Archive: December, 2006

I just celebrated my first Christmas in Brighton. I usually spend the holiday season either in Ireland with my family or in Arizona with Jessica’s family. This year, thanks to a Kafkaesque game of beaureaucratic tag involving the Home Office and Jessica’s passport, we were stranded in the UK—like most people as it turned out.

It ended up being a most pleasant affair, spent in the company of good friends and copious amounts of good food. Following a shady rendez-vous with chicken-pimp Pete, we had the raw materials for an excellent roast. After an evening (and early morning) of playing poker, in which Andy emerged victorious, the festivities were complete.

With Christmas done, I am now going to spend my first New Year’s Eve in Brighton. To be honest, I’m not much of a party-goer so I don’t think I’ll be enduring the cold for Fatboy Slim. Besides, my mother is coming over to visit and I don’t think that would be her scene either.

Instead, I’m planning to carry my current enjoyment of coziness, comfort food and mindless entertainment across the threshold of the year. The entertainment will be delivered via the big screen TV that I treated myself with at Christmas.

Now I can finally watch those films that I vowed only ever to watch on a big screen:

1. Blade Runner
2. Brazil
3. 2001: A Space Odyssey

If you need me, I’ll be busy treasuring the twin spirits of Christmas present: gluttony and sloth. Once the new year has been rung in, they can go back to being vices but for now they are both most assuredly virtues.

The RSS vine is humming with point and counterpoint this week.

Adobe revealed their new range of icons, based on mashing up a colour wheel with the periodic table of the elements. Lots of people don’t like ‘em: Stan doesn’t; Dave doesn’t. Some people do like ‘em: Veerle does. I can’t say I’m all that keen on them but I honestly can’t muster up much strength of conviction either way.

Let us leave the designers for a moment and cast our gaze upon the hot topic amongst the techy crowd…

Dave Winer looked at JSON and didn’t like what he saw:

Gotta love em, because there’s no way they’re going to stop breaking what works, and fixing what don’t need no fixing.

James Bennet wrote an excellent response:

Of course, this ignores the fact that the Lisp folks have been making the same argument for years, wondering why there was this great pressing need to go out and invent XML when s-expressions were just dandy.

The debate continues over on Scripting.com, where the best comment comes from Douglas Crockford:

The good thing about reinventing the wheel is that you can get a round one.

The discussion continues. Be it icons or data formats, the discourse remains remarkably civil. Perhaps it’s the seasonal spirit of goodwill. Whatever happened to the good ol’ “Mac vs. Windows”-style flame wars?

In contrast, Roger has posted a refreshingly curmudgeonesque list entitled Six things that suck about the Web in 2006. He had me nodding my head in vigourous agreement with point number six:

Over-wide, fixed width layouts. Go wide if you must. Use a fixed width if you don’t know how to make a flexible layout. But don’t do both. Horizontal scrolling, no thanks.

Perhaps I should post my own list of things about the Web that suck, but I fear it would be a never-ending roster. Instead I’ll restrict myself to one single thing, specifically related to blogs:

Ads on blogs. They suck. I find them disrespectful; like going into somebody’s house for a nice cup of tea only to have them try to flog you a nice set of encyclopedias.

Just to be clear: ads on commercial sites (magazines, resources, whatever) I understand. But on a personal site, they bring down the tone far more than any use of typography, colour or layout could ever offset.

I used to wonder why people put those “Digg this” or “Delicious this” links on their blog posts. I couldn’t see the point. But combined with google ads, I guess they make sense. They’re a way of driving traffic, eyeballs, click-through and by extension, filthy lucre. That’s fine… as long as you don’t mind being a whore.

Remember the term “Cam whore?”:

A Cam whore is a term for people who expose themselves on the Internet with webcam software in exchange for goods, usually via enticing viewers to purchase items on their wishlists or add to their online accounts.

I think it’s high time we coined the term “Blog whore” to describe people who slap google ads all over a medium intended for personal expression.

Alas, most of my friends, colleagues and co-workers are Blog whores. Scrivs manages to be Blog whore, Digg whore and pimp all at the same time with his 9 Rules bitches. In his recent round-up of blog designs, he says of Shaun’s site:

In a perfect world there are no ads, but we don’t live in that kind of world yet for the time being we can escape to the land of make believe when visiting Inman’s site.

Well, I see no reason why we can’t all live in that perfect world. In the style of Robert’s ludicrously provocative hyperbole, I hereby declare that a blog with ads isn’t really a blog. So there.

Ah, that’s better. There’s nothing like a good rant to counteract all that civilised discourse.

Happy holidays, Blog whores!

After I wrote about mashing up RSS feeds to create a sort of life stream, some people have taken this idea and run with it. Probably my favourite implementation is Deliciously Meta from Steve Ivy, which looks very classy. For Wordpress users, Chris J. Davis has created a plug-in. Check out his own life stream to see it in action.

Just the other day, I came across a site which allows you to create a life stream by entering a series of URLs. The site is Jaiku.

Jaiku is a Finnish competitor to Twitter—with the added benefit of a life stream thrown in. You send the site little updates of what you’re doing (via the Web or mobile) and you track what your friends are up to.

In many ways, Jaiku is superior to Twitter. It certainly looks a lot better. It feels snappier. The markup is clean. There’s also a dedicated mobile client for Nokia smart phones. All in all, it’s a slick, fun site.

And yet… simply by virtue of the fact that I discovered it after Twitter, I’m unlikely to use Jaiku as much. It all comes back to the issue of creating yet another network of friends on yet another social networking site: I don’t feel very motivated to do it and I suspect that none of my contacts on Twitter relish the prospect either.

Khoi posited the idea that the exclusivity of social networks may be a feature, not a bug. That may be true to a certain extent. On Last.fm, my criteria for adding a contact is not just my relationship with that person, but also whether or not they have crappy taste in music. On Twitter, I only add people I’ve met in real life. Perhaps I’ll end up using Jaiku for a limited subset of people I know: maybe I’ll use it just for tracking my Central European Tribe comrades.

But what I really want is to be able to take all my friends from Twitter and quickly and easily port them over to Jaiku. Alas, in the absence of hCard and XFN on Twitter, this seems unlikely. A movement in the other direction seems more likely given that Jaiku is using hCard.

Meanwhile, I could kill two birds with one stone and add my RSS feed from Twitter to my life stream on Jaiku. That way, every time I post to Twitter, it would show up on Jaiku. I wonder if that would constitute “gaming” the system?

If I wanted to game the system in a harmless but fun way, I could have some fun with the query string on Jaiku and post the results to Flickr. D’oh! They fixed it: that was fast!

Drew has clearly forgotten how much work he put into last year’s advent calendar because he’s only gone and relaunched 24 Ways this year.

It being the 18th of December, the webby festivities are well underway so be sure to read through all the morsels that have been published thus far. Today it’s my turn to pop something out of the calendar. I’ve written a piece called Boost Your Hyperlink Power, dedicated to the humble hyperlink. It’s mostly about the little used rel and rev attributes.

I’ve also included some microformats in there. I’m particularly pleased with the example I came up with for vote-links:

I agree with <a href="http://richarddawkins.net/home" rev="vote-for">Richard Dawkins</a>
about those <a href="http://www.icr.org/" rev="vote-against">creationists</a>.

I’ll take any chance I can to strike a blow for science. Mind you, I’ve got nothing on Patrick: he’s managed to create entire case studies in his new book that champion evolutionary theory.

Maybe we should form a web ring of Humanist web developers: explaining semantic markup whilst battling against the forces of superstition and ignorance.

Twitter continues to fascinate. There’s so much wrong with this app—the interface, the documentation, the usability—and yet somehow it exerts a strange hold over all who come in contact with it… for now, anyway.

The site offers a nice feature in the shape of “favorites” (sic), those extra special gems that you’ve plucked from the ebb and flow of Twittery chatter. Here are some of mine:

Kitta: having my legs waxed, trying to explain Twitter and why I just got 4 SMS’s to her, I think she thinks i’m either a drug dealer or a secret agent

Relly: wonders if her husband would fancy her even more with a bargain star tattooed to her butt and a permenant reflection in front of her boobs.

Dunstan: Mmm-mmm, I am now baby-wipe clean… boy I hope they fix my shower soon.

Pete: just took the phone away from the chickens - he’s had enough of the crank calls they keep making…

Anton: thinks of how cool a zeppelin on a monorail would look.

Craig: I sometimes fear that the pinhole iSight built into my MBP is secretly recording me when I pick my nose. Is it just me?

And possibly my favourite so far:

Glenda: On AIM Mobile you can now “snowball a friend.” Oh, REALLY now?

While I was in Berlin for the BIENE awards, I found myself thinking a lot about language and meaning… as one does when one is in a foreign country.

First of all, I think I may have inadvertently insulted my fellow jury members, and just about everyone else I came into contact with, by continuously using the familiar, rather than the polite form. I never could figure out when to use “du” and when to use “sie”, so I’ve always just stuck with “du.”

Secondly, I was thinking about the German word being used to describe accessibility: “Barrierefreiheit”, literally “free from obstacles.” It’s a good word, but because it’s describes websites by what they don’t contain (obstacles), it leads to a different way of thinking about the topic.

In English, it’s relatively easy to qualify the word “accessible.” We can talk about sites being “quite accessible”, “fairly accessible”, or “very accessible”. But if you define accessibility as a lack of obstacles, then as long as a single obstacle remains in place it’s hard to use the word “barrierefrei” as an adjective. The term is too binary; black or white; yes or no.

Thinking further along these lines, I realised that English is not without its problems in this regard. Consider for a minute the term “making a website accessible.” There’s an implication there that accessibility is something that needs to be actively added, something that requires an expenditure of energy and therefore money.

The BIENE awards ceremony began with some words of wisdom from Johnny Haeusler, the German of equivalent of Jason Kottke and Tom Coates rolled into one:

In der realen Welt steht fast immer die Frage im Mittelpunkt, was wir tun müssen, um Menschen mit Behinderung zu integrieren. Im Internet müssen wir umdenken und fragen, was wir tun müssen, um niemanden auszuschließen – und dabei spielt die Barrierefreiheit eine zentrale Rolle.

In the real world, we’re almost always asking what we can do to include handicapped people. On the Internet, we need to rethink this question and ask what we can do so that we don’t shut anybody out—and accessibility plays a central role in that.

This highlights a really important point: good markup is accessible by default. As long as you’re using HTML elements in a semantically meaningful way—which you should be doing anyway, without even thinking about accessibility—then your documents will be accessible to begin with. It’s only through other additions—visual presentation, behaviour, etc.—that accessibility is removed.

Far from being something that is added to a site, accessibility is something we need to ensure isn’t removed. From that perspective, the phrase “making a site accessible” isn’t accurate.

Just as “progressive enhancement” sounds better than “graceful degradation”, talking about accessibility as something that needs to be added onto a website isn’t doing us any favours. Accessibility is not a plug-in. It’s not something that can be bolted onto a site after the fact. So here’s what I’m proposing:

From now on, instead of talking about making a site accessible, I’m going to talk about keeping a site accessible.

Join me.

My brief excursion to Berlin is at an end and I’m back in Brighton.

The prize-giving ceremony for the BIENE accessibility awards went well. It was a very professional affair in nifty surroundings. Champagne, canapés and short films from the folks at Ehrensenf made for a most pleasant awards ceremony. After the ceremony itself, a plentiful supply of food, beer and music ensured that the whole evening was enjoyable.

The highly valued prizes went to some very deserving websites. I can vouch for the fact that the jury was pretty strict in its judgement. Even as the prizes were being handed out on stage, the sweet taste of victory was tempered by some words advising where improvements could still be made.

Most of the winners sported valid markup; usually XHTML Transitional, sometimes even XHTML Strict. Quite a lot of the sites offered text-resizing facilities, though I wonder if that’s something best left to user agents. Joe will pleased to note that many of the sites also offered zoom layouts.

The Pfizer website, winner of a golden Biene, includes a remarkable section that sets out to translate those bits of paper you get with your prescription into plain language… and sign language! The whole thing is done with Flash and it works wonderfully well with screenreaders. From a technical viewpoint, I’m really glad that I now have an example I can point to, should I ever find myself in one of those “Flash is inherently inaccessible” arguments.

I also felt that it was very important that the prize-winning websites should be well-crafted with strong visual design. The Barmer website is not only accessible, it looks good too. It’s extremely bulletproof with a semi-liquid layout. There’s more semi-liquid goodness to be had at the site of the Bundesrat—the federal council of Germany. I’m really impressed with the clarity and cleanliness of the design.

My personal favourite is the website of the Media Management department of the Wiesbaden Technical College. I like the nice clean design. They also offer material in plain language and sign language. It scales nicely, it’s usable and it’s accessible. But what impressed me most was the story behind the site.

The website was created by students. A small group put the whole thing together in three months. They did this as just 12.5% of their coursework, so there was a ton of other work they needed to attend to at the same time. Under the guidance of professor Stephan Schwarz, they learned about structuring documents with markup and styling with CSS. The end result is something that would put many “professional” agencies to shame. What a debut! An accessible, good-looking site from people who have learned Web design the right way, without ever having to nest a table.

I’m just blown away by their achievement. I requested, and was granted, the honour of awarding them their silver Biene on stage. That meant I had to speak German in front of a roomful of people (and television cameras) but I made it through without stumbling too much.

At South by Southwest earlier this year, Andys Budd and Clarke gave a talk on Web Design Superheroes. The students from Fachhochschule Wiesbaden are my heroes. If they represent the next generation of designers, the Web is in very good hands indeed.

I lived in Germany for about five or six years in the nineties. In all that time, while I was ensconsed in the beautiful Black Forest town of Freiburg, I never once made it to the capital. Now I’m finally here.

I was invited to come to Berlin to be part of the jury for the highly-prized Biene awards. This is quite an honour. In the Biene awards, the emphasis is on accessibility and the criteria are really quite strict. It’s no cliché to say that just being nominated is quite an achievement.

One of the restictions on entries for the awards is that the site is primarily in German. I suspect that it’s my familiarity with the language that secured my place on the jury. The only problem is that I haven’t spoken German for six years.

Yesterday was judgment day. The jury gathered to debate and discuss the relative merits of the sites on offer. I had absolutely no problem understanding what everyone else was saying but as soon as I opened my mouth to add my opinion, I found that words and grammar were failing me at every turn. It was quite frustrating. I know if I was here for a few more days, it would all come back to me but having to dust down the German-speaking part of my brain after an interval of half a decade felt like quite a tough task.

I learned most of my German from sitting in pubs chatting with Germans, which is why I’m still fairly crap at reading and writing in the language. I usually find that my German improves greatly after one or two beers. Strangely though, after another three or four beers, I can’t understand a word anyone is saying. Komisch, nicht wahr?

The prize-giving ceremony will take place tonight. I can’t give away any of the results yet; that’s verboten. But I’ll definitely be blogging about some of the sites as soon as the pre-ceremony gag order is removed.

Until then, I have a few hours to explore Berlin. The good people from Aktion Mensch are putting me up at the ludicrously swanky Westin Grand, once the crown jewel of East Berlin. Its central locataion means that I’m just a short stroll away from the Brandenburg gate and plenty of other must-see attractions. Flickr demands pictorial evidence of such visual delights: I must obey.

The second day of Flash On The Beach was miserable… at least, the weather was miserable: the presentations were excellent.

Brendan Dawes kicked things off with a superb presentation. It was funny, passionate, down to earth and inspiring. He’s a bullshit-free zone. Once again, I was struck by how little was specific to Flash. Instead, the presentation was universal, covering design, inspiration, life, the universe and everything.

After that, I saw some of the beautiful data visualisations from Marcos Weskamp. You’ve probably seen his scrAPI-powered Newsmap app. It was fascinating stuff and despite the fact that English isn’t his mother tongue, Marcos did a good job of explaining some fairly complicated topics.

After a quick lunch at Wagamama’s, I gave my presentation. People were very kind to me and said they enjoyed it. I got a real glow of pleasure when Brendan told me how much he liked it. It’s always nice to hear that someone enjoyed a presentation, but it means so much more when the complement comes from someone I admire so much—just like when John Allsopp complemented me on my presentation at Web Directions South.

I took a break after my talk and re-entered the dome to see Hillman Curtis. Again, this was only tangentially related to Flash. He told some stories and showed some movies, all in a very relaxed way. It was a very pleasant experience to sit there and take in his work while he filled in the back story.

With that, the presentations were done and all that remained was the Flash tenth anniversary party in the Honey Club. Despite the weather (still miserable), many Flash geeks showed up and I spent the evening in conversation with people from Belgium, France and Norway.

I find it extremely cool that Brighton can attract such a far-flung crowd with an appealing, professional conference. John Davey took quite a risk with Flash On The Beach. I’m really glad it paid off.

I wish I could have been there for day three. Instead, I spent the day getting a bus to Heathrow, waiting at the airport, sitting in a plane, waiting for my luggage, getting a taxi and finally settling in to my hotel room in Berlin. The travelling was worth it: this is some hotel.

I just got off the stage at Flash On The Beach. To be honest, I didn’t think anyone would turn up: Microsoft were demoing their newest product in the big auditorium. On the plus side, I had a much smaller room to fill which made it nice and intimate.

The talk went well. The crowd were receptive and responsive, despite the oppressive stuffiness in the room. I was really, really glad that I had time for questions after I was done talking. I ended up talking for an hour (longer than I anticipated), but that still left fifteen minutes for a question and answer session.

I was talking to some people afterwards about some specific Ajax issues (cross-domain stuff, mostly) and I’ve posted some relevant links over on the DOM Scripting site.

Now that my talk is done, I can relax and enjoy Hillman Curtis.

The first day of Brighton’s very own Flash conference covered quite a wide range of subjects.

I skipped the keynote. That’s partly because I thought it would be a product pitch from Adobe but mostly because I had a late night at Aral’s party. By all accounts, it was actually a very good presentation.

The first presentation I saw was from Craig Swann. It was great! He reminded me a lot of Matt Webb with his talk of unusual sensory input devices. Craig was was like a mad scientist, pulling out wires and sensors to build engaging works of art. It made me want to go out and subscribe to Make magazine.

I went out for lunch with Pete who introduced me to two of my Flash heroes, Todd Purgason and Brendan Dawes, gentlemen both. After we all filled up on pies, I went back to the conference to listen to Branden Hall talk about Actionscript 3, which doubles up as a preview of JavaScript 2.

Branden was a very entertaining presenter but he had a tough crowd to work with. Maybe it’s because the venue isn’t packed out and people are sitting apart but there’s a constant feeling of being on the edge of the audience no matter where you sit.

Aral was up next and he was his usual ebullient self. He talked about agile development and user-centred design. For a while there, he was channelling Jason Fried. I was just waiting for him to start talking about “getting real.”

There wasn’t much that was specifically Flash-related in Aral’s talk, which made its appeal even broader: this is a presentation that would fit equally well at a non-Flash conference.

Finally, Eric Natzke showed off some of his amazing work and explained the process behind it. The presentation is online. You could lose hours looking through his hypnotic creations.

All in all, it was a diverse day of talks: art, code and business. Tomorrow I’ll be giving my controversially-titled presentation. There is a very real possibility that it will go down like a lead balloon, but fingers crossed…

Web Directions North in Vancouver is shaping up to be the conference highlight of next year. I’m extremely happy that I’ll be speaking. If it’s just half as good as its Australian predecessor it will be awesome in its rockitude.

‘Scuse my usage of words like “awesome” and “rockitude” but I’m trying to get in the mood for the aprés-conference weekend of snowboarding. Sound good? Why don’t you join me.

You’ve got a couple of options for securing a ticket (aside from the obvious option of actually buying one). If you’re quick off the mark, you can just about make the closing deadline for the competition from Digital Web magazine:

To win, submit your very own snowboard design! In the grand tradition of pro snowboarders and classic boardsmiths like Burton, Lib Tech, and Sims, we invite you to put your design skills into the most radical snowboard ever! Make it geeky, make it awesome, make it classic—whatever you want, it’s your design.

There are already some great entries. Even if you don’t win a ticket, there are tons of runner-up prizes.

The other way of earning a ticket is very cool indeed. You can participate in the Web Directions affiliate program:

Join our affiliate program and get 4 people to sign up for the conference and we’ll give you a free ticket for youself.

All you need to do is get your unique affiliate URL from us, and then you can spread the word in whatever way you think is right for you.

This is an excellent idea and something I’d like to see more conferences offer. It’s a great way to ensure that enthusiastic, passionate bloggers get to attend, regardless of their financial situation. Seeing this kind of innovation three months before the event bodes well for the conference itself.

I had a thoroughly enjoyable time at the Semantic Web Think Tank this week. Most of the other attendees were there representing museums and—geek that I am—I found it thrilling to be able to chat with people from such venerable institutions as the V&A Museum, the Science Museum and the Natural History Museum.

Apart from one focused effort to explain microformats, my contributions were pretty rambling affairs. Still, I thought I’d try to put together a list of things I mentioned while they’re still fresh in my mind.

• Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia by Cory Doctorow.
• The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki.
• The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell.
• Six Degrees: The New Science of Networks by Duncan J. Watts.
• Nexus: Small Worlds and the Groundbreaking Theory of Networks by Mark Buchanan.
• The Long Tail: How Endless Choice Is Creating Unlimited Demand by Chris Anderson.
• Sturgeon’s Law by Theodore Sturgeon.

There was a lot of talk about tagging and folksonomies, including a great demo of the user-contributed content at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney. I was chatting with Glenda later on and she pointed me to the steve.museum project, which is described as the first experiment in social tagging of art museum collections. That sounds like exactly what we were talking about at the think tank.

There was also plenty of talk about (uppercase) Semantic Web technologies. Museums have to deal with classifications far beyond the reach of microformats—with the glaring exception of events, which are crying out to be marked up in hCalendar. I don’t envy them the task of classifying and publishing all their data, but I remain convinced that user contributions (a la Wikipedia) can help enormously.