Archive: January 31st, 2014

Baldur Bjarnason has written down his thoughts on why he thinks HTML is too complex.

Now we’re back to seeing almost the same level of complexity and messiness in most web pages as we saw in the worst days of table-hacking. The semantic elements from HTML5 are largely unused.

The reason for this, as outlined in an old email by Matthew Thomas, is down to the lack of any visible benefit from browsers:

unless there is an immediate visual or behavioural benefit to using an element, most people will ignore it.

That’s a fair point, but I think it works in the opposite direction too. I’ve seen plenty of designers and developers who are reluctant to use HTML elements because of the default browser styling. The legend element is one example. A more recent one is input type=”date”—until there’s a way for authors to have more say about the generated interface, there’s going to be resistance to its usage.

Anyway, Baldur’s complaint is that HTML is increasing in complexity by adding new elements—section, article, etc.—that provide theoretical semantic value, without providing immediate visible benefits. It’s much the same argument that informed Cory Doctorow’s Metacrap essay over a decade ago. It’s a strong argument.

There’s always a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation with any kind of language extension designed to provide data structure: why should authors use the new extensions if there’s no benefit? …and why should parsers (like search engines or browsers) bother doing anything with the new extensions if nobody’s using them?

Whether it’s microformats or new HTML structural elements, the vicious circle remains the same. The solution is to try to make the barrier to entry as low as possible for authors—the parsers/spiders/browsers will follow.

I have to say, I share some of Baldur’s concern. I’ve talked before about the confusion between section and article. Providing two new elements might seem better than providing just one, but in fact it just muddies the waters and confuses authors (in my experience).

But I realise that in the grand scheme of things, I’m nitpicking. I think HTML is in pretty good shape. Baldur said “simply put, HTML is a mess,” and he’s not wrong …but HTML has always been a mess. It’s the worst mess except for all the others that have been tried. When it comes to markup, I think that “perfect” is very much the enemy of “good” (just look at XHTML2).

When I was in San Francisco back in August, I had a good ol’ chat with Tantek about markup complexity. It started when he asked me what I thought of hgroup.

I actually found quite a few use cases for hgroup in my own work …but I could certainly see why it was a dodgy solution. The way that a wrapping hgroup could change the semantic value of an h2, or h3, or whatever …that’s pretty weird, right?

And then Tantek pointed out that there are a number of HTML elements that depend on their wrapper for meaning …and that’s a level of complexity that doesn’t sit well with HTML.

For example, a p is always a paragraph, and em is always emphasis …but li is only a list item if it’s wrapped in ul or ol, and tr is only a table row if it’s wrapped in a table.

(Interestingly, these are the very same elements that browsers will automatically adjust the DOM for—generating ul and table if the author doesn’t include it. It’s like the complexity is damage that the browsers have to route around.)

I had never thought of that before, but the idea has really stuck with me. Now it smells bad to me that it isn’t valid to have a figcaption unless it’s within a figure.

These context-dependent elements increase the learning curve of HTML, and that, in my own opinion, is not a good thing. I like to think that HTML should be easy to learn—and that the web would not have been a success if its lingua franca hadn’t been grokabble by mere mortals.

Tantek half-joked about writing HTML: The Good Parts. The more I think about it, the more I think it’s a pretty good idea. If nothing else, it could make us more sensitive to any proposed extensions to HTML that would increase its complexity without a corresponding increase in value.

Mandy has written a great article about making remote teams work. It’s an oft-neglected aspect of working on a product when you’ve got people distributed geographically.

But remote communication isn’t just something that’s important for startups and product companies—it’s equally important for agencies when it comes to client communication.

At Clearleft, we occasionally work with clients right here in Brighton, but that’s the exception. More often than not, the clients are based in London, or somewhere else in the UK. In the case of Code for America, they’re based in San Francisco—that’s eight or nine timezones away (depending on the time of year).

As it turned out, it wasn’t a problem at all. In fact, it worked out nicely. At the end of every day, we had a quick conference call, with two or three people at our end, and two or three people at their end. For us, it was the end of the day: 5:30pm. For them, the day was just starting: 9:30am.

We’d go through what we had been doing during that day, ask any questions that had cropped up over the course of the day, and let them know if there was anything we needed from them. If there was anything we needed from them, they had the whole day to put it together while we went home. The next morning (from our perspective), it would be waiting in our in/drop-boxes.

Meanwhile, from the perspective of Code for America, they were coming into the office every morning and starting the day with a look over our work, as though we had beavering away throughout the night.

Now, it would be easy for me to extrapolate from this that this way of working is great and everyone should do it. But actually, the whole timezone difference was a red herring. The real reason why the communication worked so well throughout the project was because of the people involved.

Right from the start, it was clear that because of time and budget constraints that we’d have to move fast. We wouldn’t have the luxury of debating everything in detail and getting every decision signed off. Instead we had a sort of “rough consensus and running code” approach that worked really well. It worked because everyone understood that was what was happening—if just one person was expecting a more formalised structure, I’m sure it wouldn’t have gone quite so smoothly.

So we provided materials in whatever level of fidelity made sense for the idea under discussion. Sometimes that was a quick sketch. Sometimes it was a fairly high-fidelity mockup. Sometimes it was a module of markup and CSS. Whatever it took.

Most of all, there was a great feeling of trust on both sides of the equation. It was clear right from the start that the people at Code for America were super-smart and weren’t going to make any outlandish or unreasonable requests of Clearleft. Instead they gave us just the right amount of guidance and constraints, while trusting us to make good decisions.

At one point, Jon was almost complaining about not getting pushback on his designs. A nice complaint to have.

Because of the daily transatlantic “stand up” via teleconference, there was a great feeling of inevitability to the project as it came together from idea to execution. Inevitability doesn’t sound like a very sexy attribute of a web project, but it’s far preferable to the kind of project that involves milestones of “big reveals”—the Mad Men approach to project management.

Oh, and we made sure that we kept those transatlantic calls nice and short. They never lasted longer than 10 or 15 minutes. We wanted to avoid the many pitfalls of conference calls.