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Posted in Classic shows on by Paul Boag

Returning with a new site. Jeff Croft talks about his view on web standards and we discover why the personal website is dead.

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News and events

Creating grid layouts

Last month I attended the Future of Web Design conference. The speakers were exceptional, however my favorite was a presentation by Jon Hicks on his web development process. The guys at Carsonified are slowly releasing the videos so it wonʼt be long before you get to watch it yourself.

I find it interesting to see how people work and it is amazing how many new techniques you learn. One thing Jon shared was a Javascript library called GridLayouts that overlays a grid systems on top of your pages. This is useful when creating layouts directly in CSS because you can align elements to the grid.

I have since discovered there is a firefox extension called GridFox that does the same thing.

Flash goes open source

Of course, you might be wasting your time designing with CSS. According to Aral Balkan flash is soon going to be everywhere and is the platform we should now be developing on.

The reason for Aralʼs excitement is an announcement by Adobe that Flash is going open source. Not only will the swf format be open source, they are also relaxing the licensing on the flash player.

All of this is good for the flash platform. Although it is never going to replace HTML, it does undermine one of the main arguments used by its detractors.

Accessibility and AJAX

While Flash gets a shot in the arm its main competitor AJAX is under attack. Brothercake has written a passionate article for Operaʼs development site pleading with us to stop using AJAX.

His argument is that AJAX is immature and unnecessary in the majority of cases. He believes that the accessibility cost of using AJAX outweighs it benefits (many of which are oversold).

I cannot say I agree with everything he has written, but the article does make you pause and consider whether your implementation of AJAX has been entirely necessary. Coming within days of the WCAG 2.0 candidate release, I think this article puts accessibility firmly back on the agenda. It will be interesting to see what affect WCAG 2.0. has on the growth of AJAX and web 2.0.

Developing effective forum leadership

Our final news story is anything but web 2.0. because it focuses on the oldest of community tools, the forum. It is an article by Patrick O’Keefe entitled Develop Effective Forum Leadership.

The article is aimed at those website owners who run larger communities and need to provide guidance to their community leaders. I have worked with so many large organisations who have tried and failed to effectively run communities. Their failure is often down to bad decisions concerning moderation and management.

This article helps to address those issues providing solid advice. If you are a community manager or have clients who run (or want to run) a forum then this is a must read.

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Feature: The personal website is dead

This week Zeldman mourned the decline of the personal site. Several responded rebutting the claim. In this weeks feature I explain why I agree with Zeldman but just don’t care.

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Interview: Jeff Croft Talks About His View On Web Standards

Paul: OK. Joining me today is Jeff Croft, who no doubt you have heard of. Good to have you on the show Jeff

Jeff: Great to be here Paul, thanks for having me.

Paul: So you work for Blue Flavour, and I have to confess the reason why I wanted you on the show is because you do tend to court a little bit of controversy, shall we say, is that a fair comment?

Jeff: I suppose that’s a fair comment. I don’t necessarily do it on purpose, but it does seem to keep happening!

Paul: Well you say you don’t do it on purpose, but I’ve looked through your blog, and you have some excellent articles on there that are really good and really quite excited me. Not necessarily because I agreed with every word

Jeff: Sure

Paul: But what I like about what you do, Jeff, is that you challenge kind of the standards, you know, you challenge the standard thinking and you kind of come at things from a different angle. So…

Jeff: Right

Paul: As a result of this, you seem to have antagonised a few people, especially in the standards community. Why is that? What have you done and why…why do people find you so annoying, Jeff?

Jeff: Well I was going to ask you that same thing Paul!

Paul: Ha ha ha

Jeff: No, seriously, it’s a good question. Like I said, I won’t ever set out to antagonise anyone. I think sometimes, you know, people take opposing viewpoints on these industry matters, a little personally, that’s, you know, my opinion. I know I write in kind of a pointed way that sometimes is blunt and I tend to be the type of person who doesn’t always have a filter when maybe I should. But, you know, I love everyone in this community, everyone I’ve ever met in this community’s been awesome so I’m not…it certainly isn’t ever personal, but I think, dealing specifically with web standards, it sort of feels a lot like religion to me. Like I sort of see myself as a Protestant of sorts, like I…you know I came up as a firm believer in the dogma of web standards, but more recently I’ve sort of split off from the Church on a few key points, but in the end, I mean Catholics and Protestants are both Christians, right? And we read the same Bible which is, I suppose, designing with web standards, and so you know, just there’s….I usually sort people there’s probably 5% of stuff that I differ on than kind of the purist viewpoints. So I’d see it as a purist versus pragmatist sort of thing
and I like to write about it and I like to write in a kind of a blunt way that I guess sometimes rubs people the wrong way.

Paul: So you’d like to call yourself a pragmatist. Tell us a little bit about where you, you know, what areas you think that other people are being too purist over when it comes to web standards. What are the areas that get under your skin?

Jeff: Well the main thing is just that I don’t really consider…I never think of web standards as the end goal. I think of web standards as a means to the end, and so, you know, when I’m building a website my priorities are, you know, to serve the needs of the client and to create a great user experience, more than my priorities are to validate or to, you know, use all the right ….most semantic elements all the time. I mean I do try to do that, but it’s…those are just in support of the greater goals that I have and I think…sometimes I feel like peoples’ priorities get a little out of whack there, and that’s kind of the purist mentality that I’m talking about.

Paul: I mean the trouble is with writing posts like this, and this is something I get accused of as well, that when you say something like, well web standards, you know, are not the goal, they’re merely a means to an end and all the rest of it

Jeff: Right

Paul: Aren’t you actually encouraging lazy coding?

Jeff: Well I don’t think so. I can see how it seems that way. I mean I definitely do believe that everyone should be writing valid markup and CSS and I just encourage people to remember that web standards are simply tools to advocate, you know, to help achieve the end goal, and you know, if you’re…I don’t know, I guess it’s kind of hard to explain, but if, like…let me use an example. If you’re building a house, I don’t think anybody would have their goal be…I need to use a hammer, and nails and bolts when I’m building this house. I don’t think that would be anybody’s end goal. Their goal would probably be like, I’m going to build a house that is structurally sound and has spaces that serve the needs of the residents and it’s comfortable and it’s aesthetically pleasing. They’d probably have goals like that. And you know, they probably would use a hammer, nails and bolts, but I don’t think they’d probably get so bent out of shape about, well in this house I used, you know, 3½ inch long nails instead of 3 inch nails, but those are the kind of like sort of semantic and pedantic debates that we get into in the industry a lot that irritate me a little bit because I feel like sometimes people just don’t pay attention to, you know, somebody can redesign a site that can be beautiful and amazing, and they make a blog post about it, and they say, you know, this is a new project I’ve done and it’s got all this new innovative stuff and the comments on it are, well you didn’t encode your ampersands and you know, you used too many divs and just to me I’m just like, man you totally missed the point, you totally missed all the great stuff that is there about my site.

Paul: But I mean using your house example that you just gave

Jeff: Right

Paul: I mean, within, you know, construction there are standards. There are, you know, rules that have to be followed and it may be the case that the person that’s getting their house built for them doesn’t…don’t particularly care about those things, you know, they care about the aesthetics, they care about the living space, they care about that kind of stuff, but somebody has to care about, you know, the fact that it’s built to Fire Regulations and things like that. Is that not our job as a Designer to worry about things like that?

Jeff: I think it’s completely our job, I just think that it is our job to …to do those things and to create great user experiences and have beautiful designs and…and it’s mostly just a priorities thing, like it’s just…I think all those things are important. Validating and creating, you know, writing semantic mark-up, all these things are important to me, they’re just… they’re just tools that I use to reach greater goals is all….and I think some people in our industry have turned that around to where they are more interested in writing valid code than they are in creating great experiences.

Paul: Mmm. So do you actually think that there are situations where the, you know, these different objectives come into conflict, because you know, I can’t say that in my experience there have been many situations where you know, I’ve gone, you know, oh I can’t do that because it’ll make the code invalid or whatever, you know, where…or where, you know, I’ve had to over-rule a client because I feel that it would compromise, the, you know, the semantics of the website. They don’t often seem to come into conflict, but I mean do you disagree?

Jeff: No,….no I agree, they’re very rarely in conflict if ever. It’s…you know, it’s more what irritates me and what I have talked about is more it has to do with the discussion and the kind of….community, you know, within the web standards community it’s not something that really affects client work too much or anything like that, it’s just I want to talk about some other stuff; I want to talk about design and I want to talk about users and I want to talk about community and networking and bringing people together and sometimes I feel like those conversations can’t be had because they’re…because as soon as somebody starts to talk about something a little bit more abstract and conceptual, people derail the conversation by saying, again, like your ampersands are unencoded, or you know, why did you use all these divs when you could’ve, you know, been more semantic, or you know, whatever. So….it’s more about the conversation…yes

Paul: I’ve got to say, I can associate with your point of view, I mean at the moment I’m re-building the Headscape website, our corporate website, and you know, although obviously I should primarily be thinking about the client all the time and potential customers that are coming along to the site, after all, that’s the target audience, but you can’t help but almost be a little bit afraid, you know, that …oh is this code of good enough standard, are people going to criticise this, that and the other, and really you shouldn’t have to live your life in fear of what your peers will say.

Jeff: Exactly, that’s exactly wha
t I think.

Paul: But I mean from the point of view of…we were talking about lazy coding weren’t we, and about, you know, does this encourage lazy coding. You guys have taken an interesting position at Blue Flavour, and I have to say this…this is something I think I probably disagree with, which is that you guys use Blueprint, which is the CSS library, actually in a production environment. That’s interesting that you take that point of view. Explain a little bit about how you came to that…that point, you know that position.

Jeff: Well…well first of all I was sort of involved in the creation of Blueprint. It was…I was accidentally involved; I didn’t mean to be, but at my previous job I had…I had created a sort of CSS framework for us to use internally, it was a media company, a newspaper company and we had several different newspaper sites. They were all similar and we had a team of designers and we wanted to just sort of standardise on some….some class names and just some ways of coding things across our sites and across our team, so that you know, we would all kind of be on the same page, and I wrote an article on a A List Apart about that process and somebody found…somebody went and found that code and wrote me an e-mail asking if they could use it, and I said sure, I can’t support it, but if you want to use it, go ahead, and thinking that they were probably going to use it on their personal site or whatever, and it turns out what they’re actually going to do is build Blueprint. So that’s kind of how the whole thing happened and…so that’s how I got involved in it and I gotta say before I go any further that since then, Blueprint is very different from what I wrote and there’s been a lot of changes, and a lot of them are good but a lot of them I don’t like too, so I don’t….at this point in time I’m not as sold on Blueprint as I was three or four months ago just because of some of the changes they’ve made. But I think the reason, I mean the justification to me for using Blueprint or any CSS framework like that is the same justification that you would have for any Open Source project. It’s really good CSS written by smart people that has been tested by the masses, it’s constantly being updated, having bug fixes applied, and you know I believe that most of the time the Open Source community is going to be able to write better code than you or me or any one individual person, so to me that’s the justification, it’s the same reason I would use Apache or Django or Rails or Linux or anything Open Source because it’s just been proven time and time again that….that Open Source methodology works for having good code.

Paul: I mean, I have to say, I had a look at it and played with it for a bit, and I’ve got to say that for some stuff it was very impressive, you know, if you’re putting together wireframes or, you know, doing initial production work then I can see a value in it, but I think what concerned me was some of the limitations surrounded the fact that, you know, it’s designed primarily for a fixed based site, but also…sorry, is that…am I wrong?

Jeff: No, no, you’re absolutely right, although I think adding liquid is on their ‘to do’ list, but yes,

Paul: OK. And then…I mean the other thing was that, you know, I’m trying to avoid using the word ‘semantic’ in order not to get in trouble with you, but I mean the thing that did strike me with it is that there were a lot of class names that you were having to put in, you know, which is fine, you know, I can accept that, you know, it’s not the end of the world if you do that, but you know, if it’s a site that’s going to be around over the long term, I just felt it was a little bit of a second-rate solution for probably the type of clients I do. Now I can understand that if you’re doing, you know, a lower…you know, lower end work, smaller websites, with less of a budget and you need to turn things around quickly then this is better than not using standards at all, but it just felt a little bit of a lightweight solution. Am I being unfair to it?

Jeff: Nope, I don’t think you’re being unfair at all. I think you’re absolutely right and I think, you know, I mean at Blue Flavour, we have used Blueprint before, we don’t use it all the time, and it is…we do tend to use it in those situations where we have a very tight timeframe or a very tight budget, and just need to get things done and get them out the door as quickly as possible. Because like you said, I mean we think it’s a good solution that is better than not using web standards at all, but it’s…it’s never going to be as good as hand-crafting every line of code for, you know, for the particular project. We recognise that, but it’s, you know, sometimes in the real world, when we have deadlines and clients and budgets, sometimes just getting things done on, you know, an efficient way trumps being absolutely perfect every time which is again that pragmatist versus purist sort of view.

Paul: I mean it felt like a bigger compromise, and maybe…I’m using some other, you know, frameworks and libraries, you know, I just jQuery for example in JavaScript, and this felt more of a compromise, more of interfering with the kind of underlying content of the site, and that’s what I was probably slightly uncomfortable with, was the idea that, you know, the content would be in some ways compromised if the site was going to be around a long time, you know, if it was a shorter term project that maybe wasn’t around as long, then the fact that the content is somewhat compromised maybe is not as big a deal.

Jeff: Yeah, well I think, you know, when you were saying that I was thinking, you know, like you use jQuery, so do I. I think there’s a certain…like…those of us who are not great JavaScript people will lean on these frameworks, whereas I bet JavaScript gurus sometimes have the same feelings like about…it being a compromise when using one of those libraries, you know, and there’s probably people in the Ruby community that say, ‘oh, I’m not going to use Rails, it’s a compromise’, because they really know the ins and outs of Ruby or they really know the ins and outs of JavaScript and we really know the ins and outs of HTML CSS so yeah, I wonder if it’s always …these kind of libraries are always going to be a little more popular with people who are…who are like have to use CSS but it’s not really their primary area of expertise.

Paul: So what you’re implying is that I’m a snob?

Jeff: Sort of!

Paul: Ha ha ha…..that’s fair enough, that’s OK. I don’t mind being a snob! So I’ve….so moving on from that then a little bit

Jeff: OK

Paul: Now I’ve read some stuff that you’ve written before critical of validators and you know, some of these automated validators that are out there. Maybe tell us a little bit about why you’re critical of them, why you feel so anti towards them?

Jeff: Well it’s not so much that I’m opposed to the validators, I mean on the contrary actually I use validators almost every single day. What I’m critical of is the way people use them sometimes. I think that, you know, validators are there for…as a tool to help you de-bug during the development process, you know, you have some problem on your page and why isn’t it working? When you validate you find the error and then that helps you move along to solving it. But what irritates me is the use of validators as sort of in unprovoked attacks on other peoples’ code, you know, where again, it’s kind of that same…that same mentality of somebody launches their new site and the first thing somebody does is view source and validate it, so that they can then make a comment that says, you know, this is crap, and that is…that is really irritating. I feel like there’s almost never any reason to validate someone else’s code, I mean unless they’ve asked you to, I can’t understand why….it’s just that mentality of the first thing you do when you get to a site is view source is a little baffling to me, because I’m…I’m more interested in the design and the functionality and what are they doing here that’s new and interesting.

Paul: I guess…but that depends…surely that depends on your priorities, I mean…you know, I find it quite interesting to look at other people’s code and how they’ve built the site. It doesn’t necessarily mean I’m going to validate it.

Jeff: Right, and….no and I mean that’s fine, I do that at times as well and that’s certainly how I learned a lot of what I know, but I don’t do it with the intention of then picking apart every single error they made publicly, which is really the thing that bothers me.

Paul: I have to say the other thing that concerns me a little bit about this is I’m starting to see more clients going and viewing source and validating websites and you know, it’s quite difficult, because I mean obviously like yourselves, we kind of sell ourselves on, you know, being standard based designers and produce good quality code and all the rest of it; it’s part of our sales package. And you know, when a client goes along and validates one of our client sites and it’s invalid, you know, you feel like you have to defend yourself in some way, but, you know, there are good reasons why a site won’t validate sometimes, and…and certainly once a client starts using a content management system you can pretty much kiss goodbye to it can’t you really?

Jeff: In many of them, yeah.

Paul: OK. That’s…it’s interesting to hear a little bit about the way that you operate and the kind of priorities that you have at Blue Flavour. In some of the posts that you’ve put up, I mean you were kind enough to send through a big bunch of your more controversial posts to me which was good. And I was reading through some of them, really enjoying them by the way, but there seemed to be this kind of under-lying current that maybe standards and even the W3C to some extent, a kind of stifling innovation. Where does this kind of feeling come from, you know, is that something you really, really believe and what makes you believe it?

Jeff: I would say again it’s not so much that I think that the W3C themselves or the standards themselves are stifling innovation; it’s the culture of compliance that is around those standards and around the web standards community to where people are so obsessed with being valid and being compliant all the time that they…you know, they tend to…I think it even extends past actually writing mark-up or writing CSS to where people just keep doing things the same way that everybody else is doing them or the way that Jeffrey Zeldman told them is the way to do things, or whatever, and it just kind of….they just keep doing things the same way and not innovating as much as I would like to see. Now I say that, and I…but I know I probably do the same thing myself, like I don’t…I’m not always incredibly innovative either, so…so it’s kind of, you know, it’s a balance there. But I think….I think also, I mean…and this might be a little bit of difference in my viewpoint too, is when I really thing of web standards, the web standards movement, I think about the browsers. I think the…gold web standards movement was to get the browsers all rendering standards correctly and supporting standards, which for the most part has been done, I mean granted there are still little problems here and there, and IE isn’t totally there, but at least we know that they’re on board now. I don’t think of web standards movement so much as being a thing where we’re getting the developers all on board. I mean I guess that’s part of it too, but when I think about the web standards movement when I was, you know, when I was first involved in it four or five years ago or however long it was, to me it was all about the browsers, and so, you know, today I think there’s a sort of chicken and egg problem where…browser makers could be innovating and doing cool new things and the one that consistently has done cool new things is Webkit in Safari, I mean they’re adding the CSS3 properties and they’re adding, you know, they’re coming up with properties of their own and adding them and they’re…and they’re doing it, I mean today we have this name spacing, right, where they can say, you know, it’s going to be hyphen webkit hyphen border radius or whatever, so they can keep it out of the, you know, it’s got its own name spaces, kept out of the global area so it doesn’t conflict with anything else, and I would just like to see a lot more of that kind of innovation from browser makers where they’re trying these new things, they’re throwing them in, they’re letting developers play with them, and like I said, it’s kind of a chicken and egg thing I think where the browser makers would like to do this maybe, but they’re afraid of the backlash from the standards community. If they’re adding new properties that aren’t part of a spec, you know, the standards community is…has proven that it’s going to backlash against them and it’s going to say, ‘why did you add this, this isn’t in the spec’, and so then they don’t do things, but the developers and designers also would like to try new things but…so it’s kind of a chicken and egg thing there a little bit I think. So that’s the…that’s the main …the main plan I have on that, and the, you know, like there are examples, like X….sorry, XML HTTP request or Ajax, you know, was a pr
oprietary IE property that they just put in, and eventually got standardised, and that’s kind of the way that I would like to see it go more is where the browser makers are doing new things and then we’re trying to standardise them, which is the opposite I know if, you know, some really respectable people and friends of mine like Jina Bolton and Andy Clarke which see that it should go the other way, which is that specs are written and then browser makers standardise on them, so…

Paul: Yeah…I must admit, listening to you talk kind of fills me with a certain level of dread, to be honest, when you talk about browser manufacturers. You know, I studied…I studied designing websites back in ’95, and you know, and so I lived through this whole period of time where you have browser manufacturers, you know, introducing all kinds of bizarre tags and it was absolute chaos, you know, and you didn’t know what was happening on what browsers. What’s to stop that happening again, beyond the standards community growling in the corner aggressively?

Jeff: Yeah, well I mean that…I mean I was there for that too. I studied also in ’95 and yeah, it was pure chaos. But I think, you know, I mean first of all I think the standards community has made a lot of inroads to where these, you know, I don’t think it would be complete chaos simply because we understand the value of standards now. And there are some…there are some mechanisms in place like the name spacing I’m talking about, where they can do these things and keep them from conflicting with other…so when …when WebKit decides they’re going to add border radius property, they can do it under dash webkit dash border radius, so that if anybody is actually using the real border radius without a, you know, prefix, you know, there’s no conflict, so I think, you know I just feel like there’s some mechanisms in place that would keep it from being so chaotic and the value of standards we’ve learned through the web standards movement, you know, and the browser makers are now on board with the idea of inter-operability, I think would keep it from being so chaotic, but I guess I don’t know for sure. It is…it’s definitely…there’s definitely a balance there because I definitely feel like the browsers have not been doing as many new things as they did back in those days, but those new things did cause problems too, so it’s, you know, but as a Designer I sometimes get bored, I’m like, I’ve played with all that stuff; I’ve played with all the tools we have and I want to try something different, you know, I want something that will…I want advanced grid positioning and, you know, I want to be able to draw shapes and, you know, it’s not out there.

Paul: I mean that is the only trouble I guess with…you know, you were talking about innovation and we need to be innovating more as Designers as well as browser manufacturers. The trouble with innovation to some degree is that you’re always in danger of undermining users’ expectations. I mean this is something you hear someone like Nielsen go on about loads. How…where do you feel the balance is between kind of doing cool new stuff and…you know, not undermining users’ needs or expectations?

Jeff: Well you’ll probably remember from back in the late ‘90s and that sort of thing that there was….and another sort of interest of mine is the sort of demise of the personal website, but back in those days, there was just so many experimental kind of crazy out there personal projects that were happening, and I think that that is a great place to try those things, because they’re not…they’re not real users accessing them; people that are using them are, you know, expecting that, I mean that sort of thing’s a great place to try new things, is on personal projects. Now again, with the culture of compliance that we have, I don’t know how that would fly today. Like if somebody made some crazy experimental site, I think there’s a certain fear of doing that because of backlash again from the web standards community, like you know, it’s a thing where people aren’t seeing the…the meaning, you know, it’s…I’m putting this out there because I’m trying to do something new and difference and …and it’s almost not allowed by the web standards community. Well, you can’t do that, because it doesn’t validate, or you know, whatever. And again, like I said, that’s not always specifically about validation and mark-up. It goes onto the…to that …into usability and into layout and design where people say, don’t change that because it’s messing with users’ expectations, but I think there are places where you can try those things and personal projects to me are the big place where you can try that.

Paul: You’ve got a good point about personal website. It’s like everybody now …have…you know, it’s all about blogs isn’t it, it’s all about….there’s almost this kind of citizen journalism thing where, you know, we’re all actually trying to create a little audience for ourselves and so therefore we don’t want to do anything too dangerous with our…with our personal sites. I remember my….my first personal site was absolutely chaotic, you know, it had no proper navigation whatsoever, but it was fun, it was a place I could experiment, so yeah…

Jeff: Yeah, that’s a real kind of…pet annoyance of mine is that …the loss of that, and I do think, you know, it’s because everything’s a blog, and I love blogs, and you know I have a blog, but I still wish that there was just a little bit more of that crazy experimentation that we had going on back then.

Paul: Mmm. I mean it’s a good point as well. A question I often get asked by people is, you know, how do I promote myself online. They say, I don’t want to…I don’t want to run a blog because I don’t want to write. Well you know, a personal project in a way you’re trying out different things like a sandbox you can play in. It’s a good way of promoting yourself and showing what you’re capable of, and that you do innovate without having to write reams of stuff, because let’s face it, not all of us are big writers, so….yeah

Jeff: Right.

Paul: Good to have your perspective on things. It’s really nice to have a kind of new perspective and you know, a different point of view, so great to have you on the show, and no doubt we will get you back in again in the future. Good to talk to you.

Jeff: Great. Thanks so much for having me.

Thanks to Anna Debenham for transcribing this interview.

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Listeners feedback:

Getting a site
off the ground

Shaun writes: Following the headscape redesign and promised boagworld redesign what tips can you give to getting a personal/own site off the drawing board/local machine and actually published.

The problem with internal projects is they lack motivation. They are never as important as client work because they donʼt directly generate income. The answer is to increase their perceived importance. I use a number of techniques:

  • Document the benefits to your business or personal profile.
  • Produce a statement of work just as you would an external client.
  • Price the project so that you can set it against your targets as a marketing cost.
  • Set a deadline and preferably announce that publicly so you are forced to meet it.
  • Block out time for the project rather than attempting to “fit it around” client work.

Ultimately it comes down to determination. However, knowing the value of the project and treating it as any other project really helps.

Testing

Erich writes: Thanks so much for the show, all the work you guys put in really shows. It is great learning about aspects of the business that I donʼt get to deal with much.

I was just wondering if you guys had any kind of a testing station at Headscape. We are looking at putting something like that together at my work. Somewhere you can just go sit at and run through all the browsers, maybe even some with different versions of flash and such. Do you guys run anything like that?

Because our designers are based remotely it is not easy to have a central testing suite. We did try that at one stage but it did not work. Connecting remotely wasnʼt as smooth as it should have been and we found multiple designers often wanted access at the same time.

Currently, each designer runs a number of virtual PCs on their individual machines. Most have two versions of XP one running IE7 and one with IE6. We also run multiple version of Firefox and Opera. Most of our designers also own macs allowing them to test Safari. Those that donʼt connect to a mac in the office.

To be honest our testing environment is not the most sophisticated. Most clients do not want to pay for testing against minority browsers and when they do we setup something specific for their needs usefully using a virtual machine. If you are interested in setting up your own Virtual Machines then I recommend VMWare Fusion(7) for the mac and Virtual PC(8) under windows.

 

110. The mighty Meyer

Posted in Classic shows on by Paul Boag

On Show 110: Eric Meyer on version targeting, the business benefits of usability testing and do I have to have a blog?

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News and events | The profit and loss of usability | Eric Meyer on version targeting | Listener emails

News and events

Before we kick off the news section today I should point out that I actually link to many more articles, tutorials and news stories than I ever include on the show. If you go to boagworld and click the links in the header you can receive all of these posts by either email or RSS.

CSS reference library

Raise your hands if you have ever used the W3 School. Okay put your hand down now because you are looking kind of stupid. For those of you who didn’t raise your hands the W3 School is a comprehensive reference sources for almost every web language around. It really is very impressive.

The problem is that it doesn’t provide the nicest user experience. If you are looking for CSS reference information then a possible alternative is the new Sitepoint reference section. At the moment it only includes information on CSS however they are obviously looking to expand.

Its design is a lot more attractive than W3 School and although it is not as comprehensive it will provide you with all the latest information on CSS properties including CSS 3. It also provides you with an indication of which browsers support that property.

Stay on :target

Talking of CSS 3 there is an interesting article by Brian Suda over at Think Vitamin entitled Stay on :target. Target is a new CSS pseudo-class being introduced in CSS 3. Although it has yet to be implemented by Internet Explorer it is supported by many other browsers.

Essentially what target does is allow you to style a target element in much the same way you can style on hover. So when you click on a link that goes to a fragment identifier (what used to be called anchor links) then it styles that fragment.

So for example a good use of this attribute would be to highlight the content that you have just been jumped to (like the fade to yellow technique) or to hide and show content when the user clicks on a tab.

Of course many of you might be asking why I bring this up when it isn’t supported in IE. Well, not only is it an interesting glimpse into what is to come, it can also be used right now when the functionality provided isn’t crucial. For example you wouldn’t want it to hide and show content but it might be okay to highlight linked content with it.

Read the article and you can see the potential yourself.

Search behaviour patterns

Another article worth reading is Search behaviour principles over at Boxes and Arrows. This article looks at how people search and the different types of searchers there are. It also looks at what things affect the way people search and techniques that can be used to accommodate their approaches.

As I have said before on this show, not enough attention is given to search and this article will really get you thinking about how to better accommodate it. Best of all there are still a lot of hints that can be applied here even if you are lumbered with an inflexible search mechanism that cannot be customised or tweaked.

10 principles of effective web design

Talking of search usability brings us nicely on to our final story of the day which is a post from Smashing magazine. We haven’t mentioned them in a while but this week they are back with another top ten list. This time it is the 10 principles of effective web design.

Personally I think it is a misleading title as actually the post is about basic usability techniques. That said, it is a very good list and contains some really solid advice. It also contains lots of examples which really helps you get your head around the issues.

I don’t think the post has a lot to offer seasoned usability testers but if you have always avoided the subject in the past then this is a nice simple starting point.

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Feature: The profit and loss of usability

We have looked at the subject of usability testing relatively recently on the show and have mentioned it countless times before. However, never have we taken a step back and asked the fundamental question: why is usability testing important? This week we look at how usability testing can be presented to clients and dispel some of the misconceptions about it.

For more detail on what we cover read my post The profit and loss of usability.

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Expert interview: Eric Meyer on version targeting

Paul: So on last weeks show we discussed Internet Explorer 8 and some of the plans Microsoft have for it and joining me this week is Eric Meyer. Hello Eric, good to have you on the show.

Eric: Cheers, hello.

Paul: Cheers, very British of you.

Eric: I try to localise my content.

Paul: Yes, very good. Most impressed! We’ve got Eric on the show really because this whole news surrounding Microsoft and what they were planning to do was broken on the A List Apart website, in 2 articles, one of which Eric wrote. The reason I think I wanted to get you on the show to talk about it is because I was kind of struck by the honesty of your article that a lot of what you were saying was very much ‘I really don’t want to like this idea but…’ kind of attitude. Which is the kind of attitude that I think goes down well with the people that listen to this show. So I was wondering Eric, could you kick off by giving a brief explanation of what it is that Microsoft are proposing doing, just so that we’ve got a bit of an understanding of it?

Eric: Um, well pretty much what they’re proposing is that Internet Explorer, Internet Explorer 8, and in the future will recognise a single element, a meta tag which can be used to say ‘This is the version of Internet Explorer that I want you to act like’ so that Internet Explorer 11 can act like Internet Explorer 8 did, or Internet Explorer 7.

Paul: Right.

Eric: So the idea basically is well they call it Version Targeting so that you can have your page actually targeted to a certain version of Internet Explorer even if newer versions have come out.

Paul: Ok. So, I mean at face value that sounds very much like browser sniffing, which is obviously something that has kind of become considered bad practice. How does it differ?

Eric: Well my perspective is that it differs because it actually reverses the direction of sniffing. Browser sniffing To date it has been a case of authors trying to figure out what browsers they want to sniff for and what should happen as a result. This was sort of the reverse side of. It would be the browser sniffing the page to say, ‘What do you want me to do?’, at least in the case of Internet Explorer. It should be clear that Microsoft has so far as I am aware anyway not proposed that anyone else has to do this, or that this has become any part of any sort of standard. They’re saying if it is what we want. This is what we’re planning to do on the browser. So they have the same echoes. I really feel like they are not the same thing. There are a lot of people who disagree with me but they are really very different because one of the reasons that browser sniffing by authors has become viewed as a bad practice is because it becomes fragile over time. First of all there’s a case of people saying ‘If this is Internet Explorer do such and so’, and they don’t consider that there might be a version this version of Internet Explorer that might change what I’m trying to work around. Another reason is that people make guesses about what will be in user agent strings which is usually what people browser sniff on and sometimes those guesses turn out to be wrong as when Safari first came out its user agent strings had the phrase White Gecko in parenthesis.

Paul: Yeah.

Eric: A lot of people had done browser sniffing scripts that looked for the word Gecko so all of the scripts thought that Safari was Mozilla, Firefox or whatever and so some of them broke. In a way it is hard to fault the authors because how are they supposed to know a browser from Apple, not based on Gecko, would have the word Gecko on it’s user agent string and yet that happened so this would be much more controlled it seems to me were it would be browser saying ‘What do you want me to act like?’ and that’s the other reason this has varied from browser sniffing usually tries to predict the future, whereas this version targeting that looks like it will happen in Internet Explorer it actually has to predict the past which is inherently easier to do.

Paul: Why has Microsoft decided to take this position? It seems to me like in some ways they’ve created a rod for their own back in the sense that they are producing I don’t know, Internet Explorer 11 and in that has got to be the rendering engine for 10, 9, 8, 7 and all the way back. Is that not just a lot of work on their part? What’s driving them in this direction?

Eric: I think it will be a lot of work on their part. I do not believe that the idea is to have completely separate rendering engines for each of those browsers, but to have effectively if then else statements in the rendering engine or cases or switch statements for a little more program language savvy. The reason that they’re doing this is that they really have a problem, well they have a dilemma, and they need to get out of the dilemma. The dilemma that they face is basically this: There are a lot of pages out there both on the public web and in private intranets that were developed to IE6 or IE7 let’s say and weren’t developed in an open standards way they weren’t developed the way a lot of people in the standards movement develop sites which is to code to the standards and then figure out how to work around the problems that they encounter. If you have an intranet, a massive intranet site, and your company standard is IE7 the default tendency is to develop it to IE7, you use behaviours that are not correct according to the standard, but are the way that IE7 acts. You have all these past mistakes which every browser makes past mistakes. IE7 it can be argued has made more mistakes than others, not an argument I want to get into. They have that situation where there’s this large legacy of pages. So they can’t have those break for a number of reasons, many of them business reasons, actual monetary reasons but at the ground level you could look at it as if the browser changes enough that those pages start to break it becomes a bad browsing experience for users of that browser. At the same time, the Internet Explorer team would like very much to improve their standards support. They did this for IE7; they fixed a lot of things. They went more towards the updating the browser and didn’t worry quite as much about breaking sites, and they got into quite a lot of trouble over it both internally and externally. There were people who took on the task for breaking the web. We’ve been here before as an industry back in 2000. This is how DOCTYPE switching became to be because the first few iterations of IE and Netscape did very badly at CSS support. They tried and more power too them but Internet Explorer got the box model wrong. Netscape got so many things wrong that they had to junk it and start off with a new browser. So DOCTYPE switching was basically invented as a way of being able to say ‘Given these criteria render pages the way they used to be rendered and give them these other criteria go the more standard route’. From the Microsoft prospective this is like a super DOCTYPE switch except in this case instead of hinging it on a DOCTYPE they’re hinging it on information about what the browser version is.

Paul: Yeah. It is interesting when I first heard about this and I first read your article and the other one on A List Apart, my initial reaction was oh no all this feels wrong and indeed which is what in the sense you said that you went through when you were writing the article and then we actually were discussing it on last weeks show with John Oxton and John Hicks, the same kind of thing came out that we felt very uncomfortable with this and we were reflecting on a lot of things that were said including Jeremy Keith who made this point of you’re actually in a position where you’re actively having to tell Internet Explorer 8 how to behave like Internet Explorer 8 and not IE7, which seems a bizarre set of circumstances but since then I’ve been thinking about it a little and I’m struggling to come up with a reason that I really object to this beyond a principle of the thing that I feel like I shouldn’t agree with it but I’m having trouble articulating why I guess. What kind of things are you seeing? You must have seen a lot of objections come up when you are brave enough to step up and say what you did on A List Apart, I’m sure there was quite a backlash. What kind of things are people saying and throwing against this?

Eric: Well I can see quite a few objections.

Paul: *laughs*

Eric: Well one of them is an objection that Jeremy brought forth which I think I am glad that were talking about that which is that the default behaviour is to default to IE7 as I understand. So when IE8 comes out, if it doesn’t see this version target meta tag in a page it will assume that page is to be treated as IE7 would have treated it, which again completely reverses what were used to. What were used to is when a new browser comes out the page will be interpreted according to the latest and greatest unless you’re using a quirks mode DOCTYPE switch but anyway, it’s bizarre, and yet I did go through the same thing when I first saw it I was like &#”;What!&#”; *laughs*

Paul: Yeah.

Eric: Good old WTF basically.

Paul: *laughs*

Eric: And when I first saw this it was at the beginning of January when Aaron Gustafson submitted the first draft of his article, I hadn’t actually heard about this before then, and I started arguing with him about it in the A List Apart editing forum and very quickly came to realise, &#”;Why am I objecting to this?&#”; and I took the time to step back and say &#”;What’s the deal here?&#”; and that’s were my article came from with the two of us going back and for and it was like, could you write an article about that because that’s what a lot of people are going to go through. So there’s the default behaviour, you have to have the meta to have the latest and greatest, yeah, I would like to see that changed, I would like to have Internet Explorer act the way browsers always have because that’s what I’m used too, but at the same time I have to be realistic about the problems that they face, that I was explaining before.

Paul: Yeah, because that wouldn’t solve their fundamental problem which is that people that aren’t aware of working to the latest standards aren’t going to be aware that they have to put meta data in there pages either.

Eric: Right, so people have said that Microsoft, of anyone, are in a position to educate people who are not aware of the need to do that one thing and that’s the point I made when I was talking to a member of the IE team about this. There are other objects that I think mostly have been related to that for example Bruce Lawson posted just in the last few days, the default behaviour means that from an accessibility point of view any page that doesn’t have this meta tag is stuck with IE7′s accessibility support which apparently is not were it should be, so he’s made the point that freezing pages to IE7 in the absence of any other information freezes them in this inaccessible state, I’m not an accessibility expert so I don’t know how best to categories that but, will have accessibility problems and keep them for years and years as opposed to, ya know, as accessibility problems improve in Internet Explorer, getting those benefits and that a very real objection and a very real concern, and I think one that needs to be made to the Microsoft people because accessibility is very important. There are other objections from the javaScript community, it’s actually been interesting in the javaScript community, there’s been a real dichotomy, there have been some javaScript library authors who’s been like &#”;Yes! Finally, thank god somebody is talking about versioning!&#”; right, and there’ve been others who have been like &#”;Oh my god, are you kidding, libraries will have to support all these backwards engines&#”;.

Paul: Yeah.

Eric: Again, I’m not an expert to know what side of that certain dichotomy I would come down on, in my own blog posts I’m saying, wouldn’t you just use object detection and not worry about what the version number is?, but I guess that doesn’t fully address the problem, or at least that’s what I’ve been told. Again it’s something that needs to be figured out, because there have been some fantastic javaScript libraries and fantastic things that can be done with those and if this is a move that will hamper the growth of that field then that’s something else that would also bother me. There’s also the security objects, the idea that every backwards versions that you have your complicating your ability to keep your security holes closed, that’s the kind of thing we’re I have to say &#”;Look that’s down to the browser maker to figure out&#”;.

Paul: I guess that the problem with the whole default behaviour thing is how badly it’s going to break things, how many sites are going to be broken if the default behaviour was the latest browser and how badly are these sites going to be broken, are they going to be unusable? Are we talking about some small changes? I guess there are a lot of websites out there as well that just aren’t supported at all, content has been put online, nobody is checking them, nobody is checking when a new browser comes along, and if when IE8 was released and those websites became completely inaccessible and unusable then obviously there’s a big issue there because your loosing vast amounts of content on the web. I guess a lot of it is unknown entities at the moment isn’t it? It’s guess work.

Eric: Yeah. There’s a lot of guess work and that’s part of the problem, I think if we knew, if there were some kind of statistics, like if the IE team were to come out and said we built a version were the default behaviour was latest and we tested it against these 1000 QA sites and 20% of them broke, 5% were completely unusable, that would be one thing, or if they said we tested and 2 sites were broken, you could still read them but they look a little weird, that would be different and nobody does really know and at least nobody outside of Microsoft and maybe not even them, I don’t know if they’ve done that kind of testing yet. And, I’m sorry, there is one other objection that come from a couple of other browser manufacturers that this is in affect, anti-competitive, whether it’s meant to be or not, but it has that effect because Internet Explorer has such a large market share they have to worry about what it does and so to them it becomes a lot harder to do that, so if they are going to keep up this effort it’s going to become a lot harder to do in this version targeting world after a few releases, of course the question is whether they would need to do that or not and there’s a lot of debate about that, there are people who are like, &#”;Just stop, stop making reference to Internet Explorer and just let it strangle itself to death&#”;. I don’t want to get into all the back and forth that’s happened but that is another objection.

Paul: I guess, is there some danger here as well that once you’ve got this version targeting in place Microsoft could go off on some complete tangent and start introducing all kinds of proprietary functionality into their browser that isn’t supported in the other and we end up in a situation were we’re having browser wars again with different browsers implementing different proprietary tags and stuff like that, or are we truly beyond that do you think?

Eric: Umm, It is certainly a risk and how much of a risk influences were people stand on this. I don’t see that personally as being much of a risk, because yes, the Internet Explorer team could introduce a load of proprietary properties that let an author change the colour of the browser kernel right or replace the backwards and forwards buttons in the browser, whatever, and if nobody else supports that, I think those efforts will largely support them strangling themselves, I mean, colours scroll bars we don’t really hear about anymore, people will still do them, but nobody else really cares.

Paul: Yeah.

Eric: So, I would not claim to be smart enough to see everything that could possibly be done but I think in a lot of ways that might not be a bad thing, because it would let Microsoft experiment with less constraints, they can do initial implementation of things that are in CSS3 and if the behaviour of those things changes, in a later version they can fix what they did, they can change to match the spec, and then still have backwards compatibility for pages that took assumption of that, there are people that would say &#”;Well they should never implement anything that hasn’t been completely nailed down&#”;, but that doesn’t really work, because one of the ways that you get yourself out of the candidate recommendation stages at the W3C is to have implementations and the only way to have implementations is for someone to implement them and if they find out during that phase, and this is what the candidate phase is about, if they find out in that phase that such and such property that has been specified, doesn’t work in the real world for whatever reason, they’re then able to go back and change it, but in the mean time if your Internet Explorer and 11′ty billion pages have been implemented to your particular version of the property.

Paul: So, you wrote this A List Apart article that went out of the 21st of January, and we should probably say that we’re recording this interview on the 29th of January and it’s not going to go out for another week, so things might move on in-between but there’s obviously been a lot of discussion since you released that article, have your views really changed in any way, are you still in favour of this approach or have there been more concerns raised that have made you doubt it?

Eric: Hmm, I’m still in favour of the general idea, the implementation I’m a little less, I guess I would say I’m more agnostic about, but the general idea of backwards compatibility so as not to break sites, whilst still being able to change and improve and fix the browser I’m all in favour off. The default behaviour still bothers me, and I’m still having trouble working out if there is a case of honest to goodness technical reasons or it just feels wrong, there has to be something, how’s it’s gone about is a different question, if the IE team and the people that they have to answer to effectively can be convinced that having the default behaviour switched and then educating people whole want to freeze their sites, on how to freeze there sites using the meta, they can be convinced to do that and that that will fix the problems that they face then I’m all for it. Accessibility concerns do bother me and I think that that’s another argument in favour of switching the default behaviour but at the same time I also have to recognise that switching the default behaviour, as you said earlier, from a certain prospective, completely negates the entire reason to do this, given a certain set of circumstances if they’re going to switch the default behaviour it might almost as well not even do it. Again though that also depends on how much breakage on how many sites and what kind.

Paul: Yeah.

Eric: The other unknown that we’re facing here is we don’t yet know just how different the IE8 behaviours are compared to IE7, we have a clue in that we already know that there’s an internal build of IE8 that can support the ACID2 test, which they weren’t even really very close too, well I guess that depends on who you talk to, but they didn’t support it before so in or to support ACID2 they have to have things like generated content with CSS which we completely don’t have in IE7 they have to have fixed some of there parsing bugs and so on and so forth that hints at a very large change, an even bigger change than that between IE6 and IE7, but we don’t know at this stage, it could be, and this has been one of my objects to ACID2 or one of my discomforts with ACID2 over the years, it could be that they’ve just implemented exactly the things that were needed to ACID2 work and not more, which is the wrong way to go about supporting ACID2 and I don’t know that they’ve done that, but it’s possible. So I may be that it’s not such a huge change, but those things came about as sort of a broader push towards implementing more advanced selectors and fixing bugs and implementing area content and really pushing into the areas of CSS2 that they don’t support and the areas of advanced CSS modules that they don’t support yet, then that could be an enormous change and in that case there’s more chance of them breaking a ton of sites if they don’t have a mechanism like this in place to deal with them.

Paul: So I mean in some senses, after discussing this for however long we’ve been discussing it, there’s very little at this stage that we can really do about this, for the average web designer, Internet Explorer 8 isn’t going to be out in the immediate, one presumes and even when it does we’re talking about relatively minor changes that they’re going to have to make to their site, I guess the biggest immediate concern is maybe how you think about building sites at the moment, do you worry so much about things like progressive enhancement if maybe the way that Internet Explorer works in the future, I guess they’re still good principles.

Eric: Yes, absolutely they’re still good principles and that is how I have developed sites and will continue to develop sites and really I think what it comes down to here is who’s going to have to add the meta tag.

Paul: Yeah.

Eric: Is it going to be people who do forward development, ya know forward compatible development, is it going to be standards aware developers or is it going to be people who aren’t in that sort of craft. It’s not fair in a way, that the people who have been doing things in the right way will have to take that on, but on the other hand it could well if you look at the numbers, there are a lot less of us.

Paul: And in some ways we’re much more equipped to do it.

Eric: Right, to understand why it’s needed and how to do it the right way and when not to do it for that matter.

Paul: Yeah.

Eric: Because when you develop a site for someone and it seems like a one off and they really not going to be keeping it up, you might want to keep the meta tag off because you know that that will default to IE7 and that’s what you want or you might explicitly include it because you want it to default to IE7 and IE8 or ya know on my site if this happens I’ll probably use the edge keyword of IE equals 1024.

Paul: Yeah.

Eric: So I’ll always get the latest and greatest and so that’s for me personally, but for a client I would have a much harder time justifying that because clients don’t care if it’s forward compatible development or not they just care about whether their site works and will continue to work right and so the point has been made, as you did, that in a lot of ways people who are sort of more clued in are better equipped to take this on as opposed to somebody’s grandmother who uses Dreamweaver or whatever to put together a site for her poetry circle and this happens all the time, they don’t even look at the mark-up let alone would understand why this would need to be done why there would need to be some kind of meta tag, first you would need to explain the concept of tags etc, etc, etc.

Paul: I mean a lot of these people don’t even realise that there are multiple versions of a browser, or indeed that there are multiple browsers.

Eric: *laughs* And those are also issues that will need to be faced, somebody is going to have to do this. A lot of these advances that IE8 seems to have ready to go as indicated by passing the ACID2 test may well have to come back out.

Paul: Yeah.

Eric: You can always back changes out of a code base and that really seems to me to be the dilemma and I’ll want to say again, there are people who reject that as being the choice, there are people who feel very strongly that that isn’t in fact a choice, even if you except that’s a choice that they should keep the changes in but be willing to break sites because sites always have to be updated anyway and that’s how browsers have always done it, so there’s a large amount of history that says that can happen but browsers can still advance.

Paul: We will see won’t we, that’s what it boils down to. We will have to wait and see. Okay, Eric, thank you so much for coming on the show and talking that through, it’s an interesting area and I think it’s an area that will have significant impact on how things develop in the future, so it’s good to have your perspective on it. Thanks very much.

Eric: Paul, thanks for having me on, I really appreciate it.

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Basic CMS options

As in last week’s show I so badly bastardised the name of our textmate reviewer, I decided it is only fair to allow him another go this week. He asks:

I have a friend who wants me to build a website that they can update. They don’t know how to write HTML or CSS. What is the best way to solve this problem?

The obvious solution is to use a content management system of some type. Indeed this is something we have covered before on the show back in show 24. If you were building a relatively big site that needs constant updating, then I would definitely encourage you to check out that episode. However if your needs are simpler a full blown CMS might be overkill. In such situations you should consider a simple blogging system like WordPress.

One final option maybe to use a tool like Contribute. That way you could build a nice simple static site but your friend would have a WYSIWYG tool to edit it.

The importance of blogs

Our second question is from Lauren:

My question is about starting a blog. Right now, my nights are filled with homework, but once I complete my program, I can truly dedicate my time to building my portfolio. Are blogs really that important now? I don’t know if I can come up with meaningful content to make my blog stand out. Does this mean that I won’t be able to find a good job in the industry without one?

You talk about a portfolio and blog as if they are separate things, but I would suggest they should be combined. As somebody who regularly hires web designers, I have to say I find portfolio websites frustrating. At worst they show me some pretty pictures, at best examples of fully functional websites. However, what they don’t tell me is the thought process behind the designs. Why did you choose the colors you did? Who is the target audience and how did this affect the design?

A blog can also be used as a portfolio but allows more depth into the designs you are presenting. Also, a blog allows you to link to other content on the web and express your views on that content. This shows me as a potential employer that you are well read and interested in what is out there.

As a student looking for your first job I wouldn’t expect your blog to include new CSS techniques or innovative approaches to user testing. However, I would like to see examples of work fully explained and evidence that you are reading other web design sites and have opinions on what you are reading.

109. Rissington?

Posted in Classic shows on by Paul Boag

On Show 109. IE8 divides the web design community, Anton Peck talks about imagery, and the Rissington Podcast crew stand in for Marcus.

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News and events | Anton Peck on imagery | Listener emails

Unfortunately Marcus is not yet back on active duty but does thank you all for your kind support. However, do not fret. You do not have to endure another show of me waffling on by myself. Stepping into Marcus’ still warm shoes are two giants in the world of web design and podcasting. From the infamous Rissington Podcast we have Jon Hicks and John Oxton.

News and events

Microsoft to automatically roll out IE7

First up I was sent an article by several listeners which seems to indicate Microsoft is intending to do an auto-update of Internet explorer on the 12th February.

When IE7 was initially released Microsoft made the decision to make the upgrade to their latest browser optional. So even though a user had requested automatic updates they would not receive IE7 unless they specifically approved it. This decision not to force users to update frustrated those in the web design community who wanted to wave goodbye to the evils of IE6.

However, it would now appear Microsoft has decided to take the plunge and will be rolling out IE7 as part of the automatic update. Not all users are signed up to receive these updates but those who are will be using IE7 from February 12th (if they are not already).

Expect to see a significant decline in IE6 users to your site very soon. Perhaps it will not be long before IE6 follows IE5.

IE8 divides the standards community

Talking of Microsoft and Internet Explorer, probably the biggest story of the week is Microsoft’s plans for IE8.

IE8 promises to be a huge step forward in standards support and has been significantly rebuilt in order to enable this. However, such dramatic changes in their rendering engine comes at a cost. They fear that by becoming more standards compliant they will break many websites which are not built with standards in mind.

The way they have dealt with this problem is to introduce a small piece of code that you drop into your pages which can be used to specify what version of IE your site is designed to work with. The browser then renders the webpage as if it was that version of the browser. So for example you could specify that a page was designed for IE7 and a person viewing the page in IE8 would see the page as if it was rendered in IE7.

If no browser is specified then it defaults to rendering the page in IE7 that way no matter what changes Microsoft make in future browsers legacy sites are still rendered correctly.

What on the face of it seems like a very sensible plan has caused uproar in the web design community. A List Apart and Eric Meyer seem to be generally supporting the principle while many others including the likes of Jeremy Keith strongly object.

One of the main sticking point seems to be that this approach breaks progressive enhancement. In other words I may choose to implement a piece of functionality on my site knowing that it wont currently work in IE7 but does work in other more compliant browsers such as Firefox. If i don’t add this special code when IE8 comes along it will look at my page see the code is absent and so render it as IE7. That means even if IE8 supports the functionality now it wont use it because it is rendering my site as IE7.

Its a complex issue with good arguments on both sides. In next week’s show Eric Meyer and myself will discuss it in more depth.

HTML 5 is coming

Still on the subject of the future of web design we now turn to HTML 5 which has just been released in draft format. Sitepoint provides a nice little summary of what is in and what’s out. There is also a summary of the differences between HTML 4 and 5 which is very useful as well.

I cannot claim to have read the entire specification yet but I have to say what I have seen contains some exciting stuff. Having HTML tags to define common areas like headers, footers and navigation offers some interesting possibilities and its good to see built in support for video and audio.

The big shame is that practical application of this is still a long way off but its nice to know that there is potential there.

Career advice for web designers

Of course all these upcoming technologies wont matter to you if my predications of a couple of weeks ago come true and we all find ourselves without a job! This week I was pleased to discover I was not the only one with a pessimistic attitude towards the coming year. Robert Scoble has posted a entry entitled “what to do if you are laid off in 2008 recession“, which I thought was a particularly cheery title.

Actually it is a really good post with some excellent advice. What I like most about it is that the advice applies as much to a student trying to break into web design for the first time as it does to a out of work professional.

In fact if you are considering a career change of any kind (or have had one forced upon you) then this is a good read.

Advice includes…

  • Spend at least 30% of your day job hunting
  • Start a blog
  • Share your knowledge with the world
  • Demonstrate your skills on youtube
  • Networking
  • Contact web start ups because they are hiring.
  • Volunteer
  • Prioritise friends and family

The list goes on and is definitely worth reading.

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Expert interview: Anton Peck on imagery

Paul: So joining me today, as I said at the start of the show, is Anton Peck. How are you Anton?

Anton Peck: I’m doing great Paul. Thank you.

Paul: It’s good to have you on the show.

Anton Peck: I know. It’s about time isn’t it? *laughs*

Paul: It seems like it’s been a while. We haven’t actually had you on BoagWorld before have we?

Anton Peck: No, no. This is the first time.

Paul: But I’ve known you from… Where did we first meet? Was it South By Southwest?

Anton Peck: Yeah. I think we had sorta done virtual communication before then through email, IM or whatever. But we actually first met at South By Southwest last time.

Paul: Cool. So Anton, tell me and the listeners a little bit about yourself. How do you describe yourself? Do you primarily describe yourself as a web designer or an illustrator?

Anton Peck: That’s a tough call. The illustration is more my fancy, my hobby. It’s where my passion lies but the design is what I’ve been doing for a long time. So it’s sort of my trade of skill.

Paul: I see. So you’re kind of torn between two worlds.

Anton Peck: A little bit.

Paul: But fortunately those two worlds do overlap quite a lot which is why we have you on the show today. We thought it would be good to get Anton in really not to just talk about illustration but to talk about imagery on the web generally as that’s kind of his thing really, amongst many others, because you have a growing reputation. You do art-casts don’t you which are like illustration tutorials? Is that a good way to describe them?

Anton Peck: Yeah, that’s probably a good way to describe them. That is the rumor that I do those isn’t it. I don’t do them as often as I should but I do manage to get them out every once in a while.

Paul: And they are excellent. I have to say, I really do enjoy watching them. So let’s talk a little about imagery on websites and the use of imagery on websites. Let’s start off with a really nebulous and broad question that I guess is pretty impossible to answer but I’m going to ask anyway, which is what makes good imagery for a website? How do you go about picking imagery for a website?

Anton Peck: Well there’s a few things and some of them might seem obvious. First of all the images should complement the content of the website so that the substance isn’t too diluted from its original intent. I know that might seem kinda out there and obvious but it’s probably disappointing and surprising that there’s a lot of website owners that would want to put an image on a website because it’s really pretty or cool.

Paul: I guess it’s important to have imagery that relates to the branding or message you are trying to communicate.

Anton Peck: Right because imagery is meant to support the content rather than take away from it. You don’t want to pull everybody’s focus right away to the images but at the same time you want to support what’s already there. The images should have some interesting quality about them which could mean how well they have been cropped or resized. They should be saved at a pretty decent quality if they are JPEG’s or GIF’s. Not over compressed as they can sometimes diminish the personality of the website. When you go to a website and you see that it’s over compressed it really doesn’t look very good.

Paul: So for a relative newbie, an amateur that’s getting into web design, there’s always this question of GIF vs. JPEG. What do you use and when?

Anton Peck: Well for photographic style images that have a lot of… I would say colours but that’s not quite accurate but more photographic style images I would use JPEG’s. Then for images like logos, things that seem very flat and have a limited palette, maybe go with the GIF’s. Although I tend to do that a little bit less now that PNG’s are finding a little bit more broad support among browsers.

Paul: So do you use PNG’s very much?

Anton Peck: Every so often. They compress nicely especially when you use the adaptive palette which is similar to a GIF format but they can actually get a little bit smaller.

Paul: Cool, yeah. That’s been my experience as well.

Anton Peck: It just gets a little tricky when you are trying to do transparency.

Paul: Yes, exactly.

Anton Peck: That’s a whole other discussion.

Paul: Yeah, I don’t think I’m going to open that can of worms today. So any other tips for selecting good imagery?

Anton Peck: Well I would say it’s got to be appropriate and tasteful of course. So that way you can minimise the risk of offending someone or losing possible business. If you might have a certain sense of humour and want to put something on your website, you might have to watch out for how that might appear to someone else.

Paul: And I guess cultural considerations come in there as well. It’s easy to forget that the worldwide web is worldwide.

Anton Peck: Definitely.

Paul: The next big issue that a lot of people face is this whole kind of stock imagery kind of question. You reach a point where your website’s becoming relatively important to your business or you’re a web designer that’s working for certain clients. At what stage do you say that actually stock imagery isn’t the way to go, perhaps I should be getting something specifically commissioned whether that be commissioned illustrations, commission photography or whatever. It’s a difficult line. What’s your opinion on stock imagery? Is it the devil’s spawn or does it have a place? What do you think?

Anton Peck: No, I think it definitely has a place. It offers a great solution for those trying to find a good quality image when they can’t afford a commissioned photograph.

Paul: So what kinds of site do you use for stock imagery?

Anton Peck: I’ve been a fan of Crestock.com lately.

Paul: Ooo! I haven’t heard of that one.

Anton Peck: Yes and actually they have this huge contest going on where you can win a Mac Pro and all kinds of equipment. It’s a Photoshop contest and I happen to be one of the few judges on that particular site.

Paul: Ahh. So what’s this website again?

Anton Peck: It’s Crestock.com.

Paul: OK. I’ll check that out. Sounds good. So does that do both illustration and photography or…

Anton Peck: Yeah. They have a wide range of different material. They have background textures and you can search for pretty much anything there. A lot of it is user supported so if you even feel that you are a good photographer you can submit your work and see if you can even sell it and make a little bit of money off of it.

Paul: Oh cool. So when selecting stock photography, what should you look for? What should you avoid? The trouble with stock photography is a lot of it can look really similar to one another. What advice would you give about selecting stock imagery?

Anton Peck: Well there’s no real secret to it. There’s not a lot of advice either other than just go through a lot of it. Don’t try to find the very first searches you come across as that would be a higher chance it would be used somewhere else. You want to get a unique image, something that’s probably not as commonly found. It’s always a little disconcerting when you come across a new image that you see on 13 different sites like, “Oh that’s the same image used there”.

Paul: Yeah. It becomes obvious that it’s stock imagery.

Anton Peck: Right. So you want to find that unique image.

Paul: Yeah, couldn’t agree more.

Anton Peck: And the only way to find the perfect, unique image is to just go through a lot of it.

Paul: Yes! Which does take time doesn’t it.

Anton Peck: Certainly.

Paul: When it comes to commissioning stuff is there any particular advice you would give there in regards to briefing the photographer or the illustrator? I mean when somebody commissions you to do a piece of work, what kind of information are you after from them?

Anton Peck: Since they would commission me as an illustrator rather than an actual photographer, I’d mainly look at what they are trying to achieve for their website and how they expect it to support what they’ve done. One of the things that I was gong to talk about for commission photography, even though I’m not one, was the benefits for the websites because you can have a one of a kind image that fits exactly what is needed for the page. A photographer can come out to the business and take photos of the staff and location which is obviously something you can’t do with stock photos.

Paul: Yeah, which obviously makes a huge difference. I think often at times people actually want to see that kind of stuff because on the web you’ve got no way of judging what the company behind the website is really like. So to be able to see real imagery of real people and real locations does add some credibility and trustworthiness to a company. It’s not just somebody working out their back bedroom or whatever.

Anton Peck: Exactly what I was thinking, yes.

Paul: OK so you have a budget. How much difference does it make actually commissioning imagery rather than getting stock imagery. Is there really a difference? Is it really worth going out and getting stuff specifically commissioned?

Anton Peck: I would say if you are looking to get high exposure and if you were a big enough business I would definitely say do it.

Paul: So why is that? What difference does it make?

Anton Peck: Well that’s exactly what I mentioned earlier. It’s the one image that you are going to own or the website is going to own and it’s not going to be found anywhere else. Completely unique.

Paul: You do feel that when you go through these thousands and thousands of stock images that “Well, it’s pretty much unique. Who else is going to use it?” but it’s amazing how often images turn up. I’ve got a little program that changes my desktop image on a regular basis and I’ve had this really nice one that I loved and kept for a while which was a cityscape of London that had been made all futuristic and I thought “Wow! What a great image”. And then I’m going on the tube and there’s the same image plastered across the wall. It’s amazing how often they do turn up again.

Anton Peck: Yeah it’s takes away a little bit doesn’t it?

Paul: Yeah definitely. Definitely. You’re an illustrator, let’s get onto the role of illustration. What advances or disadvantages do you think that illustration has over photography. When should you be using photography, when should you be using illustration?

Anton Peck: Illustration’s gonna provide a whole different type of personality to a website that you can never find in a photo. You can create situations, objects, environments that would either be too expensive to reproduce or they just don’t exist in the real world. Things that you just can’t do with a photograph. Again, that’s going to have to be through the interview of the illustrator trying to describe whether the job is appropriate or not. Actually that would be up to the art director trying to commission to decide whether they need an illustrator or a photographer. But custom website illustrations are so unique right now. When you do have a custom illustration it stands out a great deal more than a photograph. I think one of the greatest examples that stands out on the top of my mind would be Andy Clark’s website with Kevin Cornell’s image that he did of that scooterboy, the guy on the scooter.

Paul: Yeah, it looks superb. That’s stuffandnonense.com, if I remember.

Anton Peck: .co.uk

Paul: Oh .co.uk. Well check that out.

Anton Peck: Just try to imagine if Andy would have reproduced that with a photograph. It wouldn’t have the same personality I don’t think. He wouldn’t have been able to pull it off.

Paul: So do you think that photography has less personality generally or is it just the stock photography that has less personality?

Anton Peck: I wouldn’t call it a more or less personality thing as much it would be a different type of personality. It depends on what you’ve going for.

Paul: Do you think there’s some situations where illustration just isn’t appropriate because it would create the wrong kind of personality or is illustration flexible enough to be able to work in most situations?

Anton Peck: No I think illustration is not appropriate for everything. I think there’s probably a time and a place where an illustration is not going to do the job of a photograph. The photograph tends to look a little bit more… I was going to say professional but I don’t think that’s the word for it. There’s a sort of business approach… I don’t know. Illustration is very personal. It’s one of a kind. It seems that if you have a corporation maybe an illustration isn’t going to work unless it’s a certain kind of illustration.

Paul: Yeah I kind of know what you mean. There’s something… A photograph has a kind of… trustworthiness isn’t the right word but a realism to it perhaps that lends itself to certain circumstances.

Anton Peck: Definitely. It’s really hard to distinguish between the two. It would really boil down to the specific case that it was going to be used.

Paul: Tell us a little bit about some of the different types of illustration and why you would pick when. Obviously every kind of illustrator has very different styles but are they any kinds of broad categories you would recommend in certain circumstances?

Anton Peck: Well, let me think off the top of my head. It seems like you have a real nice vector, flowery styles with flat colours like Veerle. Her work is fabulous and it’s all Illustrator. Her style is just so unique. Then I think of Kevin Cornell. His style is so organic and painted. Then there’s styles like my own. I tend to learn for more photorealism in some cases. My own personal gallery doesn’t lean that way too much. There’s a few different styles out there and it’s hard to say when it’s going to be used properly.

Paul: Do you think that some styles date more quickly than others? You talked about that flowery style where you see a lot of art deco type shapes being used on the web at the moment. Do you think that illustration goes through more fashion trends than photograph does?

Anton Peck: I would venture to say yes and in a way. However like all fashion trends, it always comes back. Right now the big popular thing is artwork that looks like it’s straight from the 70′s. The muted brown colours and the nice organic curves, swirls and circles, things like that. Those are going over quite well I think.

Paul: It’s interesting isn’t it. I think there some sites that need to be fashion conscious and on the cutting edge of what’s going on and there are others that need to be generic and long lasting. It very depends on what kind of industry you are in as whether you should follow these trends or not I guess.

Anton Peck: Right. Or then if it seems to expire then you can just change it out and get a new one.

Paul: The glory of CSS, the separation of content from design.

Anton Peck: Absolutely.

Paul: OK Anton. Thank you very much for coming on the show. It’s really interesting that we haven’t tackled the discussion of imagery before.

Anton Peck: I did have one real quick public service announce if you’ll let me have another minute.

Paul: Yeah, go for it.

Anton Peck: For your listeners I’m wanted to just bring up that they shouldn’t take images, and I know it’s kind of obvious, take images from fountain sites or Flickr or Google Image search. That’s just bad practice and they are normally just going to get found out and it’s not a very nice thing to do. If they find images on sites that they like, they can contact the owner to obtain permission.

Paul: And it’s surprising. Often the owners are very happy and flexible to accommodate that. If you take the time to contact them they are often very flattered that you asked. Good piece of advice. OK thank you very much Anton and we’ll get you back on the show again in the future. Good to talk to you.

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Listeners email:

Textmate reviewed

Teifion shares his thoughts on Textmate for the mac, an incredibly powerful text editor with a sophisticated plug-in architecture.

I have to confess that I have only opened Textmate once and found myself unsure where to begin. I do know however that Teifion and many other web developers rate it extremely highly and use it as their primary development tool. In the show I pick Mr Hicks and Oxton’s collective brains about its benefits and whether I should make the effort to learn it properly.

Javascript or JQuery

The second listener contribution comes from Will who writes…

I was listening to your last one and you said it would be important to learn javascript for 2008. I know bits of javascript but don’t particularly like it and don’t know ajax yet, however, I have been playing with jQuery and find it much simpler. Do you think it’s a good alternative to learning all of javascript and have you used it at all?

Personally I think it is important to learn a language from scratch and that relying too heavily on libraries can cause problems in the long run. Although there is nothing wrong with you learning jQuery I would suggest it should be an addition to learning Javascript rather than a replacement.

If you want to know if Mr Oxton and Hicks disagree with me you will have to listen to the show :)

To leave an audio comment for the show skype “boagworldshow” or call +44 20 8133 5122.

106. Back to work blues

Posted in Classic shows on by Paul Boag

On this week’s show: Paul and Marcus discuss common mistakes when creating your sites structure and Rachel Andrews shares her experiences of getting into web design.

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News and events | Common mistakes of site structure | Rachel Andrews on building your web design career | Listener emails

Just a quick little request before we kick off today’s show. I need to get some more moo cards for the boagworld podcast (I am too tight to get proper business cards). Anyway I am having trouble with what to put on the cards. I was going to put a nice image on the cards but when I thought about it I couldn’t think of anything appropriate. In the end I decided to include tiny snippets from the reviews people have written about the show. However, being typically British with our self deprecating sense of humour. I decided to use the negative reviews rather than the positive ones. I have some great stuff such as “Paul has an ego that doesn’t need boosting” and “truly crappy jokes”. However, I need more. So, if you have 5 minutes this week drop me an email with a short, witty and hopefully not too rude review of the show. Let the venom flow :)

News and events

Internet Explorer 8

So the last time we did the news before Christmas Microsoft were under attack from Opera for its lack of standards support. Well, things have moved on since then and it is looking like Internet Explorer 8 is shaping up to be a very nice browser indeed. For start IE8 has passed the Acid 2 test published by the Web Standards Project. This is a definite commitment from Microsoft to provide comprehensive standards support and should be applauded. Jonathan Snook explains the ramifications of this as well as making some predications of his own as to what IE8 will look like. According to him we can expect straightforward column layouts, grid positioning and improved javascript support. Best of all if Jonathan is right we might see IE8 out in beta by the summer and in final release by next Christmas. Maybe then we can look at dropping support for IE6.

Using CSS to diagnose problems

Although there is still a lot of CSS not supported by browsers such as IE it is incredible what is possible with just what we have at the moment. Eric Meyer recently posted an article suggesting that you might want to consider using CSS to diagnose issues in your HTML that need resolving. In his article he uses CSS to find out where markup might be choking on missing accessibility features, targetless links, and just plain missing content. For example he uses CSS to visually highlight all images that have an empty or missing ALT attribute.

This isn’t an entirely new ideas. In fact Marco Battilana proposed a similar approach to highlight accessibility issues back in July 2006. However, Eric has taken it that much further and offered an excellent way of not only highlighting problems to yourself but also to your clients who maybe editing HTML.

Common accessibility mistakes

Talking about highlighting accessibility mistakes I came across a great article that does exactly that. Basically the article focuses on the fact that website owners can often be over enthusiastic when it comes to accessibility and start overusing HTML attributes designed to help accessibility. The result is that we can often do more harm than good. The article looks at the alt and title attributes which are often verbose or repetitious. It also looks at tabindex and accesskeys that can cause confusion and conflicts with normal browser behaviour. If you are applying any of these attributes to your code then I highly recommend you cast your eye over this article.

Basic design principles

The final story this week is an amazing series of posts by Patrick McNeil over at Design Meltdown. The reason I say they are amazing is because they are immense and I confess I am yet to read all of them. As you probably already know Design Meltdown tracks trends in web design and shows examples of sites that highlight these trends. Using the same example based approach Patrick looks at the fundamental principles of design and deconstructs them expertly. He covers Emphasis, Contrast, Balance, Alignment, Repetition and Flow in a screenshot packed series of posts that are a must read for anybody starting out in design. In the past I have always recommended Jason Beaird’s book “The Principles of Beautiful Web Design” for those starting out in design. In fact we have Jason on the show soon. However, if you don’t like reading books or want to save a bit of money then Patrick’s analysis is a credible alternative. Check it out.

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Feature: Common mistakes of site structure

Just before Christmas I wrote my final blog post for the year on creating the structure for your site. It is a topic that I have been thinking a lot about recently because of various projects I am working on and so it was fresh in my mind. In particular it occurred to me how much harder producing a good site hierarchy is than it first appears. In fact I see the same common mistakes occurring again and again. It is these mistakes I want to look at in today’s show. Read Common mistakes of site structure.

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Expert interview: Rachel Andrews on building a web design career

Paul: OK, so joining me today is Rachel Andrew from EdgeofMySeat.com. Hello Rachel. It’s good to have you on the show at last.

Rachel: Hello, Paul. It’s good to be here.

Paul: I feel like I’ve been trying to bully you to come on the show forever and ever and ever, but it hasn’t worked out for one reason or another, but we finally got you here, so that’s good news. So uhm, Rachel, when I came to kind of putting together what I was going to do, talking to you. I suddenly realized I didn’t know you very well. I’ve heard a lot about you and I’ve heard a lot of other people say good things about you, which has gotta be a good thing, but I didn’t know anything about your background or kind of how you came to be involved in web developement. So, I thought it might be quite interesting, if It’s ok with you, just to spend a few minutes talking about how you came to be a web developer. How did you get into this illustrious career?

Rachel: Uhm, completely by accident, really. It wasn’t something I intended to do. My training is as a dancer. I was going to dance. That’s all I ever wanted to do.

Paul: All right.

Rachel (laughing): So, the part where I ended up doing this surprised everyone, (Paul laughing) especially my programmer father. (Rachel laughs)

Paul: Ahhhhh

Rachel: We didn’t even have computers in school when I was in school. I’m showing my age.

Paul: Yeah, I know the feeling.

Rachel: Yeah, so, and I remember when I was, I don’t know, either 13 or 14 there were two guys that came in and said, “All of you will need to know about computers in your future careers.” And I was like, “No I won’t. I’m going to be a dancer.” and they couldnt tell me why I would need computers and so I felt quite pleased with myself. So, yes, it wasn’t on the radar after all.

Paul: So, how did you go from dance to web developement? It seems a bit of a leap there.

Rachel: Well, I know this is a fairly technical career, and I was working back stage for a quite a while and when I decided to quit dance for various reasons, I was working in the west end and I managed to my way into a back-stage techie job.

Paul: OK.

Rachel: I did work as a choreographer and I knew a reasonable amount about sound and lighting and could my way in. So, I worked back-stage in the west end and for a year and a half on Charlston and on The Mouse Trap.

Paul: Right, I see.

Rachel: So, so that was it. So, it wound up to be a technical kind of job and then I found myself pregnant with my daughter. And you cant go heaving around stage equipment while pregnant.

Paul: No.

Rachel: So (laughing), I found myself with some time on my hands. It was really that I even started using the internet.

Paul: Oh, ok.

Rachel: I was fairly young and didnt know anybody else with a child and pregnant.

Paul: What kind of… how long ago are we talking about here?

Rachel: Well, the said child is now nearly 11.

Paul: Right.

Rachel: So, quiet a while ago. ( laughing)

Paul: OK.(laughing)

Paul: So, in the relatively early days of the Web then to some degree…

Rachel: Yes. Yeah and I mean thats really so very important in that at the time there wasn’t actually that much to learn and I was chatting to people on for the parents on the forums because as I said, I didn’t know anyone with a baby and I didn’t know anything about babies. So, (Paul: Ahhh) I was using the web just to talk to other people in the same situation. And then if you wanted to put anything online there wasn’t Flickr or all of these hings. You really had to build a web site.

Paul: Right. Yeah.

Rachel: So, you know, once my daughter was born, I started putting together various HTML. So I could put together a web site telling people about her and things like that. And that’s what everyone did.

Paul: OK.

Rachel: You chat in the discussion forums and you build web sites. Uhm I don’t know… I quite liked that. That was always good fun. So, it didnt take that long before people would start asking me if I would build them a web site.

Paul: Mmhmm

Rachel: And… and at the time there was so little to know. You know, it was a bit of HTML and you had to do some basic things with images. As time went on, I realized I was actually quite interested in, what at the time fewer people were doing which was writing things with Perl which was about the only thing that anyone used to do things like guestbooks and (Paul: Yeah) posting forums to email. It was very, very limited at the time in terms of what people were doing on the server side. I sat down with the Orilley Camel book and taught myself Perl.

Paul: Oh Right, OK. (Rachel laughing) As you do.

Rachel: As you do. Obviously

Marcus: Or not, in my case.

Rachel: Yeah, well… I was bored. (all laughing) I had a baby. You know? Nothing else to do. So, that’s really how I got into doing the back-end stuff via such a strange route and I didn’t really realize what I was learning or if there was real reason to do so. It was interesting to me.

Paul: Do you think there was any advantages or drawbacks to taking that kind of route. I mean I know that most of us that entered the web in the early days did it through some convoluted route in preference to having some kind of formal training. Do you think the people that are coming along these days are going through a proper… you know, going through some kind of computer training course or whatever? Do you think their at a disadvantage for not learning it themselves and discovering it themselves.

Rachel: Well, yeah, but I think things are so different now. I mean back then, it really was a case of: You learned HTML. You learned a little bit about how to make graphics work online. And maybe, if you’re very pushy, you learned some Perl. (Paul: Yeah) And that was it. There wasn’t a huge amount of decisions. I mean, even just to start learning to do this now, you start having to think, “Well, which language do I want to learn? What is the best thing to be learning? Where should I put my time?” (Paul: Yeah, totally). You know, I was just kind of sitting with a little 486 computer and thinking, “You know… this is quite interesting. Look, I can do this!” But we were all just discovering what we could do at the time. Whereas now, if you’re looking at this as a career and what’s going to be best right from the start, before you’ve even gotten started, you know? (Paul: Yeah) So, It’s very different. And It’s very difficult when people always say, “Well, how did you get started? Have you got any suggestions on how I can get started?” And It’s so different now.

Paul: That’s probably one of the most common emails I get. It’s, how do you get started and what languages do you start with? So, I guess you really didn’t have a lot of choice. (Rachel (laughing): No…) It was Perl or nothing, wasn’t it?

Rachel: Really, I mean, yeah, there were other things around but generally people were writing in C, Javascript, and Perl. And the web host I happened to have, had this server which you were allowed to run your scripts on. (Paul: Oh, ok) (Rachel laughing) They were still slightly nervous of it. You know, it was just one server you could run things on. It was a quite good community around that. People would help each other out on how to do things.

Paul: So what advice do you give people who do write with those kinds of questions as to what languages to start with? What do you say?

Rachel: I think the important thing is to learn something well. At the end of the day, once you’ve learned one launguage, you can usually swap to something else. It’s the concept that’s the hard thing. (Paul: Yeah.) Understanding based design or understanding just the basic constructs of any language. Once you’ve done that, you can usually swap to something else. I usually say that PHP is a pretty good choice. Just because It’s out there, everywhere. (Paul: Yeah) You’re going to be able to easily find somewhere to run it. You can set up your own development environment without having to spend any money, really. You can get that all set up. And there is lots and lots of help and there is a great community around that. And to be honest, PHP is what we tend to develop in now and most of the time.

Paul: I mean, It’s quite interesting that you talk about those early days and how you basically got into it because you became a mother. But the early days in the web, and to be honest, to some extent now, there arent exactly a huge number of female developers around. I mean, it seems to be a very male dominated thing. Did that put you off? Did that create barriers to you?

Rachel: It didnt really at the time when I was learning because I came out of a very male dominated profession anyway, (Paul: Oh, OK.) having been working back stage. So, it didnt, worry me. And also at the time, I was just interested in learning it. I think out there in the work place once I became employed doing this, I encountered all sorts of strange situations where people really couldn’t quite get their head around the fact that I was technical and not like a designer or not something else that cliquey females are doing. I was the head of a technical team and went to help someone with a computer and I was the most senior person on the team. And they said, “Oh, can you not send one of the boys down?” (Paul gasps) I then said, “I can send one of the boys down. They’re not going to fix your computer for you, but I can send them down if that’s what you want.” (all laughing) I mean, so people were a bit taken aback, I think and don’t immediately assume that I do the job that I do (Paul: Yeah.) and are much more comfortable of putting me in a designer area.

Paul: Well, that was the mistake I made, isn’t it? (Rachel laughing) The first time, I suppose. I was the typical male chauvinist pig and presumed you are a designer, which I don’t know why. I think it was the hair color, more than anything.

Rachel (laughing): To be honest, I am not particularly hung up about it. It’s not something I get terribly upset about. I find it sort of intriguing that people just assume that. I’m not… you know… I’ve work in… sort of male dominated jobs for a long, long time now and I think if I got terribly upset about these things I wouldn’t be doing it. It is interesting. But in other ways, it works for me. When I was going for job interviews, for instance, if I’m the only woman who walks in and there are lots and lots of men, they’re going to remember me. (Paul: Yeah) And in the same, you know, if I’m pitching for work it’s a talking point. You know, people are always interested as to why I’m doing what I’m doing.

Paul: Damn, and here I was thinking I was asking original questions!

(Rachel and Paul laugh)

Rachel: I think sometimes, it does work for me because do remember. They would think can’t a woman do something a bit unusual?

Paul: Do you think it’s a problem within the industry or would you just think It’s one of those things and what will be will be kind of attitude?

Rachel: It’s really hard to see where it’s a problem. I think It’s a problem if girls or young women who are looking at career choices are being put off because they don’t see female role models out there. And, there’s lots of reasons why. There are women around doing this and tend not to be so high profile. (Paul: Yeah) I mean the reason that I’m not touring around all the different events and things is because I’m a mom. (Paul: Yeah!) You know, and I think that’s the same for an awful lot of women. I talked about this on my blog once and got loads and loads of women contacting me going, “Yes, exactly!” We’re the one’s doing the majority of childcare. I know there are men in that position too, and I’m not saying there aren’t men who are having to be… going to pick up kids at 3:00 or whatever it is. But it does tend to be women and It’s often the women who make that choice or wants to spend time close to the kids when they’re very little. My daughter is getting older but even so, I still wouldn’t be happy about, say going to a different country and leaving her here to go to an event.

Paul: Yeah. I mean to be honest, even for this interview we kind of have to fit it in around you taking your child somewhere, Marcus has got to do a school run in a minute. You know, so, it’s all part of the kind of… yeah… It’s nice we’re in a position where we can kind of fit our work around our families. It’s a good thing, not a bad thing.

Rachel: Yes, it is. And I think that’s possibly one of the reasons why there aren’t so many high profile women, because it takes time to raise your profile. And without me quite looking, I’ve been able to do that through writing, which I can do at midnight or whatever. If you’re going to get out there and get around to all the conferences and things, you know, and look at what other people who are considered to be my peer group and what they’re doing. I just couldn’t physically do that. (Paul: Yeah, totally) Because, I don’t want to. I don’t want to spend a lot of time away from my daughter right now. Maybe in 6 years time, she will be very disinterested in spending any time with me.

(Rachel and Paul Laughing)

Paul: Once she’s a teen-ager, you won’t want to be with her either.

(Both continue laughing)

Rachel: Exactly, you know, so things change but there are quite a lot of people with quite young children and actually more and more so. It’s quite funny, I feel like I’ve got quite an old child for the group of people that I speak to. There are lots of new developer babies out there.

Paul: Yeah, well Marcus is old and decrepit.

Marcus: Well, just to depress you, Rachel, what happens when they get older and become teenagers, they just rely on you as a taxi service.

Rachel: Well, I get that as well. That was the case today. I was ferrying mine and two others back from the

Marcus: The only thing I would say though is, we went through a period about 6 months the beginning of this year, trying to recruit new developers. And we only interviewed one woman out of probably a dozen candidates

Paul: I think that it’s worth saying that’s because we only have 1 woman apply, rather than we segregated all the women who refused to interview.

Marcus: That’s what I meant. Yes, well put Paul. We literally had only 1 woman apply, so yeah… I don’t really know why. Maybe it just seemed like kind of a boy’s area at the moment. I suppose, from what you were saying about the fact that you’re not inclined to go out there and sort of go out on the circuit like Paul does. I suppose until that happens, and maybe younger women who aren’t thinking about motherhood yet, are the ones who are going to be out there raising the profile of women and hopefully, this sort of “boys’ club” type mentality will sort of just fizzle away.

Paul: I mean, It’s quite interesting that you say, how you talked about how you managed to raise your profiles through writing. Tell us a little about that. How did you get into writing books? Because, you seem quite prolific. I did a quick search on Amazon to see exactly how much you’ve written and it seemed to go on for quite a long while.

Rachel: Yeah, there’s quite a few. That was, again, like most things, I tend to say, “Oh yes, I’ll have a go at that!” and then worry about it later. It was a long time ago, I had written some stuff for the Macromedia Web Site about Dreamweaver.

Paul: OK

Rachel: And it was Glasshouse who contacted me and said, “Oh, would you write a couple of chapters for a book?” A couple of chapters, that would be alright, you know (laughing). (Paul: Yeah, no big deal). So yeah, I wrote a couple of chapter for a book and it kind of went from there, really. I like writing. I enjoy… I’m much more from an arts background really than technical. So, I do enjoy writing and putting things across that way. So, yeah, it just went from there. And then when someone said, “Oh, will you write a few more chapters?” Yeah, ok, that was alright. (laughs) And before I know it, I’ve got this great list of books.

Paul: Yeah. It’s a very time consuming thing to do. I mean, beyond the fact that you obviously sound like you enjoy doing it. Do you find it beneficial from a publicity angle for bringing in work?

Rachel: Yeah, absolutely. I think people tend to see you as an expert if you’ve got things in print; if you’ve written things. It does sort of depend that you do know what you’re talking about. And especially with what I do, which is much more… It’s not like I have to show a nice portfolio of pretty things. This is what I can do. What people are doing when they hire me or hire my company is they are hiring us for our expertise. And they have to constant that we actually are experts; that we know what we’re talking about. So the writing does help in that because people assume that if someone let you write a book, you must actually know what you are talking about.

Paul: I mean, I get emails from people asking how do you go about raising your profile. I’m quite interested as to whether you stumbled into this. You know, you talked about you were writing for the Macromedia web site. Did you go out purposefully, intending to write for them or did it just kind of happen? How’s that come about?

Rachel: Again, that really just happened. But because I was writing on my own blog, and I was writing… you know, I was helping people out in forums. (Paul: Right) You know, if you’re out there doing things, people do notice. I mean certainly with things like magazines and books and you know, varies sites that want articles. There are people out there that are looking for people to write all the time, because there’s actually an awful lot of people who know what they’re doing but there are fewer who can express it and express it in a way that someone new to the concept is going to understand. If you are able to do that, if that’s something you can do and you are doing that on your own site or are helping people out in forums and things then it will get noticed. And there are quite a bit of places you can be submitting I suppose, to, you know, Site Point and Vitamin… There’s quite a bit of other sites that accept good content. (Paul: Yeah.) It means that you have to write a few things that you’re not paid for to get going. You can find then, that you can start putting together a body of work and say, “Well, this is the stuff I’ve done.” It’s not in It’self something that you earn a huge amount of money from. I think people who write for a living must have to work incredibly hard.

Paul: (laughing) Or be incredibly good. One or the other.

(Rachel and Paul laughing)

Rachel: Both I think, both. As something that helps raise your profile for the other things you do. If I found it an absolute chore, I don’t think I would do it because you don’t want to be sogging away at things you can’t stand in the hope that it will get you some profile. But it is one way to do it and It’s certainly a way to do it if you are in a position where you can’t get out to lots of events or you’re not someone who wants to do public speaking. I’m not keen at all on public speaking. I much rather hide behind the computer (laughing).

Paul: A proper developer. That’s what I like to hear.

Rachel: So, you know, It’s another way of doing it, because I do sort of think of the public speaking if you’re going to be thinking of conferences as being something that would really get that profile up there. No one has really met me until fairly recently at any events because I didn’t get to anything really. And yet a lot people would have known of me and the stuff I’ve done because of the lighting.

Paul: I mean, you talk about that you use this as a mechanism to you know, to increase your profile for the other work that you do. So, perhaps we ought to talk about the other work that you do. I mean, you run a company, “Edge of My Seat” which is edgeofmyseat.com. How did that start? You obviously from going… from being an enthusiastic amateur, you must have gotten a job in web design, I’m guessing. How did you go about getting that job and from there, how did you end up running your own company?

Rachel: Well, I… When I decided I actually wanted to go back to work… I’ve been doing bIt’s and pieces while my daughter was quite little and I decided I wanted to go back to work and it was really tail-end of this whole dot com era. (Paul: Oh, OK.) And so, I ended up heading up a technical team at Property Finder. (Paul: Oh, OK. Yeah, I know.) Which was very much on the technical side and we managed the servers and things like that rather than even doing any development or very much development. There were other people who were more on the development team, although we still did bIt’s and pieces. I did that for a while and the whole sort of dot com thing was starting to fall apart really, at that point. And I moved to another dot com company who built portal sites for accountants. So I know quite a bit about stage integration (Paul: Wow. What an exciting life you have). Yeah, but that’s the time where things really weren’t looking that stable and I felt, well I can actually do this myself. And at least then I would know where I was in terms of whether I was going to get paid by people. The problem is being employed in an unstable situation is that really, you can work a whole month and get to the end of the month and find out that nobody’s paying you. (Paul: Yeah.) And so I figured that actually, I may be better off setting off on my own. And so people had asked if I would take on bIt’s of freelance work and things. And so, I actually purchased a printer’s trust because at the time I was a young single mom. I’m not so young anymore but I purchased a printer’s trust and this in 2001. And they basically gave me a small grant and loan to get the company started. So, I had about a month’s money when I started. (laughing) I didn’t have the dot coms, so I kind of had to work. (Paul: Wow!) It’s a good way to start a business, you know (Paul: Yeah.) … make or break really. If it doesn’t work, we don’t eat.

(Rachel, Paul and Marcus laughing)

Marcus: I remember that feeling very well.

Rachel: Yeah.

Paul: Yes

Rachel: But it makes you really dive into it. The nice thing was, because I was paying for a child, mind you, at the time, I actually only had to earn half of what I had earned because I could keep her home with me.

Paul: Ahh, ok.

Rachel: So, I must have cut my expenses by being able sort of work around my daughter’s schedule and things. So, that kind of worked out alright and really, it went from there.

Paul: So how did you begin to win the business in that first month of, “Oh crap! What have I done?” (Rachel and Marcus laugh) You know, where did the work come from?

Rachel: Well, at the time, what I realized was that because of how the dot com was collapsing, everyone was getting rid of their developers. But they still had all these applications. And something I’ve always been good at is picking up on other people’s stuff and working on it. So, probably, uhm, September ’01, which was like a terrible time to start a company (Rachel and Paul laugh) and really for the first two or three years was taking stuff that was already built and was falling apart, or the developers had gone or had all sorts of problems with it and just fixing it or adding bits to it. And I did lots and lots of that which, during this time of recession, really, was actually, really good work because there was plenty of it. Everything had to have been built while they had lots of developers and they had money and things. And so I sort helped things limp along a lot. And what this sort of lead to really was this idea of doing development for design agencies. (Paul: OK.) And focusing on doing really good development to support really nice design. That really is what we’ve moved on to do now. Most of our clients are designers or design agencies. And they do a really good design, and then they hand it over to us and we look after it and we make sure it will work. (laughing) That’s actually a really nice way to work because it means we get to work with some really nice stuff, anyway, well designed stuff and we have people who care about what they do. (Paul: Yeah.) And we get to do the development side of things that we enjoy. Sort of working with people rather just sort of chucking things over the fence and throwing it back.

Marcus: The point your picking about picking up what other people have done and fixing it and that kind of thing… did that not kind of cause you problems with development platforms and having to deal with lots of different types of languages and that kind of thing?

Rachel: Yeah. I had learned ASP by that point and a bit of Java. And I tend to not have too much problems swapping from one thing to the other. Certainly, I mean then, it was a lot of Perl and my class PSP. Because that was, at this sort of time, they were really the two things that you were seeing things built in. So, I used to do either and then I started doing PHP as well around the same time. So, I’ve always been quite happy swapping between languages, swapping between databases. (Marcus begins to speak: I think the reason why…) It gets a bit much if you do too many in one day, you know, because you start putting semi-colons in the wrong place and stuff. It doesn’t really bother me too much. I mean, its nice to be able to concentrate one thing. As I said, we tend to build new stuff in PHP. But, I’m generally quite happy switching around.

Marcus: I suppose, the reason why I was asking is we’ve come across a few briefs that we’ve been sent in the past where it seemed like the perfect job for us but the development platform in particular has been something that we just don’t work on. Do we want to invest on that kind of platform just so we can go after this job and quite often, we’ve thought to ourselves, “No, we don’t.” So, I guess that’s where the question is coming from.

Rachel: Yeah, I think in terms of new stuff, you kind of do have to focus unless you’ve got an awful lot of people able to create your own libraries and things in different languages. So for new stuff, we do tend to choose PHP but at the time, what I was doing was just picking up on stuff. It was less of a problem really because I was just fixing stuff that already existed.

Paul: You seem to have done very well over the last few years and Drew has come and joined you now and you seem to be branching out a bit into the area of training. That seems to be something that’s come up.

Rachel: Yup.

Paul: I’m quite interested, you know… it’s great you’re there and you’re able to offer training courses. You do have a basic CSS training course, I think (R: Mmmhmm) and you’re talking about doing an advanced one, is that right?

Rachel: Possibly going to do that. We’ve had a few people ask. (Paul: OK) So, that’s what we’re thinking of doing.

Paul: So, I mean, the question now is who trains the trainer? How do you guys stay on top of the latest things that are emerging and how do you keep up with what’s going on?

Rachel: Well, basically, because we are doing it all the time, I think. The difference between us and a training company that just does training is that actually what we’re doing is, we’re using this stuff all the time. It’s the same as when I buy a book. I’m writing a book from the point of view of someone who has to do this. You know, who practically is doing it. And it’s the same with the training. Obviously, we’re constantly reading up on new things and trying things out in browsers and trying to get around problems and just by the day to day work that we do. So, that’s really what we’re bringing to a training course. For two or three years, people have asked me if I would do training. But until Drew joined, we just didn’t have the capacity. It comes down to one of those things that have to be arranged. So, it wasn’t saying that I really felt that I couldn’t do, but Drew was making to do it as well. Its great fun. Its an enjoyable… its actually enjoyable to be face-to-face with people. Especially writing a book and then the feedback you get as the occasional email that people say, “Oh, I really enjoyed that!” or, “Why did you say this? Its rubbish!” (Rachel and Paul laughing) Actually being face-to-face with people and seeing how they work through the course is really, really interesting and great fun.

Paul: Cool!

Rachel: So, yes. It’s been good.

Paul: Excellent! Well, thank you so much, Rachel, for coming on the show. It was really good to hear how you got into things and how your career has progressed. Even if it’s somewhat chaotic along the way. Although I can associate with that (Rachel laughing) kind of bouncing from one thing… We’d set up Headscape in January, 2002. So we were only 3 months behind you, so we understand your pain there.

Rachel: Yes, well it wasn’t the best time, really.

Marcus: We were both made redundant from a dot com in December, 2001, so it was necessity that got Headscape, I think.

Paul: Yeah. Always the best way. OK, thank you very much, Rachel, uhm and I’m sure that we will get you back on the show again if you’re willing at some point (Rachel laughing) in the future. Alright, thank you.

Rachel: OK.

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Listeners email:

So just before we wrap up the show I wanted to share with you an idea sent in recently by a listener (sorry I can’t find your name)! A number of you have written in since we said we were going to change the format of the show with ideas about how things could be improved. One idea that particularly appealed to me was a new short section at the end of the show where we read out some listeners emails. These emails could be a question, comment, recommendation or indeed anything else you think others maybe interested in. So whether you have a tip for improving your sites search engine rankings or just want to tell me how ignorant we are then drop us an email. Write in soon as we need content for next weeks show!

Podcast 47: The mobile web

Posted in Classic shows on by Paul Boag

In this week’s show, we look at why you should take the mobile web seriously. What potential pitfalls you will face and what options are available to you for utilising mobile technology.

There are three times as many mobile phones than personal computers. By 2009, it is predicted that there will be 3 billion mobile phones worldwide. This week on boagworld, we discuss an evolution of the web almost as profound at the arrival of the internet itself… the mobile web.

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The mobile web

Without a doubt, it will not be long before more people access the web via mobile devices than desktop PCs. However this huge (and potentially lucrative market) is not without its pitfalls. With over 40 mobile browsers and 160 devices, the mobile web makes the browser wars look like a walk in the park.

In this week’s show, we look at why you should take the mobile web seriously? What potential pitfalls you will face and what options are available to you for utilising mobile technology.

Most of the discussion is based around presentations given by Tom Humes at last years d.construct and Cameron Moll at this year’s @media. They know much more about the subject than either of us and so we highly recommend you take the time to download their talks and hear what they have to say for yourself:

Also on this week’s show

Once again, I antagonise up every mac user on the planet by quoting from Jakob Nielsen’s new book on prioritising web usability. We talk about the recent list of IE6 fixes that will appear in IE7 and discuss both Refresh 06 and d.construct. I also recommend John Allsopp’s latest article on Microformats, which is ideal for those who want to track their growing popularity.

We review two books on this week’s show:

Beginning JavaScript with DOM Scripting and Ajax

Web Accessibility: Web Standards and Regulatory Compliance

Finally, if you haven’t seen it yet check out the superb demo by our sponsor RightCart and see just how fast it is to integrate a shopping cart into your site.

Books and Tears of Joy

Posted in Reviews on by Paul Boag

First, let me apologise for the lack of posts recently. However, I do have a couple of good books for you to check out and a post on the IE blog that almost brought tears to my eyes.

As the podcast has grown in popularity, I have found it increasingly hard to strike the balance between my work for Headscape and my passion for boagworld. On one hand, I get to write for various magazines (like .net or Practical Web Design), speak at conferences and contribute to other sites, which is all very exciting. On the other, I could easily become divorced from the day-to-day process of building websites, which would be a real shame. I get concerned about how the more "vocal" and "active" members of the web design community, end talking about design and development more than they actually doing it. That is why for the last few weeks I have been a bit more quiet on boagworld and have been focusing more heavily on client work.

Of course, you don’t care about my personal woes so I will move on to a couple of things that have caught my eye recently.

Books of note

Firstly, I have seen a couple of books you might want to look at. I cannot say I have read either of them personally yet (I am still ploughing my way through "Prioritizing Web Usability" by Jakob Nielsen) but they have both received excellent reviews and I respect the opinions of their respective authors:

Beginning JavaScript with DOM Scripting and Ajax

I really want this one as my DOM Scripting knowledge still has significant room for improvement. Also Chris is an excellent writer and talks a lot of sense.

Web Accessibility: Web Standards and Regulatory Compliance

Sounds dull doesn’t it? However, from what I can gather it is actually a lively read. A number of excellent designers and developers have contributed to this one so it is well worth your attention. If you want to finally nail this accessibility issue once and for all then this is a good place to start.

Tears of joy

On a completely different note, I wanted to draw your attention to a recent post on the IE 7 Blog. This post lists all of the bugs and problems from IE6 that have now been fixed in IE 7. Credit, where credit is due, IE 7 is an excellent browser and I can’t wait until it is officially rolled out.

Podcast 45: The importance of art direction

Posted in Classic shows on by Paul Boag

This week on boagworld, we get all pretentious and arty as we talk about the need for “art direction”. We share a few tips on how to ensure your site can expand easily over time and we look at what is in the news.

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Art Direction

Every other creative sector has it and yet the web seems to thinks it can do without. Art Direction is the cornerstone of the advertising industry and yet is sadly lacking among web designers to the detriment of our sites. In this week’s show, we discuss Art direction; what is it, how does it relate to the web and how to go about using it?

The discussion is largely based on an article I posted a while back about Art Direction. I suggest you check that out for more details on what we cover.

Art direction on the web

In the news

As normal there has been loads happening in the world of web designer over the last week:

IE 7

There has been yet more discussion surrounding IE 7. Think Vitamin have released an audio interview with Chris Wilson (lead developer for IE 7) confirming that IE 7 will be released as an automatic update but unfortunately will not be marked critical.

Also on the IE front, the Web Standards Project seems to be saying a somewhat premature goodbye to IE 6 while Firefox have pulled off a bit of a PR coup by registering ie7.com.

Designing through the storm

A list Apart released its latest edition this week with an excellent article aimed squarely at the designer community. Designing through the storm really gets to the nitty gritty of producing designs in the face of artistic block and difficult clients. Superb advice!

A call for greater professionalism

Egged on by John Allsopp, Molly is back on the subject of Web professionalism. Although I agree that the web design industry needs to "grow up" and start acting more professional, I am slightly unsure of whether Molly’s call for a charter is really going to help matters.

Google offers accessible search

This week Google has released a new version of its search engine weighted towards websites that offer improved accessibility. Aimed at the visually impaired community it aims to return results that give greater emphasis to sites that are friendlier to this audience. However the new engine is not without its problems.

Also in the show

This week we also look at how to build your website in a way that enables it to evolve gradually over time as well as review an excellent article on search engine optimisation drawn from a new book entitled "Deliver First Class Web Sites: 101 Essential Checklists".