The other day I logged into Paypal and was confronted with the following sight:

That was the end of breakfast for me but I was also excited – I like the idea of winning a year’s salary and I had to buy a mouse for a friend of mine anyway. Normally I would go to ebay for a mouse or directly to SVP who’ve never let me down in the past. But hey, let’s win that extra income, right?

How wrong I was. I found two mice I would love to buy, from Pixmania and another one from Novatech. I clicked through and I was asked to sign up for each of the sites. They asked me for my address, they wanted my email, all of it was hidden in horrid 5 step processes. Pixmania even signed me up for their deals mailing list before I was able to buy my mouse. I then was not able to buy the mouse without becoming a Pixmania subscriber – no thanks. Novatech was even more interesting – I was able to go through the whole process just to be told at the final checkout before paying that they would only be able to deliver the mouse to the address of my Paypal account – and not the friend’s address – although I was asked to enter her address first.

In short, I gave up. I went to ebay, bought the mouse, checked out using Paypal and I was done. I couldn’t win the yearly income but I also kept my sanity. There is simply no point in the implementation of the promotion right now. I like Paypal, I like its simplicity. Why the implementers don’t recognise that I come from the promotion page to their sites and just let me pay with Paypal (as this is what the promotion is about) and send the product wherever I want is beyond me. Why Paypal pays money and promotes horrible shops like that is also beyond me.

So if you use Paypal for your shop – give me a way in. You know me, I can sign in with Paypal – don’t ask me to sign up again for you and ask for all kind of data – filling in forms is annoying. I already give you a blank cheque, just let me find a product, click it and buy it.

At the Fronttrends2010 conference Tantek Çelik spent the last few minutes of his HTML5 talk praising HTML as a great format for presentations and urged people for the good of the open web to use HTML slide systems instead of Flash or PDF. Other presenters right now write awesome CSS3 driven slide shows and build their own scripts to show their presentation. I could, but I don’t – and here’s why.

Presentations are not web documents

I am all for the open web (heck, I just took a job evangelising it) but I don’t write my slides in HTML and I really don’t consider it a good format for something like a presentation. Here are my reasons:

• A presentation is not what you see on the screen – many speakers have notes that are shown in presenter view in Keynote or Powerpoint and not shown to the audience but on a different screen. There are probably ways to do that with CSS and media queries but I have yet to find a slide system using web standards that supports this requirement. If you just read your slides you might as well not be on stage.
• Adding images should also allow you to edit them – I find myself dragging photos into Keynote and cropping and resizing them all the time. This can be done with CSS and JavaScript but I have yet to see a slide system have that functionality.
• Presentations need to scale to different resolutions – I’ve encountered anything from 800×600 to 1280×1024. A slide package resizes my fonts and keeps them the way I intended them to – HTML doesn’t do that yet. Again, I am sure with SVG, Canvas and clever trickery this can be easily done but please tell me about a system that considered that.
• Presentations need to be a single, printable file – presentations get mailed around and printed out for people who like to edit or read on paper. Using a PDF I can do that. Printing out is needed for example when you have a conference with sign translation. As sign translators do not translate word by word but sentences by meaning it is important that they know what is coming. Unless HTML slide systems also support good print styles this is not really possible
• HTML slides can’t be embedded and resized – using Slideshare people can embed my slides in their blog posts or articles and people can watch them in context. You can put HTML slides in an iframe but they wouldn’t resize but instead get massive scrollbars
• Slides might need to be synced with audio to make sense – I normally record my talks in addition to offering the Slideshare embed. I also used to do slidecasts, but the editor on Slideshare is not good enough yet. This is something we could write for HTML slides – a syncing tool with audio that automatically moves ahead in the deck.
• Slides need to work offline – many a conference doesn’t have working wireless and people want to read the slides on the train. If you use third party fonts or images hosted elsewhere or you link to live demos this is very frustrating. You can use offline storage for that though.
• Slides should work without your computer and your browser – many hand-rolled slide decks expect the presenters settings, operating system or nightly build of a certain browser and are not written with progressive enhancement as they are for personal use. When people try to watch them on their own computer and cannot see the effects or demos explained this actually is bad advertising for open web technologies.
• A slide deck has a fixed layout and fonts – and differences in browser rendering or elastic design effects are not welcome in a slide deck – so why choose a technology that excels in this?

Presentations are more than a document on the web and unless I can do the things above as effectively and easily in HTML as I can do them in Keynote, I won’t switch.

Arguments for HTML slide decks

The main argument – beyond “doing the right thing for the web” that Tantek mentioned was that your slides as a PDF or Flash movie just can’t be found on the web. This is not true – Google happily indexes PDF and Flash and furthermore Slideshare creates a transcript of your slides as an ordered list for SEO reasons.

The other argument which is more to the point is that HTML documents are easy to edit, re-use and update. Collaborating on a slide deck in Keynote and Powerpoint can lead to annoying inconsistencies across operating systems and software versions.

My hybrid approach

Personally, I use a hybrid approach to the issue. I write my presentation as notes and then create a slide deck from those. I explained the lot (and the above arguments against HTML slides) in the presentations chapter of the Developer Evangelism handbook:

When I write a new slide deck I start with a text editor. I write the story of my presentation and I follow the same rules as for writing online articles. That way I make sure of a few things:

• I know the content and the extent of what I want to cover – which also allows me to keep to the time limit when presenting.
• I have the information in a highly portable format for people to read afterwards – by converting it to HTML later on or blogging these notes.
• I already know all the links that I want to show and can create easy-to-find versions of them – for example by bookmarking them in Delicious.
• I don’t get carried away with visuals and effects – which is a big danger when you play with good presentation software.

Yes, this is duplicating work, but I think it is worth it – after all Slideshare is a community for slide decks – you already have a captive audience rather than hoping Googlebot comes around and considers you better than another resource on the same subject.

Going through my RSS feeds this morning I found this Ninja name translation table:

I thought that was a perfect candidate for a YQL table, so I made one. So find out your Ninja name in the YQL console.

Conversion was easy – simply convert the table to a hash, check that the user has not entered any non-alpha characters, lowercase and loop over the different characters with a lookup. You can see the source of the table on github

Yours, mirishikiari.

OK it is time to end the cruelty of the cliff-hanger.

As mentioned yesterday, today I shall reveal the identity of my new employer. I left clues – videos of people with Dinosaurs and some CSS geekery:

#chris{
—moz—position:relative;display:inline
}

So yes, this is it, to say it with (mock) YQL:

insert into mozilla (employee) values (
select chris from yahoo where color=”red”
)

From the first of December 2010 onwards my job title will be “Principal Developer Evangelist” at Mozilla. The job contract came from Denmark but as far as I know I don’t have to start eating pork.

Principal Developer Evangelist – what will I do?

The job is more or less the same as I have in Yahoo right now, with a few differences:

• The main topics are the open web and HTML5 - we want to move the amazing Mozilla Developer Centre to become the “Switzerland of HTML5” which means reporting on all the cool HTML5 stuff that happens and showing people how you can apply them cross-browser. Microsoft, Apple and Google all do a great job evangelizing HTML5 but a lot of it is product centric without fallbacks for “the other browsers”. We want to change that.
• Instead of being the only one doing it the job already comes with two open headcounts to fill to fight the good fight with me.
• My office shall be my flat – I will finally use it!
• I will work closely with the Mozilla Drumbeat people to also drive the adoption of open web technologies in schools and universities.

Why Mozilla?

People already asked me why I would go to Mozilla and then vented their frustration about Firefox. Well, when I talked at Fronteers this year I concentrated on the great things about our jobs in my talk and explained that happiness and excitement is the main factor that makes you successful and get up in the morning with a “fuck yes, I want to do something cool” attitude rather than “here’s to my paycheck, I hope my boss is late, too”. Whilst I wasn’t unhappy at Yahoo I felt redundant (as explained yesterday) and Mozilla made me feel incredibly excited:

• I always was a Mozilla fanboy – heck, I even preferred Netscape and worked with Firebird, Phoenix, even Kmeleon before switching to Firefox as my main browser. More importantly I love the open attitude of Mozilla. Read the Mozilla manifesto and check what I have done in the last years and you see how this meshes completely. This web has to constantly become better and only open discussion and collaborative efforts will make that happen.
• I went through a few other interviews (no, I won’t mention names) and felt unhappy during the interview. A lot of companies try to make you uncomfortable or intimidate you during an interview. I find this pathetic. The interview in Mozilla was 5 hours of the best brainstorming I had done in a while. We bounced ideas off another and people came into the meeting room in between interviews as they were excited to see me there and asked me for a quick comment on a new idea of theirs. It was pure creativity.
• People walked around with dogs in the office – you can’t argue that that is not awesome
• I knew most of the people who interviewed me and had worked with them before – it is a great sign to see people you like and trust ending all up in one spot
• Sections of the office are called “Ten Forward” and “Holodeck”- c’mon, do tell me you don’t want to work there!
• Firefox4 is friggin exciting and I am looking forward to working with Paul Rouget in Paris from time to time to build great demos

Settling in

So, I am right now handing over my responsibilities, ordered my hardware from Mozilla and look forward to the Christening of Mozilla – as I am Chris, I work directly for Chris Beard (who is clean shaven) and with Chris Blizzard. I am so looking forward to the confusion that will happen on conference calls because of this name clash. I am excited as heck!

YQL is great, it is a technology that turns the web into a database and allows you to mix and match and filter before writing your first line of code. It also allows you to release an API without any infrastructure, knowledge of authentication and access control. In essence you can use Yahoo’s server infrastructure and processing power to unleash the awesome of the web into your products or the awesome of your data on the web.

There is a truckload of documentation, forums and blog posts about YQL on the YDN web site but as it is people love books so I was asked to write a YQL guide for Yahoo Press.

Specifically I was asked to write a demo chapter for the book to pitch to O’Reilly over Christmas, which I did. I then waited for the paperwork to be signed off and so on and time came and went until I was offered to write the YQL Guide for O’Reilly together with my colleague Tom Hughes-Croucher (as he had also sent in a proposal for a YQL book). We agreed on some collaboration and then Tom moved on to write another book.

As I am leaving Yahoo and yet have to see a contract about this book to sign, I announced that I am not going further with this project. Being the techno-hippie that I am though I thought it would be a waste to not give the first chapter to the world, so here it is:

• The why of YQL

You can read the chapter online, download the PDF or browse the “source” on GitHub in case you want to translate or quote it. I licensed it with Creative Commons so go nuts!