Posts in the Web Category

Right in the middle of AEA Atlanta — which was awesome, I really must say — there were two announcements that stand to invalidate (or at least greatly alter) portions of the talk I delivered.  One, which I believe came out as I was on stage, was the publication of the latest draft of the CSS3 Positioned Layout Module.  We’ll see if it triggers change or not; I haven’t read it yet.

The other was the publication of the minutes of the CSS Working Group meeting in Paris, where it was revealed that several vendors are about to support the -webkit- vendor prefix in their own very non-WebKit browsers.  Thus, to pick but a single random example, Firefox would throw a drop shadow on a heading whose entire author CSS is h1 {-webkit-box-shadow: 2px 5px 3px gray;}.

As an author, it sounds good as long as you haven’t really thought about it very hard, or if perhaps you have a very weak sense of the history of web standards and browser development.  It fits right in with the recurring question, “Why are we screwing around with prefixes when vendors should just implement properties completely correctly, or not at all?”  Those idealized end-states always sound great, but years of evidence (and reams upon reams of bug-charting material) indicate it’s an unrealistic approach.

As a vendor, it may be the least bad choice available in an ever-competitive marketplace.  After all, if there were a few million sites that you could render as intended if only the authors used your prefix instead of just one, which would you rather: embark on a protracted, massive awareness campaign that would probably be contradicted to death by people with their own axes to grind; or just support the damn prefix and move on with life?

The practical upshot is that browsers “supporting alien CSS vendor prefixes”, as Craig Grannell put it, seriously cripples the whole concept of vendor prefixes.  It may well reduce them to outright pointlessness.  I am on record as being a fan of vendor prefixes, and furthermore as someone who advocated for the formalization of prefixing as a part of the specification-approval process.  Of course I still think I had good ideas, but those ideas are currently being sliced to death on the shoals of reality.  Fingers can point all they like, but in the end what matters is what happened, not what should have happened if only we’d been a little smarter, a little more angelic, whatever.

I’ve seen a proposal that vendors agree to only support other prefixes in cases where they are un-prefixing their own support.  To continue the previous example, that would mean that when Firefox starts supporting the bare box-shadow, they will also support -webkit-box-shadow (and, one presumes, -ms-box-shadow and -o-box-shadow and so on).  That would mitigate the worst of the damage, and it’s probably worth trying.  It could well buy us a few years.

Developers are also trying to help repair the damage before it’s too late.  Christian Heilmann has launched an effort to get GitHub-based projects updated to stop being WebKit-only, and Aarron Gustafson has published a UNIX command to find all your CSS files containing webkit along with a call to update anything that’s not cross-browser friendly.  Others are making similar calls and recommendations.  You could use PrefixFree as a quick stopgap while going through the effort of doing manual updates.  You could make sure your CSS pre-processor, if that’s how you swing, is set up to do auto-prefixing.

Non-WebKit vendors are in a corner, and we helped put them there.  If the proposed prefix change is going to be forestalled, we have to get them out.  Doing that will take a lot of time and effort and awareness and, above all, widespread interest in doing the right thing.

Thus my fairly deep pessimism.  I’d love to be proven wrong, but I have to assume the vendors will push ahead with this regardless.  It’s what we did at Netscape ten years ago, and almost certainly would have done despite any outcry.  I don’t mean to denigrate or undermine any of the efforts I mentioned before — they’re absolutely worth doing even if every non-WebKit browser starts supporting -webkit- properties next week.  If nothing else, it will serve as evidence of your commitment to professional craftsmanship.  The real question is: how many of your fellow developers come close to that level of commitment?

And I identify that as the real question because it’s the question vendors are asking — must ask — themselves, and the answer serves as the compass for their course.

• Unfixed was published on Thursday, February 9th, 2012.
• It was assigned to the Browsers, CSS, Standards, W3C, and Web categories.
• There have been twenty-one replies.

After the blackout on Wednesday, it seems that the political tides are shifting against SOPA and the PROTECT IP Act — as of this writing, there are now more members of Congress in opposition to the bills than in favor.  That’s good news.

I wil reiterate something I said on Twitter, though:  the members of tech community, particularly those who are intimately familiar with the basic protocols of the Internet, need to keep working on ways to counteract SOPA/PIPA.  What form that would take, I’m not sure.  Maybe a truly distributed DNS system, one that can’t be selectively filtered by any one government or other entity.  I’m not an expert in the area, so I don’t actually know if that’s feasible.  There’s probably a much more clever solution, or better still suite of solutions.

The point is, SOPA and PIPA may soon go down to defeat, but they will return in another form.  There is too much money in the hands of those who first drafted these bills, and they’re willing to give a fair chunk of that money to those who introduced the bills in Congress.  Never mistake winning a battle with winning the war.  As someone else observed on Twitter (and I wish I could find their tweet now), the Internet community fought hard against the DMCA, and it’s been US law for more than a decade.

By all means, take a moment to applaud the widespread and effective community effort to oppose and (hopefully) defeat bad legislation.  When that’s done, take notes on what worked and what didn’t, and then prepare to fight again and harder.  Fill the gap between battles with outreach to your elected representatives and with efforts to educate the non-technical in your life to explain why SOPA/PIPA were and are a bad idea.

Days of action feel great.  Months of effort are wearying.  But it’s only the latter that can slowly and painfully bring about long-term change.

• Vigilance and Victory was published on Friday, January 20th, 2012.
• It was assigned to the Commentary, Culture, and Web categories.
• There has been one reply.

Though I certainly do not support SOPA or the PROTECT IP Act (the complete, rather contrived acronym of PIPA), I will not be blacking out meyerweb.  This is largely because the vast majority of my readers already know about these bills, and very likely oppose them; as for anyone who visits but does not know about these bills, I feel I’ll do better to speak out than to black out.  (Which is not a criticism of those who do black out.  We all fight in our own ways.)

Instead, I will reproduce here the letter I attempted to send via contact form to my state Senator this morning, and which I will print out and send by regular postal service later today.

Senator Brown:

I grew up in Lexington, Ohio.  I moved to Cleveland in pursuit of a career, and found success.  Through a combination of good luck and hard work, I have (rather to my surprise) become a widely recognized name in my field, which is web design and development.  Along the way, I co-founded a web design conference with an even more widely respected colleague that has become one of the most respected and successful web design events in the world.  This business is headquartered in Ohio — I live in Cleveland Heights with my family, and I intend to stay here until I either retire to Florida or die.  Politically I’m best described as a moderate independent, though I do tend to lean a bit to the left.

As you can imagine, given my line of work, I have an opinion regarding the PROTECT IP Act which you have co-sponsored.  The aims of PROTECT IP are understandable, but the methods are unacceptable.  Put another way, if you wish to combat piracy and intellectual property theft, there are far better ways to go about it.

As someone with twenty years of technical experience with the Internet and nearly as many with the web — I started creating web pages in late 1993 — please believe me when I say the enforcement mechanisms of the bill are deeply flawed and attack the very features of the Web that make it what it is.  They are akin to making a criminal of anyone who gives directions to a park where drug trafficking takes place, regardless of whether they knew about the drug trafficking.  You don’t have to be in favor of drug trafficking to oppose that.

This is not a case where tweaking a clause or two will fix it; correction in this case would mean starting from scratch.  Again, the objection is not with the general intent of the bill.  It is with how the bill goes about achieving those aims.

If you would like to discuss this with me further, I would be delighted to do whatever I can to help, but in any event I strongly urge you to reconsider your co-sponsorship of the PROTECT IP Act.

Thank you for your time and consideration.

Eric A. Meyer (http://meyerweb.com/)

Partner and co-founder, An Event Apart (http://aneventapart.com/)

If you agree that the PROTECT IP Act is poorly conceived, find out if your senator supports PIPA.  If they do, get in touch and let them know about your opposition.  If they oppose the bill, get in touch and thank them for their opposition.  If their support or opposition isn’t known, get in touch and ask them to please speak out in opposition to the bill.

As others have said, postal letters are better than phone calls, which are in turn better than e-mail, which is in turn better than signing petitions.  Do what you can, please.  The web site you save might be your own.

• Standing In Opposition was published on Wednesday, January 18th, 2012.
• It was assigned to the Commentary, Culture, and Web categories.
• There has been one reply.

Back on Tuesday, A List Apart opened the 2011 edition of The Survey for People Who Make Web Sites, the fifth annual effort to learn more about the people who work in the web industry.  If you haven’t taken it yet, please do so!  It should take about ten minutes

I’m proud to have been a part of this effort since its inaugural launch back in 2007.  It’s a major undertaking, mostly in analyzing the data and turning that into a detailed report, but it’s more than worth the time and effort.  Before the Survey, we really didn’t know very much about who we were as a field of practice, and without it we wouldn’t have as clear a picture of who we are today.

There have been growing pains, of course, chief among them UCCASS, the survey software we’ve been using since the outset.  Its limitations and lack of updates finally pushed us to find another platform, and we chose to move over to Polldaddy.  Many thanks to the Polldaddy team for giving the survey a home and helping me figure out the best strategies for recreating the survey.  (And also for putting up with my occasionally testy feature and support requests.  Sorry, gang.)

Due to differences between UCCASS and Polldaddy, we ended up restructuring the survey into two distinct paths.  I think this change actually speeds the process of taking the survey.  I’m pretty sure just about anyone could get through it in under ten minutes.

Unsurprisingly, participation in the survey has dropped over the years; last year’s survey had a bit more than half as many respondents as the first-ever survey back in 2007.  Tellingly, the actual results have been pretty consistent over the years.  I’d really like to see how those results stand up to an increase of respondents, so please:

• If you haven’t taken the survey yet, kindly set aside ten minutes and do so.
• If you have taken the survey, thank you.  Now, spread the word!  If you could post a quick link to any mailing lists, web forums, newsgroups, or other professional communities in which you participate, it will be an enormous help.  The more practitioners we have answer, the better the results.

As always, the survey will close a month after it opened; and as always, a detailed report will be published — feel free to peruse the reports from 2007 (PDF), 2008, 2009, and 2010 — along with anonymized data sets for independent analysis.  Together, they form a picture, but one that is still being drawn.  Please help us to add the most essential detail — you!

• The Survey, 2011 was published on Friday, November 18th, 2011.
• It was assigned to the Projects and Web categories.
• There have been no replies.

Now available: the results from the A List Apart Survey for People Who Make Web Sites, 2010.  This is the fourth industry snapshot we’ve compiled, and the story that’s emerged over that time is proving to be pretty consistent.  You can get a high-level view from the Introduction, and then dive deeper into the results in the following chapters.  And, as is traditional, the Addendum contains links to the full (anonymized) data set in three formats for your own analytical investigations.  We’d love to see what you come up with!

Something that surprised me quite a bit was that in 2010 we got about half the number of respondents we’ve gotten in past years — not quite seventeen thousand participated in 2010 instead of just over thirty thousand as we saw in previous years.  I’m not quite sure what to make of that.  Is the industry shrinking?  Did we not get the word out as effectively?  Was it a bad time of year to run a survey?  Are people getting tired of taking the survey?  There’s no real way to know.

At least there weren’t any wild swings in the results, which might have indicated we’d lost some subgroups in disproportionate numbers.  Whatever caused the drop in participation, it appears to have done so in an evenly-distributed fashion.

Regardless, I’d like to see higher participation next year, so if anyone has good suggestions regarding how to make that happen, please do let me know in the comments.

We plan to run the 2011 survey in the next couple of months (and I’ll post a bit more about that soon) but for now, I hope you find the 2010 results an interesting and useful look at who we are.

• Results of The Web Design Survey, 2010 was published on Monday, June 27th, 2011.
• It was assigned to the Projects and Web categories.
• There have been eleven replies.

Can CSS create art?  That’s a question I set out to explore recently, and I like to think that the answer is yes.  You can judge for yourself: Spinning the Web, a gallery on Flickr.

To be clear, when I say “Can CSS create art?” I don’t mean that in the sense of wondering if art, or artful designs, can be accomplished with CSS.  I think we all know the answer there, and have known at least since the Zen Garden got rolling.  What I’m doing here is using some basic CSS to generate art, using web sites as the medium.  For the series I linked, I spun all of the elements on a page using transform: rotate() to see what resulted.  Any time I saw something I liked, I took a screenshot.  After I was done, I winnowed the shots down to the best ones.

As some of you old-schoolers will probably have recognized, I’m absolutely following in the footsteps of Joshua Davis here, and in fact my working title for this effort was “Once Upon a Browser”.  I saw Josh speak years ago, and clearly remember his description of how he generated a lot of his art.  My process is almost identical, albeit with a bit less automation and computational complexity.

Because this is me, I built a little commentary joke into the first images in the series.  It’s not terribly subtle, but with luck one or two of you will get the same chuckle I did.

I’m already thinking about variants on this theme, so there may be more series to come.  In the meantime, as I surf around I’ll stop every now and again to spin what I see.  I’ll definitely mention any new additions via Twitter, and new series both there and here.  And of course if you follow me on Flickr, you’ll see new pieces as they go up.

I hope you enjoy them half as much as I enjoyed creating them.  And if anyone wants to use the originals as desktop wallpapers, as Tim proposed, feel free!

• Spinning the Web was published on Friday, June 3rd, 2011.
• It was assigned to the CSS, Projects, and Web categories.
• There have been fourteen replies.

A brief followup to “A Question of Degree“:  I received the following message from the person who first asked the question:

I just spent the last hour or so reading through the comments and, let me tell you, I can’t express how much they helped me! It is now clearly obvious to me that finishing my CS degree is the way to go. A CS degree can make me a better web developer by teaching me about algorithm design and analysis, performance issues, and just how to think like an engineer. Also, since the web changes constantly, a degree will help me embrace those changes. It will always be there for me to fall back on if the web industry doesn’t work out for me.

Thank you to everyone who contributed to the discussion, either in the comments here or elsewhere on the net.  You made a positive difference in this world.  Take pride in that, for it is the most important thing any of us can do.

• Degree of Influence was published on Friday, November 12th, 2010.
• It was assigned to the Questions and Web categories.
• There have been two replies.

I recently found myself asked for advice, which feels odd even at the best of times, and this was (it seemed to me) of a particularly serious nature.  I’m curious to know what you think is the proper answer.

A few days back, I got e-mail with the following questions:

…in your opinion, how useful is a computer science degree for a career in web development? I’m a second year CS major, and considering dropping out because I don’t see the value in it anymore. It’s just taking away my time from learning and doing what I love most–developing web apps. Will dropping out hurt me later on?

I chewed on it for a day or so and then ended up writing the following in response:

I wish I could give you a definitive answer, but the honest truth is that I’m conflicted.  I’m not the only one, either: a recent survey of 26,000+ web professionals indicated that just over half felt their education had some relevance to what they do (http://aneventapart.com/alasurvey2009/#roe).

To use myself as an example, I got my degree (in History, as it happens), but that was before there was such a thing as a career in web development.  The same is true for a lot of the people I think of as contemporary to me; that is, people about my age.  Almost none of them have CS degrees, and many don’t have degrees at all.  I got my job as webmaster of a respected research school because I worked there already and nobody else had ever heard of the web.  I doubt very much that, were I just now exiting school and entering the market, I could do anything like that.

On the other hand, I will say that in the computer field in general, and web in particular, very few people seem to care what degree you do or don’t have.  But here’s the rub: these days, it might be that having a CS degree is what gets you that first job or two.

On the other other hand, if you build some killer web apps, nobody will care about your schooling.  They’ll care about your portfolio.  I don’t know if that lies in front of you, of course.  Maybe it does.  Or maybe it’s a good idea to finish schooling so that you’ll be paper qualified for jobs that say “Requires CS degree or equivalent” if you need to seek them out.

So, to get back to your original question, “It is unless it isn’t” is about the best I can do.  As someone who values education very highly and knows a degree can be an asset in job-seeking, my instinct is to tell you to finish your degree.  As someone who has a lot of contact with successful people who didn’t do that, my intellect requires me to say it’s not critical.

A day past when I sent it, I still don’t feel any less torn.  (And in re-reading what I wrote, I can see my indecision in the writing: scattered, whipping from one side to the other.  Man, did that one ever need an editor!)  I don’t really need to know what people think of what I said, but I’m really curious to know what you would advise this young person.  Leave your thoughts in the comments, if you please, and I’ll make sure word of your input gets passed along to the student who wrote me.  Thanks!

Addendum 12 Nov 10: please see “Degree of Influence” to see how things turned out.

• A Question of Degree was published on Wednesday, November 10th, 2010.
• It was assigned to the Questions and Web categories.
• There have been ninety-five replies.