Posts in the Tech Category

Over at UIE‘s Brain Sparks, the brilliant and lovely Christine Perfetti talked recently about the 7-11 Milk test, and how web sites fail this test 70% of the time.

I’m glad to see that they intend to do more research on the topic, because I think there’s a lot more to the story than just buying milk, and I hope that’s factored into the future research.  Buying on web sites, to me, is not really a 7-11 milk purchase.  It’s more like trying to buy a wood screw for a specific purpose at Home Depot when I’m used to buying them at a corner market.

See, 7-11’s are all pretty much the same.  If you’ve been in one, you know where to find the milk.  Even if the one you’re in is laid out differently than you expect, the conventions are all pretty much the same.  Even if you’ve never been in one before, it won’t take long to get the lay of the land and find the milk.

But walk into a Home Depot and you’re immediately overwhelmed.  I want to find this one thing that’s so tiny compared to what’s in front of me!  There’s an immediate low-level feeling of futility.  Furthermore, any expectations I might have from my local market experience are useless, or even counterproductive.  And even better is when I ask for help and get sent to the wrong place, as has happened to me many a time in Home Depot.

Once I do find the wood screws, then I’m presented with a wide range of choices, and I have to determine which one is best.  Odds are that there won’t be anyone there able to help me make a decision, either; I’m on my own to try to figure out which is the best wood screw for my needs.  The feeling of futility returns.  If I’m not particularly invested in buying this wood screw, I might just give up at this point: faced with too many choices, most of which are going to be wrong, I might decide to make no choice at all.

Furthermore, it’s much easier to bail out of the buying process on a web site.  If I’ve gone to the time and effort of finding and visiting a Home Depot, I’ve invested something in achieving an outcome.  With a web site, I can just come back later.

You can probably draw analogies between the experience I just described and shopping on a web site: the overwhelming home page, the search to find something resembling I want, the misleading cues, the array of choices once I get there.  If web sites were as consistent as 7-11 stores, and online purchases were as simple as “I need milk”, then yes, a 70% failure rate would be abominable—almost unimaginable.  Neither is the case, though.

Mind you, this is not to suggest we should shrug our shoulders and accept this state of affairs.  I think that UIE has an opportunity here to identify the chokepoints (and I use that word on purpose) in the shopping process.  Done correctly, what they find could be applicable in physical space as well as on web sites.

• Milk vs. Wood Screws was published on Monday, September 26th, 2005.
• It was assigned to the Web category.
• There have been eleven replies.

With the Redesign Watch back up and running, the most recent entry is Slashdot, the venerable geek portal so infamous for its ability to kill web servers with a single link that the site’s name is a verb meaning “to bring a server grinding to a halt”.

I was asked in a comment:

What’s your feeling on slashdot being HTML 4.01 (and slightly failing validation) VS XHTML 1.0?

My feeling is good.  Why?  Let’s take the second part first.

When it comes to HTML versus XHTML, I just do not care.  Sure, sure, people will tell you that XHTML is XML so it’s more transformable or something.  That’s a very good argument when the XHTML is well-formed and valid.  It’s also a very good argument for using HTML when it’s well-formed and valid.  Conversely, neither HTML nor XHTML is easily transformed when ill-formed and invalid.  This is an experiential point of view, too: I’ve written XSLT (which is itself so tortuous and ugly that it almost by definition cannot be called well-formed) to transform both HTML and XHTML, and the effort is pretty much the same each way—assuming well-formed, valid markup.

So as far as I’m concerned, there’s really no major practical difference between HTML and XHTML.  There are plenty of minor practical differences, like having to throw trailing slashes on all your empty elements in XHTML and needing some namespace information.  Some people will tell you the whole MIME-type thing is a major practical concern, but I’m just not that much of a purist.  Take that for whatever it’s worth.

I mean, imagine a world where Slashdot had used XHTML instead of HTML, and was failing validation.  How would that be any better or worse than things are now?

Okay, so that’s the second part.  The first part, the failure to validate, is not something I can get too terribly upset about.  Slashdot, as a site that accepts ads, is going to get horrible markup shoved into its pages.  That’s just the way it is.  If you want major sites to be perfectly valid, then in all honesty advertisers are the place to start.  So they’re already operating with a major handicap there.

Even if we were to ride our high horses along a very hard line and say that ads are just no excuse, I’d be hard-pressed to fault the job they’ve done.  For example, I ran a check on the Slashdot home page.  Out of 1,262 lines of code, there were exactly four validation errors, and that’s using HTML 4.01 Strict—you’ll note they bypassed Transitional, which only increases my respect.  Three of the errors revolved around an image in a noscript element, and the last was due to the presence of a language attribute on a script element—something they can fix in fifteen seconds, once it gets to the top of the to-do list.

You know what?  I’d be ecstatic to have that low a failure rate when launching the markover of an incredibly complex site like Slashdot.  Think about all the content they have to manage, stitch together, and offer up.  Four errors out of all that dynamically assembled markup?  I say somebody should organize them a parade for doing such a good job, and showing that any site can make use of and benefit from standards.

I’m also really looking forward to the restyling of Slashdot through user-created style sheets, and the Greasemonkey enhancements built on top of this new structure.  If there’s a site whose readers are inherently primed to script the holy bejeezus out of it, that would be the one.

Would I be happier if they’d managed to achieve total validation?  Of course.  In the meantime, though, I’m going to be very nearly as happy for what they’ve accomplished, and also for the simple fact of it being another major site that’s taken a big step forward.  Progress is always a cause for celebration in my world.

• Slashdot’s Validity was published on Sunday, September 25th, 2005.
• It was assigned to the (X)HTML, Redesign, and Standards categories.
• There have been eighteen replies.

Those of you in the Boston area might be interested in a talk I’m giving at the Macromedia Boston User Group meeting on Wednesday, 12 October 2005:

From Comp To Code: Pulling A List Apart Together

You’re handed a graphic comp file and told to make it into a living, breathing web page.  Now what?  How do you figure out what approach to take, which techniques to use, and what kinds of markup will go into the final page?  Eric gives us a fast-paced tour of his decision-making process as he tackled the new design for A List Apart– how he analyzed the requirements, the questions he had to ask, the trade-offs he made, and the reasons behind his decisions.

If you’re interested, then please join us from 7:00pm – 9:00pm in E51-151 (Tang Center) on the MIT campus.  According to the meeting organizer, arriving early is recommended.

If you do decide to drop by, I’m sorry to say that you won’t be the first to hear this presentation: that honor, if we can call it that, will go to the attendees of Web Essentials 05.  On the other hand, you’ll be getting a more detailed version of the talk, since at WE05 I only have 45 minutes.

On the third hand, could it be that both groups will be getting a sneak preview of just one of the topics to be discussed as part of An Event Apart Philadelphia?

Maybe.

• MMBUG Talk was published on Saturday, September 24th, 2005.
• It was assigned to the Redesign and Speaking categories.
• There have been seven replies.

After an extended hiatus, the Redesign Watch is back.  I’m celebrating its return with eight new entries, including the very recently announced HTML+CSS reworking of Slashdot.  I wonder how their work compares to the third-party job that Daniel Frommelt did a couple of years ago.

Since only the most recent five redesigns are shown on the home page, you’ll have to dig into the archive if you want to see all the new stuff—from Everything Tori on forward—or you could just subscribe to the RSS 2.0 feed.  You can find it and other meyerweb feeds on the Feeds page.  (Go figure!)

• Back On Watch was published on Thursday, September 22nd, 2005.
• It was assigned to the CSS and Redesign categories.
• There have been eleven replies.

Just a reminder to all of you in the Chicago, IL area that I’ll be talking about XHTML, CSS, and that sort of thing on Thursday, 4 3 November 2005.  I’ll be talking all day long, or close to it, as I delve into details, rebuild a design or two, and answer questions from the attendees.  If you’re interested, check out the Carson Workshops site for more information on this and other workshops.

If you’re in Philadelphia, of course, you’ll want to check out An Event Apart, where Mr. Zeldman and I will trade off talking all day.  Seats have been selling pretty briskly, so if you’re interested, you might want to register soon.

I’d encourage all you Strayans to register for WE05, except it’s completely sold out.  The same is very nearly true of UI10, from what I’m told.  Things are definitely picking up on the events circuit!

Which is a good thing for me… after all, how else am I going to reach Gold Elite status?  (I wonder if I get an energy sword for that.)

• Speaking Out was published on Wednesday, September 21st, 2005.
• It was assigned to the (X)HTML, CSS, Speaking, and Standards categories.
• There have been five replies.

You asked for it, you begged for it, you demanded it: A List Apart is sporting a working print style sheet for the articles.  Want to know more about it?  Read “ALA’s New Print Styles“, my new article over at ALA.

Believe it or not, that’s only my second ALA article ever, and the first one was the classic “Going To Print“.  Maybe one of these days I should write an ALA article that doesn’t involve ink on dead trees.

Of course, if I stick to the interval established by my first two ALA articles, the next one won’t appear until 2008 early 2009… so I guess I have some time to think about it.

• ALA’s New Print Styles was published on Tuesday, September 20th, 2005.
• It was assigned to the CSS and Writing categories.
• There have been four replies.

Okay, ALA fans, we’ve deployed a print style sheet on the articles.  I don’t know if I could call it done, but it’s a big step.  Why wasn’t it online sooner?  Say it with me: “browser bugs”.  Just when the convergence of screen CSS handling had me feeling good, I had to go and mess with print styling.  Good feeling’s gone.

At the moment, the print styles seem to work quite well in modern browsers except for Firefox 1.0.6 (which is what I have in OS X).  There, when I call up a print preview, any article is fine until page 4.  Then things go off the rails in short order.  Content disappears, margins go wild, all kinds of fun stuff.  Here, try previewing or printing Nick Usborne’s “Helping Your Visitors: a State of Mind.  Now try it with J. David Eisenberg’s “Validating a Custom DTD” or (somewhat ironically) Ross Howard’s “High-Resolution Image Printing“.  Pages 1-3 are fine for me, but after that, no good.  When you get a nice long article like Joe Clark’s “Facts and Opinion About PDF Accessibility” or (completely ironically) my own “Going To Print“, you’re just asking for trouble.

I tried searching Bugzilla for some report, but my skills over there are not what once they were.  So while I got a bunch of results, I don’t know if any of them described this problem.  Could some kind soul let me know if there is a report on this sort of thing already?  If not, I can submit the report.  I just don’t want to add yet another DUPLICATE to the database.

And hey, if you can work out a solution to the problem, I have a factory-fresh ALA T-shirt all ready to send out—you even get to choose which one you want.  Let me know.

Update: Dan Wilkinson is our winnah!

• When Printing Maims was published on Wednesday, September 14th, 2005.
• It was assigned to the Browsers and CSS categories.
• There have been seventeen replies.

A little while back, David Poteet of New City Media conducted an interview with me, and the much-edited version is not only a part of today’s UIEtips newsletter, but also published as a full article on the UIE web site.  In it, I lay out my case for why standards-oriented design is a good thing from a non-technical purity-neutral point of view, and use eBay as my Exhibit A for a site that could reap big returns from moving toward using standards.  Ethan has already called the article a “great read”, further cementing his reputation as the whacked-out loon of the standards world.

I have to be honest: reading the full transcription of the interview was a deeply shocking and humbling experience.  In the past, when reading transcripts of news interviews and commentary shows, I’ve winced and clucked over the mangled syntax of the people being transcribed.  False starts, weird shifts, strange commas, unfinished sentences, mind-number repetition, long rambling assaults on syntax and coherence—what was wrong with these people?  Are these the best minds our society can produce?  Can none of them do so much as utter a sentence with a clear point and progression?  How many “you know”s does one person really need?

Then I read the transcription of me, and was utterly horrified.  I sounded exactly like everyone else!  Worse, at times.  Here’s but one example, from a portion of the interview that didn’t get used in the edited version.  (Note that this was conducted before I moved to my current host; so far as I know I’m no longer in danger of hitting any caps.)

Yeah, you’re talking about actually, you know, reducing the bandwidth bill and saving money, in that sense.  I mean, for most people, for my site, MeyerWeb, I’m actually getting close to, I’m having some bandwidth, I’m getting close to hitting a bandwidth ceiling with my current provider —

And then, not five seconds later:

It’s less of an issue because I’m paying more, 30, 40, 50, whatever number of dollars per month and as long as I don’t put up The Matrix Reloaded for people to download and, you know, they use several terabytes worth of data in a month, you know, that’s what I pay.  I don’t have to pay extra bandwidth.  That gets rolled into the cost.

The horror.  The horror!

Thankfully, the published version of the interview makes me sound a good deal less like an epileptic chimp—so you might want to check it out, if you have a few spare minutes.

You know, a lot of people have told me I write like I speak.  Apparently, they were all being very, very kind to me.

• Skewered By a Transcript was published on Monday, September 12th, 2005.
• It was assigned to the Interviews and Standards categories.
• There have been fifteen replies.