Archive: April, 2016

Psst… Jeremy! Right now you’re getting notified every time something is posted to Slack. That’s great at first, but now that activity is increasing you’ll probably prefer dialing that down.

What’s happening?

Why does everyone always look at me? I know I’m a chalkboard and that’s my job, I just wish people would ask before staring at me. Sometimes I don’t have anything to say.

I’m Little MOO - the bit of software that will be managing your order with us. It will shortly be sent to Big MOO, our print machine who will print it for you in the next few days. I’ll let you know when it’s done and on it’s way to you.

It looks like you’re writing a letter.

Your quest is to find the Warlock’s treasure, hidden deep within a dungeon populated with a multitude of terrifying monsters. You will need courage, determination and a fair amount of luck if you are to survive all the traps and battles, and reach your goal — the innermost chambers of the Warlock’s domain.

Welcome to Adventure!! Would you like instructions?

I am a lead pencil—the ordinary wooden pencil familiar to all boys and girls and adults who can read and write.

ÆLFRED MECH HET GEWYRCAN

Ælfred ordered me to be made

Technical note

I have marked up the protagonist of each conversation using the cite element. There is a long-running dispute over the use of this element. In HTML 4.01 it was perfectly fine to use cite to mark up a person being quoted. In the HTML Living Standard, usage has been narrowed:

The cite element represents the title of a work (e.g. a book, a paper, an essay, a poem, a score, a song, a script, a film, a TV show, a game, a sculpture, a painting, a theatre production, a play, an opera, a musical, an exhibition, a legal case report, a computer program, etc). This can be a work that is being quoted or referenced in detail (i.e. a citation), or it can just be a work that is mentioned in passing.

A person’s name is not the title of a work — even if people call that person a piece of work — and the element must therefore not be used to mark up people’s names.

I disagree.

In the examples above, it’s pretty clear that I, Pencil and Warlock Of Firetop Mountain are valid use cases for the cite element according to the HTML5 definition; they are titles of works. But what about Clippy or Little Moo or Slackbot? They’re not people …but they’re not exactly titles of works either.

If I were to mark up a dialogue between Eliza and a human being, should I only mark up Eliza’s remarks with cite? In text transcripts of conversations with Alexa, Siri, or Cortana, should only their side of the conversation get attributed as a source? Or should they also be written without the cite element because it must not be used to mark up people’s names …even though they are not people, according to conventional definition.

It’s downright botist.

I wrote a little something recently about some inspiring projects that people are working on. Like Matt’s Machine Supply project. There’s a physical side to that project—a tweeting book-vending machine in London—but there’s also the newsletter, 3 Books Weekly.

I was honoured to be asked by Matt to contribute three book recommendations. That newsletter went out last week. Here’s what I said…

The Victorian Internet by Tom Standage

A book about the history of telegraphy might not sound like the most riveting read, but The Victorian Internet is both fascinating and entertaining. Techno-utopianism, moral panic, entirely new ways of working, and a world that has been utterly transformed: the parallels between the telegraph and the internet are laid bare. In fact, this book made me realise that while the internet has been a great accelerator, the telegraph was one of the few instances where a technology could truly be described as “disruptive.”

Ancillary Justice: 1 (Imperial Radch) by Ann Leckie

After I finished reading the final Iain M. Banks novel I was craving more galaxy-spanning space opera. The premise of Ancillary Justice with its description of “ship minds” led me to believe that this could be picking up the baton from the Culture series. It isn’t. This is an entirely different civilisation, one where song-collecting and tea ceremonies have as much value as weapons and spacecraft. Ancillary Justice probes at the deepest questions of identity, both cultural and personal. As well as being beautifully written, it’s also a rollicking good revenge thriller.

The City & The City by China Miéville

China Miéville’s books are hit-and-miss for me, but this one is a direct hit. The central premise of this noir-ish tale defies easy description, so I won’t even try. In fact, one of the great pleasures of this book is to feel the way your mind is subtly contorted by the author to accept a conceit that should be completely unacceptable. Usually when a book is described as “mind-altering” it’s a way of saying it has drug-like properties, but The City & The City is mind-altering in an entirely different and wholly unique way. If Borges and Calvino teamed up to find The Maltese Falcon, the result would be something like this.

When I sent off my recommendations, I told Matt:

Oh man, it was so hard to narrow this down! So many books I wanted to mention: Station 11, The Peripheral, The Gone-Away World, Glasshouse, Foucault’s Pendulum, Oryx and Crake, The Wind-up Girl …this was so much tougher than I thought it was going to be.

And Matt said:

Tell you what — if you’d be up for writing recommendations for another 3 books, from those ones you mentioned, I’d love to feature those in the machine!

Done!

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

Station Eleven made think about the purpose of art and culture. If art, as Brian Eno describes it, is “everything that you don’t have to do”, what happens to art when the civilisational chips are down? There are plenty of post-pandemic stories of societal collapse. But there’s something about this one that sets it apart. It doesn’t assume that humanity will inevitably revert to an existence that is nasty, brutish and short. It’s also a beautifully-written book. The opening chapter completely sucker-punched me.

Glasshouse by Charles Stross

On the face of it, this appears to be another post-Singularity romp in a post-scarcity society. It is, but it’s also a damning critique of gamification. Imagine the Stanford prison experiment if it were run by godlike experimenters. Stross’s Accelerando remains the definitive description of an unfolding Singularity, but Glasshouse is the one that has stayed with me.

The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway

This isn’t an easy book to describe, but it’s a very easy book to enjoy. A delightful tale of a terrifying apocalypse, The Gone-Away World has plenty of laughs to balance out the existential dread. Try not to fall in love with the charming childhood world of the narrator—you know it can’t last. But we’ll always have mimes and ninjas.

I must admit, it’s a really lovely feeling to get notified on Twitter when someone buys one of the recommended books.

I just vended The City & The City, by China Miéville http://machine.supply/books/genmon/167

— Machine Supply (@MachineSupply) March 30, 2016

I just vended The Victorian Internet, by Tom Standage http://machine.supply/books/genmon/165

— Machine Supply (@MachineSupply) March 31, 2016

I was in Nuremberg last weekend for Indie Web Camp. It was great.

At some point I really should stop being surprised by just how much gets done in one weekend, but once again, I was blown away by the results.

On the first day we had very productive BarCamp-like discussion sessions, and on the second day it was heads-down hacking. But it was hacking with help. Being in the same room as other people who each have their own areas of expertise is so useful. It really turbo-charges the amount that you can get accomplished.

For example, I was helping Tom turn his website into a progressive web app with the addition of a service worker and a manifest file. Meanwhile Tom was helping somebody else get a Wordpress site up and running.

Actually, that was what really blew me away: two people began the second day of Indie Web Camp Nuremberg without websites and by the end of the day, they both had their own sites up and running. For me, that’s the real spirit of the indie web—I know we tend to go on about the technologies like h-card, h-entry, webmentions, micropub, and IndieAuth, but really it’s not about the technologies; it’s about having your own place on the web so that you have control over what you put out in the world.

For my part, I was mostly making some cosmetic changes to my site. There was a really good discussion on the first page about home pages. What’s the purpose of a home page? For some, it’s about conveying information about the person. For others, it’s a stream of activity.

My site used to have a splash-like homepage; just a brief bio and a link to the latest blog post. Then I changed it into a stream a few years ago. But that means that the home page of my site doesn’t feel that different from sections of the site like the journal or the link list.

During the discussion at Indie Web Camp, we started looking at how silos design their profile pages to see what we could learn from them. Looking at my Twitter profile, my Instagram profile, my Untappd profile, or just about any other profile, it’s a mixture of bio and stream, with the addition of stats showing activity on the site—signs of life.

I decided I’d add signs of life to my home page. Once again, I reached for my favourite little data visualisation helper: sparklines

A sparkline is a small intense, simple, word-sized graphic with typographic resolution.

I’ve already got sparklines on Huffduffer and on The Session so I suppose it was only a matter of time before they showed up here.

I’ve been tweaking them ever since I got back from Germany. Now I’ve added in a little h-card bio as well.

Initially I was using the fantastic little scripted SVG that Stuart made , the same one that I’m using on Huffduffer and The Session. But Kevin pointed out that a straightforward polyline would be more succinct. And in the case of my own site, there’s only four sparklines so it wouldn’t be a huge overhead to hard-code the values straight into the SVGs.

Yesterday was the first day of Render Conference in Oxford (I’ll be speaking later today). Sara gave a blisteringly great talk on (what else?) SVGs and I got so inspired I started refactoring my code right there and then. I’m pretty happy with how the sparklines are working now, although I’m sure I’ll continue to play around with them some more.

There’s another activity visualisation that I’m eager to play around with. I really like the calendar heatmap on my Github profile. I could imagine using something like that for an archive view on my own site.

Luckily for me, I’ll have a chance to play around with my website a bit more very soon. There’s going to be another Indie Web Camp in Germany very soon.

Indie Web Camp Düsseldorf will take place on May 7th and 8th, right before Beyond Tellerrand. Last year’s event was really inspiring. If there’s any chance you can make it, you should come along. You won’t regret it.

I wrote a little while back about making an accessible progressive disclosure pattern. It’s very basic—just a few ARIA properties and a bit of JavaScript sprinkled onto some basic HTML. The HTML contains a button element that toggles the aria-hidden property on a chunk of markup.

Earlier this week I had a chance to hang out with accessibility experts Derek Featherstone and Devon Persing so I took the opportunity to pepper them with questions about this pattern. My main question was “Should I automatically focus the toggled content?”

Derek’s response was very perceptive. He wanted to know why I was using a button. Good question. When you think about it, what I’m doing is pointing from one element to another. On the web, we point with links.

There are no hard’n’fast rules about this kind of thing, but as Derek put it, it helps to think about whether the action involves controlling something (use a button) or taking the user somewhere (use a link). At first glance, the progressive disclosure pattern seems to be about controlling something—toggling the appearance of another element. But if I’m questioning whether to automatically focus that element, then really I’m asking whether I want to take the user to that place in the document—in other words, linking to it.

I decided to update the markup. Here’s what I had before:

<button aria-controls="content">Reveal</button>
<div id="content"></div>

Here’s what I have now:

<a href="#content" aria-controls="content">Reveal</a>
<div id="content"></div>

The logic in the JavaScript remains exactly the same:

1. Find any elements that have an aria-controls attribute (these were buttons, now they’re links).
2. Grab the value of that aria-controls attribute (an ID).
3. Hide the element with that ID by applying aria-hidden="true" and make that element focusable by adding tabindex="-1".
4. Set aria-expanded="false" on the associated link (this attribute can be a bit confusing—it doesn’t mean that this element is not expanded; it means the element it controls is not expanded).
5. Listen for click events on those links.
6. Toggle the aria-hidden and aria-expanded when there’s a click event.
7. When aria-hidden is set to false on an element (thereby revealing it), focus that element.

You can see it in action on CodePen.

See the Pen Accessible toggle (link) by Jeremy Keith (@adactio) on CodePen.

I’m in Seattle. An Event Apart just wrapped up here and it was excellent as always. The venue was great and the audience even greater so I was able to thoroughly enjoy myself when it was time for me to give my talk.

I’m going to hang out here for another few days before it’s time for the long flight back to the UK. The flight over was a four-film affair—that’s how I measure the duration of airplane journeys. I watched:

1. Steve Jobs,
2. The Big Short,
3. Spectre, and
4. Joy.

I was very glad that I watched Joy after three back-to-back Bechdel failures. Spectre in particular seems to have been written by a teenage boy, and I couldn’t get past the way that the The Big Short used women as narrative props.

I did enjoy Steve Jobs. No surprise there—I enjoy most of Danny Boyle’s films. But there was a moment that took me out of the narrative flow…

The middle portion of the film centres around the launch of the NeXT cube. In one scene, Michael Fassbender’s Jobs refers to another character as “Rain Man”. I immediately started to wonder if that was an anachronistic comment. “When was Rain Man released?” I thought to myself.

It turns out that Rain Man was released in 1988 and the NeXT introduction was also in 1988 but according to IMDB, Rain Man was released in December …and the NeXT introduction was in October.

The jig is up, Sorkin!

The web will be so much better when we have images.

The web will be so much better when we can use more than 216 colours.

The web will be so much better when we have Cascading Style Sheets.

The web will be so much better when we have Cascading Style Sheets that work the same way in different browsers.

The web will be so much better when we have JavaScript.

The web will be so much better when we have JavaScript that works the same way in different browsers.

The web will be so much better when people stop using Netscape Navigator 4.

The web will be so much better when people stop using Internet Explorer 6.

The web will be so much better when we can access it on our mobile phones.

The web will be so much better when we have native video support.

The web will be so much better when we have native video support that works the same way in different browsers.

The web will be so much better when Flash dies.

The web will be so much better when we have more than a handful of fonts.

The web will be so much better when nobody is running Windows XP anymore.

The web will be so much better when nobody is running Android 2 anymore.

The web will be so much better when we have smooth animations.

The web will be so much better when websites can still work offline.

The web will be so much better when we get push notifications.

The web will be so much better when…

Everything is amazing right now and nobody’s happy.