Category: web standards

Haggis Virgin

Until last night, I’d never tried haggis and never really wanted to. But, we went to a lovely Scottish restaurant last night (“we” being Arun, Bert Bos, Chaals, Chris Lilley, Shawn, Carolie, Richard Ishida, Thomas and Liam – they were all here for the W3C AC Rep meeting), and they had haggis as an appetizer. And well, that was the opening. We all convinced each other than it was OK to try it as an appetizer because it would be a “wee little haggis.”\
So, we got it, and shared a few. Shawn and I were “haggis hosts”, and Arun and Thomas were our “haggicytes.” And you know, it was actually quite good. It’s really rich, but the barley gives it a kind of weird texture. I don’t think I need to eat it again, but I’m no longer a haggis virgin. My haggishood has been taken by a charming wee chunk of barley and sheep organs. Yum.\
Dinner was a lot of fun. I love hanging out with really smart people, and these guys fit the bill. They’re all brilliant, and terribly funny. We laughed a lot (I think the whiskey and wine helped), and told a lot of embarrassing stories about ourselves. Good times.\
Today, it’s conferencing, which probably means less fun (and wouldn’t you know it, it’s not raining today).

WWW2006 and Me

I’m headin’ to Scotland tomorrow for WWW2006, where I’ll be presenting twice:

AIM Pages

We’ve launched!! Hooray!! You can go check it out for yourself over here. If you want to create a profile, you can do that too. All you need is an AIM screen name (and who doesn’t have one of those?) to get started.\
This project has been more fun than anything else I’ve done in my \~11 years at AOL. It was full of huge technical challenges, was a great place for us to try out new things, and the team was probably the best I’ve ever worked with. From product management to QA to Operations and the rest of the developers, everyone pitched in, went the extra mile, pushed themselves to find the best (or at least the one that worked) solution, and kept a good sense of humor about it all.\
I started on this thing as a “consultant” and wasn’t supposed to write any code. I ended up:

  • joining the team responsible for it
  • writing a site’s worth of documentation
  • creating a microformat
  • coming up with a set of rules for writing CSS to accomodate modules, themes and user styles
  • writing almost a dozen modules (only some of which are actually live)
  • helping with dozens more, writing a bunch of themes, and making sure that over 60 themes were ready for launch.
  • spent late nights and weekends at the office debugging javascript
  • worked on convincing developers, management and design that web standards are the way to go
  • and discovered several one-line crashers for Internet Explorer (and one or two ways to make Firefox REALLY unhappy as well).\
    It’s not done, not by a long shot. There are still dozens of bugs and hundreds of features still to come. But, it’s a start. It’s all kinds of fun, not just for end users, but for developers too. One of my “secret” goals at the beginning of this project was to make module development easy enough that even “normals” could do it. And just this morning, sitting around a big conference table, there were three product managers talking about their modules. And my other secret goals? Here they are:
  • Get more people to learn the “right” way to write CSS.
  • Help microformats go mainstream.
  • Show the outside world that AOL can do innovative stuff, and that we support Open Source (we’re using the hell out of Dojo).
  • Show the outside world, and the internal development community, that using web standards don’t limit you. They help you. Creating modules for our product is so much easier than creating them for live.com, dashboard or Google Homepage. Why? Because microformats are “just” HTML.\
    There you go. Go play. And while you’re at it, check out my profile.\
    Oh, and for all you Digg folks, I Am Alpha is not AIM Pages.

Just to Clarify

If you’re coming here from Digg, you may have the wrong idea about me. I’m not the “leader” of anything. I’m a contributor to the project and helped design the nerdy bits behind a lot of it. But, I’m not in charge of nothin’. I’m just a nerd who loves web standards (I designed the microformat behind the modules), and who hasn’t gotten enough sleep in the past two months to say more than that without doing irreparable to my employment status.\
Oh, and if you’re looking at I Am Alpha, that’s not the real thing. It’s just a place to test out modules. It’s not meant for consumers, and we periodically nuke the pages created there (especially when we roll out new code).\
The Paid Content article has a lot more detail about what’s coming and says more than I can right now.\
Stay tuned for more info. After we launch the real thing, I’ll be able to talk a lot more about it.

Microformats a Go-Go

One day last week while the boys were watching TV, I decided to finally get this here blog up-to-date with microformats, especially since I’m all for them and keep telling people to use them. Might as well take my own medicine, right?\
As of sometime last week, the front page has three separate hAtom feeds and each entry has an hCard on it. I’ve been trying to find time to redo my resume (no, I’m not looking, this is just an excuse to use hResume), but haven’t had time (working nights and weekends will do that to you, along with the fact that I really need a haircut).\
I didn’t have time to remove the classes I had on there before and change the CSS, so the source looks a little cluttered, and nothing’s been done to the archives. I just didn’t have time (running theme, I know).\
If you see anything wrong, please let me know so I can fix it.

Come To My Panel… Or I Will Cry

Come to Convincing Your Company to Embrace Standards this morning! If you want a preview of the presentation, it’s here. But, it would be better if you help fill up the room. If the room is empty, I’ll be sad, although it might make doing the presentation a little easier.\
And, if you don’t care about standards, but still have a small group that needs to convince a large group to do something, you might get something out of today’s panel. It’s all about subverting from the inside and effecting change within large organizations with limited means.\
Should be fun! See you there!

Since I Can’t Put Up Photos…

Look at Daniel’s – I forgot the USB cable for my camera at home. Silly me.\
I did document several of the courses we had at L’Ermitage du Riou, which was, as usual, amazing. We’re winding down, and will end up closing down the joint as one of the last two working groups still meeting. We CSS folk just don’t know when to stop.\
I have more stories, but we’ve just had a breakthrough that when it’s implemented will change the way we write CSS. Gotta pay attention!\
This isn’t it, but if you’re a designer or use CSS, please please please go read the new Advanced Layout CSS3 module and post your feedback. This module is very important, and could change the way we build web products if we ever get the browser folks to implement it.

Hanging Out With The Elite

You know how I said I was more comfortable this year than last at the Plenary It’s true, but it’s also still enlightening to be reminded, again and again, how much I don’t know. Today, we spent two hours talking about text direction, and the issues it presents to CSS and other web standards. I was completely lost. Here’s just a taste of the vocabulary:

  • grapheme clusters
  • Boustrophedon
  • glyphs
  • diacritics\
    That’s just the beginning. It was a enlightening as it was confusing. It makes me long for selectors, adjacent siblings, shrinkwrap, specificity and the box model.\
    The other funny thing is that as brilliant as all the people here are, they’re an extremely diverse group. It’s fun to see so many different types of people interacting so well (usually). Everyone has been very friendly, even thought a lot of us are competitors, we all seem to get along. There is, of course, a lot of friendly needling, but overall, it’s been a very collegial experience. I love nerds.

Accepting Small Progress Gracefully: IE7

Here I am again at the W3C Plenary, where I get to spend a week with the web’s big brains and soak in nerd soup. A lot of time has been spent so far talking about IE7 and its progress or lack thereof and the reaction Microsoft (and especially Chris Wilson and Markus Mielke) are getting from the web development community. Molly is here, and she’s especially worried about how poorly the community is reacting to Microsoft. And here I sit in the middle somewhere…\
I’m a standards geek, and part of me wants to kick the IE team in the shins for creating another browser that doesn’t at least get to the point where Firefox and Safari are. There’s a spectrum of standards support, especially as far as CSS is concerned, with IE6 at one end and Opera, Safari and Firefox at the other. I foresee all kinds of problems with IE7 situating itself right in the middle. It’s going to cause developers all kinds of problems, some of them of those developers’ own making, some because IE is cherry-picking CSS2.1 modules to support (and some CSS3).\
On the other hand, the practical side of me is happy to see any development at all out of IE. Progress, of any kind, is a good thing. The fact that IE7 will support selectors beyond the paltry selection we have now. We’ll have child and attribute selectors (finally!! Now we don’t need extraneous classes on elements), :hover on arbitrary elements and min and max width/height, which will all make building pages easier once IE7 overtakes IE6 in usage – sometime in the next five to six years.\
And there’s the rub. I’m impatient. I don’t want IE7 today, I want IE8 today. That it took Microsoft over five years to start working on the successor to IE6 is unforgivable. They abandoned the web development community and did what they could to kill progress in web development, whether on purpose or not, it doesn’t really matter. That we were able to do what we did, given the horrible state of IE6’s standards support, is impressive and we should be proud of it as an industry.\
Now that they are working on IE again, what should our reaction be? Should we be angry? Should we embrace them? Can we embrace them angrily? I think the time for anger is over, and as soon as the next beta comes out (which I’ve been promised will have the final standards features in it and all that will change are security features), it’s time to get to work.\
And for those of you who use standards mode and are complaining about having to change your CSS to change or remove the CSS “hacks” you used… you were warned a long time ago about managing hacks (at least in June 2004 by Molly). The fact that IE didn’t change in 6 years is really no excuse. Hacks are just that – hacks. They’re going to change. And, Microsoft is actually doing the right thing and not changing how pages are rendered in quirks mode at all. So, if you’re using standards mode, you should know what you’re doing. If you don’t, well, you’ve got at least six months to learn (I don’t know when IE7 will be out of beta, I’m guessing).\
It’s time to move from anger and denial to acceptance, even if it’s begrudging. IE7 will not get the market share that IE6 has. Firefox has 30% usage in Europe, and now over 10% in the US and growing. IE7 is not going to get the 90%+ market share that IE6 once had, just because it’s only on Windows XP SP2. This is a good thing for the other browsers, and a good thing for web developers, because I think the adoption rate for IE7 will be slow and gradual, which is a good thing.\
We can be angry. We have lots of reason to be. We can be angry about all the things that aren’t going to be in IE7. But, let’s at least recognize that IE is finally moving forward and that we think most of the things we want (display:table) will be in future version – that we hopefully won’t have to wait five years for. Microsoft deserves some credit for its new openness, with the IEBlog, their outreach at conferences and their work in the W3C. Embrace the change, get used to it, move on to acceptance and get to work (when the next beta comes out).