Back in 2004, Brian Alvey wrote in A List Apart about Everything I Need To Know About Web Design I Learned Watching Oz, detailing that some parts of prison life can be translated to becoming a good web designer (avoiding solitarity, playing to your strength, giving things out for free and so on).

Lately I get the feeling that the bad habits necessary to survive jail also become part of our life as web developers, namely making sure to beat up the biggest guy in your way to establish your place in the pecking order.

A lot of presentations lately take the mickey at larger corporations and their web sites and during panel talks like last week’s @media in London there seems to be no better fun than constantly picking on the W3C, Yahoo, AOL, Microsoft, Apple or whoever is big and corporate and seems to be much slower in bringing us towards the brave new world of standardization, microformats goodness, semantics and a very cool, available and usable world wide web.

Well, looking back several years, I distinctly remember that we wondered why large corporations don’t follow web standards and what can be done to change that. We had the problem that every small client would come to us and ask why they should have CSS layout and valid HTML when none of the big companies do. Corporations seemed too far away to reach and talk to and we reveled in being hard-core and grass-roots celebrating our independence.

Well, times changed and many of the large corporations do take web standards serious, have a thorough understanding of them as a part of the interview process of new developers and give out information as to what obstacles were in their way when shifting from easily maintainable tag-soup (remember, this is what enterprise level frameworks create out-of-the-box) to CSS driven layouts with cleaner, semantically valuable markup. Some even offer frameworks, widgets and code for anyone to use that is built upon their findings.

Instead of welcoming this, we rather ridicule these efforts and pick out bad examples to show how much cooler we can be as smaller, fast-moving individuals and companies.

Maybe it is time to remember that working with grass-roots means getting your hands dirty and we should concentrate more on really producing some larger products, actively help improving framework output and allow for tools to make things easier for people who are bound to software to maintain their sites that is sub-par in terms of quality of generated code.

Maybe we should also remember that the way of working as a web standards evangelist or famous blogger is not the norm, but far from it. For example it is really easy to claim you can add microformats to any document by adding some spans and classes to an HTML document, but in reality a lot – and I mean a massive amount – of content of the web is developed by people who never touch the HTML or know about it. This is why we invented CMS - to separate content from structure and allow maintenance without needing to code HTML.

I do realize that a lot of these panel talks and presentations are tongue-in-cheek, but let’s not forget that this can hurt a lot when someone slaps you on the back of the head while you do it.

Just for the record: I do work for a large corporation, but I was not asked to write about this. I would have written this in any case as I welcome the change web development has done and I don’t want our efforts of the last few years to be in vain because of arrogance.

[tags]webdevelopment,web standards,communication,professionalism,corporations[/tags]

Scrounging my referers in statscounter I just came across the .net magazine podcast linking to my blog post about print magazines having problems in delivering tutorials. Yes, I just bought my first iPod a week ago, I am not using iTunes and in general I do stumble across podcasts by chance and not by subscription.

I was pretty much shocked that the podcast discusses my points – if you can call them that – without any of the people involved commenting on the blog post or actually telling me about it (I do write for .net after all). So here are some more points on this matter, as the blog post was a bit rushed.

• I am not attacking .net magazine, but based my musings on several different publications I have done – even old ones in German for things like Commodore 64 magazines
• I am very much in agreement with the arguments mentioned in the podcast that magazines and books have a professional editorial process and that way come up with higher quality content.
• I stand by my point though that the restrictions of print and this editorial process – if done badly – can be detrimental to the quality of the tutorials. It is all about chosing the right subject. As Paul pointed out, he cannot do tutorials as audio podcasts, either.
• I based some of my points on me spending half an hour in the airport waiting for my rental car to be ready and browsing US publications.
• I am shocked to see that people really seem to read the stuff I write here. This has always been a bit of a braindump for me – much like the pensieve in Harry Potter.

Anyways, I just wanted to point out that my post is not a snotty attack towards print media as a whole, but was meant to point out that some tutorial materials are just not meant for print but are better online, the same way a lot of online material should undergo a proper editorial process before being put out there.

[tags]blogging,print,online magazines,netmag,podcast[/tags]

Yay, the speakers list for the Open Hack Day in London is out. As explained on the official blog attendees can look forward to the following talking about the following topics:

• Jonathan Trevor – Yahoo! Pipes
• Cal Henderson – Flickr
• Ian Forrester and Matt Cashmore – BBC API
• Christian Heilmann and Nate Koechley – Yahoo! User Interface Library
• Kent Brewster – Yahoo! Developer Network
• George Wright – BBC Interactive TV services
• Mirek Grymuza – Yahoo! Maps API
• Mor Naaman – Yahoo! Research Berkeley / Zonetag
• Dan Catt and Aaron Straupe Cope – Flickr / Machine Tags

I am proud as punch to be able to talk at Hackday and do a double act together with Nate Koechley, and I am looking very much forward to meeting all the others. I will share the flight back to the UK on Tuesday with Nate so there is a big chance that we will write the talk on the plane.

[tags]hackday,openhackday,london,alexandrapalace,yui,maps,flickr[/tags]

I am currently at the WhereCamp07 in the US Sunnyvale office and not being too proficient in geotagging or maps stuff I thought it’ll be good to strike a usability or accessibility chord.

• Human Accessible Mapping Applications

[tags]accessibility,usability,maps,directions,wherecamp,wherecamp07 [/tags]

Update: This post was discussed in the latest .net magazine podcast and there are some updates to this available in this post.

As those of you who follow the ol’ ink on dead tree technology channels know I am writing articles for paper magazines from time to time. I’ve done this less and less lately, not because of lack of offers but because of the format you have to deliver articles in.

Print magazines are an amazingly bad media for delivering technology articles because of the following reasons:

• A working example of a web technology tells a lot more than a description of what it should do (admit it – you always click the “see it in action” link on web zines before reading the article)
• Code examples take up a lot of space
• Screen shots with legible text take up a lot of space

Space in a magazine is limited, first of all because of the format (no scrollbars) but also because space not used for advertising means no money coming in. Furthermore, code that spans several pages is as much a no-no in magazines as it is in books.

Together with short deadlines – after all the mag needs to be up-to-date and almost as quick as information you can read online – leads to articles being rushed and cut down to the shortest possible form. There are good reasons for this: in order to gain the trust of readers and deliver a magazine quickly and steadily you have to stick to a fixed format for certain articles. Readers who get every issue of the magazine can easily identify what this article will be and skip it or look forward to it based on this decision. However, this leads to ridiculous restrictions like:

• Main article should be 300 words followed by 2 screen shots with 20 words caption each.
• Three parts, 50 words each with a headline of up to 8 words each
• 200 Words, then a screenshot with a caption of 10 words and a “find out more” of 100 words

These restrictions makes it pretty tough to get your message across as the format of the article should vary with the content. Many a time you’d only need one screenshot and use 400 words, or 50 words and 3 screenshots. Sometimes there is no need for any screenshot at all.

As there is no flexibility in these matters you end up having to cut down your articles to something that vaguely makes sense, or, if you are even less lucky, some editor will do it for you. It is the same problem with web sites that allow only for a certain amount of content inside different sections before breaking – they are simply a bad idea.

The question is what to do about this? The answer is either changing the format or the content. Maybe it is a good plan to back up a paper article with a URL or a demo on the CD that comes with every magazine (which is normally crammed with outdated shareware you don’t need anyways). Maybe a magazine should not try to simulate web zines or blog posts but go deeper, get more thoroughly researched and talk about the rationale of a technology, not about the implementation.

Implementations are always prone to errors, and there is no place better to get comments to and how to fix them than on the web. Most of the time the logic and rationale of the technology doesn’t change, but the technical part of it does. Let paper be more thorough than the web and the web for what it is good for – quick response times. You could even sell ads on the web page accompanying the article.

[tags]paper,layout,magazines,writing[/tags]