Who You Calling A Jesse?

The recent buzz online between WaSP members over IE 8 is approaching lunacy. With the respected Zeldman suggesting WaSP co-lead Drew was not doing his co-lead job of signing an NDA with Microsoft. Lets step back and think about the lay of the land for the moment.

WaSP has a Microsoft Task Force and an Adobe focused Task Force both with NDA requirements, both companies are now seriously competing for the web developer market. The lead of WaSP shouldn’t be NDA’d by either but they should be informed when an announcement is coming and that is the Task Force leads job.

WaSP needs to refocus and those in all the task forces need to shake their heads at recent events and figure out their next steps. Rachel asks what happens now? Well I am inclined to say re-state the goals of the organization, re-evaluate what each task force is doing and how that fits in the goals, and ensure process are developed to maintain a professional presence.

I also commented on Rachel’s blog that I believe SXSW is partly to blame for some of the recent mess. Why? People feel cut out of contributing if they don’t go to Austin. I know I do and what is worse I know that isn’t totally true. WaSP needs to distance itself from all events unless it runs them, at least for now. Let the participation focus around online venues and crank up the advocacy once things are figured out.

The next big challenge is in front of us. IT departments now have massive, poorly developed, monsters of web applications to maintain… or Sharepoint. They don’t want the browser to change, not now, not ever. WaSP, there is your new enemy.

For the record I don’t much care for the meta targeting but I won’t hate it… just think it is a quick fix, not well thought out, but isn’t that what ‘beta’ is for?

I have been on thing about figuring out coding patterns in HTML. Since I did the UW CLF back in 2004, I have been thinking about a macro-format for content generated on higher education web sites. Any CSS framework uses some abstract naming convention now—so I guess what I have been looking at is a “blueprint” that works specifically for higher ed.

What I did today was grab the code structure from about 10 higher ed web sites (three each from the UK, US, and Canada plus one more). It is just amazing how different HTML can be. Most sites are similar design wise, they have very similar content, and they supposedly trying to provide the same type of experience to the exact same audience.

Only three had Microformats on them, one had errors, and all are ‘valid’ HTML/XHTML. Good and bad ;) Well time for a break then on to more research and maybe even some prototyping. You can call what I am researching is a possible Macroformat for higher ed…

There has been a pretty interesting flame war that has erupted over a posting by Jeff Croft entitled What’s not to love about CSS frameworks? It seems like it has been quite a while since a good flame over web standards and best practices has played out. The tone of the post likely has really fueled the war but the topic itself seems to truly polarize some in the web standards community. Why is that? The devil is likely in the definition and I see it as the less formal art world colliding with the engineering world (something that has been slowly happening for a while with web development I believe).

Jeff Croft posted some follow ups: A follow up on CSS frameworks and The final word on frameworks, from someone way smarter than me. Andy Clarke interjected a comical What’s not to love about instant cake mixes in between that offered some satirical insight. The comments on the posts are shocking in some ways but once the definitions were clarified I think it comes down to artistic approaches meeting formal engineering process.

If you agree a framework is just a collection of reusable code that offers enough abstraction that you could apply it to whatever project you are working on then you have probably some engineering exposure ;) Reusing things is common practice, if you have a problem with that then you are just plain dumb with your time. This reuse of code features is part of what makes Dreamweaver CS3 such a good tool for rapid development. The CSS templates that come with it offer a powerful ‘framework’ to start with. Would you consider that a framework? I dunno. The ‘CSS Framework’ proper that is implied (blueprintCSS ) is in fact a more extensive framework that tries to solve more problems.

I think frameworks are great. I am building one now along with my GUI team of co-op students for a new system here. We are using a more formal engineering process to approach it but what we are essentially doing is creating a framework of GUI elements along with their HTML and JavaScript. Love them or hate them frameworks are just another thing the web dev world ‘re-invented’ from the software engineering world.

For Mac users of Adobe software it seemed like there was no hope to getting Photoshop to run very well on an Intel based Mac. Having to wait until CS3 seems like cruel and unusual punishment… especially if you support people that want to run Photoshop on a Macbook. Well wait no more, a public beta is about to appear with a universal binary in the Adobe Labs site for current CS2 users. The speed improvements are welcome. I am sure many CS3 reports will flood the mac blogging world… all that I can say is try it out for yourself, its free so why not?

Adobe didn’t stop at software… oh no… For the CSS developer there is a new CSS Advisor web site that will allow anyone with an Adobe ID to post, rate and comment on articles. It is a sort of Adobe CSS wiki. Sure it seems like a duplication of efforts with the different sites out there but I must admit I like the idea of having a central resource to find this information. I do wish it existed outside the Adobe site though… some creative commons Adobe sponsored domain would be ideal. It will be interesting to see how the web standards community reacts—will this site take off?

Update: Photoshop CS3 is now in labs awaiting your download…

Over the past week and a bit I have been using a Blackberry Pearl for web and email. My main reason for trying this out was to get a better idea of what the ‘web experience’ is like on the small screen. If you want a review of the Pearl there are a few of themaround and all agree the device is pretty good. I am just going to talk about my web browsing experience with the Pearl.

Once I got use to the keyboard, installed some software like the gmail client and Google maps, I started to have a lot of fun with it. The Pearl comes with RIM’s own new version Blackberry browser that supports HTML and some hand-held CSS. It seems to allow for some javascript and cookies which is handy for sites that have authentication based on that. Like any browser for mobile phones it scales images oddly. Overall the browser works ok but the poor hand-held CSS support makes most websites a pain to use and it can be hard for CSS/HTML developers to design for them unless they have a mobile version that changes the html.

Where it gets interesting is with some of the push services that you can build for the browser. The Weather Network has my favourite so far—it simply just gives me the 5 day forecast. But it does it in a really nicely designed way for the small screen (really should have a screen shot). I think this feature is cool but it appears to require a Blackberry Enterprise Server to deliver it and… which isn’t good for most web folks but if you are in a Blackberry shop, it is a really cool option for delivering content to your co-workers.

I installed Opera Mini 3.0 on the Pearl as well. This browser has some interesting features like RSS support and good hand-held CSS support. It does make it possible for sites that support CSS/HTML to easily modify its design for the browser with a content folding technique that offers help to the user.

Because Opera Mini can run just about any phone made after 2001 it might be the hand-held browser to develop for.

Overall though the browsing experience isn’t very good which isn’t the fault of the Pearl at all. In fact its better than I have seen on a Windows Mobile environment, it is just that the bar is set pretty low. But what are you trying to do with device? For news, updates, and messages the Pearl (as with most modern mobile devices) is just amazing in a purely text environment. However, when developing for users of devices like these there are a number of challenges I think but the biggest is figuring how mobile device users interact with your content as it can be very different across devices.

My approach at the moment is to take the lead from Flickr and give mobile devices the basic content of the site and some functionality. In reality people will likely not be filling out large forms on the things so keeping any forms to no more than two screens worth is probably not a bad idea either. I am working on a mobile device friendly home page and version of UW Events… I will let you know when there is something to look at.

One thing for sure: Standards friendly code will help you, so might things like Microformats, as it gives you a solid base to parse from. Like with any site that pulls content from other sources, you may want to create a PHP script on an otherwise static site that will create a mobile friendly version on the fly. I should have an example of that soon

A short note: Drew McLellan has been hard at work all year dreaming up articles for 24ways. The opening article looks at a very cool text trimmer that add a little magic to a content heavy web page. This site is a great resource all year even though it is only active for the 24 days leading up to Christmas ;) Worth adding to your feed reader.

The whole IE 7 thing has been pretty entertaining thus far. You have IT folks everywhere hyper-ventilating over a browser update that will eventually help out web standards and you have web developers (myself included) being caught in tough spots because they failed to really test IE 7 while it was in beta. My mistake was ignoring the influence of a conditional comment on printing (placing a ‘gte’ in it seems to do the trick) but other than that UW pages should be fine if you don’t have anything above your DOCTYPE and you didn’t create more conditional comments with IE specific CSS.

Roger Johansson has summed up nicely the three top reasons sites break in IE 7. I think that covers 99% of the problems. The lessons learned with IE 7 is that having a CSS/HTML site is great but if you cut corners and worked towards IE 6 in quirks mode you are likely going to pay a hefty price when an IE 7 user views your site. If you having problems with IE 7 on your site, take a look at Roger’s post. The discussion that follows on his site should be helpful as well.

Update: Wake up and smell the IE7! – Vitamin feature

It’s funny, I have been loosing that standards preaching feeling lately. It just seems like more people nod your heads when you mention standards. Should I feel like the Web Standards War (is it a war? I suppose you could call it that) is over since IE 7 is just catching up to Firefox and CSS seems to be everywhere? Do Web Standards still matter? Of course web standards still matter according to Roger Johansson in an article over on Vitamin. Roger Johansson makes a mention on his blog as well, you can follow the thread ;) Robert Nyman makes the point that the war is far from over – developers get it, well they might know the W3 exists, but do they really get why?

I must admit that I don’t get all the ins and outs of the XHTML vs HTML debate (and I really don’t care that much) but I do know that having valid code makes life so much easier. It is when you start using non-standard hacks is when you get into trouble. Same goes for coding and best practices (maybe not a W3 standard but certainly important). I am not a PHP guy by any stretch but if you follow best practices the code is nice for the next Co-op/Web Developer that comes along. This term Sasha has pretty much picked up where Mitch left off… That hasn’t happened that smoothly before.

When I think best practices and then look at something like Spry just coming out (or other AJAX frameworks for that matter) that appear to pretty much ignore best practices in order to make it easy for people to use, I realize web standards and best practices have a long way to go. Take the fact you can’t use Spry if you have to meet accessibility requirements – who thinks they shouldn’t make an effort to make their site accessble? Sure Microsoft, Adobe, and others have moved towards web standards with some stuff but the push of AJAX highlights the issue that people forget standards when it suits them…

I suppose its best to keep teaching myself more about web standards and best practices… and share ;)

On Digital Web and Vitamin John Allsopp has written The Big Picture on Microformats and Add microformats magic to your site. If you have been wondering what the heck I have been talking about when I looking at Microformats in education then this might help. So far I have stuck hCard on the footer of the UW home page, had Mitch ensure UW Events supports hCal and even had him stick some hCard into the people search results on the search off the home page.

For those Dreamweaver users out there, after you have read John’s articles and you want to check this out, a great way to do that is just go and grab Drew’s extension for Dreamweaver and create a couple simple things. Look at the code.

I am just taking a look at how maintaining Microformats will work for Dreamweaver users that support Contribute folks. I have a feeling the extra classes to wreak some havoc but there may be a simple way to manage and even enhance it. If not I would like to know and hopefully find some workarounds.

As part of my promise to the Edu TF mail list, I have started a wiki to discuss Microformats in education and allow the larger Higher Education web community to have some input and share ideas on Microformats and how they apply to Edu’s. Anyone is welcome to submit ideas and information, the hope is that we can build a discussion and a community of people that are interested in pursuing.

I realize the Microformats has a section for discussion but I think this discussion covers more than just one topic. Once topics are identified and narrowed down they can moved to the Microformats site (I hope). Students are welcome to submit their ideas as well ;)

Worth more than just a ‘cool links’ mention, Bite Size Standards is great idea from John Oxton that breaks web standards tips and tricks tutorials down to small easy to remember bites. It appeared over the weekend and it getting some decent blog coverage so far. It already has a good load of useful information and I am sure it will become an essential side in your news reader.

My new favorite article appeared today – Automatic coloured rows – makes table data a lot easier to read and is dead simple! The comments mention different ways of applying the code and things to watch for. I will likely kill my Monday poking around in this site.

Dave Shea is down at MIX06 and has posted a nice summary of events he participated in which includes a note about fixes in IE 7 beta:

“Summary for the rest of us: Floats, overflow, and the like? Fixed. Done. It’s over. No more inconsistency, it looks like that’s a wrap. We get min-width and max-width. Oh, joyous day. CSS2 selectors? You name it. There’s only one remaining which might not make it into IE7, the rest are all there.”

This sounds good… I will have to get Virtual PC fired up and check this out. You can get the IE teams word on IE 7 on their blog as well as where to download it.

Another positive note from Dave Shea’s post is that IE 7 is not the last version… there is talk of 7.5!

A recent post on the webstandards.org buzz on Queens has caused a few emails to be about standards and the UW home page. Sometimes the UW home page doesn’t validate and that is fine. The fact is you can’t keep a page that is maintained by different tools and people valid at all times, nor should you have to, accessibility should be your top priority.

Another thing about that article is it may give the impression UW and Queens are the only two campuses in Canada working towards accessible, standards based design. There are lots of other Canadian Universities that have valid code on their home pages (and in my opinion better designed as well), two I can think of off hand (cause I checked first) is University of Victoria and University of Saskatchewan. As I find others I will list them but some schools are pretty close, like UBC.

I would say that is close enough to say congrats for all the work ;)

It looks like the Dreamweaver Task Force at the Web Standards Project is still buzzing after all ;) Today there is an announcement of new members – Stephanie Sullivan and me! I am looking forward to working the group. We should have more to show and tell in the coming weeks.

Looks like Dave Hyatt has done it. Safari is the first browser to pass Acid2 – now when do the rest of us get that version? Still though, very cool.

With the announcement of a new Common Look and Feel for UW web pages came a solid week of presentations. There was a lot of talk about web standards and, look at that, the current UW web developers page didn’t validate. Funny enough, I forgot to add some quotes on some links that appear from parsing RSS with PHP. When validating the page it didn’t tell me the exact problem though but it helped narrow down the problem by spitting out errors about one part of the page. A little forward slash and a quote into my PHP and all is good again. See, you can’t have it valid all the time ;) but it is fun to try.

So lets talk standards, Mike Davidson has a nice mention about why his site is not valid. He makes a good point, read it.

It is good to strive for standards and do your best to follow them, but please, please, please do not put a “valid XHTML 1.0 strict or whatever code” on your web site. It will soon be as passe as “best viewed in” – save yourself from the web page mullet.

What does have to do about UW’s CLF?

Well the template you get (yes I will post it today), starts off with standard code but the CSS, the CSS does not validate.update: now it does validate! Do I get worried about it? Nope. Is it the end of the world? Nope. Why is it still invalid, don’t you know better you muppet (favorite Brit term of the moment)? Suppose I do and I am not going to justify my lack of valid code with anything other than I just am not that bothered to track down what is the cause of the problem, 1.0 had to be made public and the site works in IE, Firefox, etc. I would prefer to spend my time helping move things along. When time allows I will revisit the problem.

Make sense? Btw, if you figure out how to get that CSS to validate I will give you a cookie ;)

It looks like a beta or test version of Internet Explorer 7 will be coming out this summer. Oh joy. I just picked it up from the Web Standards Project Buzz which also as a couple interesting links. I wonder what will happen to all those IE hacks? Lets see if they really listen to what users want in IE 7.

• Dave Shea – IE7
• Ars Technica – Internet Explorer 7 beta due out this summer
• Slashdot – IE7 Announced for Longhorn and WinXP
• Techtree.com – IE 7 to Have Better Security
• Digital Web – Misinformation about the IE7 announcement

At the Accessible Technology Fair here at UW on October 28, 2004 (tomorrow), I will be presenting on a the topic of ‘Navigating Accessibility.’ There will be a repeat for UW folks on the 10th of November in DC 1304 at 9:30am.

• Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 – working draft
• Three things about screen readers
• No Accesskeys
• Hiding with display:none hides it from screen readers as well
• Guild of Accessible Web Designers
• Accessible & usable forms: Guidelines, examples and JavaScript tricks

Hope those who attend my presentation enjoy(ed) it and the discussion afterwards is useful to you. I will put a link up to the PDF of the presentation tomorrow.

UPDATE: The HTML version and links to download the PDF and PowerPoint versions are now up. If you have any questions you can contact me or post below.

UW has an interestingly diverse web culture. In a presentation or two I have suggested that when it comes to conceptualizing the web’s importance, there are Four Corners (stay tuned for more on that) to consider in University web development. But that is just a larger-picture-management-what-should-be-considered sort of thinking. What about site development? What goes into that? What are you developing?

Microsoft doesn’t seem too interested in the web as a publication medium but more as a development platform. In a Buzz article on the WaSP site, Chris Kaminski discusses the web is a platform for developing and deploying applications. He also touches on the impact and where things could be going. To add some fuel to the flames a Google board member recently remarked that he believes things are going to get interesting in the browser world yet again. His comments go some way to supporting the web as a platform idea.

These applications for the web are considered brilliant because: they don’t require certain hardware/software configurations and applications that can be up updated without the user having to do anything. They include things like gmail and Yahoo. Here at UW we have things like myHRinfo,QUEST, UW-ACE, and myWaterloo to name just a few.

Publications and Applications

What makes those web-based applications and web pages just web pages? Good question, I am not entirely sure. It could be that web-based applications are web pages that run on server side code that are designed to be a specific tool to complete some task. Web pages are just publications that provide people with information. In the case of this blog, Textpattern is an application designed to assist me with publishing web pages for you to read.

An example of light web application development is how the news release site works. We are utilizing mailman but we had to develop an application to auto-magically make the content appear in a database and in an XML feed. For more complex web application development, we are building a system that works with Contribute 3, that allows for easy editing of database content and keeps a sandbox (or test site) to pass around drafts in with Contribute. More on that another time ;)

Most pages at UW (near 500 000 or so) are just publications. They provide information to people but are not utilized as a tool to complete any tasks (ok information is a tool but not the right kind of tool).

Developer or designer or editor or contributor or …?

There is a growing identity crisis in the general web world – what is web development and what isn’t? Lets not go down the classification route (another article perhaps) but instead quickly address the similarities between web development and software development with some required reading. Drew has a great article declaring web development is software development. I would have to agree. His next few posts in his blog are worth reading. What Drew has done is applied Joel on Software’s 12 Steps to Better Codeto his web team to see how they stack up. Follow the links and enjoy.

In the next part I will go over the roles in web page development.

Worth a mention, the Spread Firefox has surpased its goal and is still moving along nicely. For those who don’t know what Firefox is; it’s a web browser based on Mozilla – Netscape 6.x-7.x is as well. It has a huge number of extensions that make the browser a lot of fun. One I would highly recommend to web folks is the web developer 0.8 extension.

Check out Firefox, UW staff can ask IST for more information. Not sure about the support angle but if enough people ask I am sure they will make it available once version 1.0 is out ;)

UPDATE: From IST, they don’t support Firefox and have no immediate plans do so.