Month: January 2008

Categories
Standards

Bobbing heads and the IE8 meta tag

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I was astonished to read the A List Apart article Beyond DOCTYPE: Web Standards, Forward Compatibility, and IE8 and even more astonished to read compliance with the message from Eric Meyer, Molly Holzschlag, and the WaSP organization.

How the mighty have fallen is so very cliché but, oh, how appropriate.

According to Aaron Gustafson, who wrote the ALA article, the plan is rather than depend on DOCTYPE to trigger quirks and standard mode for page rendering–a necessity first generated by Microsoft’s IE5/Mac by the way–we all add a meta tag to our pages that locks the page into a specific browser rendering. For instance, the following would lock a page into IE8 rendering:

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=8" />

IE will then render the page within some form of IE8 compliant mode. Needless to say, as for the old wish for progressive enhancement where if we design our pages to working with released standards, ensuring that they’ll be future proof, well, we must abandon this along the road:

As much as it pains me to lose this particular aspect of progressive enhancement, this behavior is honestly the best thing that could happen, especially when the site concerned is public-facing. After all, we shouldn’t make assumptions about how browsers will behave in the future. If a change in IE9 would break the layout of our site or the functionality of one of our scripts, that could be disastrous for our users, sending our team into a mad scramble to “fix” the website that was working fine before the new browser launched (which is pretty much the boat we’re in now). Version targeting gives our team the ability to decide when to offer support for a new browser and, more importantly, gives us the much-needed time to make any adjustments necessary to introduce support for that new browser version.

I would say that if a change in IE9 would break our standards-based pages, the problem lies with IE, not the pages. The whole point on standards is that by using them we ensure a consistency of access for our pages, now and in the future. When a browser states it supports CSS 2.1 or XHTML 1.1, we know what to expect. Obviously support for standards is not important or part of any plan for Microsoft. Indeed, it would seem that Microsoft has, by supporting (encouraging, funding) this concept, decided to maintain its own path from now into the future, smug in the assurance that it will always manage to lock people into using IE. Frankly, I’m not surprised at Microsoft, but I have to wonder at WaSP, ALA, et al.

This new meta tag is not a browser switch according to PPK, who writes:

A browser detect is a piece of JavaScript or server side code written to parse the user agent string of a browser and take action based on the results of that parsing—typically by denying users of the “wrong” browser access to a page.

The new versioning switch does something completely different. In IE, it starts up a certain mode, such as Quirks Mode, Strict Mode, or the upcoming IE8 mode. In all other browsers it does nothing, since these browsers are not programmed to recognise the meta tag.

Therefore, if a non-IE browser encounters the switch, nothing happens. The browser ignores the meta tag, reads the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript as always, and allows its own rendering engine to interpret it.

In other words, the versioning switch does not have any of the negative effects of a browser detect.

There’s a second difference: the versioning switch is a contract. The IE team tells people what will happen if they insert the meta tag in their pages, and it’s up to individual web developers to decide whether they want to use this contract or not.

Bully for Microsoft. I used to think commitment to standards was a contract. Evidently, my interpretation was incorrect. How gauche of me.

In comments at the IE blog, James Schwarzmeier wrote:

Unlike the majority of other posters here, I have to say that I agree with this approach. I currently wok on a team that maintains a suite 20 large web-based applications. If I had to guess, I would say there’s serveral (if not 10s) of millions of lines of code. If the layout engine radically changed, it would literally take years to fully test everything and update everything to be compatible. It’s not that we’re lazy or “behind the times” — it’s just that the sheer volume of code makes it impossible to simply turn on a dime.

What an absurd statement to make. What Schwarzmeier is saying is that each page in these 20 major applications is hand coded, not using standards, not using a template, and that individual changes need to be made, one page at a time. Frankly, any large site or application in this shape should seriously consider firing its existing team, and starting over.

The days when each web page is hand crafted are over. They’ve been over for years. I can’t believe that there are any major web sites that don’t use some form of templated system now. Templates and CSS.

In fact, I would say that most hand crafted pages now probably wouldn’t work with IE8, or even IE7 or IE6. I find it likely they still have the silly little icon for requiring IE 4.x. They definitely wouldn’t be adding in the meta tag. The creators probably won’t even hear of these discussions.

The argument for this tag is actually the number one argument against this tag: those people with hand crafted pages are not going to be willing to hand edit each page to make it standards compliant–why on earth would they hand edit each of these pages to add this tag? As for being able to test a site against a version of a browser–this site looks good in IE7, but not IE8, or some such nonsense–when are we finally going to actually commit to standards? Not just as browser vendors, but as web page designers and developers? More importantly, as people who use browsers to surf the web?

I am not writing this because I work for Opera or Mozilla. I am not writing this because I’m unaware of the challenges facing web page designers. In fact, in my books I warn people about being aware of their audiences and the browsers that they use. It would be irresponsible for me not to cover these topics.

However, I no longer buy into the stories of millions of charities, schools, or libraries with old computers that can’t run anything but Win95 and IE 5.x.

I no longer buy into the stories of web sites with millions of lines of code, each of which has to be tweaked any time a new standard or browser is released.

I no longer buy into a web where we continue having to add foolishness into our pages in order to satisfy a company who can’t even be trusted to provide an upgrade path for IE 6 on older, but still popular, operating systems like Windows 2000.

Nothing will stop Microsoft from adding its little IE-specific tags here and there. If the company were truly concerned about breaking the web, though, such tags should be opt-in. In other words, Microsoft should render a page in standards mode if this stilly tag is not added to the page–not force all of us to redefine the web just because Microsoft has seemingly brainwashed the WaSP, ALA, et al.

I will not add this tag to my web pages–no, not even using some twisty tech method–and the company had better determine how it is going to render sites like this one, which serves up good, honest, standard XHTML 1.1.

Update

Over at Anne’s the following comment from another member of WaSP:

Just to be clear Anne, the members of the Web Standards Project in general were not informed about this article and Microsoft’s proposal/plans until it was announced on A List Apart. Any Web Standards Project members who consulted with Microsoft did so as individuals and not as representatives of WaSP.

I am sure that I am not the only WaSP member (and web designer/developer) who is unhappy with these proposals on first reading.

I think it’s time for the WaSP to get its ducks in a row. I think it’s also important that members of WaSP, and perhaps the ALA, also, to publicly declare their financial dealings with any of the impacted browser companies, including Microsoft.

Second Update

Jeremy Keith writes of meta-blackmail:

But—and this is a huge “but”—if you don’t include a X-UA-Compatible instruction, you are also condemning your site to be locked into the current version: IE7. This is a huge, huge mistake.

Let’s say you’re building a website right now that uses a CSS feature such as generated content. Any browsers that currently support generated content will correctly parse your CSS declarations. Future browsers that will support generated content should also parse those CSS declarations. This expected behaviour will not occur in Internet Explorer. IE8 will include support for generated content. But unless you explicitly declare that you want IE8 to behave as IE8, it will behave as IE7.

There’s another option: continue as we are.

Last update

Who is this man and what has he done with the real Zeldman? I will say one thing: such prissy, looking down one’s nose arrogance will not win adherents to this approach.

I feel like I’ve walked into an episode of the Twilight Zone.

Categories
Photography

Raptor

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I don’t do much bird photography anymore. We’ve had many less birds this year, after the loss of so much seed crop with last year’s bad weather. Our song birds are shy, too, preferring to hide among the brambles and brush. However, I spotting a pair of red tailed hawks I thought I’d try to photograph and dragged my large telephoto lens over to Powder Valley.

When you take your camera, with the big and heavy lens, you won’t see birds, isn’t that the rule? I spotted a few nuthatches, several cardinals, a Steller’s Jay, mourning doves, and what looked like some form of falcon, but too far away for pictures. Luckily, though, I had my camera pointed in the right direction when what I thought was the falcon, cricked its wing tips to bring it in for a landing–long enough for me to grab one single photo.

Cooper's hawk

I wasn’t sure what the bird was. At first I thought it was an osprey, because it crooked its wings in a way similar to an osprey when flying. After looking at various photos, though, I believe it’s a Cooper’s Hawk, a rare, endangered raptor native to our state. It also looks similar to a sharp-shinned hawk, but it was much larger than these birds–much closer to crow size, than jay. If you have another identification, please let me know.

The photo was the first half-way decent one I’ve been able to get of a bird in months. This has not been a good year for birds, so much so that I’m thinking of selling my telephoto, a Nikon AFS VR 70-200mm F2.8 on eBay. I don’t take bird photos very much, and though you can use other settings, the thing is so bloody heavy it’s tiring to use. It’s really meant to be used with a tripod, but I don’t care much for tripod work.

I like my 50mm fixed length lens, and have been thinking of getting an 85mm, though I’m still trying to wrap my head around the sensor sizes and equivalent lens issues. Perhaps what I really need is a 35mm. Or more birds.

Categories
Burningbird Connecting

Community and Technology

I am cleaning out my weblog after all these many years. Seven years. Seven years of past discussions and writings, many of which no longer make sense when taken out of the context of the previous times.

Every once in a while, though, I’ll find an old post that seems to highlight, not only what I felt then but what I feel now. One such was the following, posted May of 2002. Long before the Techmemes, WordPresses, OpenIDs, and the social networks; much earlier than the Facebooks and Twitters, it read:

————————-

Dave responded to my earlier post with a thoughtful and considerate posting that asked a very valid question:

So anyway, here’s a question for Shelley. When I see your site update on Weblogs.Com, I usually go for a visit to see what the bird is burning about now. I think of that as a community feature. Do you think it’s valuable? If not, why do you participate?

First, thanks for stopping by Dave, always appreciated. And as a point of clarification — I dropped that silly rule about comments I had about five minutes after I originated it, so please feel free to drop in with comments.

Back to the question: Why do I participate in pinging weblogs.com, when my interest tends to be on the people aspect of weblogging rather than the technology?

Though my focus is on the participants, I also appreciate much of the technology used in weblogging, particularly the weblogging tools such as Movable Type, Radio, and Blogger. And I also appreciate community services such as weblogs.com that let me know when my favorite webloggers have updated.

To me, technology provides a framework that allows me to communicate with my weblogging community easily and without a lot of hassle. I’ll alway be grateful for the folks who create all this technology that makes my weblogging life a lot easier. Still, technology is only an enabler — the content of the weblogs is the key aspect to “community” in my opinion.

If technology could be considered equivalent to the nerves in the brain, it is the people that provide the chemistry that enables the synaptic (community) connections to be made. Without the chemistry provided by the webloggers, the technology is nothing more than bits and bytes and wires all jumbled about in a chaotic and undifferentiated mess, thrown into the ether.

Consider my own community of webloggers — the virtual neighborhood that I reference fondly and at length. Technology will tell me that Bill Simoni’s weblog can be accessed at the URL, http://radio.weblogs.com/0100111/. And technology can let me know when Bill has updated his weblog, through weblogs.com.

Bill uses technology to create his weblog (using Radio), which is accessed through additional technology (the Internet). And I read the weblog through my browser (Mozilla by preference), contained on my laptop — yet more examples of technology.

However, technology doesn’t tell me that Bill is expecting a baby any day now. And technology doesn’t tell me that Bill has a nice, self-deprecating sense of humor, is pretty excited about the baby, and has a a thing about grammar and spellchecking.

That’s community.

If Userland and Movable Type and Blogger were to discontinue innovating their products as of this minute, we would perhaps have less fun toys to work with. We’d miss out on better products, and more reliable hosting, and more interesting ways to post, and better ways to aggregate the postings, and more efficient approaches regarding notification…

…but we’d still have our community. You’d have to take the Internet down to take down our community, and due to the pervasive nature of the Net, I don’t think this is even possible, now.

Ultimately, the community is not dependent on the technology as much as the technology is, itself, dependent on the community. Because without the community, why would we need the technology in the first place?

—————

What I didn’t know then but I do now is that online communities are both dynamic and mutable, and if not created or destroyed by technology, can be fragmented by technology. When I wrote the original post, if someone would say something online I would know what they said–it would be in their weblog. Now, though, this same person posts photos in Flickr, and short quips in Twitter, and sends virtual chocolates or plays Scrabulous in Facebook, or MySpace or whatever the new thing will be in 2008–and there will be a new thing in 2008–as his or her weblog remains silent, sometimes for weeks. But I only, still, listen to the weblog.

Technology has created new paths and in the wake of passing, left us a conundrum: follow the paths to stay with the community, or remain where we are, either to be part of the fragments left behind, a new community, or no community at all.

Then one looks closer at that long ago post and realizes that technology’s fragmentary effect on community is illusory, at best. Life triumphs over all, as it always has with any community, virtual or not. Every person, but four, in the comment thread or mentioned in the earlier post has either quit weblogging, or died. Of the four remaining, Allan and I are still friends, though our communication with each other is sporadic; I haven’t talked with Bill in months; Dave and I stopped being part of the same community a long time ago–not because of technology, but because of who we are, and who we became.

Categories
Social Media

del.icio.us for January 14

These are my links for January 14th:

Categories
Burningbird

New Year, 2008

Once upon a time, when I wrote a story or a tutorial and published it online, it had a beginning, a middle, and an end. It wasn’t driven by artificial deadlines, or created from pieces scattered about in weblogs and in Twitter, and the occasional IRC or email. It certainly wasn’t dependent on whether I would be acknowledged by some ‘leader’ so that I would actually be included in an all important, and soon over, discussion. Now, my writing is becoming less a story and more like that half heard cellphone call of the guy sitting next to us on the train–the only difference being with the phone call, at least there was someone on the other end of the line, listening to what the guy said.

I’ve been lucky at this site for the people I have met over the years. I’ve also been lucky for the excellent discussions that have occurred in my comments, whether inspired by my writing or by the quality of the other commentary. The times, though, are changing.

I’ve turned comments off of Burningbird and am re-fashioning it back to the type of writing I used to do before I got caught up in the ‘social network’ this has all become. I don’t want to come across as I’m taking my social graph and heading home. It’s more that I find myself resistant to becoming yet another data node.

I have found that turning off comments on older posts does not impact on hearing new stories and new views. Some of the most charming and treasured email I get has come from those who have discovered an older story of mine, and sent me an email with a story of their own. I hope the same will continue with the new stories I write, and, perhaps, form the basis for new stories.

Comments are still very welcome at Burningbird’s RealTech, which will become the focus of most of my tech writing. However, rather than focusing on new events, RealTech is going to be focused on real technology–technology I’ll have tried, or technology I’m currently using. As such, I’ll most likely miss the ebb and flow of this minute in tech history that has been the basis of so much of my writing in the past. One other change is, since RealTech is focused on my ongoing experiments, the technology used to build the site is based on specification and not browser. My current list of supported technologies is XHTML 1.1, SVG 1.1, CSS 2.1, and JavaScript. I’ll leave it to your imagination to determine which browser will drop by the wayside.

I’ll still link other posts in some of my writings, but most outside linking will come through the use of my del.icio.us account. We can add commentary using this site’s services, and I plan on using the API to list my most recent entries in the sidebar. I’ll also be linking less to the stories of the moment and more to stories that are fresh, new, and perhaps not given the audience they deserve.

I’m not sure what I want to do on the tech at this site yet. I may not continue using WordPress for this main site, or if I do, use my own customized version since it’s now so easy to keep up with changes and bug fixes in the underlying code. If I do create a universal feed, it will take the place of the existing Burningbird feed. I plan on longer, and less frequent writings, so the main feed will be an excerpt only. RealTech still uses full feeds: got to leave some door open for IE users.

I wouldn’t trade the people I’ve met through my comments here and elsewhere for all of the DRM-free MP3s at Amazon. I’ve known many of you longer than most marriages last. You are my friends, and as such, will always be cherished. If we don’t meet up in comments at my place, I hope we do at yours, or at RealTech, or in emails. As friends, I also know you’ll understand that I need a change.

Thank you for your time you’ve gifted me. Thank you, also, for your patience and support in the past and hopefully in the future.