Adactio: Journal

Monday, August 30th, 2010

Team meme

I’m somewhat fascinated by the divisive spin on fandom taken by Twilight fans—you know; the whole Team Edward or Team Jacob debate. I wonder what it would be like to take the same approach to more important issues…

Get those T-shirts printed!

The secret, however, is knowing when to stop. I do not want to see “I’m with Team HTML5” vs. “I’m with Team Flash.”

5:56pm

TeuxDeux Part Deux

I’ve tried a few different to-do list apps in my time: Ta-da List, Remember The Milk. They’re all much of a muchness (although Remember The Milk’s inability to remember me on return visits put me off it after a while).

The one that really fits with my mental model is TuexDeux. It’s very, very simple and that’s its strength. It does one thing really well.

Now it has been updated with a few little changes.

I’m very pleased to see that it has become more flexible and fluid. I’ve said it before but I really think that web apps should aim to be adaptable to the user’s preferred viewing window. With more content-driven sites, such as webzines and news articles, I understand why more control is given to the content creator, but for an application, where usage and interaction is everything, flexibility and adaptability should be paramount, in my opinion.

Anyway, the new changes to TeuxDeux make it better than ever. Although…

If I had one complaint—and this is going to sound kind of weird—it’s that you mark items as done by clicking on them (as if they were links). I kind of miss the feeling of satisfaction that comes with ticking a checkbox to mark an item as done.

I told you it was going to sound kind of weird.

5:21pm

Sunday, August 29th, 2010

Listening

Whenever I take a trip somewhere—like Copenhagen, for example—it’s a good opportunity to catch up on what I’ve been huffduffing. Trains, planes and buses are the killer apps of personal podcasting. In many ways, Huffduffer becomes more useful the further away you are from a computer and an internet connection.

I didn’t get the chance to see Mark speak at this year’s Web Directions @media in London, but now that I’ve listened to his talk on Designing Grid Systems, I’m cursing the two-track format of the conference and the fact that I couldn’t be in two places at once. This talk is superb; one of the best presentations I’ve ever heard. It’s got a fantastic long-zoom perspective and completely crystalises and clarifies the fundamental problem with the approach taken to most web design today: canvas in, rather than content out. Do yourself a favour and huffduff this today.

The audio from the hot topics panel I moderated at the same conference is also available for your huffduffing pleasure and you can read a transcript of the panel right here in the articles section of my site.

Matt Ridley’s usual area of expertise is in evolutionary biology but lately he’s turned his Darwinian gaze to the evolution of man-made systems. His talk on How Prosperity Evolves, based on his latest book The Rational Optimist is a fascinating look at how ideas have sex with each other.

Two new podcasts showed up on my radar recently. One is The Box from web designer Tim Van Damme. Episode 1 features a short, snappy interview with Neven Mrgan, one of the creators of the iPhone game The Incident. Expect more short snappy interviews to follow.

The other new podcast is called The Incomparable, a chat show about sci-fi and geek culture. The first episode, We’ll Always Have Zeppelins began with a discussion of China Miéville’s The City and The City (which I’m planning to read now) and finished with a look at Cory Doctorow’s For The Win. While I was sitting in a chair in the sky listening to the discussion, I remembered that I had downloaded the ePub version from ManyBooks.net. I began reading it on my iPod Touch and now I’m hooked.

So that’s just some of the stuff I’ve been listening to:

…and I haven’t even mentioned the prolific audio output of Dan’s excellent 5by5 network.

If audio isn’t your bag, then you might enjoy the beautiful-looking videos from Put This On, a web series about dressing like a grown-up from the ever-brilliant Jesse Thorn and Adam Lisagor. You’re welcome.

3:38pm

Saturday, August 28th, 2010

Scandinavian sojourn

I’ve been on a little trip to Copenhagen. Usually when I go to Denmark, it’s for Reboot but alas, there is no Reboot this year. Instead, I was there for Drupalcon.

I have to admit, it was quite a surprise to be asked to speak at a Drupal event. After all, I don’t use the Drupal framework. To be fair, I don’t use any framework—though I did dabble with Django once. Clearleft is a backend-agnostic company: we do UX, IA, front-end, but we’ve deliberately avoided committing to one particular server-side solution.

Anyway, I was kinda nervous about addressing a large group of programmers devoted to a PHP framework that I’m not that familiar with. I needn’t have worried. Everyone was incredibly welcoming and I got a very warm reception.

I had been asked along to speak about HTML5 but rather than just run through a whole bunch of features in the spec, I thought it would be more interesting to talk about why features have been added to HTML5. So I concentrated on the design principles driving the development of the specification.

I’m pretty pleased with how it turned out. The whole thing was streamed live and it’s all been recorded and posted online.

The Drupal community is clearly very vibrant: the 1000+ people gathered in Copenhagen were very enthusiastic about their chosen platform. That said, I did sense some frustration from the theming community—it isn’t always the easiest to change the markup and CSS that’s output by Drupal. This is something that Dries acknowledged in his keynote and people like Jen Simmons are fighting the good fight to improve Drupal’s front-end output.

The Drupal community also know how to party. This was the first conference I’ve been to that had its own beer; the rather excellent Awesomesauce from the world-renowned Mikkeller.

All in all, it was a thoroughly enjoyable experience. And I had enough time before my flight back to Blighty to nip across to Malmö in Sweden, where Emil showed me the sights.

Then it was time to catch a ludicrously comfy train across a remarkable bridge, past a stunning wind farm to the snazilly-designed airport to catch my flight home.

11:04pm

Monday, August 23rd, 2010

Slight return

Tantek is bringing back the blog after skipping an entire year:

I had gone from owning (most of) my content, to digital sharecropping. The past two years I watched life-changing, brilliant, and some long-lived sites get killed by owners that knew not what they had, or just gave up.

Leo Laporte is doing the same:

I feel like I’ve woken up to a bad social media dream in terms of the content I’ve put in others’ hands. It’s been lost, and apparently no one was even paying attention to it in the first place. I should have been posting it here all along.

I approve of this ongoing process of Pembertonisation.

5:47pm

Friday, August 13th, 2010

Clarification

HTML5.

In a comment on one of Jeffrey’s blog posts, Tantek wrote:

We as a community that is learning/relearning/teaching all this stuff need to vigilantly clarify what’s what rather than calling things “HTML5″ that are not actually HTML5 (e.g. CSS3, Geolocation, etc. etc.), and correct the marketing messages being shouted from various rooftops so we can better understand and reliably build HTML5 websites and web applications that use HTML5.

Jeff Croft argues just the opposite:

Sometimes we just need a word to rally behind. And put in job descriptions. And claim we “support” (another word that is mostly meaningless). It’s a language thing and a human psychology thing.

For the most part, I think what Jeff is saying is fine …assuming we’re talking about managers, marketers, and other people who aren’t making websites for a living. For the rest of us down in the trenches, I think it is important to understand what is in which spec. As Jeff later clarifies:

That “HTML5” means something different to marketers than it does to web developer is an annoyance, no doubt — but I don’t think it hinders us any real way, and I don’t know that we need to, as Tantek suggests, “vigilantly clarify” the matter.

Fair enough. If someone in middle management wants to use the term HTML5 where they previously used, say, “Web 2.0”, that’s fine. But here’s the problem…

A couple of weeks ago, I got a got phone call out of the blue from a local web developer. My mobile number is listed right here—anyone is free to call me whenever they want. He had a reasonable enquiry. He wanted to know if he could pop ‘round to the Clearleft office and buy a copy of my new book directly from me rather than ordering it online.

Alas no, I said. That’s my personal stash, not for resale.

But while he had me on the phone, he asked a couple of questions about what’s in the book. I started talking about semantics and forms. He asked Does it cover CSS?

No. Nope. Definitely not. The book is very specifically about HTML5, not CSS3.

And then he said But CSS3 is part of HTML5, isn’t it?

He’s not in management. He’s not in marketing. He builds websites. And the scary thing is, I think he’s probably fairly representative of many working web developers.

Don’t get me wrong: I honestly don’t care that much about whether something like geolocation is technically part of HTML5 or not: that’s a fairly trifling matter. But CSS3? C’mon! In what universe is it in any way acceptable that a web developer wanting to learn about web fonts begins by Googling for HTML5?

Still, it could be worse. At least, to the best of my knowledge, no working web developers are quite as misinformed as the New Media Age journalist who listed some HTML5 Key Facts such as:

Supports sophisticated typography…

Supports social content and sharing…

Key features are part of CSS3…

Clarifying what is and isn’t in HTML5 isn’t pedantry for pedantry’s sake. It’s about communication and clarity, the cornerstones of language.

In Politics and the English Language, George Orwell wrote:

A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know better.

12:29pm

Friday, August 6th, 2010

Hypertext history

I’m not a big fan of acronyms in general but I like the word WWILF: What Was I Looking For. It’s such a webby word.

You know the drill: you start looking at a Wikipedia page about zeppelin crashes and before you know it, you’re reading about ekranoplans and Dyson spheres. That’s wwilfing.

Interestingly, there’s no Wikipedia entry for wwilfing. Maybe it should just redirect to the page about the World Wide Web.

I’ve found the wwilfing motherlode for markup nerds like me: The Early History of HTML. It’s a short document, but each link will send you down a rabbit hole of geek history.

Thrill to the original code by Tim Berners-Lee for parsing hypertext! Gasp at the first document ever published on the web!

Interestingly, that first ever web page almost validates as HTML5. It’s just missing a doctype, which—as the spec makes clear—is only required for legacy reasons. Oh, the irony!

As an aside, the world’s first ever web site went live exactly nineteen years ago on August 6th, 1991. I know that because the front page of Wikipedia had it listed under “On this day…” I was wwilfing again.

Back to that document about the early history of HTML… it’s a fascinating look at the origins of many of the elements that we use to build web pages today. I knew that HTML was based on SGML but I always thought that Sir Tim came up with the elements in HTML Tags himself. It turns out that many of the elements come directly from an existing flavour of SGML already in use at CERN called GMLguide.

That’s a textbook example of the design principles that are now codified for HTML5:

Speaking of HTML5, check out this excerpt from an email Tim Berners-Lee sent to Dan Connolly in 1991, describing how HTML should work:

I would in fact prefer, instead of <H1>, <H2> etc for headings [those come from the AAP DTD] to have a nestable <SECTION>..</SECTION> element, and a generic <H>..</H> which at any level within the sections would produce the required level of heading.

That’s right: the outline algorithm for sectioning content in HTML5 was first proposed nineteen years ago!

If you’re as fascinated as I am by the history of the web, you’ll enjoy re-reading the original proposal by Tim Berners-Lee for a global hypertext system, which is famously described as vague but exciting. I’m struck by the relevance of the opening problem statement, Losing Information at CERN:

The problems of information loss may be particularly acute at CERN, but in this case (as in certain others), CERN is a model in miniature of the rest of world in a few years time. CERN meets now some problems which the rest of the world will have to face soon.

The proposed solution—what would become the World Wide Web—is ingenious:

We should work toward a universal linked information system, in which generality and portability are more important than fancy graphics techniques and complex extra facilities.

The aim would be to allow a place to be found for any information or reference which one felt was important, and a way of finding it afterwards. The result should be sufficiently attractive to use that it the information contained would grow past a critical threshold, so that the usefulness of the scheme would in turn encourage its increased use.

The original problem still remains. The web hasn’t solved the problem of data loss but it has provided us with the means to quickly and easily share incredible amounts of data …but will that data simply disappear again?

5:07pm

Monday, July 26th, 2010

Facing the future

There is much hand-wringing in the media about the impending death of journalism, usually blamed on the rise of the web or more specifically bloggers. I’m sympathetic to their plight, but sometimes journalists are their own worst enemy, especially when they publish badly-researched articles that fuel moral panic with little regard for facts (if you’ve ever been in a newspaper article yourself, you’ll know that you’re lucky if they manage to spell your name right).

Exhibit A: an article published in The Guardian called How I became a Foursquare cyberstalker. Actually, the article isn’t nearly as bad as the comments, which take ignorance and narrow-mindedness to a new level.

Fortunately Ben is on hand to set the record straight. He wrote Concerning Foursquare and communicating privacy. Far from being a lesser form of writing, this blog post is more accurate than the article it is referencing, helping to balance the situation with a different perspective …and a nice big dollop of facts and research. Ben is actually quite kind to The Guardian article but, in my opinion, his own piece is more interesting and thoughtful.

Exhibit B: an article by Jeffrey Rosen in The New York Times called The Web Means the End of Forgetting. That’s a bold title. It’s also completely unsupported by the contents of the article. The article contains anecdotes about people getting into trouble about something they put on the web, and—even though the consequences for that action played out in the present—he talks about the permanent memory bank of the Web and writes:

The fact that the Internet never seems to forget is threatening, at an almost existential level, our ability to control our identities.

Bollocks. Or, to use the terminology of Wikipedia, citation needed.

Scott Rosenberg provides the necessary slapdown, asking Does the Web remember too much — or too little?:

Rosen presents his premise — that information once posted to the Web is permanent and indelible — as a given. But it’s highly debatable. In the near future, we are, I’d argue, far more likely to find ourselves trying to cope with the opposite problem: the Web “forgets” far too easily.

Exactly! I get irate whenever I hear the truism that the web never forgets presented without any supporting data. It’s right up there with eskimos have fifty words for snow and people in the middle ages thought that the world was flat. These falsehoods are irritating at best. At worst, as is the case with the myth of the never-forgetting web, the lie is downright dangerous. As Rosenberg puts it:

I’m a lot less worried about the Web that never forgets than I am about the Web that can’t remember.

That’s a real problem. And yet there’s no moral panic about the very real threat that, once digitised, our culture could be in more danger of being destroyed. I guess that story doesn’t sell papers.

This problem has a number of thorns. At the most basic level, there’s the issue of link rot. I love the fact that the web makes it so easy for people to publish anything they want. I love that anybody else can easily link to what has been published. I hope that the people doing the publishing consider the commitment they are making by putting a linkable resource on the web.

As I’ve said before, a big part of this problem lies with the DNS system:

Domain names aren’t bought, they are rented. Nobody owns domain names, except ICANN.

I’m not saying that we should ditch domain names. But there’s something fundamentally flawed about a system that thinks about domain names in time periods as short as a year or two.

Then there’s the fact that so much of our data is entrusted to third-party sites. There’s no guarantee that those third-party sites give a rat’s ass about the long-term future of our data. Quite the opposite. The callous destruction of Geocities by Yahoo is a testament to how little our hopes and dreams mean to a company concerned with the bottom line.

We can host our own data but that isn’t quite as easy as it should be. And even with the best of intentions, it’s possible to have the canonical copies wiped from the web by accident. I’m very happy to see services like Vaultpress come on the scene:

Your WordPress site or blog is your connection to the world. But hosting issues, server errors, and hackers can wipe out in seconds what took years to build. VaultPress is here to protect what’s most important to you.

The Internet Archive is also doing a great job but Brewster Kahle shouldn’t have to shoulder the entire burden. Dave Winer has written about the idea of future-safe archives:

We need one or more institutions that can manage electronic trusts over very long periods of time.

The institutions need to be long-lived and have the technical know-how to manage static archives. The organizations should need the service themselves, so they would be likely to advance the art over time. And the cost should be minimized, so that the most people could do it.

The Library of Congress has its Digital Preservation effort. Dan Gillmor reports on the recent three-day gathering of the institution’s partners:

It’s what my technology friends call a non-trivial task, for all kinds of technical, social and legal reasons. But it’s about as important for our future as anything I can imagine. We are creating vast amounts of information, and a lot of it is not just worth preserving but downright essential to save.

There’s an even longer-term problem with digital preservation. The very formats that we use to store our most treasured memories can become obsolete over time. This goes to the very heart of why standards such as HTML—the format I’m betting on—are so important.

Mark Pilgrim wrote about the problem of format obsolescence back in 2006. I found his experiences echoed more recently by Paul Glister, author of the superb Centauri Dreams, one of my favourite websites. He usually concerns himself with challenges on an even longer timescale, like the construction of a feasible means of interstellar travel but he gives a welcome long zoom perspective on digital preservation in Burying the Digital Genome, pointing to a project called PLANETS: Preservation and Long-term Access Through Networked Services.

Their plan involves the storage, not just of data, but of data formats such as JPEG and PDF: the equivalent of a Rosetta stone for our current age. A box containing format-decoding documentation has been buried in a bunker under the Swiss Alps. That’s a good start.

David Eagleman recently gave a talk for The Long Now Foundation entitled Six Easy Steps to Avert the Collapse of Civilization. Step two is Don’t lose things:

As proved by the destruction of the Alexandria Library and of the literature of Mayans and Minoans, “knowledge is hard won but easily lost.”

I’m worried that we’re spending less and less time thinking about the long-term future of our data, our culture, and ultimately, our civilisation. Currently we are preoccupied with the real-time web: Twitter, Foursquare, Facebook …all services concerned with what’s happening right here, right now. The Long Now Foundation and Tau Zero Foundation offer a much-needed sense of perspective.

As with that other great challenge of our time—the alteration of our biosphere through climate change—the first step to confronting the destruction of our collective digital knowledge must be to think in terms greater than the local and the present.

9:44pm

Tuesday, July 20th, 2010

Ship talk

The always-brilliant Tom Taylor, prompted by the incessant peanut-gallery criticism from Da Meedja, wrote You’ve either shipped, or you haven’t:

You’ve either poured weeks, months or even years of your life into bringing a product or a service into the world, or you haven’t.

He finishes with:

And the next time someone produces an antenna with a weak spot, or a sticky accelerator, you’re more likely to feel their pain, listen to their words and trust their actions than the braying media who have never shipped anything in their lives.

Bobbie took issue with that last point and wrote Shipping news:

I’d suggest the opposite is in fact the case: the trouble is that media ships constantly, and therefore becomes inured to the difficulties and delicacies of launching a product of any size or scale.

It’s an excellent point, which Tom readily concedes.

Finally, Paul Ford wrote Real Editors Ship:

People often think that editors are there to read things and tell people “no.” Saying “no” is a tiny part of the job. Editors are first and foremost there to ship the product without getting sued. They order the raw materials—words, sounds, images—mill them to approved tolerances, and ship.

It’s a rather spiffing conversation and it’s fascinating to see the ideas get bounced around from blog to blog. Notice that none of those blogs allow comments. I’m pretty sure that if they did have comments, the resulting conversation wouldn’t have been nearly as good. As I’ve said before:

I don’t think we should be looking at comments to see conversations. It isn’t much of a conversation when the same person determines the subject matter of every dialogue. The best online conversations I’ve seen have been blog to blog: somebody posts something on their blog; somebody else feels compelled to respond on their own blog. The quality of such a response is nearly always better than a comment on the originating blog for the simple reason that people care more about what appears on their own site than on someone else’s.

But how can we keep track of the conversation? I hear you cry.

I don’t think there’s any one particular technological solution to that problem but the combination of RSS, Delicious, Twitter and other linking tools seem to be doing a pretty decent job. If you dig down deep enough, they’re all using the same fundamental technology: the a element and the href attribute.

It’s messy and it’s chaotic but it’s also elegant …because it works. Seeing these kinds of distributed conversations makes me very happy indeed that Tim Berners-Lee shipped his product.

3:28pm

Sunday, July 18th, 2010

Analogue Inception

I don’t usually get all that excited about forthcoming films, but ever since seeing the first trailer for Inception I’ve been like a kid at Christmas time. Everything about it looked like it was going to press all my buttons.

I went to see it on its first day of release at the lovely Duke of York’s cinema. It didn’t disappoint. If anything, it exceeded my ludicrously high expectations.

The structure of the film is that of a heist movie, but if the film were to be slotted into a genre, that genre would have to be science fiction. Personally, I would say it’s cyberpunk. But it’s a strange kind of cyberpunk where the emphasis is less on technology and more on the film-noir mood and transcendental possibilities of the genre.

In fact, technology in Inception is notable by its absence. There is a piece of hardware to enable the central premise of the film, but it’s of no more importance than the hardware used in Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind—the last great science fiction film to cover similar territory.

Both films also avoid making any reference to specific dates. We assume that the narrative plays out in the very near future but we’re never explicitly told that. It strikes me that both films are attempting to place the action in a kind of continuous present.

Inception is particularly adept at avoiding anything that would date the film. Nothing dates a story quite like technology. William Gibson has remarked on numerous occasions that the glaring omission of cell phones in Neuromancer dates the book to the 1980s …although younger people assume that the omission is a deliberate plot point.

Computers make no appearance in Inception. The unstoppable momentum of Moore’s Law means that this year’s cutting edge laptop may appear laughably out of date by the time the film is available on DVD (and my reference to a specific storage medium like DVD dates these words).

Christopher Nolan goes further and avoids the use of digital input and output devices: the mouse, the keyboard, the screen (either LCD or cathode ray) …all of these things anchor a narrative to a specific period. Instead, there is almost a fetishisation of the analogue. When we see people planning and prototyping in Inception, it is with paper and cardboard rather than any computer-aided design tools.

It’s slightly jarring when the occasional piece of technology appears on the screen, such as an electronic key card for a hotel room door, or the electronic fingerprinting device used at American airports.

Analogue objects age too, of course, but the rate of ageing is slower. To borrow a term from architecture—and boy, is Inception a fun film from that perspective—the analogue and the digital are different shearing layers:

The Shearing layers concept views buildings as a set of components that evolve in different timescales.

Sound familiar? It’s a concept that’s at the heart of Inception’s dream logic: the idea that the passage of time slows down within a dream, allowing a far longer narrative to play out in a dream world than in the faster-moving “reality” of the dreamer.

Inception takes pains to use the medium- to long-term obsolescence of physical objects: trains, planes, cars, guns and—above all—buildings. The film neatly sidesteps the inevitable timestamp that electronic technology would impart on the narrative.

Inception is a film that will stand the test of time remarkably well. The phrase “timeless classic” is one that gets bandied about far too freely, but in this case it could well turn out to be the literal truth.

Update: Adrian Sevitz points out that Inception is also remarkably lacking in product placement, or branded products in general. It’s true: I can’t recall seeing a single logo in the film. That’s something that has dogged Blade Runner with its unfortunate choice of brand extrapolation: Pan-am, Atari, Bell…

12:00pm

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