Posts from 2005

Just a few days after Chris Wilson’s post to IEblog, Håkon Wium Lie, CTO of Opera and one of the originators of CSS, published a column on news.com titled “The Acid2 Challenge to Microsoft“, outlining the intent to create “a test page… that will actively use features Web designers crave, such as fixed positioning of elements”.  As indicated in his article and confirmed via the Buzz, the Web Standards Project  is a partner with Håkon in the development of this new “test suite”, as it’s termed on the WaSP Buzz.

I don’t know about you, but as I read the article, several red flags went up and alarm bells rang in my head.

First off, the Acid2 challenge to Microsoft?  Why only Microsoft?  An acid test worthy of its name would expose bugs in every browser on the market today.  The original test did exactly that, and helped change the face of the Web.  In fact, if you’re still using IE/Mac, the first browser to actually get the Acid test correct, you can see it in action.  Type about:tasman into the address bar, and there it is, with modified text.

Second, the original Acid test (which I haven’t linked to because it seems to longer be available on the Web) was part of a larger and more constructive effort.  At the time, Acid test author Todd Fahrner was (as was I) a member of the WaSP’s CSS Action Committee.  If that name doesn’t sound familiar, you might be more familiar with the CSS Samurai.  One of the things the CSS AC did was to produce reports on the top ten failings of CSS support in various browsers.  We didn’t just say, “Browser X should be better”.  We wrote up what should be better, and why, and pointed to test cases illustrating the problems.  The Acid test was justifiably famous, but it was in the end one test among many.

And those tests were tough for all browsers, not just one browser or one campany’s browsers.  We weren’t partisan snipers, despite what many claimed.  We worked to point the way toward better behavior on the part of all browsers by focusing on the problems specific to each browser.

I am no longer a member of the WaSP.  When the first incarnation of the organization went into dormancy, the CSS AC went along with it.  Although the new WaSP has asked me to join a few times, I have resisted for various reasons—personal, professional, and perceptual.  I was also asked if I wanted to contribute to the Acid2 effort as an independent, and declined that as well.  So in many ways, this post is the epitome of something I find distasteful: a person who has had every chance to make contributions, and instead criticizes.  In my defense, I can say only that while I may have refused these invitations, it is not out of antagonism to the basic goal of the WaSP.  I have every reason to want the WaSP to succeed in its goal of advancing the cause of standards on the Web.

But this Microsoft-centric campaign has me concerned, and ever so slightly appalled.  The creation of a tough CSS test suite is a fantastic undertaking, something that is to be applauded and is probably long overdue.  But to cast it as an effort being undertaken as a challenge to Microsoft not only starts it off on the wrong foot, it has the potential to taint not just the Acid2 effort, but the entire organization.

• That Acid Buzz was published on Wednesday, March 23rd, 2005.
• It was assigned to the Browsers and Standards categories.
• There have been fourteen replies.

While I was preparing for SXSW, Chris Wilson—and there’s a name that takes me back a few years—posted an entry on IEblog about standards.  I’m not going to excerpt any of it here because most of you have already read it.  For the rest of you, go read it.  As long as you don’t continue into the comments, it won’t take very long.

First off, let me say that I’ve known Chris for many years, and we get along great together.  I have a lot of respect for him, and I firmly believe the feeling is mutual.  He did incredible work in the very early years of CSS, and while some of that work may seem lacking when viewed in light of later implementations, it was that all-important first step on the journey of a thousand miles.  If I ever make it to Seattle with a couple of days to spare, he’s right near the top of a pretty short list of people I’d do my utmost to find time to see while I was there.  (I just added another person to that list a couple of days ago, actually, but that’s a story for another time.)

With a paragraph like that, you probably think I’m going to tear into him now.  Nope.

I’m posting my thoughts on this for three reasons.

1. Chris was nice enough to name-check meyerweb as a site that’s helped “[harvest] the collective knowledge of the web development community” with regard to standards.  If nominations were being taken, I’d point to the css-discuss wiki before I would meyerweb, but nevertheless I’d like to think I’ve earned a place on that list—and I’m glad that Chris thinks so too.
2. Some of my writing from the post “Unbreaking the Web” was quoted in a comment by Thomas Tallyce.
3. The 800-pound gorilla is stirring.  It’s hard not to share a few observations.

So as Chris points out, the IE team faces an enormous challenge.  This is compounded by the enormous loss of IE developers over the past few years.  Think about it.  Would you work on a project that was the legal and administrative equivalent of a toxic cloud?  Internet Explorer is the focal point of dozens of lawsuits, antitrust litigation, and more.  It’s a project straitjacketed by its own success (however rightly or wrongly that success was achieved).  I don’t have any direct knowledge of this, but the IE team has probably become the Marie Celeste of Microsoft, a doomed wanderer of the bureaucratic seas, staffed by a few trapped souls and the subject of whispered tales of horror among the engineers.

( “And there… dangling from the door handle… was a scripting hook!” )

Despite this recent legacy of pariahship, it would seem that resources are gathering behind Explorer, and not just on the security front.  Chris says, and I have no reason to doubt him, that plans are afoot to add standards support to Explorer.  My concern is over the fate of those plans, because the best-laid plans… you know.  No matter how much the engineering team might want something, if their irresistible geek force encounters an immovable administrative object, well, my money’s on the object.  The only hope is to interpret the object as damage and route around it, which is usually a lot harder to accomplish in a bureaucracy than it is in a network topology.

Chris’ post makes it very clear that backwards compatibility will not be sacrificed, at least in quirks mode.  I wrote some thoughts along those lines in “Unbreaking the Web“, so I won’t repeat them here.  In summary: improving standards support will not break the Web.  It won’t even break the vast majority of sites, and any sites that do break will get sorted out in short order.  With a public beta, those problems could be identified and solved well before the browser went final.  Backwards compatibility is no longer a reasonable excuse for avoiding standards support.

And then there are the resource limitations.  It’s hard to think of anything Microsoft does as lacking in resources, but just as there are hungry people in America, there are starving programs within Microsoft.  I believe that, for some time now, the IE project has been living on a sub-subsistence diet.  It will probably be hard to attract people to help feed it.  The staffing requirements for regression testing alone would be daunting.  I don’t envy the IE managers their task—all the more so because no matter what they do, it won’t be enough for some people.  They’re going to get slammed.  Their only real choice is in trying to pick the things for which they’ll be slammed less.  If improving standards support in IE isn’t a corporate (or divisional) priority, they’re in for a world of hurt.  Which is why I sincerely hope they’re a priority.

But neither is that a complete excuse.  Working for a firm like Microsoft means taking on massive challenges, doing more than you thought possible with less than you should have available, pulling long hours and pounding your head against a wall in order to do the apparently impossible.  That’s part of the job description, and being there is pretty much a matter of choice.  I say this isn’t a complete excuse because, obviously, any given team can only accomplish so much.  It just isn’t a “get out of jail free” card.  If you’re going to tell us that standards are important and that support will be improved, it has to be a notable degree.  There has to be evidence that a lot of work went into adding a lot of useful things, and fixing a lot of old problems.  Again, this is because the promise was freely made, not because it’s what the Web Gods demand.

We all, and by that I mean “us Web designers and developers”, need to stay involved in this conversation.  It’s easy to post a few thoughts, assume that they’ve been ignored, and let things drift.  It’s also easy to assume that the entire IE team read your ideas and immediately agreed to every single last one of them because they’re so blindingly obviously critical, and then get completely enraged when they don’t show up in the final product.  I for one plan to keep an eye on this situation, and to think about ways I could help the IE team.

Because if I truly care about standards—and I do—then I owe the IE team as much as I’ve given to the teams working on Firefox, Safari, Opera, and all the rest.  We all do.  Whatever we would have done for the least of these our browsers in the name of advancing standards support, we owe the Explorer team no less.

Chris did ask for specific requests, so here are my top ten CSS requests in priority order:

1. Support all selectors—including CSS3 selectors, which I believe are stable enough to be implemented
2. Clean up positioning and add fixed positioning
3. Clean up floating/clearing
4. min-/max-width/height (got that?)
5. Fix problems with inline layout, especially the handling of top and bottom padding and margins on inline elements
6. Arbitrary-element hover
7. Focus styling for form elements
8. Better printing support, including better page-break control and page orientation
9. Support CSS table styling, including the table-centered display values
10. Support generated content

…plus the unranked but still very important “fix bugs! fix bugs! fix bugs!”.

Did I miss anything important, or under- or over-value anything, on that CSS list?  Let us know.

• Exploring Better Standards Support was published on Monday, March 21st, 2005.
• It was assigned to the Browsers and Standards categories.
• There have been forty-four replies.

Just a quick update to say that work on both S5 and Gatekeeper has come to a screeching, if temporary, halt.  On the last night of SXSW, my PowerBook started suffering frequent kernel panics with no apparent source—they happened after an hour of trouble-free operation, thirty seconds after logging in, ten seconds into the reboot process, etc., etc.  Occasionally, they’d happen in such a way that the computer could neither be shut down nor booted up with the power key.  I had to pop out the battery and start again.

And why didn’t I boot off the OS X install DVD that came with it in an attempt to fix the problem?  Because the DVD drive stopped working a few weeks ago.  For all I know, some short in its circuitry got bad enough to start panicking the kernel.  I hadn’t gotten it fixed because with all of the conferences and other work, I couldn’t afford to be without the machine for two days, let alone a week.  I’m just thankful that the system held out until after SXSW, when I have some time to spare.

So for the next several days, I’ll be working off of my trusty old G4/500, running OS 9.1.  Since it doesn’t have a local copy of Apache running (it being Classic OS and all), I can’t do live testing of Gatekeeper, so it’s on pause.  The laptop is also where I have Virtual PC running, so any further coding work on S5 will have to wait.

All this has me wondering, though—is it reasonable to run OS X on a G4/500 with 384MB of RAM and an ATI 8MB VRAM card?  I don’t have the hard drive space to do so right now, although I’m about to fix that.  I’m just wondering if it would be worth it to try to run OS X on this guy.  Anyone have any experiences along those lines?

• Laptopless was published on Saturday, March 19th, 2005.
• It was assigned to the Tech category.
• There have been twenty-nine replies.

So late this morning—that would make it the fifth and final day of the conference—I was doing what everyone else in the freakin’ conference was doing, and taking pictures of attendees while standing in the hallway.  As I held up the camera to get a high-angle shot of a group of friends, one of the badge checkers was suddenly leaning around me to look at something.  “You don’t have a press tag on the camera,” she said.

“No, I don’t; it’s a personal camera,” I told her.

“You still have get a tag,” she said.

“You’re kidding,” I said.  But she wasn’t.  I offered to put the camera away, but she wasn’t really satisfied with that.  “You’ll just pull it back out again, won’t you?”

She was right, of course, but that just didn’t seem like a problem to me.  She said, “All right, I’ll tell you what.  When you get a chance, go down to the press booth and get a tag.  All right?”

Now, most people would have agreed just to get her to go away and ignored the request.  But me, I’m a little different.  My sense of the totally absurd had been engaged, and I decided to do just as she had suggested and obtain a press tag.  Porter Glendinning, having heard the story and possessing a similar sense of the absurd, came along to pick up one of his own.

So yes, along with Porter, I am now duly authorized and my camera tagged with badge #331 to indicate that I am an official SXSW Videographer/Photographer, and as such am permitted to take pictures of people standing around in hallways talking.  Also, I have official authorization to take pictures of people taking pictures with their own personal non-tagged cameras.  That’s fun too.

• Pressed was published on Tuesday, March 15th, 2005.
• It was assigned to the Humor and Speaking categories.
• There have been fourteen replies.

So at the end of “Where Are the Women of Web Design”, someone made a comment to the effect that the conference seemed very sexist, and that there was too much sexual content—that the conference isn’t a boys’ club, so we should knock off the dirty jokes.  I asked a question of that person in response, but rather grievously misspoke in doing so.  Here’s what I actually said:

Are those same people offended by all the sexism in mainstream advertising?

What I meant to say was:

Are those same people offended by all the sex in mainstream advertising?

My sincere apologies for any confusion or misunderstanding my mistake may have caused.

• A Clarification was published on Tuesday, March 15th, 2005.
• It was assigned to the Speaking category.
• There have been no replies.

Just a quick link to my slide deck (when did that term gain currency, and why didn’t I get a memo?) for “Emergent Semantics“.  I was honestly surprised by the number of attendees, and there were some great questions and ideas from audience members.  Throughout the rest of the day, I had some great conversations with people about their own microformat ideas.  Another measure of the level of interest in microformats and the semantic web was attendance at Tantek’s “The Elements of Meaningful XHTML“, which was so heavy that after the seats and floor space in his room filled up, a knot of people stood outside the door, turning their heads slightly and standing on tiptoe in an attempt to hear what he was saying.

On a very related note, I’ve updated my blogroll with some new met values.  I’ve met a ton of people I’d never met before, and hope to meet still more—so if I do assemble a metroll, it’ll have to wait until I get home.

• Emergent Semantics was published on Monday, March 14th, 2005.
• It was assigned to the semantic web, Speaking, and XFN categories.
• There have been seven replies.

So a few weeks ago you might have noticed a bit of brouhaha that surrounded the new Terms and Conditions for Orbitz.com, set to go into effect today.  For anyone who missed or forgot about it, a refresher:  in Section 6, you find this wonderful bit of total cluelessness:

We reserve the right to require you to remove links to the Site, in our sole discretion.

Linking to any page of the Site other than to the homepage is strictly prohibited in the absence of a separate linking agreement with Orbitz.

So under their Terms and Conditions, it would be forbidden for me to point to a press release that announces Orbitz suing some former employees; or to their mangled-markup list of press releases; or, for that matter, to a medium-resolution JPEG of the Orbitz logo (which is rather ominously referred to in the Terms and Conditions as a “Mark of Orbitz”, which sounds like something that might have been mentioned in the first draft of the Book of Revelation).

It should be noted, however, that Section 4 of the old Terms and Conditions contains this amazing little gem:

You agree not to create a link from any Web site, including any site controlled by you, to our site.

Because nothing could be worse than increasing traffic to your site.

So yes, this post is in complete violation of the both the old and new Terms and Conditions for Orbitz.com.  And if I had ever been, or ever planned to be, a customer of Orbitz—thus agreeing to said Terms and Conditions—that might actually bother me for a second or two.  But, as they say:

If you do not accept all of these terms, then please do not use these websites.

Boys, you got yourselves a deal.

• Deep Linking, Shallow Thinking was published on Saturday, March 12th, 2005.
• It was assigned to the Web category.
• There have been fifteen replies.

Seems like half the Web is already at SXSW, and I’ll be there myself soon.  For those of you who love to build networks out of your social contacts at such events, Tantek’s recently shared the secret of metrolling, which is a great way to get into XFN if you haven’t already.  I’m already planning to add metrolling to my presentation on Sunday as an example of ground-up semantics.  (And I really wish I could be at the Semantic Web panel on Monday, but it’s at the same time as “Women of Web Design”… oh well.)

It’s interesting to see how interest in evolutionary semantics is itself evolving.  A recent example of this is David Berlind‘s ZDNet article “Will social networks give way to social protocols?“.  I firmly believe the answer to be “yes”, even though there are a lot of skeptics (some of them on conference review committees, as it turns out).  Berlind clearly understands the advantage of social protocols.

You might then wonder, “Then what’s up with you writing a whole document about how to set up XFN ‘me’ values in a bunch of services?”  At this stage of social networking, that sort of thing is necessary.  Without interim steps, the information sitting in those services will stay scattered and isolated.  Thanks to the me value, XFN offers a very simple, lightweight solution to the problem of identity consolidation.  As I recently wrote in a poster proposal:

As the Web has evolved, a number of personal-information sites have arisen.  Some of these sites exist to help create and increase professional contacts; others are intended to help bring together one’s friends or even find potential mates.  In every case, however, the user must create a new profile for each site.  Each of these profiles constitutes a small island of identity.  Over time, a person can end up with a fairly extensive identity archipelago.

Unfortunately, there has… been no easily created machine-discoverable way to bridge the gaps between the islands.  An author might publish a page containing links to all his profiles, but to an indexing engine, these links are no more or less notable than his links to the latest amusing Flash animations.

With XFN, it becomes very easy for an author to annotate a link to indicate that its destination is one of the islands in his identity archipelago.  This kind of link is referred to as a “me” link throughout the rest of this paper.  By creating symmetric links between the islands, the author can make it possible to consolidate the various pieces of his online identity into a more cohesive whole.

The same is true for a person’s links to other people.  By pulling them all into one place, or at least by marking them all with XFN and then using “me” links to tie together all the bits of his identity archipelago, real social networking start to emerge.

Now, one of the things that people like to carp about is the limits of XFN.  The first of the two most common complaints are that it’s impossible to capture the full range of human relationships in fifteen words.  We agree.  The other complaint is that we only picked “positive” terms; that is, we have friend but not enemy.  We did that on purpose, as we explained; besides, it’s called XHTML Friends Network, which should be kind of a clue.  Apparently this choice makes us arrogant, or clueless, or some combination thereof.  Maybe that’s so.  What I find interesting is that the people who complain that we didn’t include their preferred relationship terms never do anything about it.  They just complain.  What’s so interesting to me is that the guys who decided to focus on the positive went out and did something; those who want to mix in the negative seem to have nothing to offer except complaints.  That says something, I think.

Because XFN is not, nor was it ever meant or represented to be, the final word on social protocols.  We fully expect it to either be improved, or else superseded.  Suppose one of the critics actually did something to address his concerns, and published an “XHTML Relationships Network”.  This could include all the XFN values, plus their negative counterparts, plus whatever else is thought to be useful by the author(s) of this new XRN.  At that point, you have competing protocols.  The more useful one will win.  The loser will be eventually discarded, although some of its memetic genes may live on.  This isn’t a problem: it’s a strength.

It’s also in many ways the entire point of XHTML Meta Data Profiles.  See a need to fill?  Fill it!  At the end of his column, Berlind says in an update:

Looking at the XFN profile, it suddenly dawned on me that perhaps there should be an XBN/XB2BN that’s strictly for the relationships between businesspeople/businesses. Thoughts?

Here are my thoughts: go for it!  He’s almost certainly right that there’s utility in such a protocol.  All it takes now is for someone to look at the problem and write up an XMDP-based protocol that solves the problem.  The microformat approach makes this so simple, pretty much anyone could do it.  What’s needed is someone who actually will do it.

At some point down the road, it’s possible that the protocols that define personal and professional relationships would merge.  Again, that’s completely in keeping with the vision we have.  The whole point of this kind of ad-hoc semantic enrichment is that it’s evolutionary.  New players will enter the field, and will either prosper or wither.  Anyone can join in.  There is no star chamber of lofty experts to say whether your idea passes some sort of ideological muster.  It’s a great big landscape, and there a million conceptual niches to be filled.

As those niches are filled, the ways in which different protocols interact can trigger truly astounding results… but for thoughts on that aspect of the whole subject, you’ll have to come see my talk.

• Social Protocols was published on Friday, March 11th, 2005.
• It was assigned to the semantic web and XFN categories.
• There have been five replies.