I’m not a fan of false dichotomies. Chief among them on the web is the dichotomy between documents and applications, or more broadly, “websites vs. web apps”:
Remember when we were all publishing documents on the web, but then there was that all-changing event and then we all started making web apps instead? No? Me neither. In fact, I have yet to hear a definition of what exactly constitutes a web app.
I’ve heard plenty of descriptions of web apps; there are many, many facets that could be used to describe a web app …but no hard’n’fast definitions.
One pithy observation is that “a website has an RSS feed; a web app has an API.” I like that. It’s cute. But it’s also entirely inaccurate. And it doesn’t actually help nail down what a web app actually is.
Like obscenity and brunch, web apps can be described but not defined.
I think that Jake gets close by describing sites as either “get stuff” (look stuff up) or “do stuff”. But even that distinction isn’t clear. Many sites morph from one into the other. Is Wikipedia a website up until the point that I start editing an article? Are Twitter and Pinterest websites while I’m browsing through them but then flip into being web apps the moment that I post something?
I think there’s a much more fundamental question here than simply “what’s the difference between a website and a web app?” That more fundamental question is…
Why?
Why do you want to make that distinction? What benefit do you gain by arbitrarily dividing the entire web into two classes?
I think this same fundamental question applies to the usage of the term “HTML5”. That term almost never means the fifth iteration of HTML. Instead it’s used to describe everything from CSS to WebGL. It fails as a descriptive term for the same reason that “web app” does: it fails to communicate the meaning intended by the person using the term. You might say “HTML5” and mean “requires JavaScript to work”, but I might hear “HTML5” and think you mean “has a short doctype.” I think the technical term for a word like this is “buzzword”: a word that is commonly used but without any shared understanding or agreement.
In the case of “web app”, I’m genuinely curious to find out why so many designers, developers, and product owners are so keen to use the label. Perhaps it’s simply fashion. Perhaps “website” just sounds old-fashioned, and “web app” lends your product a more up-to-date, zingy feeling on par with the native apps available from the carefully-curated walled gardens of app stores.
We’re all building sites that people visit, do something, and leave. Differentiating websites vs. web apps is no good to anyone. A lot of people ignore new JavaScript tools, methods or approaches because those are just for “web apps.”
That’s a good point. A lot of tools, frameworks, and libraries pitch themselves as being intended for web apps even though they might be equally useful for good ol’-fashioned websites.
In my experience, there’s an all-too-common reason why designers, developers, and product owners are eager to self-identify as the builders of web apps. It gives them a “get out of jail free” card. All the best practices that they’d apply to websites get thrown by the wayside. Progressive enhancement? Accessibility? Semantic markup? “Oh, we’d love to that, but this is a web app, you see… that just doesn’t apply to us.”
I’m getting pretty fed up with it. I find myself grinding my teeth when I hear the term “web app” used without qualification.
We need a more inclusive term that covers both sites and apps on the web. I propose we use the word “thang.”
“Check out this web thang I’m working on.”
“Have you seen this great web thang?”
“What’s that?” “It’s a web thang.”
Now all I need is for someone to make a browser plugin (along the lines of the cloud-to-moon and cloud-to-butt plugins) to convert every instance of “website” or “web app” to “web thang.”
I occasionally get sent some devices for the Clearleft device lab (which reminds me: thank you to whoever at Blackberry sent over the “Dev Alpha B” Blackberry 10).
Last week, an interesting little device showed up.
I had no idea who sent it. Was it a gaming device ordered by Anna?
The packaging was all in Chinese. Perhaps some foreign hackers were attempting to infiltrate our network through some clever social engineering.
It turns out that Rich had ordered it, having heard about it from Chris Heathcote who mentioned the device during his UX London talk.
It’s an S18 Mini Pad. You can pick one up for about £30. For that price, as Chris pointed out, you could just use it as an alarm clock (and it does indeed have an alarm clock app). But it’s also a touchscreen device with WiFi and a web browser …a really good web browser: it comes with Chrome. It’s an Android 4 device.
It has all sorts of issues. The touchscreen is pretty crap, for example. But considering the price, it’s really quite remarkable.
We’ve got to the point where all the individual pieces—WiFi, touchscreen, web browser, operating system—can be thrown together into one device that can be sold for around the thirty quid mark. And this is without any phone company subsidies.
Crap as it is, this device really excites me. A cheap mobile web-enabled device …I find that so much more thrilling than any Apple keynote.
I have some dConstruct news for you. First and foremost, mark your calendar:
Tickets for dConstruct go on sale at 11am on Tuesday, May 21st.
That’s just eight days from now. In some previous years, tickets went very quickly. I don’t think we’ll see a repeat of those heady days of selling out within 24 hours this year, but it’s still worth grabbing your ticket nice and early. At £135+VAT, it’s a steal (as usual).
If you want to be all set next Tuesday, the Eventbrite page for tickets will be dconstruct2013.eventbrite.com. Speak, friend, and enter.
On the subject of this year’s line-up, it is now complete with the addition of Simone Rebaudengo who will share his tells of neurotic network-enabled toasters. He was a huge hit at this year’s UX London and it became clear to me that I had to have him for dConstruct. I mean, the theme is “Communicating With Machines”, for crying out loud!
I’ve also been rounding up the finest and brightest teachers for full-day workshops that will precede the conference. The workshop tickets also go on sale next Tuesday. A workshop costs £395+VAT and that includes a complementary ticket to the conference day as well. Your choices are:
(Speaking of workshops, if you fancy a full day of responsive design with me, I’m doing a workshop on a workshop right before Ampersand in June and you can grab a 20% discount before the end of this month—‘twould be lovely if you could join me.)
In case you can’t tell, I’m getting very excited indeed about this year’s dConstruct. It’s going to be a lot of fun! Hope to see you there.
I’ve really, really enjoyed the previous two Mobilisms, and I always get a kick out of moderating panels so I’m pretty chuffed about getting the chance to host a panel for the third year running.
The first year, the panel was made up of Mobile browser vendors (excluding Apple, of course). Last year, it was more of a mixed bag of vendors and developers. This year …well, we’ll see. I’ll assemble the panel over the course of the conference’s two days. I plan to choose the sassiest and most outspoken of speakers—the last thing you want on a panel is a collection of meek, media-trained company shills.
Mind you, Dan has managed to buy his way onto the panel through some kind of sponsorship deal, but I’m hoping he’ll be able to contribute something useful about Firefox OS.
Apart from that one preordained panelist, everything else is up in the air. To help me decide who to invite onto the panel, it would be really nice to have an idea of what kind of topics people want to have us discuss. Basically, what’s hot and what’s not.
So …got a burning question about mobile, the web, or the “mobile web” (whatever that means)? I want to hear it.
If you could leave a comment with your question, ‘twould be much appreciated.
Someone sent an email to Clearleft recently pointing out what they thought was a certain similarity between our website and the website for a company called Kent Web Host.
I can’t see it myself. But I can’t guarantee that we weren’t somehow unconsciously influenced by these guys.
Garry from Kent Web Host is totally cool with me publishing our conversation.
I’m not publishing this out of any spirit of schadenfreude. I’m publishing it because it was a fun conversation and Garry handled the situation like a true gent.
Garry is a really nice guy. If you want to say unkind things about him on Twitter when you’re linking to this, don’t: you don’t know what you’re talking about.
I think you’ll agree that’s not your typical conference line up. It’s going to be great! And it’s going to be a lot of fun. Trust me.
Trust is something I feel I’ve earned after last year’s tour-de-force. Last year’s line-up was pretty unusual too, but it worked superbly. Now I’ve got to make sure that I don’t squander the trust I earned.
So if you came to dConstruct last year, I don’t need to tell you why you should come back this year.
If you didn’t make it to last year’s dConstruct, you can make up for it this year. You don’t want to miss out two years in a row now, do you?
Tickets will go on sale in a few weeks time. I’ll announce the exact date soon. I’ll also be updating the information about the workshops we’ll be running this year.
And if you’re planning to come to Brighton for dConstruct, make sure to stick around for the weekend. The Brighton Digital Festival is happening again this September. That means a Maker Faire, meetups, hack events, and art shows all around town.
A funny thing happened when I was in Berlin two weekends ago. I was walking down the street that my AirBnB apartment was on when I heard someone say “Jeremy Keith?” It turned out it was Andre Jay Meissner, one of the founders of the excellent Open Device Lab website. We had emailed but never met before. Small world!
The Twitter account for the open device lab in Nuremburg pointed out that it’s been one year since I wrote a blog post about the open device lab I set up:
Much as I’d love to take credit for the idea of an open device lab, it simply isn’t true. Jason and Lyza had been working on setting up the open device lab in Portland for quite a while when I flung open the doors of the Clearleft test lab. But I will take credit for the “Ah, fuck it!” attitude that I introduced to the idea of sharing test devices with the community. Partly because I had seen how long it was taking the Portland device lab to get off the ground while they did everything by the book, I decided to just wait for the worst to happen instead of planning for it:
There are potential pitfalls to opening up a testing suite like this. What about the insurance? What about theft? What about breakage? But the thing about potential pitfalls is that they’re just that: potential. I’m treating all of them as YAGNI issues. I’ll address any problems if and when they occur rather than planning for worst-case scenarios.
It proved to be a great policy. So far, nothing has gone wrong. And it also served as an example to other people thinking about opening up device labs at their companies: “don’t sweat it; I didn’t!”
Open device labs are a small, small part of working on the web but I like to think that they represent the same kind of spirit of openness and sharing that Tim Berners-Lee and his colleagues demonstrated at CERN:
I really, really like the way that communal device labs have taken off. It’s like a physical manifestation of the sharing and openness that has imbued the practice of web design and development right from the start. View source, mailing lists, blog posts, Stack Overflow, and Github are made of bits; device labs are made of atoms. But they are all open for you to use and contribute to.
At UX London I had dinner with a Swiss entrepreneur who was showing off his proprietary native app on his phone and proudly declaring that he had been granted a patent. He seemed like a nice chap, but his attitude kind of made my skin crawl. It seemed so antithetical to the spirit of sharing and openness that I’m used to from the web.
Tim Berners-Lee invented the Web and the Web browser — that is, the world as we now know it — pretty much single-handedly, starting in about 1989, when he was working as a software engineer at CERN, the particle-physics laboratory in Geneva. He didn’t patent it, or any part of it. On the contrary, he has labored tirelessly to keep cyberspace open and nonproprietary.
We are all reaping the benefits of Sir Tim’s kindness and generosity.
It’s not so much that Tim Berners Lee invented WWW, it’s that he gave it to the world as a gift. Supreme kindness as well as innovation.
Pretty much every time I give a talk—be it on progressive enhancement, responsive design, or web development in general—I almost always make reference to John’s A Dao Of Web Design. Invariably, I ask for a show of hands: “Who’s read this article?” I ask. I try not to get too dispirited when only a few hands go up. Instead I encourage everyone—in the strongest possible terms—to seek it out and read it.
It’s not just that I consider A Dao Of Web Design to be part of the canon of great writing and thinking for web designers and developers. I’m also continually amazed by its longevity. Thirteen years is a very, very long time on the web, and yet just last week Richard referenced John’s article when he was describing how best to approach designing for the web today.
The only other article I can think that matches its importance is Ethan’s unveiling of Responsive Web Design three years ago, also on A List Apart. It’s no coincidence that Ethan’s article references John’s article from a decade before. Both pieces are essentially making the same rallying cry: stop fighting the flexible nature of the web. Embrace it.
I think that finally, finally we’re beginning to do just that.
I spent most of last week up in Greenwich for this year’s UX London. ‘Twas a most excellent event. The move to the new venue gave the whole event a much more fun vibe and the format of a morning of talks followed by an afternoon of workshops was perfect.
Hats off to Kate who worked her ass off to make sure that everything ran smoothly. Seriously, you wouldn’t believe the amount of work she did. The change of venue and format for this year resulted in at least twice as much work as usual.
In the middle of UX London’s three days, I ran a workshop called Responsive UX. As I told the audience that morning when I was pitching the workshop, I got the title by taking the term “responsive design” and doing a find-and-replace on the word “design” with the phrase “UX”. After all, what’s the difference? Right, Peter?
Seriously though, this workshop was a little different in that I wasn’t covering any HTML or CSS or JavaScript. It was much more about planning for the unknown and good ol’-fashioned content priority and hierarchy.
I wasn’t entirely pleased with how it went. It was a workshop of two halves. The first half had far too much of me talking (and ranting), probably preaching to the choir. But I felt I had to lay the groundwork first. The second half—when everybody got hands on with paper-based exercises—was much better.
I learned my lesson: show, don’t tell. I’ll be doing a full day responsive workshop at Ampersand in June. I plan to make sure that there’s less of me talking and more making and collaborating. Also, because it’s a full day, I’ll be able to get down to the nitty-gritty of markup and style sheets.
And don’t forget; if you want me to come to your company sometime and do a workshop there, no problemo.
Some people at the workshop asked about me publishing my slides. The slides by themselves really don’t contain much information but I’ve published them on Speakerdeck anyway. But what’s more valuable are the URLs to articles and resources I mentioned along the way. So here’s the structure of the workshop together with links to examples and further reading…
Representing Clearleft, I wrote a little something for The Pastry Box. As Tantek pointed out, it’s somewhat ironic that it’s published on a third-party site, considering that I explicitly said “I really encourage you to publish on your own site.”
So here it is.
…
I had the great pleasure of organising the Responsive Day Out here in Brighton last month. It was a lovely gathering of front-end developers and designers getting together to swap stories and cry on one another’s shoulders about the challenges involved in responsive design.
There were some well-known names on the roster: people who speak at international conferences and whose work you’d be familiar with. But there were also some first-timers: people who had never spoken at a conference before.
So why would I, as a conference organiser, ask someone who has never spoken before to get up on stage and share their thoughts?
The answer is simple: their writing. Reading the intelligent and cogent blog posts and articles that they had published made me want to hear what they had to say …and I wanted to introduce their smarts to an audience. These people took the time to write down and publish their thoughts, and that led directly to their appearance at a web conference.
I really encourage you to publish on your own site. If you don’t have your own site, I think you should. In the meantime, there are plenty of other wonderful online publications: 24 Ways, Smashing Magazine, A List Apart. Why not get in touch with them if you’ve got an idea for an article?
To say that communication is a valuable skill when you’re working on the web would be quite an understatement. In a very real sense, the web was made to allow us all to share and communicate. Anybody can do it. That’s one of the great things about the web. You don’t need to ask anybody for permission. If you have an idea or a technique or a question that you want to share, all you need to do is publish it …as long as you take the time to write your thoughts down.
