RSSMix.com Mix ID 16755

adactio: Back from an evening of drowning @JennLukas's sorrows. First @noel's mugging, now a handbag theft. Not your best side, San Francisco.

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 02:52:55 -0500

adactio: Back from an evening of drowning @JennLukas's sorrows. First @noel's mugging, now a handbag theft. Not your best side, San Francisco.

Adactio, Zeldman

nobody@flickr.com (adactio) — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 21:06:14 -0500

adactio posted a photo:

Adactio, default

nobody@flickr.com (adactio) — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 21:05:29 -0500

adactio posted a photo:

Jazz hands

nobody@flickr.com (adactio) — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 21:04:51 -0500

adactio posted a photo:

Jeffrey Veen channels Simon Willison.

Veen

nobody@flickr.com (adactio) — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 21:04:11 -0500

adactio posted a photo:

Poshy listening to Kelly

nobody@flickr.com (adactio) — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 21:03:35 -0500

adactio posted a photo:

Kelly

nobody@flickr.com (adactio) — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 21:02:41 -0500

adactio posted a photo:

A tiny subset of my social graph

nobody@flickr.com (adactio) — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 21:02:00 -0500

adactio posted a photo:

As demonstrated by Tantek.

Snap!

nobody@flickr.com (adactio) — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 21:01:23 -0500

adactio posted a photo:

The view from the stage

nobody@flickr.com (adactio) — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 21:00:41 -0500

adactio posted a photo:

Palace hotel

nobody@flickr.com (adactio) — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 20:59:36 -0500

adactio posted a photo:

Craig

nobody@flickr.com (adactio) — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 20:58:25 -0500

adactio posted a photo:

Social Network Portability, future

nobody@flickr.com (adactio) — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 20:57:34 -0500

adactio posted a photo:

Social Network Portability, present

nobody@flickr.com (adactio) — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 20:56:39 -0500

adactio posted a photo:

An Event Apart, Day Two

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 20:22:40 -0500

The second day of An Event Apart San Francisco is drawing to a close. The day opened with my talk, Patterns in the Process. You can download the slides if you like—Creative Commons licensed, as usual—but just looking at the slides is like trying to listen to a presentation by putting a glass against the wall of the building next door.

When I was giving my talk, I thought it was kind of rambling and incoherent. But it went down well and lots of people told me they liked it afterwards so I’ll put my self-criticism away.

I was glad to have my talk over and done with. I was able to relax and enjoy the other presentations. The very high standard set on the first day was upheld. I was completely blown away by Jeff’s fantastic smrgsbord of storytelling and data viz porn: I think I had a little design orgasm in my brain.

At one point during his talk, Jeff showed this very site! He then proceeded to show the style-switching in action by switching to the Zeldman theme …while I was sitting next to Zeldman! When I think back to ten years ago when I was reading Webmonkey and Ask Dr. Web, I never, ever, ever thought I would find myself in this situation.

I’ll be leaving San Francisco tomorrow with a warm glow and good memories. Before that, I’ll be heading to the microformats meetup at the food court of the Westfield Center this evening. If you’re around, maybe I’ll see you there.

Tagged withaea aeasf aeasf08 aneventapart sanfrancisco presentation conference

adactio: summary: Microformats meetup, dtstart: 2008-08-19T18:30:00, location: food court of the Westfield Center.

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 20:07:56 -0500

adactio: summary: Microformats meetup, dtstart: 2008-08-19T18:30:00, location: food court of the Westfield Center.

adactio: AEA SF 2008 is over. sniff Anyone who's going to the microformats meetup, let's meet in the lobby of the Palace Hotel at 6:15pm.

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 20:06:33 -0500

adactio: AEA SF 2008 is over. *sniff* Anyone who's going to the microformats meetup, let's meet in the lobby of the Palace Hotel at 6:15pm.

adactio: Totally bowled over by @veen's talk. That was teh awesum.

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 18:42:33 -0500

adactio: Totally bowled over by @veen's talk. That was teh awesum.

adactio: Wow! @veen just used my website in his presentation. I'm feeling a little teary-eyed. Just ...wow!

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 18:19:44 -0500

adactio: Wow! @veen just used my website in his presentation. I'm feeling a little teary-eyed. Just ...wow!

adactio: Listening to @veen channel @stevenbjohnson, talking about Snow's cholera map. http://icanhaz.com/cholera

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 18:05:49 -0500

adactio: Listening to @veen channel @stevenbjohnson, talking about Snow's cholera map. http://icanhaz.com/cholera

adactio: Drinking from the firehose of knowledge that is @veen.

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 17:55:44 -0500

adactio: Drinking from the firehose of knowledge that is @veen.

adactio: That was nice of @zeldman to publicly apologise to me for turning off the Afghan Whigs to introduce @veen.

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 17:48:46 -0500

adactio: That was nice of @zeldman to publicly apologise to me for turning off the Afghan Whigs to introduce @veen.

adactio: OH: So I noticed that April Fool's next year is a sequence of three squares.

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 17:11:53 -0500

adactio: OH: So I noticed that April Fool's next year is a sequence of three squares.

adactio: @Brilliantcrank Wha? Leaving? Noooo!

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 17:08:41 -0500

adactio: @Brilliantcrank Wha? Leaving? Noooo!

adactio: Listening to Kelly talk about Waterfall within Agile which sounds like what we at @clearleft are sort of doing on one project.

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 16:53:39 -0500

adactio: Listening to Kelly talk about Waterfall within Agile which sounds like what we at @clearleft are sort of doing on one project.

adactio: Listening to @t talk about the password anti-pattern.

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 15:04:17 -0500

adactio: Listening to @t talk about the password anti-pattern.

adactio: Listening to @t at An Event Apart San Francisco. He made it.

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 14:25:52 -0500

adactio: Listening to @t at An Event Apart San Francisco. He made it.

adactio: Wondering where @t is.

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 14:15:57 -0500

adactio: Wondering where @t is.

adactio: Loving that @feather is spreading the story of those terrible UK pedestrian signals. @clagnut actually wrote to the council about them.

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 13:31:10 -0500

adactio: Loving that @feather is spreading the story of those terrible UK pedestrian signals. @clagnut actually wrote to the council about them.

adactio: The opening of @feather's presentation was possibly the best I've heard. Open with a story.

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 13:05:09 -0500

adactio: The opening of @feather's presentation was possibly the best I've heard. Open with a story.

adactio: I leave the office for a few days and it gets overrun by gorillas. http://live.yahoo.com/paulannett

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 12:49:58 -0500

adactio: I leave the office for a few days and it gets overrun by gorillas. http://live.yahoo.com/paulannett

adactio: Loving @meyerweb's debug stylesheets. I foresee this going into the Clearleft sandbox.

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 12:02:44 -0500

adactio: Loving @meyerweb's debug stylesheets. I foresee this going into the Clearleft sandbox.

adactio: Finished my talk at An Event Apart. It wasn't terrible but I don't think it was great either.

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 11:54:47 -0500

adactio: Finished my talk at An Event Apart. It wasn't terrible but I don't think it was great either.

adactio: Standing on stage at An Event Apart San Francisco, getting ready to deliver my talk in five minutes.

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 10:25:05 -0500

adactio: Standing on stage at An Event Apart San Francisco, getting ready to deliver my talk in five minutes.

An Event Apart, Day One

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 20:59:46 -0500

The first day of An Event Apart is wrapping up in San Francisco. The quality of talks has been outstanding. Now I’m really bricking it about my talk tomorrow morning. The bar has been set ridiculously high.

I’ve done my best to liveblog throughout the day. Inevitably there will be mistakes and omissions in these second-hand reports but here they are:

I’m kind of wiped out from all the typing. I probably won’t be able to manage a second day of liveblogging. I can’t wait to have my talk out the way and enjoy the rest of the speakers.

Tagged withaea aeasf aeasf08 aneventapart sanfrancisco liveblogging liveblog conference presentation

Implementing Design: Bulletproof A-Z

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 20:53:48 -0500

Dan Cederholm is in the house at An Event Apart San Francisco. He’s all about the bulletproofing.

Simplebits describe what they do as hand crafted pixels and text. This idea of craft, building something with your hands, is what Dan wants to concentrate on. It isn’t always obvious in web design how well-crafted a web site is. Dan will run through a case study that focus on three aspects of web design: being bulletproof, being adaptable and focusing on the details. Like progressive enhancement for JavaScript, Dan will be using Progressive Enrichment for CSS which really means using cool stuff that doesn’t work in IE.

The case study will be a site all about coffee called Iced or Hot (it doesn’t actually work).

A is for anchor links with meta information. If you’re going to put data inside links, think ahead to links with really long text.
B is for border-radius. This is progressive enrichment. Rounded corners are usually a pain in the ass. But you can do them today with namespaced webkit- and moz- border-radius declarations. Dan puts these vendor-specific properties into a separate stylesheet called enriched.css to keep them quarantined like hacks. What about other browsers? Well, they don’t get rounded corners but so what? Rounded corners just degrade gracefully to rectangles.
C is for colour transparency with RGBa. You could use opacity but that sets the transparency for an element and all its children. Giving colour values with RGBa (background-color: rgba(0,0,0.7);) you only set the opacity of the background. A PNG would reach more users but like border-radius, RGBa is great for prototyping.
D is for Do Websites Need To Look Exactly The Same In Every Browser? No!
D is also for decision-makers who get that. The example of the semi-transparent menus on the Sundance Festival site (made by Airbag) demonstrates this. IE just gets flat colours and that’s fine. Dan himself used generated content on Foamee to add images to the headlines. Browsers that don’t support generated content don’t get the ornaments and that’s fine.
E is for easy clearing of floats. There’s the classic clearfix solution but man, that’s a crappy class name to put in your markup. The alternative of creating a list of wrappers that you want to clear is as bad. Dan uses a class name of group.
F is for frameworks. We all use our own frameworks: the code you start from for each project.
G is for gridlasticness. From the latin Gridius Lastius Emius which means working with em-based grids. Dan shows some grid-based designs: Mark Boulton, CNN, Erskine. Then he gives a refresher in elastic layout. Em-based layouts force you to ensure ultimate flexibility. You have to think about font sizes, layout, margins and padding in ems. Richard’s 62.5% rule helps make the calculations easier. Set a max-width on elastic layouts (of 100%) you can make sure that the layout won’t go outside the viewport. On Iced or Hot, has four columns of 16em with a 2em gutter between them. The XScope tool is handy for checking your grid lines.
H is for horizontal grid? Sure. Vertical grid? Sort of. Here, Dan is talking about that annoying habit that visual designers have of lining everything perfectly on the top and bottom of element. It looks great in Photoshop but it bears no relation to reality. It’s like those people who make the pillows look perfect on the bed. It’s a waste of time because they’re just going to get messed up. But we can uses classes for groups of content so that there are break-points in the vertical layout.
I is for IE8 beta still refuses to resize text sized in pixels. WTF? We still need to use relative units for text sizes. Does page zoom change things? Who knows.
J is for jQuery. Spontaneous applause from the audience. Dan hates JavaScript and he normally doesn’t talk about it in presentations but jQuery makes his life easier. It uses the familiar CSS selector syntax.
K is for Kitty.
L is for .last. Dan is constantly having to put a class of .last on the last item in a list (for style reasons). You can use jQuery to add the class programatically. jQuery('ul.lst li:last'),addClass('last');
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S is for shifting backgrounds. Heeeeere’s Silverback! Parallax scrolling is a great example of craftmanship. Not everyone is going to see it but it’s a lovely added extra.
T is for a testimonial for reset.css.
U is for ur stats. When can we…? Drop support for X. Start using Y. Answer: when your site shows the stats to support that decision.

The alphabet ends with U.

Tagged withaea aeasf aeasf08 aneventapart conference presentation simplebits liveblogging liveblog css design

The Framework Age

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 19:35:51 -0500

Liz Danzico is talking at An Event Apart San Francisco about frameworks. Not CSS frameworks, not JavaScript frameworks, not Rails, not Django, but websites as frameworks. These days were designing frameworks for user interaction rather than static artefacts.

Liz tells a story about Miles Davis who showed up at the studio with six slips of paper listing the six musicians he wanted to play with on his record. Over the course of one day, these people who had never played this music together recorded a whole album. Davis wanted to capture something called creative instability. Kind of Blue came out of this framework that he created.

Liz wants to talk about frameworks that are uninscribed and detectable cues that loosely govern a set of actions. These are interaction frameworks, frameworks that shape how people behave.

Back to music. Classical music uses classical notation. If you cant read notation, you cant make sense of it so its kind of elitist. It also provides rules like tempo and key. If you step outside these boundaries, you are deviating from the notation. Also, every note is accounted for in the notation. You cant improvise it. Jazz notation is different. It provides chord progressions. Its up to the musician to improvise around this framework. Modal jazz is even more abstract. Thats what Miles Davis invented that day in the studio. Kind of Blue was created out of just a scale.

On the web, were making the same transition from classical to jazz. Were improvising. Weve moved from a hard-coded system of building pages to an open system of creating participatory environments.

But this kind of tension is nothing new. Its being going on for years. Theres been a long-running tension between orality and literacy. The printing press destroyed a lot of oral tradition but we still use word of mouth to pass on urban legends and recipes. Liz mentions Alex Wrights observation in Glut that we are seeing a resurgence in this kind of oral tradition online. Even though were writing in blogs and mailing lists, were not so much publishing as talking.

Theres evidence of improv online. Exquisite simplicity was how pianist Bill Evans described Miles Daviss framework of six slips of paper.

Quoting from The Paradox of Choice, Liz shows how the default settings can make a big difference (in the number of organ donations, for example, which could be opt-in or opt-out). Geni has some smart default settings. Same with Tripit. All you need to do is forward an email and it will take care of the rest. Focus on creating smart defaults.

In improv, you need to involve the audience. Its important to adapt to what your audience is doing. Heres an example from architecture: there was a fountain that was built in Washington Square Park in New York but before they got round to turning it on, people started using it as a seating area. When the city tried to turn on the fountain, people revolted. The fountain is dry to this day and is used for public theatre.

Referring to the redesign of the Wordpress admin, Liz points out that its really important to involve users in the design process. Theres a difference between asking your audience what they think of a system compared to looking at how they are actually using that system.

Listen and watch. Thats another lesson we can take from music and apply to the web. When youre playing with other people, not only do you have to listen to what the other people are doing, you have to watch them too. Its the same with architecture. Desire paths are created by people actually using a space. They show clearly where paths should be built. Eyetracking can reveal the desire paths of users interacting with an application. There are other tools like User Voice which can involve the audience. Observe. Listen. Pay attention.

A common technique in Jazz is call and response when musicians play off one another. You see this online in reviews where the reviews start reacting to each other rather than the original item being reviewed. Allow users to build on one another.

User-centred design and participatory design are great ways of involving the users in the design process but thats still different to actual use. Its time for a new way of working: designing for improvisation (but remember that no one single process will ever be successful). Our design process should reflect the trend towards user participation that were seeing on the web. Peoples tolerance for improvisation is increasing and our role as framework providers should reflect that.

Tagged withaea aeasf aeasf08 aneventapart sanfrancisco conference presentation design process interaction liveblogging liveblog

Shepherding Passionate Users

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 18:26:52 -0500

Heather Champ is speaking about community management at An Event Apart San Francisco.

She begins with a little history lesson in the Ludicorp/Flickr/Yahoo story. Flickr is constantly evolving and Heather’s job is to make sure that people’s experience on the site remains pleasant. Flickr is huge and sometimes when people are complaining in the forums, Heather would like to just show them the statistics on how much processing Flickr is doing.

Heather demonstrates the amazing spread of real-time information coming into Flickr, showing examples from the Asian tsunami and the July 7th bombings in London. The counterbalance to these really big world events are the personal events being documented: births, deaths, weddings. Heather shows an wonderful touching from Ari of her grandfather’s death.

Heather’s role is community manager. Sometimes she feels like a piata—people beat you with sticks and you still have to give them candy. She’s helped out by a lot people; regular Flickr users.

Good guidelines really help: Don’t be creepy. You know that guy? Don’t be that guy. As Flickr has grown, the guidelines have stood the test of time really well.

It’s important to give people tools. Allowing people to flag up their own photos as potentially offensive is hugely helpful. Allowing people to block other users is also really empowering. Heather herself has used this to block the angry hordes who were leaving nasty comments about video in her photostream. Then of course there’s always reporting tools; allowing people to report problems.

Communication is key. Heather relates the story of the long downtime; over six hours (never believe the developers when they tell you that everything will be fine). During the downtime there were constant updates on the blog. It’s really important to be open and transparent. When things to go wrong, own it. Admit it. Don’t try to whitewash it. Also, if you need to make a change to how people experience your community, don’t wait. Flickr waited eighteen months to finally do the Flickr/Yahoo merge and they really regret it.

Don’t create super villains. Sometimes you have to make difficult decisions and take actions that won’t be appreciated. If you don’t handle that situation well, you can end up with a super villain—someone who keeps coming back to haunt you forever …just like the people in that amazing New York Times article about trolls.

When the universe gives you lemons, make lemonade. When there was unannounced downtime on Flickr, they turned it into a colouring contest: print out these circles, colour them in and the winner will get a prize. Over 2000 submissions were uploaded. The level of creativity was startling. Every one participated ended up getting an extra three months on their account.

Change is hard. A very vocal minority responded really badly to the addition of video on Flickr. Some people had very fixed ideas about what Flickr’s purpose was. In the first 48 hours of a new feature, you’re just going to get people responding to the fact that there’s been a change of any kind. In the next two weeks, you get a clearer idea about what people think about a feature.

Heather finishes up with some stories.

There’s the tale of the subway flasher. These stories that break into the mainstream bring with them a flood of people to your site who are not part of your regular community.

Another great story involves a thief who stole a Mac and then subsequently used Photobooth and unknowingly uploaded photos to the real owner’s Flickr account.

When they launched geotagging, the Flickr folks thought that there would be islands of porn in the middle of the ocean. What actually happened was that somebody managed to spell FUCK over Greenland, just through geotagging a ton of photos!

You can’t make this stuff up and you certainly can’t predict it.

One last story. Pandas are cute and cuddly. But in the Flickr universe, there are two warring groups of panda conservationists who try to hack each other’s accounts. Unbelievable but true.

Tagged withaea aeasf aeasf08 aneventapart conference presentation community flickr liveblogging liveblog

Web Application Hierarchy

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 16:04:35 -0500

Luke W., master of forms, is at An Event Apart San Francisco to tell us about hierarchy in web apps. He asks whether visual hierarchy matters and how we can construct a visual hierarchy.

Let’s face it, people don’t read everything when they get to a web page. Instead, they look around frantically until they see something that looks vaguely like what they’re interested in and then click on something to find out if that’s what they want, hitting the back button if it isn’t. We have an evolutionary capability to assess things quickly and tune stuff out.

The are three design considerations with web apps:

Organisation. The structure of the app.
Interaction. The behaviour of the app.
Presentation. How your app looks to the audience.

The presentation layer should communicate how a web app works (interaction) and where stuff is (organisation). The presentation has two components:

Visual organisation.
Personality.

We focus a lot on communicating What is this?, How do I use it?, Why should I care?

Luke shows a screenshot of a very generic looking interface with no real visual hierarchy. No one can tell what it does. By reorganising the page elements, it becomes clearer what the application does. All that’s changed is the hierarchy.

He shows another example: Yahoo Desktop. The old design was very flat, everything was emphasised equally. The redesigned version has emphasised the labels “Search” and “Browse”.

In another example, a listing site, we see that de-emphasising page elements is as important as emphasising. There’s no point in having everything competing for attention.

Having shown us the benefits of visual hierarchy, Luke is going to show us how.

We make sense of the world in terms of relationships. We don’t know when we smell because we’re used to the smell, but other people notice because our smell stands out. It’s much the same with sight. We can associate or disassociate things using contrast, distance and size. We can use contrast in visual weight to guide the eye and create a flow. A screenshot of the Apple website demonstrates a considered creation of flow (compare that to a site where everything has equal weight—your eyes can’t focus on any one thing).

With cheap storage and open-source development environments, the barriers to entry for creating a web application are approaching zero. With so many web apps out there, how do you communicate at a glance what your app does?

When we design web pages, we concentrate on how a page fits into the structure of the site (is it a “parent” page or a “child” page, for example). But increasingly we should be thinking about how our pages fit into the structure of the web. Most people will probably arrive at a web page directly, through a search engine or content aggregation tool, rather than by drilling through the structure of your site.

Enough about the importance of letting people know what they can do on a web page. The next step is to make good on that promise and allow people to do what they came to do. Let people get straight to what they want to do. Don’t put any roadblocks in their way.

Luke’s talk is filled with excellent examples to convey his points but of course, given the visual nature of what he’s talking about, I can’t really do them justice here. You had to be there.

Tagged withaea aeasf aeasf08 aneventapart sanfrancisco conference presentation design hierarchy

Storytelling by Design

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 14:50:41 -0500

Jason Santa Maria is here at An Event Apart San Francisco to give a design counterbalance to Erics code-filled talk.

He kicks off with a heavy question: the meaning of web design. We often talk about the tools like grids and typography but we often overlook the storytelling aspect. Usually were trying to accomplish a narrative through design, such as a visitor to a site buying a product.

From an early age, were taught to recognise stories. We learn to recognise stories from pictures before we can even read. This is graphic resonance. The game Haunted House on an old-school Atari. Its fear personified, jokes Jason of the pixelly 8-bit images. The graphics dont tell you much but if you look at the packaging, it sets the mood for the game.

The designer is the narrator. Jason shows the Tufte visualisation favourite of Napoleons invasion of Russia. It tells a dramatic story (and conveys lots of information) through design. You can see more modern versions of storytelling through graphic design in magazines like Wired. They vary the layout and the design direction to set a mood for the article. The design helps reinforce the story. But when these articles move online they are all served up in the same template. Weve distilled our stories down to content.

David Carson says Design cant not communicate. No matter what you put on a page, you are communicating something. A lot of the time we arent thinking about this and that means our stories are lacking. Take a look at all those Web 2.0 logos to see homogenisation in action. Its pretty much the same with page layouts. Why are we plagued with this sameness?

Whos heard people say, Most web designers arent designers or Were limited to just five typefaces. Its such bollocks. You can still tell a story. For many years, print design also had a very limited amount of typefaces but they still came up with great stories through design. Are we just not trying hard enough on the web?

Jason tackles the same chestnut that Jeffrey mentioned: Where are the examples of iconic web design? asked Armin Vit. But its apples and oranges to compare print (or any other medium) with the web. Its a different medium. Here are things that distinguish the web:

The metaphorical page. When we design, we usually do it on a physical medium like a cave wall or a paper page. Figuring out how to convey lots of information in a limited space is not a new problem. There are always constraints. Usually these are physical constraints, like the physical dimensions of say, a book. But what about a web page? Theres no limit to the height of a web page. Web pages can extend beyond the boundaries of the viewport. That gives us a license to talk more.
Ubiquity and WYSIWYG. A magazine doesnt change from printing to news stand to reader. But a web page can change. We can switch off images or style sheets. Not only can things change through user input, the designer can change the scope of the page.
Collections of pages. With a book, you can tell a lot about the amount of information it contains just by looking at it. It has attainability and grasp of depth. You dont get that with a web site.
Layout. The golden ratio is a very valuable tool for layout. Its a pleasing relationship thats found in nature. We can develop a system based on it. Theres also the rule of thirds. Books are usually held at the same distance in the same way. Thats certainly not true with web sites when theyre viewed on different devices. Ratios and the rule of thirds break down because we cannot predict the dimensions of a web page. So how is it fair to compare the two media.

Jason has found some sites that are telling interesting stories through design. No one belongs here more than you. Fray. A Brief Message. The Principles of Beautiful Web Design.

Jason realised that he was in the same boat as the rest of us. So recently he redesigned his website to try to tell better stories. He has a basic template but he customises the design for each article he publishes, changing colours, fonts, images, even layout. Its a simple system for quick art direction. We want to publish quickly online and that can be a big hindrance to customising visual design.

Its always difficult to describe new technologies. We can always fall back on storytelling though. Early photography was described as telling stories with light. No one needs to know about the underlying technology. On the web, weve figured out the technology to a large extent: formats, etc. Design for the web has chiefly been driven forward by technology rather than message. Maybe its time to go back and start asking what are the stories we are trying to tell. The form of design should be driven by the story.

Tagged withaea aeasf aeasf08 aneventapart sanfrancisco conference presentation design

The Lessons of CSS Frameworks

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 13:50:40 -0500

Eric Meyer is going to talk about CSS frameworks here at An Event Apart San Francisco.

He did a Google search for CSS Frameworks and put together a list of the big players. Its a list of nine frameworks. Eric wants to know two things: what are they doing the same and what are they doing differently.

Lets get one question out of the way, the question which one is right for you? Answer none of the above. Its like templates. Theres nothing wrong with templates but you dont put together your clients site based on a template, right? They can be a good starting point for ideas but you do your own designs. If youre going to use a framework, it should be yours; one that youve created. You can look at existing frameworks for ideas and hack at it. But the professionals in this room are not well served by picking up a framework and using it as-is.

Eric put together a grid of features and which frameworks support those features. Every framework does reset, colours, and fonts. The fact that every framework has a reset is evidence of the frustration we all feel with the inconsistencies between browsers. The rules for colour tend to be much more minimal. Font styling, on the other hand, is more fully-featured generally. Whereas the colour might just be set for the body element, font sizes and faces are specified throughout. Usually that font face is Helvetica. Most frameworks steer away from trying to style form elements. Almost all of them do layout, usually combinations of columns. Four of the nine frameworks included print styles. Three of the nine included hacks.

Font sizes

Four of the nine frameworks are setting font sizes on the body with pixels. Tripoli uses Richards 62.5% rule. Eric points out how using a 76% rule on the body can lead to inconsistent font-sizing between browsers because of the inconsistencies of rounding off font sizes. Only two of the frameworks aren’t using unitless line-heights. Generally you want a line height of 1 to get propagated down the document tree rather than simply the computed value of 1em in pixels. You dont want a 40 pixel element having a line height of 12 pixels.

Heading sizes

Most of these frameworks, with the exception of YUI, are setting heading sizes in some form or another. The only place where youll see a heading size go below 1em is in a browser style sheet. In the frameworks, no heading size, even h6, goes below the size of body text, 1em. Blueprint and Elements set pretty large sizes on h1 and h2. The other frameworks cluster around the same size range, never getting very big or very small. Eric averaged out all the measurements to get the average size for h1 and h2.

Naming conventions

Where frameworks are using IDs or classes, what names are they using? Four of them use psuedo-namespaced class names beginning with grid- or container- or span- (which you would apply to a div!?). Youre supposed put classes in your markup like grid-3 or span-5 or whatever. This seems pretty complicated. Three frameworks use more intuitive names like page, header or main. In fact header, main and footer are universal IDs across the three frameworks.

Style inclusion patterns

Some of the frameworks have a single short style sheet that you point to from your markup, which then links off to separate style sheets for fonts, colours, layout, etc. But most of them use separate style sheets and you must link to each one in your markup. Eric reckons that this is because IE for Windows will cache the first style sheet you point to with a link element but not any subsequent style sheets with @import.

What the hack?

There are two kinds of hacks:

Hacks that point to failings in CSS like self-clearing floated elements and things like pseudo-padding.
Hacks for Internet Explorer 6.

Some cool bits

Some of the frameworks provide compressed versions for production use to keep file size down.

Three of the frameworks had debugging styles that you could turn on to say, display the grid in the document.

YAML provides a draft file which is like a template style sheet. The selectors are written out but the declarations are left empty. This could be a handy training tool (fill in the curly braces).

960 provides sketch” files: PDFs of the grid for you to print out and scribble on.

Thus endeth Erics roundup of CSS frameworks.

Tagged withaea aeasf aeasf08 aneventapart sanfrancisco conference liveblogging liveblog presentation css frameworks

Understanding Web Design

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 12:33:52 -0500

Im at An Event Apart San Francisco where Jeffrey Zeldman is taking to the stage. Hes going to talk about web design and what it means.

First question, What is the thing that you need most? Empathy, he says. He brings up a screenshot of Real.com. Everything that looks like a link isnt a link. Everything that doesnt look a link is a link except the Free Download button. This site isnt being driven by user needs, its being driven by corporate needs. Their mission is to compete with Quicktime and other media players but they also want to push the advanced player and make it hard to find the free player competing needs.

Heres another site: Consumer Search. You can find consumer reports there. They have a store of reports on how well products work or dont work. But the site has no visual hierarchy, no sex appeal, just a long list of links.

Both sites suffer from a lack of empathy; empathy with the sites users.

Its hard being a web designer. The unmotivated need not apply. You have to constantly educate yourself. There are plenty of tutorials out there on using web design tools like Photoshop, Flash, Dreamweaver, and so on. But teaching Excel is not the same as teaching business. Knowing how to use Photoshop and Illustrator doesnt make you a web designer. Good resources are hard to find. Theres that really good place in Florida (where Jade studied) that has a great curriculum but its the exception that proofs the rule. Once youre out of college and in a job, you still have to keep learning. Jeffrey asks who often feels like theyre faking it and most of the audience puts their hands on.

The A List Apart Web Design Survey aims to answer some questions about working in web design. Last years survey showed that many people found that their education was not relevant to their job. In fact there seemed to be a correlation between how rich you are and how irrelevant your education is. When you break it down by job title, it turns out that graphic designers did find their education relevant but most developers are self-taught.

Web designers get no respect. Imagine youre on a plane and you start chatting with the person in the seat next to you. If you ask someone what they do and they say theyre an architect then you make some assumptions about them; that theyre educated and respected. You dont get that when you tell someone youre a web designer. Part of the problem is that there is no standardisation of job titles. We call ourselves lots of different things. If youre working with Fortune 500 companies that use lots of baloney titles, you feel you need to make up baloney titles for your company too. If youre at a university, someone might be called a Webmaster. If youre at a startup, someone might be called a User Experience Director. But theyre probably doing the same thing.

Another problem for people working in-house is answering the question Who owns the website? Usually its either Marketing or IT. There should be a separate Web division.

Another thing that the survey showed is that web designers dont get rich. They make less money than people in comparable fields. This field also suffers from many of the same prejudices as other fields.

So who speaks for web design? Communication Arts is a magazine about graphic design. Every year they have an end-of-the-year round-up of the best in design. The problem with any kind of competition is that it fosters the same kind of design all the time. For example, when Jeffrey was a judge for Communication Arts, there was a beautiful site but it was half a gig in size. Jeffrey didnt think that was worthy of a prize (although it really was gorgeous). In the 90s in advertising, it was much the same. There was a trend for edgy, sarcastic advertising that won awards and therefore prompted more sarcastic advertising.

Then theres the Webby Awards, a very glitzy affair. David Bowie was the host this year. Jeffrey loves Bowie (he has bought his music multiple times) but is he necessarily the best judge of web design?

If you cant rely on competitions and awards, you could turn to traditional news media. A few years ago Wolf Blitzer discovered blogs. They didnt quite get it.

Jeffrey asks who reads TechC*nt. People put up their hands they should be ashamed of themselves. Jeffrey, like me, doesnt read TechC*nt because it just makes him angry. Who gives a shit about how much money people are making? Arent the ideas more interesting?

Theres the old chestnut about iconic web design, sparked by Armin Vits Under Consideration article. Jeffrey and Jason disagree on this one. Jeffrey thinks that lamenting the lack of a web design equivalent of a Milton Glaser poster is missing the point of web design.

Time for some practical lessons. Most importantly, we need to get away from the guitar solo approach to design. You should not be designing just to make other designers jealous. It happens a lot in design but it happens in development too (Im looking at you, Ajax). Good design is invisible. Its about the character of the content, not the character of the designer. Lets get away from showing off get to empathetic web design. It means user-centred design but by abandoning that label we can side-step the religious wars between UCD and agile.

Here are twelve tips to empathetic web design.

Start with the user. If youre making a personal site, great, do whatever you want. But if its a site for other people, start with the user and stay there.
Know yourself. Know your weaknesses. Know what youre good at and what youre bad at. Jeffrey knows that hes good at painting the big picture on a project but hes not good at dealing with the details.
Find the right client (or job). Find an environment or project where you can thrive. This ties in with tip number two: when you know what you like doing, you can seek out that environment.
Sell ideas not pixels. Andy paraphrases this as sell the sizzle, not the sausage.
I dont know is okay. It should be acceptable to tell a client you dont know something. If youre afraid of saying that, that might not be the right client.
Build trust. They need to know that you know what youre doing.
Bring out the big guns. Dont be afraid to quote research at your clients. They wont read it but theyll be persuaded to trust you.
Create a paper trial. Remind people what they already agreed to.
Never underprice your works.
Say no to spec. Dont work on spec. Dont work for free.
Say no to rush jobs. They never work. The clients are always in a rush but theyre always late getting back to you. The reason its a rush job is because they spent months disagreeing about stuff.
End with the user. When in doubt, go back to the user.

Tagged withaeasf aeasf08 aneventapart liveblogging conference presentation zeldman design

404 gang sign

nobody@flickr.com (adactio) — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 19:53:24 -0500

adactio posted a video:

Team 404

nobody@flickr.com (adactio) — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 19:41:29 -0500

adactio posted a video:

I left my (big) heart in San Francisco

nobody@flickr.com (adactio) — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 19:34:18 -0500

adactio posted a photo:

#26

Pose with some eggheads

nobody@flickr.com (adactio) — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 19:34:15 -0500

adactio posted a photo:

#35

Yoda has a waterfront view here

nobody@flickr.com (adactio) — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 19:34:12 -0500

adactio posted a photo:

#17

Draw an ode to Wordpress in the sand

nobody@flickr.com (adactio) — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 19:34:09 -0500

adactio posted a photo:

#49

Writing where Coppola did

nobody@flickr.com (adactio) — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 19:34:04 -0500

adactio posted a photo:

#34

Automatic eagle

Thu, 14 Aug 2008 15:54:28 -0500

Im looking forward to getting to San Francisco this weekend. Mostly thats because Ill be seeing so many of my friends there. But theres a lesser reason thats so geeky Im almost ashamed to admit it

At some stage while Im online in San Francisco, I will, no doubt, visit my Pownce profilewhere I post something almost every dayand I will take great delight in seeing my location listed as San Francisco, CA rather than the usual Brighton, UK because thats what Fire Eagle will have told Pownce. Fire Eagle will know this because my visit to San Francisco is listed on my Dopplr account. Dopplr talks to Fire Eagle. Pownce talks to Fire Eagle. In a roundabout way, Dopplr talks to Pownce.

In case you missed it, Fire Eagle is out of beta. Go forth and explore the apps.

Whats missing from that list is a kick-ass iPhone app that would do its this app wants to know your location trick to update Fire Eagle (and therefore Pownce, Dopplr and soon, Twitter) on the go. I hereby invoke the LazyMobileWeb to build such an app. I wish I could offer some kind of modern day version of a longitude prize for geeks on the move.

Tagged withpownce dopplr fireeagle location mobile

Traces of Inspiration Blog Archive URL as UI

The importance of good URL design.

MOO.com | Sneaky peak of MOOs latest product: The MightyCard

The latest from Moo: the MightyCard.

San Diego Web Standards Group

Live in San Diego? Interested in web standards? Come along tomorrow to the inaugural San Diego Web Standards Group meetup. You won't regret it.

Captioning Sucks!

Joe's latest project is deliberately garish.

Silicon Valley meetings go 'topless' - Los Angeles Times

A report on the growing trend of banning laptops from meetings. We never have laptops at the Clearleft Monday morning meetings but it wasn't a policy: it's just common sense/courtesy.

John Resig - Classy Query

You have to be really, really geeky to find this funny. I find this funny.

Gmail: Google's approach to email

New from GMail: send email back in time. "Gmail utilizes an e-flux capacitor to resolve issues of causality." In all seriousness though, remember when GMail launched on April 1st, 2004 and everyone that it was a joke?

Thriving Office

Worst. Business Idea. Ever. A CD of office sounds so that homeworkers can impress clients on the phone with the sounds of industriousness. "Instant credibility for home businesses!"

New Initiative in Hyper-Localized Social Tagging - The Web Standards Project

The WaSP kicks it up a notch. Putting bookmarks in books was just the beginning. Now you can tag bad developers with the web standards equivalent of the scarlet letter.

Flickr: Find your friends

Now this is how to do the "find your friends" trick. For GMail, Yahoo Mail, and Hotmail, Flickr never once asks for your password. Bravo!

ScreenReader.net: freeware freedom for blind and Visually impaired people

A free screen reader. If this turns out to be any good, it could be a game-changer: a long overdue kick in the behind for Freedom Scientific.

Radiohead/ Remix/ Nude

Ever wanted to remix a Radiohead song? Me neither. But for those who do, they now can.

Seed Conference | Chicago | 6 June 2008

The typography on this page is simply gorgeous. And the event looks good too.

Welcome to Game Neverending

Game Neverending is back. For real. Get nostalgic with this blast from the past.

World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King

A new WOW hero class has been unveiled: the bard! "direct damage effects like "Epic Solo" that will rock foes into oblivion while powerful Indie debuffs such as "Tape Jam" and "Shoegazer" keep them in check."

The need for speed

Wed, 4 Jun 2008 11:57:54 -0500

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.

Radio on the TV

Sun, 11 May 2008 10:06:14 -0500

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.

Comprehension

Wed, 19 Mar 2008 06:47:49 -0500

Don’t tell Paul but I sometimes listen to the Boagworld podcast. I’m sharing this dark secret with you because recently the podcast featured a good interview with Christian Heilmann.

Christian talks about best and worst practices in writing JavaScript today. It’s well worth a listen.

But when the subject turns to Object Oriented Programming, Christian makes a pointed reference:

And there’s not much magic to it. I mean I get annoyed when I see JavaScript guys going on stage and saying like: Well guys, this is a function and when it’s an object it’s a method and why should I know this? Well you should know this because you need to communicate with other developers as well sooner or later.

Um… that would be me. In my books, presentations and workshops I’ve often explained methods and properties as being like functions and variables, just within the scope of an object (hence the dot syntax). But I never, ever said And why should I know this?

What I was trying to do was explain objects using reference points that I think most people will understand. I know that for me personally I had a lightbulb moment when I grokked methods and properties as being like functions and variables. The whole point of explaining this terminology is precisely so that people can communicate with other developers. As Christian says:

And these people speak that lingo and rather than you having to explain yourself for 15 minutes you could communicate in 3 minutes.

Exactly! That’s why I think it’s important that I take the time to at least explain the terminology of objects (i.e. methods and properties) even if I don’t delve into the technical details. My aim, like Christian, is to encourage better understanding and communication.

Evidently Christian takes issue with my teaching techniques. That’s fine. But I wish he wouldn’t put words in my mouth by claiming that I’m telling people that they shouldn’t have to learn the terminology around JavaScript objects.

Then again… maybe his comment wasn’t aimed at me at all and there is some other conference speaker out there who is going around telling people that they don’t have to know what the words “method” and “property” mean. If that’s true, then I agree with Christian. Such exhortations are not useful. But in lieu of any source for Christian’s imaginings of what he thinks he heard, I’ll take the egotistical paranoid route and assume he’s talking about me.

Anyway, I guess I’ll have to make sure from now on that I’m clearer about what I’m saying. More importantly, I’ll have to make sure that I’m clear on what I’m not saying.

ABBRacadabra

Mon, 28 Jan 2008 12:24:53 -0600

In Chapter 8 of the DOM Scripting book Ive got a little script that looks through the contents of an HTML document, finds any instances of the abbr element and then constructs a definition list with the information contained within them. Then theres a section in the chapter called A browser bomb in which I explain how the script needs to be forked because Internet Explorer refuses to recognise the abbr elementpart of a longstanding spat with Netscape. This means not only that you cant do any scripting on abbreviations, you cant style them either.

But now it turns out that Internet Explorer has an interesting quirk. If you write:

document.createElement("abbr");

suddenly the browser recognises the element and you are free to script and style abbreviations (you dont even need to append that newly-created element to the document). This applies to any elements that IE doesnt recognise, which could be very hand in migrating to HTML5.

It doesnt qualify as an error so Im not going to add it to the errata but I sure wish I had known about this when I was writing the book.

Bulletproof Ajax workshop in Brighton

Fri, 11 Jan 2008 05:48:25 -0600

My first public appearance in 2008 is coming up in two weeks. Ill be spending a day delivering a Bulletproof Ajax workshop. In case you couldnt tell from the title, its based on the book of the same name (wot I wrote). The workshop will be held in the cosy and comfy environs of the Clearleft office building in the heart of Brighton.

This is an entry-level introduction to the hows and whys of implementing Ajax. Ive given this workshop before and its always gone smoothly though I think I might update some of the material; maybe ditch some of the introductory DOM Scripting stuff and spend more time on implementation and design challenges. Id love to do more hands-on stuff and get people writing stuff but I find this a real challenge when it comes to code (its a lot easier with something simple like microformats). Id be interested in hearing any ideas for making this workshop more interactive.

If you can convince your boss to part with the asking price of 395 per person, maybe Ill see you on January 25th and we can climb that Ajax learning curve together.

@media Ajax, day 2

Tue, 20 Nov 2007 19:56:31 -0600

The second day of @media Ajax certainly kicked things up a notch. While day one covered a lot of the day-to-day questions of JavaScript that I could relate to, day two was a trip to the future.

The tone was set in an opening keynote by Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript, giving us the lowdown on JavaScript 2. I last saw Brendan speak at XTech 2006 in Amsterdam. Back then he was telling us what was coming; here he was showing us whats arrived. I understood about 50% of what he showed us, which I thought reflected well on Brendans explanatory prowess.

John Resig, creator of jQuery, gave a rundown of his library, focusing on prototyping. By taking questions throughoutand responding to all of them thoroughlyit was clear that he wasnt giving a canned demo; he could have happily talked for an hour about any aspect of coding with jQuery. A lot of people in the room were already using jQuery and, by the time John finished, I suspect a lot more are going to investigate it. I picked up some nifty tips and tricks for myself.

Dan took to the stage and invited us on a mind-bending journey into the depths of metaprogramming. I always knew that JavaScript was a very flexible and adaptable language but Dan really showed just how malleable it could be. But, as Dan pointed out, the best way to really get your head around this stuff is to code it for yourself.

Alex Russell of Dojo fame was up next but instead of just diving into his library, he painted a much broader picture. From my own conversations with Alex, I had a feeling that he would be a great speaker and he was. He began by applying Maslows hierarchy of needs to applications and took us forward in time to a Web of the future thats being hacked together today. I didnt agree with everything he had to say but boy, did I ever enjoy listening to him say it!

Then it was the turn of Douglas Crockford who had earlier been compared to both Yoda and Gandalf by Brendan. Douglas covered some of the same territory as Dan, demonstrating the flexibility of JavaScript as well as showing its weaknesses. He also expressed his concerns about the direction that JavaScript 2 is headed.

All of that set the scene nicely for a lively closing panel.

As always, I really enjoyed moderating but I definitely felt a bit of my depth. The panel consisted of:

Brendan Eich,
Douglas Crockford,
Alex Russell and
Stuart Langridge.

They were a little reticent at first but once the subject matter got on to the burning issues like security, the conversation took off. Highlights included Alex bitchslapping Yahoo for not being truly open source with YUI and Douglas declaring that CSS is inherently shit.

All in all, I think it was a good way to wrap up a really good conference. I was very impressed with the level of presentations and the audience interaction. The two-day schedule was clearly very well thought-out. Perhaps the Ajaxians should have been on day two and John could have been on day one but thats a minor quibble. Overall, @media Ajax was pretty darn great.

@media Ajax, day 1

Mon, 19 Nov 2007 21:32:13 -0600

Day one of @media Ajax has just wrapped up in a very wet and rainy London.

The show opened with a State of Ajax address by the guys from Ajaxian in which they gave their perspective on where Ajax and the Web is headed. I have to say, their perspective seemed somewhat alien to my experience of Ajax in the here and now, but I think theyre talking about fundamentally different use casessituations where the browser eclipses even the operating system and JavaScript drives everything from the interface to the core processes. Hey, you can even use JavaScript to create CSS layouts! Yes, they really said that and no, I dont know what theyre smoking but I want some.

I think their otherworldy perspective makes sense if youre, say, Google and youre trying to figure out how you can hack around that awkward beast that is the Web (by doing everything in Java, apparently) but I couldnt help but feel that in their enthusiasm to port the desktop to the Web, the Ajaxians are missing the core attributes that make the Web so appealingthings like hypertext and markup, to which technologies like JavaScript and Ajax should be subservient.

In complete contrast, Mike followed with the story of how, instead of trying to make everything work in a single technology he already knew, he explored a whole range of technologies and methodologies opened up by Ajax. In effect, Ajax drove him to become something of a renaissance man.

Derek then proceeded to give a storming presentation on JavaScript and accessibility, wonderfully illustrated by some snapshots of real-world instances of bad design that he has come across just in the few days hes been in the country (which reminded me that most of the examples of bad design in Donald A. Normans The Design of Everyday Things were gathered from the time he spent in the UK).

Stuart followed with a presentation about breaking the web. His tongue was firmly in cheek and possibly also in horses, judging by his continuous reference to horse pornography. It was a good lighthearted way to make some serious points.

I found Christians presentation to be a great breath of fresh air. He opened by declaring, It doesnt matter what JavaScript library you use, or whether you use a library at all, or what coding style you use, as long as your team all agree on it. He went in to a lot more detail on how to manage code and the developers working on that code but he had me at It doesnt matter.

PPK wrapped the day up with a case study that compared data formats (XML, JSON, HTML, etc.). It was also an illuminating study of the Plantagenet and Tudor royal housesit turns out hes something of genealogy geek.

Overall, a great day of talks, in my opinion. Itll be interesting to see how tomorrow goes. While the first day is pitched at covering the building blocks, day two is going to cover the bigger picture. In preparation for the closing panel, Ive been trying to gauge the backgrounds of most of the audience members; are they front-end developers, server-side developers, designers, what?

Ive had some great pub conversations with the conference attendees. In the course of these chats, some people mentioned to me that they thought the first day was covering stuff they already knew and they said they were looking forward to the meaty stuff in day two. Personally, Ill consider myself lucky if I can even follow all the high-level programming stuff thats bound to come up in the talks on Dojo and JavaScript 2.

Questioning Ajax

Sat, 17 Nov 2007 20:31:48 -0600

@media Ajax is about to kick off in London. I’ll be there but I won’t be giving a presentation—I’ll leave that to the experts. Instead, I’ll be moderating the closing panel. The line-up hasn’t been set yet but seeing as all the speakers are world-class, it’s bound to be a great constellation.

I’ll be spending my time at the conference (and its attendant social events) quizzing the attendees on what they interested in finding out. If you’re going to be there, say hi and let me know what you’d like me to talk about on the panel. Even if you’re not going to be there, I still want to know what you think I should be asking the finest JavaScript minds on the planet.

So tell me… what’s on your mind?

Spry redux

Fri, 16 Nov 2007 05:49:26 -0600

About a year ago, I wrote about my disappointment with Spry. Spry is yet another JavaScript library, this time from Adobe. My beef was with the way that Spry required proprietary markup and then claimed to be using Hijax. Roger Johansson also called them on it.

It looks like Adobe were listening. In fact, I know they were listening because not long after Roger and I published our rants, Scott Fegette recorded an interview with me that was split in two; one for public consumption and the other for developers at Adobe.

Version 1.6 of Spry looks a big improvement on what’s come before. Roger is pleasantly surprised and so am I. I’m glad to see that Adobe do listen to what we have to say but more importantly, I’m glad that they are providing solid documentation that stresses the importance of standards:

Documentation like this, which shows how to use code responsibly, is vital to any library. After all, it doesn’t matter how powerful or fast your code is if people then use it to break the Web.

Anyway, I just wanted to acknowledge the changes that Kin Blas and his team are making. I was quite vocal in pointing the problems with Spry; it’s only fair that I’m equally vocal in pointing out the improvements.

Unobtrusive Ajax

Mon, 15 Oct 2007 11:42:51 -0500

This somehow slipped under my radar when it was released in July: Unobtrusive JavaScript is part of O’Reilly’s Short Cut series. It’s written by Jesse Skinner and tech edited by Christian Heilmann. It’s PDF only so if you want a dead-tree version, you’ll have to print it out yourself.

I haven’t read it but judging from the description, it sounds like good Hijax-like advice:

This short cut will focus on the practical benefits of using Ajax and JavaScript unobtrusively and show you that unobtrusive web development and progressive enhancement benefit both web developers and users of the Web. You’ll get to see many simple examples of building web interfaces that are unobtrusive. You’ll quickly see that it is actually very easy to make web applications that everyone can use.

The PDF book grew out of a presentation from The Ajax Experience in 2006 which is well worth checking out.