Posts in the Tech Category

In response to yesterday’s musings, a correspondent wrote in to say:

…a local Swiss government [has] switched their site (now 95%+) to structural HTML and CSS and freed the site from font-tags and framesets….  In the meantime, I have found that beginning at January 1st, 2004, a new law will be in force that demands from all official Swiss sites that they be accessible.  So to speak, Switzerland has now [its] own “Section 508”.

I noticed some layout problems in IE5/Mac, but otherwise the site looks pretty good.  The important point is this: there are people working in government sectors who care about accessibility and forward-thinking design.  What we need now is a channel to get them in touch with each other and swap tips on how to advance the cause.  Who wants to set it up?  (I’d do it myself except I already ride herd over a high-volume mailing list, and that’s plenty.)  If someone does create a venue for government Webmasters who are pasasionate about using standards, and is willing to devote the time and energy to making sure that venue is a good one, please tell me where it is via e-mail and I’ll share the news here.

Another reader wrote to say that in the wake of a recent redesign:

…we’ve gotten quite a few letters from people who work for various federal government agencies (especially the DOJ) saying they aren’t even allowed to use any other browser besides Netscape 4.

I can’t say this really surprises me a great deal, having talked to folks at a U.S. government research facility who only recently managed, after much internal argument, to convince their IT staff that running Mozilla instead of NN4.x was an acceptable course of action.  I suspect that a major reason the government sticks with NN4.x is its relative level of security; it may not be bulletproof, but it’s a darned sight more secure than some other browsers I could name.  Then again, this is the same government that uses Windows more or less universally, so I’m not sure how secure they really are.  (Not much.)

Then there was a followup message from my unnamed government source, who said in part:

…none of the other on-staff developers really want to learn new methods, I think, and therefore they’re going to stonewall any endeavor that’s going to require them to take some classes (or, potentially, cost them their jobs, I suppose).

That’s sad, but it’s also not unique to the Web field; you get reactionary behavior of that kind in just about any work situation.  I wonder, though, if perhaps it’s more entrenched in the government sector because job losses are so rare.  Or are they?  I always thought federal jobs, at least, were massively protected and rarely did anyone ever get fired, but I might have swallowed some Reagan-era Kool-Aid.  Someone let me know if I’m wrong.  Too many things to learn, not enough brain tissue…

• Federation was published on Wednesday, July 30th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Standards category.
• There have been no replies.

Anyone who’s been reading this site for more than a year might remember my rantings last year when the Section 508 Web site went online and proclaimed it worked best in IE5+ for Windows.  The other day, I got e-mail from another developer working for the U.S. House of Representatives, who had some disheartening information to share, and I think it’s worth talking about.  I’m going to quote my source in some detail, but as you might expect, this will be an “unnamed government source.”  I’m going to use the pronoun “he” because it’s technically gender-neutral English, and I don’t feel like saying “he or she” every time I need to use a pronoun.

The e-mail was prompted by this person finding and reading last year’s rants.  Thus, after a short introduction, he said:

…as far as the 508 guidelines go, we use them, but nobody seems to actually be concerned with accessibility. It’s just making sure the InFocus software approves you according to the guidelines, and plod onwards. Nobody cares about the usefulness or lack thereof of the features they’re putting in, nothing is planned out, and the barest minimum to meet the guidelines is all that you’ll get from most developers.

This, of course, is a problem of management: it would seem nobody in this particular shop has made forward thinking a priority.  Rather than plan for the future, they’re stuck in the past.  (Some would say this is unsurprising in a government institution, but never mind that now.)  You might think a quick intravenous application of Designing With Web Standards might be just what the doctor ordered.  However, it turns out there’s a reason the project managers don’t care:

Of course, this is infinitely more preferable to the attitude from the actual Congressmen; I’ve actually had aides ask me if the site has to include accessibility features.

And there’s the problem.  The clients are not only aware of accessibility, but borderline hostile to it.  How do you overcome that kind of hurdle?  We can say, “It’s your job to educate the client,” but at a certain point you have to stop singing to the pigs.

I seem to recall that, some time back, AOL was sued for being inaccessible, and lost.  Will it take a similar suit to bring government sites into the 21st century?  I sincerely hope not; if there’s one thing I think America could do with less of, it’s lawsuits.  (No offense intended to the legally inclined folks I know.)

In such a situation, the best approach to improvement would likely be a back-stage effort by the coders themselves.  They can just do the right thing and not bother their clients with the details of how things get done, right?  Maybe not:

…just about everybody is still coding with FONT soup. This is especially frustrating when people ask me for help to do something which would be trivial if they knew a modicum of CSS, but which is onerous at best given whatever HTML hack they’re using. I’ve broached using more CSS with people, and they all just mutter something about Netscape 4 and stick their heads back in the sand.

At this stage, I’m not sure what can be done for Our Hero, except maybe expressing some compassion and pity.

This is the kind of situation that I think is more common than many of us realize, and it’s a serious impediment to the forward motion of the Web.  The enormous amount of wasted bandwidth and time such coding practices incur would, if translated into dollars, very likely cover a significant chunk of the U.S. national debt.  There are too many Web authors stuck in 1999, and not enough who are looking forward to 2005 and beyond.  What words, what memes would penetrate their shells and point them in the right direction?

This is a deep and serious challenge for groups like the W3C and the WSP, not to mention people like me, who just want things to be better than they’ve been in the past.  Last night I met a guy who expressed incredulity that Netscape had hired me, back in May of 2001, to tell people that standards were a good thing.  “What was your title, Manager In Charge of Repeating the Painfully Obvious?” he asked, laughing.  If only that had been so; in an ideal world, there would have been no need for Netscape to hire me in the first place.  What seems so obvious to so many of us seems to be utterly unknown to so many more—or, perhaps worse, known but disregarded.

What will it take to turn things around?  More corporate XHTML+CSS designs?  A pronouncement from one of those consulting firms who get quoted by the media all the time, but nobody really knows what else they do besides issue semi-useless browser demographic data and charge huge consulting fees?  Another grass-roots campaign like the original WaSP?  Blackmail?

I wish I knew.  This is yet another uphill battle against overwhelming odds, but a battle so much worth fighting that I can’t walk away from it.  I think this is my third such battle in the Web space alone.  Sometimes I wonder how many battles I have in me.  I also wonder why I keep finding new battles to fight.

• One Foot In the Past… was published on Tuesday, July 29th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Standards category.
• There have been no replies.

Ever worry about the security holes in your graphics and audio technology?  Yep, you guessed it, there’s a critical flaw in DirectX (specifically how it handles MIDI files) that will—say it with me, now—let an attacker take control of your Windows machine.  Go, read the security bulletin and get the patch.  Again.  For the second time in nine days.

To those who are wondering when meyerweb became the Windows Security Monitor: rest assured, I’m only passing along the flaws that Microsoft deems “critical.”  The lesser severity levels (like “important”) don’t get mentioned, because otherwise I suspect I wouldn’t have room to talk about anything else.  If you’re running Windows, you really should go sign up to get security bulletins sent to you.  It may increase your daily e-mail traffic, but at least you’ll be informed.

Critical security flaws in the multimedia APIs?  Picture me shaking my head in weary, resigned disbelief here.  The amazing part to me is that people actually choose to buy machines using this technology—and I seem to be using that term very loosely.  The real irony is that I may be buying such a machine myself, in the not too distant future.  Quite possibly next Sunday, A.D.

• Broken Windows was published on Sunday, July 27th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Tech category.
• There have been no replies.

Adam Kalsey shares a method for rounding corners that has minimal HTML impact.  I explored the same basic concept (along with several others) in Project 10 of Eric Meyer on CSS, although in my case I used it to provide rounded corners between two differently-sized sections of a document; sort of the visual inverse of what Adam demonstrates, but using the same fundamental techniques.

It’s always interesting to see ideas emerge in different places, mutate, evolve, advance, and generally act like they have a life of their own.  Did somebody say “meme?”

The thing is, of course, that we’d be better off not having to hack in bits of HTML just to get these effects.  CSS3 offers proposals for corner-rounding properties, and that’s a good step forward.  One can also use XBL to dynamically insert the needed bits and style them, without having to clutter up the source document.  Here’s my XBL-based recreation of Adam’s demonstration.  Now here’s a variant employing more complex corner and border effects.  And then there’s blockquote styling with great big background quotation marks and rounding of some corners.

The above examples will only work fully in Gecko-based browsers (as of today, anyway), but what’s interesting to note is that they don’t look bad in non-Gecko browsers.  Take the blockquote example, for one.  In a Gecko browser, you get all the eye candy.  In a non-Gecko browser you get a visually distinct blockquote with less eye candy.  It still looks pretty good, or at least not bad; it could probably use some padding, but these aren’t polished examples.  The document structure is clean, and semantically appropriate.  What’s not to like?  This seems like another aspect of the concept of graceful flexibility—or, if you prefer, progressive enhancement—and one worth further investigation.

• Rounding A Corner was published on Friday, July 25th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the CSS category.
• There have been no replies.

I don’t think I mentioned this before, but there’s an aural-CSS supporter besides Emacspeak out there.  It’s called Fonix SpeakThis, and while its aural CSS support is pretty limited, it does exist.  (A tip of the hat to The Literary Moose, by the way, for passing along the information.)  I find the existence of another aural-CSS browser, however limited, to be interesting in light of the aural style sheets appendix of CSS2.1, which says in part:

We expect that in a future level of CSS there will be new properties and values defined for speech output. Therefore CSS 2.1 reserves the ‘speech’ media type… but does not yet define which properties do or do not apply to it.  The properties in this appendix apply to a media type ‘aural’, that was introduced in CSS2. The type ‘aural’ is now deprecated.

In other words, aural is a dead end, and speech will be used in the future.  At some point.  Really.

Fans of complexspiral‘s visual groove might also appreciate Atlantis, which looks a whole lot more professional.  As is to be expected.

Raffi Krikorian raises some long-term problems arising from URL-shortening services that are worth pondering.  It isn’t the case that absolutely everything has to be preserved for all time, but how many links would suddenly break if a popular shortening service disappeared?  I already don’t like such services because they hide the ultimate destination, which robs me of an important piece of information in my quest to decide whether or not I should follow a given link.  How many times have you seen a post that says, basically, “This is interesting!” followed by a shortened link?  It could be a political story from the BBC, a collection of Battlestar: Galactica fan fiction, the official site of the Malaysian legislature, or an outrageously disgusting fringe-porn site.  How can you tell?  By following the link.  It’s like Web roulette.  Place your bets!

I guess it’s also true that shortening services irk me because they should be utterly unnecessary.  In the first place, there’s almost no excuse for URLs to be so long that they need some kind of shortening service.  Okay, maybe mapping programs have some excuse, but that’s about it.  The kind of enormous cryptic URLs that most database-driven sites generate is just sloppy and wrong.  In the second place, as for putting URLs in e-mail and newsposts, you can contain the URL in angle brackets—<http://like.this/>—and any client worth running will understand that the whole string is a single URL, and ignore any line-wrapping that might occur within the brackets.  If your program can’t handle that, especially if it tries to interpret the bracketed text as an HTML tag, then it’s time to get another one.

Incidentally, the title of today’s entry is a hand-shortened form of “Speech, Shells, and Shortening.”  Which is better?  Granted, it’s kind of cool having an entry title that sounds like a door on Star Trek, but it isn’t what I’d call particularly useful for determining the contents of the entry before you actually read it.  See what I mean?

• SpShSh was published on Wednesday, July 23rd, 2003.
• It was assigned to the CSS and Tech categories.
• There have been no replies.

Apparently I’m a desirable emigrant.  In response to yesterday’s comment-in-passing that Kat and I had been kicking around the idea of moving to another country, I’ve had three people write encouraging me to emigrate to Canada, and one other person recommend the United Kingdom.  The Canada people actually make a pretty good case, since apparently there’s a plan afoot for Canada to make the Turks and Caicos Islands their eleventh province.  That sounds pretty sweet, even if I would have to spend the whole year encased in zinc oxide.

Personally, I’ve always liked Toronto as a city.  Their weather isn’t significantly different than what we experience here in Cleveland, plus I know a number of very cool folks who already live there.  I can’t comment on places in the UK, since I’ve never actually been there (although I hope to fix that within the next year or so).  For the record, the country we had in mind was Norway.  I also gave some thought to the Bahamas, but then we’re back to the prospect of me resembling a lobster on a semi-continual basis.

There’ve been a whole lot of XHTML-and-CSS redesigns announced in the past ten days, and I’ve been remiss in pointing them out.  Here’s a list of the ones I noticed: The Open Championship, Quark, Message Digital Design Ltd., Phish.com, Lawrence, Kansas Weather, Adaptive Path, and Inc.com.  There were some others, I think, but the URLs seem to have escaped me.

On that last one, Dan talks a bit about the particulars of the Inc. redesign, and Doug points out that the markup size reduction for Inc.com’s redesign was just about the same as that for the redesigns of Adaptive Path and Wired News.  I’ll add that it’s very close to the markup size reduction seen when ESPN.com redesigned.  So yes, Doug’s absolutely right: there’s a trend here.  Old-school table-and-spacer designs can be visually recreated using lean, structural markup and CSS, and the process cuts page size by about half.  Some sites will see less savings, but some will see more.  As an example, my off-the-cuff guess (having peeked at the source of a typical page) is that eBay could drop its page weight by 66% or so.  They could probably reduce their annual outgoing bandwidth by several petabytes.  Tell you what, eBay: I’ll show you how to do it and do it right, and you can pay me five percent of your savings over the next five years.  Deal?

• Moving and Shaping was published on Friday, July 18th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the CSS and Personal categories.
• There have been no replies.

If you’re feeling safe (in a computing sense) you might want to rethink that view.  I just came across a USA Today article that leads off with:

Microsoft acknowledged a critical vulnerability Wednesday in nearly all versions of its flagship Windows operating system software, the first such design flaw to affect its latest Windows Server 2003 software.  Microsoft said the vulnerability could allow hackers to seize control of a victim’s Windows computer over the Internet, stealing data, deleting files or eavesdropping on e-mails.

Yes, there’s a patch, so if you’re using Windows, go get it before crackers reverse-engineer the patch to figure out the flaw and start attacking systems.  As it turns out, Windows ME is immune to the problem, so those folks are safe, at least in this case.  Oh, and there have been two more security bulletins and patches published since the one in question, which was released yesterday.

Hardly a week goes by any more that I don’t see one of these and feel really, really glad that all my important personal data—like my books and a current mirror of this Web site—is on a Macintosh.  One running the Classic OS, I might add, so it’s even less vulnerable than OS X machines, which are pretty darned safe.  Plus the system crashes a whole lot less often than Microsoft releases Windows security patches, and when it does crash it’s usually because of Microsoft Word.

Anyway, back to the article I was reading.  Near the end of the piece, the author adds a really chilling note:

The announcement came one day after the Department of Homeland Security announced that it awarded a five-year, $90-million contract for Microsoft to supply all its most important desktop and server software for about 140,000 computers inside the new federal agency.

Just the other day, Kat and I were kicking around the idea of moving to another country as sort of a grand adventure and interesting career move for us both.  Now the idea almost seems like a reasonable personal safety measure.

• Open Door Policy was published on Thursday, July 17th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Tech category.
• There have been no replies.

There has been more detailed information written about yesterday’s events, so it’s worth reading if you still care.  Personally, I thought Dave Shea’s summary was quite amusing.

I indicated yesterday that DevEdge would likely not be updated.  That’s because the standards evangelism team has been disbanded.  Two team members were among those let go, and the rest of us went to different places within AOL.  I’m really not sure what made the difference between those who were axed and those who were not. 

As much as I’m unhappy that we’ve come to this pass, I don’t regret for one second having taken the position of Standards Evangelist.  While it lasted, Netscape funded close to ten full-time and part-time positions whose job was to promote standards, not proprietary technology, and to spread that message as far and wide as possible.  They may well have been doing it for selfish reasons, but that hardly matters.  We were able to inform, educate, and proactively help a lot of sites get better cross-browser behavior by using standards.  In our own way, we helped make things better, and we made a difference.

So here’s to Bob Clary, Marcio Galli, Katsuhiko Momoi, Chris Nalls, Tristan Nitot, Arun Ranganathan, Doron Rosenberg, and Susie Wyshak.  We fought the good fight and created a lot of great material, including information about the redesign of DevEdge itself.

Moving forward, I have to decide what I will do: accept the position into which I was reassigned, turn down the reassignment and look for another position within AOL, or decide to take the severance package and leave AOL altogether.  This isn’t exactly an easy call, partly due to the economy, but also because the importance of standards to AOL is not, at present, clear to me.  Perhaps the message has sunk in and there will be a place for someone like me, and perhaps not.  I hope to find out which over the next week or so.  No matter what, I face some tough choices, but at least I have choices.  I can’t say the same about 50 former co-workers.

Meanwhile, DMX Zone just this morning (my time) published an interview with me, so those interested in such things can click away.  Love that Dark Jedi groove thang!  [insert lightsaber sound effects here]

• Standing At a Crossroads was published on Wednesday, July 16th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Browsers, Interviews, and Work categories.
• There have been no replies.