdata splittage. Cue outfreakage. Before too long, most of the changes were rolled back.So all of the shouting and arguing was more about politics and procedure than about features or semantics. Thats par for the course when it comes to the HTML Working Group at the W3C; the technical discussions are outweighed by the political and procedural wranglings. But thats the nature of the beast. Hammering out a standard is hard. Building consensus is really hard. The chairs of the working group face an uphill struggle every single day. Still, thats a far cry from declaring the whole thing a waste of time.As Tantek points out, if the HTML5 shenanigans seem particularly crazy, thats only because they are that much more public than most other processes: The previous several revisions of HTML (including XHTML) were largely developed in W3C Members-Only mailing lists (and face-to-face meetings) which contained a lot of similar corporate politics, egotism, squabbles and petty disagreements - however such tussles were invisible to search engines, the general public, and of course all the professional web developers and designers (like yourself) - you never saw how the sausage was made as it were.Tantek was responding to a post by Malarkey who advises us to keep calm and carry on. Thats sensible advice, although he gets some push-back in the comments from people concerned about a market-led approach to web standards, wherein we only care about what browsers are implementing, not whats enshrined into a standard.Its easy to polarise this issue into a black and white dichotomy: implementation first vs. specifications first. The truth, as always, is much more nuanced than that, as beautifully summed up by Rob OCallahan: Implementations and specifications have to do a delicate dance together. You dont want implementations to happen before the specification is finished, because people start depending on the details of implementations and that constrains the specification. However, you also dont want the specification to be finished before there are implementations and author experience with those implementations, because you need the feedback. There is unavoidable tension here, but we just have to muddle on through I think were doing OK.I think were doing OK too.Not that Im not immune to HTML5-related temper loss. Most recently, I was miffed with the WHATWG rather than the W3C but once again, it was entirely to do with specification organisation rather than specification contents.The WHATWG have never been comfortable with the term HTML5 to describe the work theyre doing, which began life as Web Apps 1.0. The very idea of version numbers is anathema to their philosophy so theyre quite happy for the W3C to own the term HTML5 to describe a particular set-in-stone markup spec. But they still need a word to describe the monolithic ongoing WHATWG spec.Historically, the term HTML5 was a pretty good fit for the WHATWG spec and it corresponded exactly with the W3C spec (in fact, the W3C spec is generated from the WHATWG spec). But Hixie declared Last Call for the WHATWG HTML5 spec a while back. That means that the specification at the WHATWG and the specification at the W3C can now divergethe WHATWG spec contains everything in HTML5 and then some. To continue to label this WHATWG spec as simply HTML5 would be misleading. So a few weeks ago, the name of the spec changed from HTML5 to WHATWG HTML (including HTML5).Accurate as that designation may be, I became very concerned about the potential confusion it would cause. Any front-end developer reading a document titled WHATWG HTML (including HTML5) might reasonably ask Oh, which bits are HTML5? a question to which theres no easy answer because at the WHATWG, the term HTML5 is seen as little more than a buzzword. In that sense, they share PPKs assertion that HTML5 means whatever you want it to mean.I was particularly concerned that the short URL http://whatwg.org/html5 would redirect to a document that wasnt called HTML5. I could point developers at this diagram but Im not sure that it would make things any clearer.Things got fairly heated in the IRC channel as I argued for either a different redirect or a better document title. I understand why the WHATWG need to transition from using the term HTML5 to simply using the term HTML to describe their all-encompassing ongoing work, but flipping that switch too soon could cause a lot pain and confusion. A gradual evolution of titles reflecting the evolution of the contents seems better to me:HTML5HTML5 (including next generation additions still in development)WHATWG HTML (including HTML5)WHATWG HTMLHixie made the change. The title of the WHATWG specification is currently at step 2. I think this will make things a lot clearer for authors.Anyone looking for the specification that will become a W3C candidate recommendation called HTML5 should look at the W3C site: http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/.Anyone looking for the ongoing evolving specification that HTML5 is a part of should look at the WHATWG site: http://whatwg.org/html5.Im happy that this has been cleared up and yet I hope that smart, savvy front-end developers who have read this far will think that Ive just wasted their time. That would be a healthy reaction to reading a bunch of irrelevant guff about what specifications are called and how they are organised. Your time would be far better spent implementing the specifications and providing feedback.Thats certainly a far better use of your time than simply shouting FAIL!Update: And, right on cue, Mark Pilgrim updates the WHATWG blog to explain the spec name change.Tagged withhtml5markupstandardshtmlw3cwhatwg
Wed, 13 Jan 2010 06:51:19 -0500 Huffcast [New Window]
Tony recently remarked on Twitter: Readwriteweb write the most thoughtful intelligent pieces around, and it’s worryingly indicative of our culture that they aren’t read moreI have my own, somewhat selfish, reason to praise this particular tech site. ReadWriteWeb’s lead writer, Marshall Kirkpatrick, is a big fan of Huffduffer. What an astute young man! He even made a screencast for Read Write Web.Huffduffer ScreencastSeriously, I’m pleased as punch with this. Marshall totally gets it. When he mentioned on Twitter: Every time I find a need to use @huffduffer I am happy happy happy……I thanked him and said: Increasing happiness is the goal of that site.…which is true. If only happiness weren’t such a damned difficult metric to track. But seeing someone else make a top quality screencast explaining the site is a pretty great indication that I’m doing something right.Mind you, it does prompt me to slap my forehead and ask why didn’t I think of making a screencast?Tagged withhuffdufferscreencastreadwriteweb
Sun, 10 Jan 2010 16:34:26 -0500 Safari askew [New Window]
I rolled out a new addition to the Huffduffer home page earlier this week. If you arent logged in, everything looks the same as before: under the heading Create a podcast of found sounds, theres a short list giving the low-down on what you can do:Find links to audio files on the Web.Huffduff the linksadd them to your podcast.Subscribe to podcasts of other found sounds.But if you are logged in, then a different list appears, this one showing the activity since you last logged in:How much has been huffduffed.How much huffduffing your collective has done.How many people have joined.Programming this was pretty straightforward. Every time a new session is startedeither because you log in or because you return to the site with a remember me cookiea timestamp is recorded. I just need to select the activity since the previous timestamp. Easy peasy.Except it wasnt working for me.I went through all the usual debugging procedures, poring over my code, but I couldnt find anything wrong. Finally, after plenty of observation, I spotted the pattern that was causing the problem. Bizarrely, every time I opened my browser, a new timestamp was being recorded for my Huffduffer account.Heres the problem:I visit Huffduffer a lot.I use Safari as my web browser.One of the new features in Safari 4 is the Top Sites view: Thanks to Top Sites, you can enjoy a stunning, at-a-glance preview of your favorite websites without lifting a finger. Safari 4 tracks the sites you browse and ranks your favorites, presenting up to 24 thumbnails on a single page.It does indeed look very pretty (if not quite stunning). But heres the kicker: Wonder which sites have changed since your last visit? Sites with a star in the upper-right corner have new content.How does Safari know which sites have changed? It effectively visits the site, screwing up your stats in the process. If you have a cookie stored for that site, Safari will use it. This has led to some skewing of Stack Overflows ranking system. Its also the root of my problem with Huffduffer.As far as I can tell, I just have to suck it up. Safari reports the same user-agent string regardless of whether its fetching a URL for the Top Sites list or fetching a URL to render for an end user.Oh, well. At least this is a problem that will only affect people who visit Huffduffer a lot (and use Safari as their browser). The new homepage feature will work just fine for everyone else.Hmmm that new version of Camino looks mighty tempting.Update: Martin Sutherland writes to tell me the results of his research into this:The user-agent that Safari reports when it performs a Top Sites call to your server is exactly the same as for a normal call, but a Top Sites request does transmit an additional HTTP header as part of the request: “X-Purpose: preview”.Excellent! I should be able to sniff for that header and, if I find it, not log the timestamp.Tagged withhuffduffersafaribrowser
Wed, 06 Jan 2010 19:26:24 -0500 That was the year, that was [New Window]
Reading through the messages from my friends on Twitter, it sounds like a lot of people didn’t like 2009. At all. I’m feeling a lot of hate for Oh Nine.Personally, 2009 was perfectly fine for me. Not superb, but not terrible either …kind of like every year, really. Good stuff happens. Bad stuff happens. Whatever.I don’t like spending my time looking forward or looking back—I prefer to stay in the present. That said, this is the traditional time of year for a retrospective.This time last year, I carried my resolutions from 2008 forward:Reduce and/or offset your non-renewable energy output.Give blood.Lose some weight, you fat bastard.Play more bouzouki.Now, at the end of the year, I can say the results have been… mixed.I did a lot less travelling in 2009. That transformed my Dopplr animal from a spritely squirrel into a more sedate butterfly. That trend will undoubtedly reverse in 2010. As well as the annual pilgrimage to Austin for South by Southwest, I’ll be speaking at five different cities for An Event Apart.I gave blood regularly in 2009. I will continue to give blood in 2010. You should too.I remained a fat bastard in 2009. I don’t intend to be a fat bastard in 2010. We’ll see how that works out. I may invest in a Wii Fit.I didn’t play more bouzouki in 2009 but I have been noodling around on the mandolin a lot so that sorta counts.Now let’s see what I consumed in 2009: some music, some films, some books.MusicThere were some good albums released in 2009. Two Suns by Bat For Lashes is pretty good. There’s some good stuff on The Big Pink’s A Brief History of Violence too. I really like Reservoir by Fanfarlo and Neko Case’s Middle Cyclone is great. But I think my album of the year would have to be The Hazards of Love by The Decemberists, which I’ve written about before.FilmsDespite my aversion to the typical cinema-going experience, I actually ventured out a few times in 2009. I enjoyed some good science fiction with Star Trek, Moon, and Avatar. My most memorable cinema-going experience was probably seeing Let The Right One In in a deserted Duke of York’s.BooksI’m not sure if I read any books that were published in 2009. As long as the publishing industry insists on first publishing only in hardback, I will continue to wait for the paperback …if I can maintain my enthusiasm that long. Honestly, I don’t know why they do it. It’s as idiotic as region-encoding in DVDs.Fortunately, the tech-publishing industry, for all its faults, doesn’t adhere to the hardback/paperback time-shifting. That’s good because there were some great books published in 2009. Emily’s Microformats Made Simple and Handcrafted CSS by Dan and Ethan are just two excellent examples.2010So that was 2009. I guess I’d better finish with some predictions for 2010. Here goes:Good things will happen.Bad things will happen.There will be some cool music.There will be some crap music.Blogging will die.Blogging will enjoy a resurgence.The publishing industry will die.The publishing industry will enjoy a resurgence.There will be some good films.There will be some bad films.Websites will be created.Websites will be shut down.Celebrities will die.Mike Arrington will be a dick.In December 2010, you will read best of lists.In December 2010, you will read predictions for 2011.In short, 2010 will be perfectly fine. Just like 2009.Happy new year!Tagged with20092010
Thu, 31 Dec 2009 23:38:27 -0500 The future of the tradition [New Window]
Drew and Brian did a superb job with this year’s 24 Ways, the advent calendar for geeks. There were some recurring themes: HTML5 from Yaili, Bruce and myself; CSS3 from Drew, Natalie and Rachel; and workflow from Andy and Meagan.The matter of personal projects was also surprisingly prevalent. Elliot wrote A Pet Project is For Life, Not Just for Christmas and Jina specifically mentioned Huffduffer in her piece, Make Out Like a Bandit. December was the month for praising personal projects: that’s exactly what I was talking about at Refresh Belfast at the start of the month.If you don’t have a personal project on the go, I highly recommend it. It’s a great way of learning new skills and experimenting with new technology. It’s also a good safety valve that can keep you sane when work is getting you down.Working on Huffduffer is a lot of fun and I plan to keep iterating on the site whenever I can. But the project that I’ve really invested my soul into is The Session. Over the past decade, the site has built up a large international community with a comprehensive store of tunes and sessions.Running any community site requires a lot of time and I haven’t always been as hands-on as I could have been with The Session. As a result, the discourse can occasionally spiral downwards into nastiness, prompting me to ask myself, Why do I bother? But then when someone contributes something wonderful to the site, I’m reminded of why I started it in the first place.My dedication to the site was crystallised recently by a sad event. A long-time contributor to the site passed away. Looking back over the generosity of his contributions made me realise that The Session isn’t a personal project at all: it’s a community project, and I have a duty to enable the people in the community to connect. I also have a duty to maintain the URLs created by the community (are you listening, Yahoo?).I feel like I’ve been neglecting the site. I could be doing so much more with the collective data, especially around location. The underlying code definitely needs refactoring, and the visual design could certainly do with a refresh (although I think it’s held up pretty well for such a long-running site).I’m not going to make a new year’s resolution—that would just give me another deadline to stress out about—but I’m making a personal commitment to do whatever I can for The Session in 2010.Tagged with24waysthesession
Thu, 31 Dec 2009 14:25:11 -0500 Fully Frontalled [New Window]
Last Friday, the Full Frontal conference took place here in Brighton. It was like having the circus come to town …but with fewer acrobatics and more closures.In short, it was superb. I’ve been to quite a few conferences in my time so I can get pretty jaded but this was a textbook lesson in how to put on a great event.The content was top-notch. The fact that the whole day was focused on a single technology gave it a very cohesive feel. That said, there was still a wide variety of topics covered: mobile, accessibility, performance, and even server-side JavaScript. The intensity and complexity increased as the day went on, finishing with Simon blowing everyone’s minds.All the speakers were great but special mention must go to Jake Archibald from the BBC. His talk on JavaScript performance was thoroughly entertaining and informative —a very tricky combination to do successfully. He made the presentation look effortless but there must have been months of preparation involved. That kind of spontaneity takes years of practice.If you weren’t lucky enough to make it to Full Frontal, you can check out the speakers’ slides on the website but really, you should have been there.Congratulations and kudos to Remy for putting together such a world-class event. I sincerely hope there’ll be a Full Frontal 2010, but it’ll be hard to match the standard set by this year’s conference.
Wed, 25 Nov 2009 13:22:15 -0500 November spawned a monster [New Window]
November is shaping up to be a very busy month for JavaScript.Fronteers 2009 is a two-day event in Amsterdam on November 5th and 6th. John Resig and Douglas Crockfordthat alone makes it worth the price of admission.Straight after that, JSConf.eu takes place in Berlin on November 7th and 8th. Its a tight squeeze but it would possible to go to both events with a train ride in-between. I wonder if thats what John is going to do; hes speaking at both conferences.But the highlight of the month still looks like being Full Frontal on November 20th. Thatll be held right here in Brighton which probably explains why Im kind of biased. But seriously, check out the line-up:Peter-Paul Koch,Christian Heilmann,Simon Willisonand more.You can still grab tickets for the early-price of just one hundred squid.
Fri, 21 Aug 2009 13:16:26 -0400 Full Frontal [New Window]
I remember when I spoke at the first @media conference in London in 2005, mine was the only talk related to JavaScript. Just a few short years later, there was an entire @media spin-off conference devoted to JavaScript: the slightly-inaccurately named @media Ajax. JavaScript has come a long way in the past few years.This years be-there-or-be-square JavaScript event is the newly-announced Full Frontal conference to be held at the fantastic Duke Of Yorks Picturehouse in Brighton on November 20th:full-frontal (JavaScript):with nothing concealed or held back.Its being organised by Remy Sharp. Doesnt this guy ever sleep? Not content with creating JS Bin and the JQuery API browser, and writing a book on jQuery for Designers, now hes going to organise a conference too.It looks like being an absolute bargain. A mere 100 will get you a ticket to a day of serious JavaScript talks from some of the smartest people in the business: Christian Heilmann, Peter-Paul Koch, Stuart Langridge, Simon Willison, and more.Best of all, I dont have to travel anywhere for this conference as its being held in my adopted hometown of Brighton. But if you do have to travel, I can think of now better place to travel to. Come along and Ill make sure the geeks of Brighton welcome you.Tickets are on sale now.
Mon, 20 Apr 2009 12:09:11 -0400 Unobtrusify [New Window]
A little while back, Phil Hawksworth, a very smart web developer at Osmosoft, created Unobtrusify.com. It’s a self-describing and rather lovely-looking ode to semantic markup, appropriate CSS and unobtrusive JavaScript.You can read all about how it was made or you can simply go and play around with it …go ahead; click on stuff.Phil’s co-worker Paul Downey is responsible for such printed masterpieces as The Web Is Agreement and The URI Is The Thing. He has now created a printable version of Unobtrusify. Head on over to archive.org, download and print to your heart’s content.Now I just need to find some sticky material so I can slap my copy up next to my desk.
Wed, 18 Feb 2009 12:23:47 -0500 Happy birthday, jQuery! [New Window]
jQuery was first released on January 14th, 2006. Now, precisely three revolutions of planet Earth later, jQuery 1.3 is out.This release features some significant changes and improvements. Theres all the usual speed improvements, of course, but what I like in particular is the way that jQuery is ditching browser sniffing in favour of feature detection. Thats the way to do it.The way the community is developing is as interesting as the code. Sizzle, the CSS selector engine inside jQuery, has been spun off into its own standalone project so that it can be used by other libraries and frameworks. Meanwhile, the jQuery project itself is coming under the banner of the Software Freedom Conservancy to formalise its standing as free and open software.Congratulations to John and the rest of the team. Congratulations also to fellow Brightonian Remy Sharp for putting together the very handy jQuery API browser. The boy done good.
Wed, 14 Jan 2009 15:55:25 -0500 Pasty [New Window]
A paste bin is a very handy tool when you’re working as part of a team, especially if there’s any remote work involved. Basically, they’re web-based clipboards where you can paste in snippets of text—JavaScript, CSS, markup or whatever—and then share the URL in an email or a chat message (a lot cleaner than pasting code straight into an email or chat window). Often you can specify a life span for the snippet so, for example, if nobody visits the page for a three month period, the URL rots.At Clearleft, we often use pastebin.com though I’ve also used dpaste in the past. I like the way that pastebin allows you to create subdomains on the fly: just type in the URL to create it.These services are great for collaborative debugging but they have one slight flaw when it comes to client-side work. JavaScript and CSS don’t exist in isolation; they are used to enhance an existing HTML document. So passing around a snippet of JavaScript or CSS might not be much good unless it is accompanied by the corresponding markup.Enter JS Bin from Brighton’s own Remy Sharp, the man behind the superb microformats bookmarklet. This is a paste bin with a twist. As well as being able to share a snippet of JavaScript, you provide the markup that the JavaScript is acting on as well. If you’ve been sent a JS Bin URL, you can play around with the JavaScript and/or the markup, saving as you go.There are some other nice touches too, like the ability to include a JavaScript library at the flick of a dropdown. For a proper explanation, be sure to watch the screencast that Remy has recorded.
Mon, 29 Sep 2008 13:22:35 -0400 Standalone selector [New Window]
John Resig is a machine. Not content with dividing his time between working on jQuery and working on Firebug, he’s also got another few irons in the fire.Just for kicks, John has created a standalone selector engine called Sizzle. It’s not quite ready for prime time yet but it looks very promising. It uses the CSS syntax that has helped make jQuery such a popular library. Right now, the code is coming in at less than 4K!I really, really like this modular approach to writing JavaScript. Instead of bloating a library with more features, the components of the library are instead being split into separate standalone pieces. I wonder if the same thing will happen with event handling and effects. Those three actions (selector, event, effect) probably make up 80% of jQuery use cases:jQuery(selector).event(function() { effect();});For an event of a different kind, there’s a jQuery Camp scheduled for September 28th, the day before The Ajax Experience in Boston. The exact location has yet to be determined but given the number of jQuery fanboys out there, I’m guessing it won’t be ‘round at John’s house. There’s a nominal registration fee of $50 to cover lunch. If you use jQuery and you find yourself anywhere on the eastern seaboard of the United States at the end of September, you should probably register now.In his spare time, John likes to relax by porting the Processing visualisation language to JavaScript. Freak.
Mon, 25 Aug 2008 08:44:28 -0400 The need for speed [New Window]
Another day, another incremental release of jQuery. This one is sporting 13% faster CSS selectors and 103% faster event handlers.Meanwhile, as the JavaScript libraries continue to evolve and improve, the browser engines are also focusing on speed improvements. Dave Hyatt and the WebKit gang have announced a brand new JavaScript engine called SquirrelFish. This looks like being about 60% faster than the previous WebKit interpreter so you can expect quite a speed boost in the next version of Safari.If you’re interested in what happens under the hood with Squirrel Engine, Dave shares some of the philosophical underpinnings: SquirrelFish owes a lot of its design to some of the latest research in the field of efficient virtual machines, including research done by Professor M. Anton Ertl, et al, Professor David Gregg, et al, and the developers of the Lua programming language.You can find plenty of gory details on the Surfin’ Safari blog.
Wed, 04 Jun 2008 12:57:54 -0400 Radio on the TV [New Window]
I was in the illustrious surroundings of Rissington last week to deliver a DOM Scripting workshop. My good friend Ann was in attendance. During the latter part of the workshop which was deliberately more loosely structured than the rest of the day she pointed me to a really lovely bit of JavaScript form enhancement.Take a look at the UK and Ireland TV and radio listings on Yahoo. See that search form in the upper right corner? Its using the standard design pattern of allowing you to specify exactly where youre searching. But unlike most implementations, this one is built on a rock-solid foundation of semantic markup.Steve Marshall has the lowdown. Under the hood the form is using radio buttons for choosing where to search. Then, using a combination of JavaScript and CSS, this default representation is augmented to look and behave as desired. Switch off JavaScript and you can still use the search form perfectly well.What impresses me about this isnt so much the code (although Im sure its top-notch), its the thinking behind the implementation: start with solid semantic markup with good ol fashioned form elements for interaction; then think about how it can be enhanced. Nice one, Steve.
Sun, 11 May 2008 11:06:14 -0400
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