Archive: December, 2009

Drew and Brian did a superb job with this year’s 24 Ways, the advent calendar for geeks. There were some recurring themes: HTML5 from Yaili, Bruce and myself; CSS3 from Drew, Natalie and Rachel; and workflow from Andy and Meagan.

The matter of personal projects was also surprisingly prevalent. Elliot wrote A Pet Project is For Life, Not Just for Christmas and Jina specifically mentioned Huffduffer in her piece, Make Out Like a Bandit. December was the month for praising personal projects: that’s exactly what I was talking about at Refresh Belfast at the start of the month.

If you don’t have a personal project on the go, I highly recommend it. It’s a great way of learning new skills and experimenting with new technology. It’s also a good safety valve that can keep you sane when work is getting you down.

Working on Huffduffer is a lot of fun and I plan to keep iterating on the site whenever I can. But the project that I’ve really invested my soul into is The Session. Over the past decade, the site has built up a large international community with a comprehensive store of tunes and sessions.

Running any community site requires a lot of time and I haven’t always been as hands-on as I could have been with The Session. As a result, the discourse can occasionally spiral downwards into nastiness, prompting me to ask myself, Why do I bother? But then when someone contributes something wonderful to the site, I’m reminded of why I started it in the first place.

My dedication to the site was crystallised recently by a sad event. A long-time contributor to the site passed away. Looking back over the generosity of his contributions made me realise that The Session isn’t a personal project at all: it’s a community project, and I have a duty to enable the people in the community to connect. I also have a duty to maintain the URLs created by the community (are you listening, Yahoo?).

I feel like I’ve been neglecting the site. I could be doing so much more with the collective data, especially around location. The underlying code definitely needs refactoring, and the visual design could certainly do with a refresh (although I think it’s held up pretty well for such a long-running site).

I’m not going to make a new year’s resolution—that would just give me another deadline to stress out about—but I’m making a personal commitment to do whatever I can for The Session in 2010.

Take a look at the line-up and schedule for UX London next May. It’s going to be fan-bloody-tastic.

I’m particularly excited about seeing Scott McCloud. When Kai found out that I had never read Understanding Comics, he very kindly sent me a copy. Now I understand what all the fuss is about. It’s a superb book and extremely relevant to interaction design …hence my excitement about Scott McCloud’s appearance at UX London.

Before reading Understanding Comics, the only Scott McCloud work I had seen was the Google Chrome comic. It was quite an achievement—there’s no way I would have read through forty pages of documentation for a web browser if it weren’t for the format it was in. It convinced me that comics could be a very powerful way of communicating online (just ask the CSS Squirrel).

Speaking of online comics, if you don’t think 2D Goggles is one of the best things on the web, your geek credentials are hereby revoked. Oh, and if you’ve never read The Spiders, do yourself a favour and track it down.

When Brad Colbow approached me about reformatting my post Misunderstanding Markup into an online comic, I thought it was a great idea—an excellent way of spreading the message of the post in a more enjoyable format. I didn’t expect the finished result to be quite so excellent. It was a smash hit. Scott McCloud liked it too.

I asked Brad if he could help me out with something else. For a while now, I’ve wanted to do something with the “about” page on Huffduffer. Don’t get me wrong; I think the copy is pretty good. It’s just a little …flat. I thought that illustrations would really help to bring it to life. Brad very kindly agreed.

We discussed various ideas. There were two possible narrative strands: we could use the wartime story of huffduffing or we could choose a more literal but abstract approach in explaining how the site works. Brad came up with some sketches for both and they were so good, I just couldn’t decide between them. So we opted to go with a kind of split-screen parallel story.

The finished results exceeded my expectations. Brad’s ability to come up creative solutions is matched only by his ability to execute them brilliantly.

Don’t take my word for it. Take a look at the final result for yourself.

Keeping up with HTML5 can seem like a full-time job if you’re subscribed to both the W3C public-html list and the WHATWG mailing list.

If you have to choose just one, the WHATWG list is definitely the red pill. The W3C list has a very high volume of traffic, mostly about politics and procedure. Sam Ruby deserves a medal for keeping the whole thing on an even keel.

The WHATWG list, on the other hand, can get pretty nitty-gritty in its discussions of Web Workers, Offline Storage and other technologies that are completely over my head.

The specification itself is shaping up nicely. My list of bugbears is getting shorter and shorter:

1. I’m still not convinced that the article element is necessary, given that it is almost indistinguishable from section. Having two very similar elements is potentially very confusing for authors. It’s hard enough deciding the difference between a section and a div.
2. The time element is still unnecessarily restrictive. I don’t just mean that it’s restrictive in the sense that you can’t mark up a month, the very definition is too narrow. I hoisted the HTML5 spec by its own petard recently, pointing out that a different portion of the spec violates the definition of time.
3. The cite element is also too restrictively defined, and in a backwards-incompatible way to boot. I’ve written more about that over on 24 Ways.

There are much bigger issues than these still outstanding—mostly related to the accessibility of audio, video and canvas—but I’ll leave it to smarter people than me to tackle those. My issues all revolve around semantics and, let’s face it, they’re kind of piddling little problems in the grand scheme of things.

On the whole, I’d say the spec is looking mighty fine. Most of it is ready for use today.

I think the next big challenge for HTML5 lies with the tools. It’s great that we’ve got a validator but what we really need is a lint tool—something like JSlint but for checking markup writing style: case sensitivity of tags, quotes around attributes, that kind of thing. Robert Nyman concurs.

Let be clear: I’m not talking about a validator that checks for polyglot documents i.e. HTML that can also be parsed as XML. I’m talking purely about writing style and personal preference; a tool that will help enforce an in-house style guide of arbitrary “best” practices.

I’ve impressed this upon Henri in IRC on a few occasions. He has explained to me that it’s not so easy to build a true syntax checker …and no, you can’t just use regular expressions.

Still, I think that there would be enormous value in having even an imperfect tool to help authors who want to write HTML5 right now but also want to enforce a strict syntax on themselves. A working rough’n’ready lint tool that catches 80% of the most common gotchas is better than a theoretical perfect tool that will work 100% of the time but that currently works 0% of the time because it doesn’t exist yet.

Anybody want to step up to challenge?

I had a thoroughly enjoyable time at Refresh Belfast. I enjoy any opportunity to geek out about building Huffduffer in front of a captive audience. This captive audience seemed to actually enjoy it. It seems like Belfast has a pretty vibrant geek scene.

It was my first time being in Northern Ireland, which is somewhat shameful given that I grew up in Ireland. Belfast felt a little strange to me; an equal split of where I grew up (Ireland) and I where I live now (England). But mostly, it has a character all its own.

Andy took great care of me while I was in town, showing me the sights. We took a black cab tour ‘round the city. The historical part of the tour was informative and the political part was …um… interesting.

Do you want to get out and take pictures? asked the cab driver. Somehow, taking snapshots on Shankhill Road just didn’t sit right with me. It’s not exactly ancient history. It reminded me of when I was last in Berlin where tourists now have the opportunity to have their picture taken with a fake East German border guard. I didn’t take any pictures of the murals.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not waxing nostalgic. I’ll take present-day slightly tacky tourism over the utterly tacky violence of the past.

Still… to the woman sitting next to me on the flight home, carrying a bodhrán emblazoned with the faces of the hunger strikers: lady, that is socially unacceptable on so many levels.

Recent events reminded me again of what a great place Brighton is for a geek like me. Remy’s all-JavaScript Full Frontal conference went superbly—hence the effusive praise over on the DOM Scripting blog. James and Nat organised a superb Skillswap on the subject of wayfinding. If you missed it, the audio is up on Huffduffer.

It seems like Brighton has a high scenius level.

Scenius stands for the intelligence and the intuition of a whole cultural scene.

It’s fitting then that, Brian Eno, the man who coined the term “scenius”, will be curating the Brighton Festival next year.

There doesn’t seem to be any particular reason why Brighton should be a geekier place than any other UK town. Sure, we could retroactively discover geographical or social conditions that favour Brighton but I think the truth is that it’s just a large-scale Schelling point.

And it’s not just a geek thing either. The music scene in Brighton is maintaining its reputation, although the scene is somewhat lessened by the recent demise of The Gilded Palace of Sin.

Occasionally, the worlds of geekiness and music mesh to form a glorious venn diagram of fun. The £5 App Musical Christmas Special was one such scenius supercollider. It featured free booze, live music from 100 Robots, and many tales of hackery including a demo of the absolutely wonderful Therething from Toby Cole of Build Brighton, one of the many Brighton geek institutions.

Lest I become too comfortable in my Brighton hive, I’m off to explore another geek scene tomorrow. I’m going over to Belfast to meet the geeks of N’orn Ireland. I’ll be speaking at Refresh Belfast about personal projects in general and the building of Huffduffer in particular. I’m looking forward to it. If you’re in the area, come along and say hello.