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Field Notes - November 16

Stale

You may or may not have noticed that things have been a little quiet around here for the past ten months.

It's been a busy summer. Three big projects, which of course, due to the usual in-progress non-disclosure legalese, I couldn't really talk about here. Lots of other stuff was going on in the world of websites, but I was too busy with those projects to be able to talk much about it, especially here.

So now it's November. Two of those projects have launched and the third is slated for launch before this month is out, which means I have the very unusual asset of a little spare time. Not a lot, but just enough to remind me that this site exists and that Something should be Done About It.

So maybe something will. We'll see.

January 22

Reassigning Responsibility

By now, you will have read Aaron Gustafson's Beyond DOCTYPE to get worked up, and then Eric Meyer's From Switches To Targets to calm yourself down. Perhaps you even poured yourself an extra cup of coffee while you sat and let your brain churn over this crazy thought which is speeding towards reality. I did, anyway, and here's what it came up with.

Browser-based version targeting will be a useful tool, but it will not be for everyone. When it comes to browsers and standards, there are three general types of designers: those who design for standards compliance, those who design for browser compliance, and those who design for both.

Those who design for standards compliance build their sites according to W3C technical recommendations, and often the latest versions thereof. If any feature is supported in any browser, they'll use it. If that feature isn't supported in your browser, their site will degrade gracefully for you, and still remain fully accessible. Their sites generally aren't concerned with cross-browser pixel precision, especially for mythical future browsers with backwards-incompatible bug fixes. They don't need version targeting.

Those who design for browsers have a set list of browsers, often a small one, and jiggle their tags and styles until everything looks just right, often at the expense of web standards. It's possible that their instructions were “make it look good in IE6, that's all that's important”. It's impossible to say whether or not they would use version targeting, although it's tempting to say that if they were smart enough to use it, they'd be using web standards as well. For our needs today, they are irrelevant.

The relevant group is the rest of us, those who design for both standards and browser compliance. We use doctypes and validate our XHTML and CSS, yet we still use conditional comments and CSS hacks to address browser bugs. We run accessibility tests, yet we still use empty XHTML elements to control visual spacing. We have an impossible mission: to make our websites forward-compatible and attractively consistent across all modern browsers, including those which have not yet been created. We have clients who demand as much, and they are real people with real budgets whose livelihood depends on it.

Version targeting simplifies that mission for us. It allows us to state that here, on this date, this site worked in these browsers, and worked well. It allows us to work to the best of our ability and not have that work degrade over time. It takes the responbility of forward-compatible maintenance, and reassigns it to the browser makers, who can actually do something effective that doesn't involve hacked aural CSS syntax.

It allows us, for the first time ever, to declare a site finished.

That said, there are aspects of the proposed implementation which are worrisome, in particular the default behaviour, which Jeremy Keith explains in detail. Version targeting needs to be an optional tool, not a mandatory layer to be written into the permanent future of the web. While tying sites to browsers may help the future arrive a little more quickly, the whole point of that future is to free the site from the browser. When IE10, Firefox 5, Safari 4, and Opera 27 all render sites the same, I don't want an extra HTTP header stating the obvious.

Maybe I'm a little optimistic on that count. But when Microsoft comes up with ways to bring web design into the year 2008, it's tough not to be.

December 3

Haze

I wake up and do my work through the haze of my annual cold. Two days ago I was almost completely mentally incapacitated. Now I'm just physically incapaticated. I can't speak without my raw throat burning up my words. I can't complete a thought without sneezing. I can't close an HTML tag without wiping my runny nose.

But the work must be done, for I leave for China in under two weeks. I would tell you more about that, but there's too much work to be done.

My days work on a bell curve. I wake up and I start off on work that requires little to no thought. XHTML/CSS implementations. Basic JavaScript. Repetitions of design themes decided upon months ago. As the day goes on, I switch to tasks requiring more and more mental effort. There's about a three or four hour window in the middle of the day in which I can deal with complex design decisions and JavaScript behaviour concepts that nobody's even thought about before. But eventually I have to tone things down, and by the end of the night, I'm back on the couch, bashing out implementations while waiting for the NyQuil to kick in.

I use my new MacBook Pro while on the couch. I would tell you more abou that, but there's too much work to be done.

November 20

Direction

Ten years ago, web design was a big part of my world. My few hours spent offline were spent dreaming up new ideas for websites. I built sites for myself, sites for friends, sites for unlikely clubs and groups that my friends and I made up. I was always creating something, always pushing myself to make a better website.

But that environment didn't agree with me. You know what web design was like ten years ago. For me, it felt like the web had no direction. With every new competing browser version, there began to be more frustration than achievement in everything I created. I gradually stopped even trying to make websites, and ended up not touching the inner workings of any website for several years.

Fortunately for me, ten years ago I was in tenth grade, so the years off were spent somewhat productively finishing high school and starting university, and the web was in the process of healing itself by the time I was ready for it again. But I must admit that I do envy today's tenth grade web designers who grow up not with a severe browser dichotomy and free-for-all methodology, but instead grow up with published works such as these.

Understanding Web Design Jeffrey Zeldman

If we want better sites, better work, and better-informed clients, the need to educate begins with us.

Why we need standards support in HTML email David Greiner

… getting an email to display consistently in all of the popular email clients is by far the most frustrating part of the job. It's a painful and always moving target that's getting harder instead of easier. There's really no justification for it and it's about time something was done.

The Future of Reading (A Play in Six Acts) Mark Pilgrim

When someone buys a book, they are also buying the right to resell that book, to loan it out, or to even give it away if they want. Everyone understands this.

— Jeff Bezos, 2002

Today, the web has direction, and it's a healthy one.

November 18

Why Facebook is integral to the continued evolution of the human race

Because without it, Blue Beanie Day would be that much more implausible.

Monday, November 26, 2007 is the day thousands of Standardistas (people who support web standards) will wear a Blue Beanie to show their support for accessible, semantic web content.

Facebook manages to make even the strangest things seem reasonable; that in itself of worthy of further analysis, but only after I get back from the tuque store.

Monday morning update:

The explanation from the beanie bearer himself, which quadruples the project's plausibility. So there seem to be two good methods for making out-of-left-field ideas seem reasonable: create a Facebook event, or be featured on The Daily Report. Mix and match to taste.

November 16

Better than renting a water cooler (also, cheaper)

prq Feeling lost and cut off without twitter. I want my fake co-workers back! about 2 hours ago

And it's true.

I thought Twitter was silly for the longest time—at least, for my purposes. I talked to people enough. I was active enough on Facebook. And my mobile phone bills were already sky-high.

Then two things happened:

1. I got Vonage, and my mobile bill went waaaay down. So much so that I actually gazed in admiration at my bill for ten minutes. At about the eight minute mark I noticed the number of text messages on my plan that I wasn't using.
2. Foamee was launched, a service that I could actually see myself using someday.

So I signed up for Twitter, if only to reserve my three-character user name. Now I'm addicted. And it feels great.

See, I work at home. My only co-worker has four legs, sleeps a lot, and prefers to stalk birds on the deck instead of interacting with me. I work and communicate with clients and contractors, all of whom are terrific people and are great to deal with, but—it's still work. Almost all that communication is a means to an end, which means that there are pressures and worries inherent in every word typed.

Twitter's a diversion from that. I follow people who are in the industry, doing the same kind of work that I do, but not necessarily working with me. With TwitterFox in my status bar, I'm reminded every few minutes that there are people out there, working on the same types of problems I'm working on, in the same kind of environment I'm in. No pressure or worries: it's just something we do and love. They inspire me to work, they keep me level when things go wrong, they keep me company. It's comforting knowing that someone's on the other side of the cubicle wall.

And it's even nicer when your co-workers don't just sit on the windowsill and demand to be let outside.

October 26

Ahead of its time

Visiting A Brief Message's White Is the New White earlier this week, my first thought was "Ooooh, black."

Glancing at the sidebar's Rackspace ad, my second thought was, "Hey, did they really... ?"

I reloaded—and the black/white/red Rackspace was replaced by something green. Sadly, just a coincidence. But hey, it still works if you get the Mosso Ruby, or the today-only Layer Tennis ad. Still, the day must be coming when colour-coordination is offered with advertising packages.

The red is slightly off, anyway.

But wait! A quick glance at The Deck's current advertisements list reveals a green Rackspace ad, not the matching reds and whites shown above. Further coincidence? Or conniving advertising strategy?

Everybody wins

Jeff follows up. And he's absolutely right. File under "should've noticed this earlier".