Archive: February, 2017

It has been exactly six years to the day since I instantiated this prediction:

The original URL for this prediction (www.longbets.org/601) will no longer be available in eleven years.

It is exactly five years to the day until the prediction condition resolves to a Boolean true or false.

If it resolves to true, The Bletchly Park Trust will receive $1000.

If it resolves to false, The Internet Archive will receive $1000.

Much as I would like Bletchley Park to get the cash, I’m hoping to lose this bet. I don’t want my pessimism about URL longevity to be rewarded.

So, to recap, the bet was placed on

02011-02-22

It is currently

02017-02-22

And the bet times out on

02022-02-22.

We have a tradition here at Clearleft of having the occasional lunchtime braindump. They’re somewhat sporadic, but it’s always a good day when there’s a “brown bag” gathering.

When Google’s AMP format came out and I had done some investigating, I led a brown bag playback on that. Recently Mark did one on Fractal so that everyone knew how work on that was progressing.

Today Richard gave us a quick brown bag talk on variable web fonts. He talked us through how these will work on the web and in operating systems. We got a good explanation of how these fonts would get designed—the type designer designs the “extreme” edges of size, weight, or whatever, and then the file format itself can extrapolate all the in-between stages. So, in theory, one single font file can hold hundreds, thousands, or hundreds of thousands of potential variations. It feels like switching from bitmap images to SVG—there’s suddenly much greater flexibility.

A variable font is a single font file that behaves like multiple fonts.

There were a couple of interesting tidbits that Rich pointed out…

While this is a new file format, there isn’t going to be a new file extension. These will be .ttf files, and so by extension, they can be .woff and .woff2 files too.

This isn’t some proposed theoretical standard: an unprecedented amount of co-operation has gone into the creation of this format. Adobe, Apple, Google, and Microsoft have all contributed. Agreement is the hardest part of any standards process. Once that’s taken care of, the technical solution follows quickly. So you can expect this to land very quickly and widely.

This technology is landing in web browsers before it lands in operating systems. It’s already available in the Safari Technology Preview. That means that for a while, the very best on-screen typography will be delivered not in eBook readers, but in web browsers. So if you want to deliver the absolute best reading experience, look to the web.

And here’s the part that I found fascinating…

We can currently use numbers for the font-weight property in CSS. Those number values increment in hundreds: 100, 200, 300, etc. Now with variable fonts, we can start using integers: 321, 417, 183, etc. How fortuitous that we have 99 free slots between our current set of values!

Well, that’s no accident. The reason why the numbers were originally specced in increments of 100 back in 1996 was precisely so that some future sci-fi technology could make use of the ranges in between. That’s some future-friendly thinking! And as Håkon wrote:

One of the reasons we chose to use three-digit numbers was to support intermediate values in the future. And the future is now :)

Needless to say, variable fonts will be covered in Richard’s forthcoming book.

I really enjoyed teaching in Porto last week. It was like having a week-long series of CodeBar sessions.

Whenever I’m teaching at CodeBar, I like to be paired up with people who are just starting out. There’s something about explaining the web and HTML from first principles that I really like. And people often have lots and lots of questions that I enjoy answering (if I can). At CodeBar—and at The New Digital School—I found myself saying “Great question!” multiple times. The really great questions are the ones that I respond to with “I don’t know …let’s find out!”

CodeBar is always a very rewarding experience for me. It has given me the opportunity to try teaching. And having tried it, I can now safely say that I like it. It’s also a great chance to meet people from all walks of life. It gets me out of my bubble.

I can’t remember when I was first paired up with Amber at CodeBar. It must have been sometime last year. I do remember that she had lots of great questions—at some point I found myself explaining how hexadecimal colours work.

I was impressed with Amber’s eagerness to learn. I also liked that she was making her own website. I told her about Homebrew Website Club and she started coming along to that (along with other CodeBar people like Cassie and Alice).

I’ve mentioned to multiple CodeBar students that there’s pretty much an open-door policy at Clearleft when it comes to shadowing: feel free to come along and sit with a front-end developer while they’re working on client projects. A few people have taken up the offer and enjoyed observing myself or Charlotte at work. Amber was one of those people. Again, I was very impressed with her drive. She’s got a full-time job (with sometimes-crazy hours) but she’s so determined to get into the world of web design and development that she’s willing to spend her free time visiting Clearleft to soak up the atmosphere of a design studio.

We’ve decided to turn this into something more structured. Amber and I will get together for a couple of hours once a week. She’s given me a list of some of the areas she wants to explore, and I think it’s a fine-looking list:

• I want to gather base, structural knowledge about the web and all related aspects. Things seem to float around in a big cloud at the moment.
• I want to adhere to best practices.
• I want to learn more about what direction I want to go in, find a niche.
• I’d love to opportunity to chat with the brilliant people who work at Clearleft and gain a broad range of knowledge from them.

My plan right now is to take a two-track approach: one track about the theory, and another track about the practicalities. The practicalities will be HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and related technologies. The theory will be about understanding the history of the web and its strengths and weaknesses as a medium. And I want to make sure there’s plenty of UX, research, information architecture and content strategy covered too.

Seeing as we’ll only have a couple of hours every week, this won’t be quite like the masterclass I just finished up in Porto. Instead I imagine I’ll be laying some groundwork and then pointing to topics to research. I guess it’s a kind of homework. For example, after we talked today, I set Amber this little bit of research for the next time we meet: “What is the difference between the internet and the World Wide Web?”

I’m excited to see where this will lead. I find Amber’s drive and enthusiasm very inspiring. I also feel a certain weight of responsibility—I don’t want to enter into this lightly.

I’m not really sure what to call this though. Is it mentorship? Or is it coaching? Or training? All of the above?

Whatever it is, I’m looking forward to documenting the journey. Amber will be writing about it too. She is already demonstrating a way with words.

For the final day of the week-long masterclass, I had no agenda. This was a time for the students to work on their own projects, but I was there to answer any remaining questions they might have.

As I suspected, the people with the most interest and experience in development were the ones with plenty of questions. I was more than happy to answer them. With no specific schedule for the day, we were free to merrily go chasing down rabbit holes.

SVG? Sure, I’d be happy to talk about that. More JavaScript? My pleasure! Databases? Not really my area of expertise, but I’m more than willing to share what I know.

It was a fun day. The centrepiece was a most excellent lunch across the river at a really traditional seafood place.

At the very end of the day, after everyone else had gone, I sat down with Tiago to discuss how the week went. Overall, I was happy. I was nervous going into this masterclass—I had never done a whole week of teaching—but based on the feedback I got, I think I did okay. There were times when I got impatient, and I wish I could turn back the clock and erase those moments. I noticed that those moments tended to occur when it was time for hands-on-keyboards coding: “no, not like that—like this!” I need to get better at handling those situations. But when we working on paper, or having stand-up discussions, or when I was just geeking out on a particular topic, everything felt quite positive.

All in all, this week has been a great experience. I know it sounds like a cliché, but I felt it was a real honour and a privilege to be involved with the New Digital School. I’ve enjoyed doing hands-on teaching, and I’d like to do more of it.

Day one covered HTML (amongst other things), day two covered CSS, and day three covered JavaScript. Each one of those days involved a certain amount of hands-on coding, with the students getting their hands dirty with angle brackets, curly braces, and semi-colons.

Day four was a deliberate step away from all that. No more laptops, just paper. Whereas the previous days had focused on collaboratively working on a single document, today I wanted everyone to work on a separate site.

The sites were generated randomly. I made five cards with types of sites on them: news, social network, shopping, travel, and learning. Another five cards had subjects: books, music, food, pets, and cars. And another five cards had audiences: students, parents, the elderly, commuters, and teachers. Everyone was dealt a random card from each deck, resulting in briefs like “a travel site about food for the elderly” or “a social network about music for commuters.”

For a bit of fun, the first brainstorming exercise (run as a 6-up) was to come with potential names for this service—4 minutes for 6 ideas. Then we went around the table, shared the ideas, got feedback, and settled on the names.

Now I asked everyone to come up with a one-sentence mission statement for their newly-named service. This was a good way of teasing out the most important verbs and nouns, which led nicely into the next task: answering the question “what is the core functionality?”

If that sounds familiar, it’s because it’s the first part of the three-step process I outlined in Resilient Web Design:

1. Identify core functionality.
2. Make that functionality available using the simplest possible technology.
3. Enhance!

We did some URL design, figuring out what structures would make sense for straightforward GET requests, like:

• /things
• /things/ID

Then, once it was clear what the primary “thing” was (a car, a book, etc.), I asked them to write down all the pieces that might appear on such a page; one post-it note per item e.g. “title”, “description”, “img”, “rating”, etc.

The next step involved prioritisation. They took those post-it notes and put them on the wall, but they had to put them in a vertical line from top to bottom in decreasing order of importance. This can be a challenge, but it’s better to solve these problems now rather than later.

Okay. I know asked them to “mark up” those vertical lists of post-it notes: writing HTML tag names by each one. By doing this before doing any visual design, it meant they were thinking about the meaning of the content first.

After that, we did a good ol’ fashioned classic 6-up sketching exercise, followed by critique (including a “designated dissenter” for each round). At this point, I was encouraging them to go crazy with ideas—they already had the core functionality figured out (with plain ol’ client/server requests and responses) so they could all the bells and whistles they wanted on top of that.

We finished up with a discussion of some of those bells and whistles, and how they could be used to improve the user experience: Ajax, geolocation, service workers, notifications, background sync …the sky’s the limit.

It was a whirlwind tour for just one day but I think it helped emphasise the importance of thinking about the fundamentals before adding enhancements.

This marked the end of the structured masterclass lessons. Tomorrow I’m around to answer any miscellaneous questions (if I can) and chat to the students individually while they work on their term projects.

Day two ended with a bit of a cliffhanger as I had the students mark up a document, but not yet style it. In the morning of day three, the styling began.

Rather than just treat “styling” as one big monolithic task, I broke it down into typography, colour, negative space, and so on. We time-boxed each one of those parts of the visual design. So everyone got, say, fifteen minutes to write styles relating to font families and sizes, then another fifteen minutes to write styles for colours and background colours. Bit by bit, the styles were layered on.

When it came to layout, we closed the laptops and returned to paper. Everyone did a quick round of 6-up sketching so that there was plenty of fast iteration on layout ideas. That was followed by some critique and dot-voting of the sketches.

Rather than diving into the CSS for layout—which can get quite complex—I instead walked through the approach for layout; namely putting all your layout styles inside media queries. To explain media queries, I first explained media types and then introduced the query part.

I felt pretty confident that I could skip over the nitty-gritty of media queries and cross-device layout because the next masterclass that will be taught at the New Digital School will be a week of responsive design, taught by Vitaly. I just gave them a taster—Vitaly can dive deeper.

By lunch time, I felt that we had covered CSS pretty well. After lunch it was time for the really challenging part: JavaScript.

The reason why I think JavaScript is challenging is that it’s inherently more complex than HTML or CSS. Those are declarative languages with fairly basic concepts at heart (elements, attributes, selectors, etc.), whereas an imperative language like JavaScript means entering the territory of logic, loops, variables, arrays, objects, and so on. I really didn’t want to get stuck in the weeds with that stuff.

I focused on the combination of JavaScript and the Document Object Model as a way of manipulating the HTML and CSS that’s already inside a browser. A lot of that boils down to this pattern:

When (some event happens), then (take this action).

We brainstormed some examples of this e.g. “When the user submits a form, then show a modal dialogue with an acknowledgement.” I then encouraged them to write a script …but I don’t mean a script in the JavaScript sense; I mean a script in the screenwriting or theatre sense. Line by line, write out each step that you want to accomplish. Once you’ve done that, translate each line of your English (or Portuguese) script into JavaScript.

I did quick demo as a proof of concept (which, much to my surprise, actually worked first time), but I was at pains to point out that they didn’t need to remember the syntax or vocabulary of the script; it was much more important to have a clear understanding of the thinking behind it.

With the remaining time left in the day, we ran through the many browser APIs available to JavaScript, from the relatively simple—like querySelector and Ajax—right up to the latest device APIs. I think I got the message across that, using JavaScript, there’s practically no limit to what you can do on the web these days …but the trick is to use that power responsibly.

At this point, we’ve had three days and we’ve covered three layers of web technologies: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Tomorrow we’ll take a step back from the nitty-gritty of the code. It’s going to be all about how to plan and think about building for the web before a single line of code gets written.

The second day in this week-long masterclass was focused on CSS. But before we could get stuck into that, there were some diversions and tangents brought on by left-over questions from day one.

This was not a problem. Far from it! The questions were really good. Like, how does a web server know that someone has permission to carry out actions via a POST request? What a perfect opportunity to talk about state! Cue a little history lesson on the web’s beginning as a deliberately stateless medium, followed by the introduction of cookies …for good and ill.

We also had a digression about performance, file sizes, and loading times—something I’m always more than happy to discuss. But by mid-morning, we were back on track and ready to tackle CSS.

As with the first day, I wanted to take a “long zoom” look at design and the web. So instead of diving straight into stylesheets, we first looked at the history of visual design: cave paintings, hieroglyphs, illuminated manuscripts, the printing press, the Swiss school …all of them examples of media where the designer knows where the “edges” of the canvas lie. Not so with the web.

So to tackle visual design on the web, I suggested separating layout from all the other aspects of visual design: colour, typography, contrast, negative space, and so on.

At this point we were ready to start thinking in CSS. I started by pointing out that all CSS boils down to one pattern:

selector {
  property: value;
}

The trick, then, is to convert what you want into that pattern. So “I want the body of the page to be off-white with dark grey text” in English is translated into the CSS:

body {
  background-color: rgb(225,225,255);
  color: rgb(51,51,51);
}

…and so one for type, contrast, hierarchy, and more.

We started applying styles to the content we had collectively marked up with post-it notes on day one. Then the students split into groups of two to create an HTML document each. Tomorrow they’ll be styling that document.

There were two important links that come up over the course of day two:

1. A Dao Of Web Design by John Allsopp, and
2. The CSS Zen Garden.

If all goes according to plan, we’ll be tackling the third layer of the web technology stack tomorrow: JavaScript.

Today was the first day of the week long “masterclass” I’m leading here at The New Digital School in Porto.

When I was putting together my stab-in-the-dark attempt to provide an outline for the week, I labelled day one as “How the web works” and gave this synopsis:

The internet and the web; how browsers work; a history of visual design on the web; the evolution of HTML and CSS.

There ended up being less about the history of visual design and CSS (we’ll cover that tomorrow) and more about the infrastructure that the web sits upon. Before diving into the way the web works, I thought it would be good to talk about how the internet works, which led me back to the history of communication networks in general. So the day started from cave drawings and smoke signals, leading to trade networks, then the postal system, before getting to the telegraph, and then telephone networks, the ARPANET, and eventually the internet. By lunch time we had just arrived at the birth of the World Wide Web at CERN.

It wasn’t all talk though. To demonstrate a hub-and-spoke network architecture I had everyone write down someone else’s name on a post-it note, then stand in a circle around me, and pass me (the hub) those messages to relay to their intended receiver. Later we repeated this exercise but with a packet-switching model: everyone could pass a note to their left or to their right. The hub-and-spoke system took almost a minute to relay all six messages; the packet-switching version took less than 10 seconds.

Over the course of the day, three different laws came up that were relevant to the history of the internet and the web:

Metcalfe’s Law

The value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of users.

Postel’s Law

Be conservative in what you send, be liberal in what you accept.

Sturgeon’s Law

Ninety percent of everything is crap.

There were also references to the giants of hypertext: Ted Nelson, Vannevar Bush, and Douglas Engelbart—for a while, I had the mother of all demos playing silently in the background.

After a most-excellent lunch in a nearby local restaurant (where I can highly recommend the tripe), we started on the building blocks of the web: HTTP, URLs, and HTML. I pulled up the first ever web page so that we could examine its markup and dive into the wonder of the A element. That led us to the first version of HTML which gave us enough vocabulary to start marking up documents: p, h1-h6, ol, ul, li, and a few others. We went around the room looking at posters and other documents pinned to the wall, and starting marking them up by slapping on post-it notes with opening and closing tags on them.

At this point we had covered the anatomy of an HTML element (opening tags, closing tags, attribute names and attribute values) as well as some of the history of HTML’s expanding vocabulary, including elements added in HTML5 like section, article, and nav. But so far everything was to do with marking up static content in a document. Stepping back a bit, we returned to HTTP, and talked about difference between GET and POST requests. That led in to ways of sending data to a server, which led to form fields and the many types of inputs at our disposal: text, password, radio, checkbox, email, url, tel, datetime, color, range, and more.

With that, the day drew to a close. I feel pretty good about what we covered. There was a lot of groundwork, and plenty of history, but also plenty of practical information about how browsers interpret HTML.

With the structural building blocks of the web in place, tomorrow is going to focus more on the design side of things.

February is shaping up to be a busy travel month. I’ve just come back from spending a week in New York as part of a ten-strong Clearleft expedition to this year’s Interaction conference.

There were some really good talks at the event, but alas, the muti-track format made it difficult to see all of them. Continuous partial FOMO was the order of the day. Still, getting to see Christina Xu and Brenda Laurel made it all worthwhile.

To be honest, the conference was only part of the motivation for the trip. Spending a week in New York with a gaggle of Clearlefties was its own reward. We timed it pretty well, being there for the Superb Owl, and for a seasonal snowstorm. A winter trip to New York just wouldn’t be complete without a snowball fight in Central Park.

Funnily enough, I’m going to back in New York in just three weeks’ time for AMP conf at the start of March. I’ve been invited along to be the voice of dissent on a panel—a brave move by the AMP team. I wonder if they know what they’re letting themselves in for.

Before that though, I’m off to Porto for a week. I’ll be teaching at the New Digital School, running a masterclass in progressive enhancement:

In this masterclass we’ll dive into progressive enhancement, a layered approach to building for the web that ensures access for all. Content, structure, presentation, and behaviour are each added in a careful, well-thought out way that makes the end result more resilient to the inherent variability of the web.

I must admit I’ve got a serious case of imposter syndrome about this. A full week of teaching—I mean, who am I to teach anything? I’m hoping that my worries and nervousness will fall by the wayside once I start geeking out with the students about all things web. I’ve sorta kinda got an outline of what I want to cover during the week, but for the most part, I’m winging it.

I’ll try to document the week as it progresses. And you can certainly expect plenty of pictures of seafood and port wine.

I’ve recorded each chapter of Resilient Web Design as MP3 files that I’ve been releasing once a week. The final chapter is recorded and released so my audio work is done here.

If you want subscribe to the podcast, pop this RSS feed into your podcast software of choice. Or use one of these links:

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Or if you can have it as one single MP3 file to listen to as an audio book. It’s two hours long.

So, for those keeping count, the book is now available as HTML, PDF, EPUB, MOBI, and MP3.