Category: Specs

Tech specs

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Specs Technology

Harmony

Harmony is a very good thing.

For some time now, the ECMAScript working groups have been split into two camps: one supporting ECMAScript 4, another ECMAScript 3.1. The former was a more radical leap forward in ECMAScript (JavaScript), while the latter favored more incremental progress.

Ajaxian, John Resig, Simon Willison, and a host of others are referencing an email by Brendan Eich to the lists for both efforts about a new, combined effort dubbed “Harmony”.

Eich writes:

It’s no secret that the JavaScript standards body, Ecma’s Technical Committee 39, has been split for over a year, with some members favoring ES4, a major fourth edition to ECMA-262, and others advocating ES3.1 based on the existing ECMA-262 Edition 3 (ES3) specification. Now, I’m happy to report, the split is over.

The Ecma TC39 meeting in Oslo at the end of July was very productive, and if we keep working together, it will be seen as seminal when we look back in a couple of years. Before this meeting, I worked with John Neumann, TC39 chair, and ES3.1 and ES4 principals, especially Lars Hansen (Adobe), Mark Miller (Google), and Allen Wirfs-Brock (Microsoft), to unify the committee around shared values and a common roadmap. This message is my attempt to announce the main result of the meeting, which I’ve labeled “Harmony”.

Executive Summary

The committee has resolved in favor of these tasks and conclusions:

1. Focus work on ES3.1 with full collaboration of all parties, and target two interoperable implementations by early next year.

2. Collaborate on the next step beyond ES3.1, which will include syntactic extensions but which will be more modest than ES4 in both semantic and syntactic innovation.

3. Some ES4 proposals have been deemed unsound for the Web, and are off the table for good: packages, namespaces and early binding. This conclusion is key to Harmony.

4. Other goals and ideas from ES4 are being rephrased to keep consensus in the committee; these include a notion of classes based on existing ES3 concepts combined with proposed ES3.1 extensions.

The rest of the email then gives the details.

As one can read in comments out and about, not everyone is pleased by this new accord, as they don’t see that the new effort represents enough progress. However, without accord from all the major browser developers, there is no progress: only variations of pretty chaos.

I must admit, being somewhat conservative — or perhaps, after having worked with JavaScript since the first glimmerings over 12 years ago, exhausted with dealing with browser differences — that I’m happy we’re going for simpler changes, implemented broadly. This is a good thing.

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Specs

The Secret of HDTV

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Popular Mechanics has an excellent article of the dirty little secret of HDTV: that there are no true standards or specifications in place defining what exactly is “high definition TV”. Because of this, the article’s writer, Glenn Derene, writes, the quality of broadcast we get from providers, varies. Considerably.

For instance, compression techniques can differ, with fast action shows needing more updates than “talking head” shows. Compression can degrade with the faster shows, than the ones that are more “static”, and with fewer moving parts. This explains to me why the news shows are the best looking shows on my HDTV.

Categories
Specs SVG Technology

State of SVG, state of the Bird

I was quite pleased to see all of the activity related to SVG in the HTML5 working group’s public email list. I agree with those who say that HTML5 needs to be able to work with any unknown vocabulary via namespaces, rather than try to coerce a HTMLized version of SVG and MathML. A case in point is the vocabulary items providing metadata information about the image that Inkscape puts into SVG documents. Creative Commons, Dublin Core, its own stuff–Inkscape believes in metadata.

In the meantime, I will continue using XHTML with my SVG design integration. I was momentarily peeved about the repetition of the “draconian” error handling of XHTML every time anyone even mentions the topic. However, I’ve since decided that rather than be peeved, I should feel flattered. According to the people who talk about the “draconian” nature of XHTML, I must then be some kind of superwoman to be able to support it. Hey, go me.

Burningbird currently demonstrates my new philosophy of design, though not necessarily using a specific design I will keep–though it is bright and cheerful in a “Horton Hears a Who” way, and I need bright and cheerful with all the rain and flooding we’re having. As I’ve mentioned in a couple of earlier posts, the site uses a relatively simple SVG image as flexible background, in addition to other SVG for decorative accents. For IE or other user agents that can’t process SVG, I provide a tiny repeating blue striped background, so that they don’t get a plain page. Different but decent.

Though I use the rgba function to set the semi-transparent background of the center column and sidebar, I first define a background color using hex notation:


.column
{
        background-color: #fff;
}
.column
{
        background-color: rgba(255,255,255,0.8);
}

Browsers that don’t support the rgba function yet will pick up the hex notation, getting a nice coordinated blue center column, with white for content and sidebar; otherwise, they’ll pick up the rgba notation, with a completely transparent center column, and semi-transparent sidebar and entry area.

Safari and Firefox support rgba, but Opera doesn’t at the moment (it most likely will in the next beta release). However, again the design is such that it degrades gracefully and looks decent even without support for this CSS3 color module attribute. Or I think it looks decent, though lord knows I’m not a web designer. Let’s say my use of the technology is sound, but my design sense may suck, depending on your perspective.

I’ve also implemented text-shadow, in this weblog and at Burningbird. The sub-headings have a very tiny text-shadow, which really makes the text pop out nicely:


        text-shadow: #ccc 1px 1px 2px;

Opera and Safari both support text-shadow, but there’s no adverse impact with browsers that don’t. It adds a nice polish, but that’s all it is, polish. I really like it, though, and can’t wait until Firefox implements it.

All in all, Safari is currently the browser with the most advanced support for my design concepts, with Firefox a close second.

Another interesting point on the design is the flexibility as to scale. The background scales large for larger monitors, but the entire content will resize based on browser window size, as well as font size and resolution. If you resize the window small enough, the sidebar pushes to the bottom. This is not a bug–the sidebar gets pushed out of the way when the web page is accessed by a smaller device, such as an iPhone. It’s still there, but not taking up valuable real estate.

In fact, the photo and the bright yellow box currently showing also demonstrate the scaling–the yellow box is a SVG element that is constrained to size to the parent container, but preserve aspect ratio; the photo will display at its maximum width, but scale down as the window scales. All in all, the site can scale to an infinite width or down to a minimum 40em in width, and still be readable. The site even works with my Kindle, either using the mobile CSS, or when using the Kindle’s advanced web browsing, the scaled down width and the blue stripe background (though in gray tones, of course).

Best of all, you can zoom the text and the whole site zooms out, so that the words per line length is consistent.

That’s the key to my site designs in the future–not trying to get the sites to look the same in all devices, but looking good for each. Or at least good enough while still giving me the opportunity to try out new technologies. We’ve fixated too much in the past on making sure a site looks “the same” in all browsers. We’ve crippled our creativity trying to make sites look “the same” in all browsers. This was someone’s anal design “rule” set out long ago, and it’s time we toss the bugger aside.

I promised Bud a writing on SVG and performance, especially as compared to raster images (such as PNG, JPEG, and GIF). I actually checked out the WebKit code to see how it manages graphics, and was surprised at how easy I was able to follow the code considering that I haven’t worked with C++ since my old Windows programming days. The WebKit code is well organized and documented, with a minimum of tricksy coding. It really is an excellent product–not the least of which that it will probably be the first browser to pass Acid3. It or Opera, they’re both very close.

Anyway, the writing will be coming after my site redesign, after I finish proofs, after I get the next book started, but I wanted to quickly mention my discovery, in the course of my explorations, how committed Apple is to the use of SVG–in browser and out–because of the scalability. Think of it: if you have a desktop icon that you want to look good in a tiny screen, as well as a monster 60 inch television, would you want to use raster images? Of course not. OK, then, would you want to invent a graphics format, or use one that already has extensive tool support, as well as earning you brownie points with the development and open source communities?

*beep* time’s up

Apple chose wisely. Still, I was surprised at the strength of commitment Apple has to the integration of SVG into its products. And this despite HTML5 disapproval. Hey, go fruit.

Update Opera is stating they’ve reached 100/100 on Acid3. Congratulations Opera! Can’t wait to get my hands on a working tech preview. When I do, I’ll run it against the *Firefox Minefield edition, and the latest WebKit build and we’ll see how they’re all doing. The real test is getting 100/100 with a publicly accessible browser version.

I will declare a winner in my Acid3 races once I’ve seen the 100/100 with my own little eyeballs. Being as I’m superwoman and all.

*Oh, and IE8, too.

Categories
Specs Web

Joel Spolsky: Crap is good

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Joel Spolksy just spent several thousand words and accompanying diagrams saying one thing: we did things crappy in the past, and we should continue doing things crappy in the future because crap is easy.

Where do I start?

This upcoming battle will be presided over by Dean Hachamovitch, the Microsoft veteran currently running the team that’s going to bring you the next version of Internet Explorer, 8.0.

At a minimum Microsoft can go off and do its own thing in total isolation, and in the long run, Microsoft will end up being the loser. The more I work with SVG and the new CSS, the more I find that I can develop using the new technologies, and the page still works for IE but I don’t have to make it look the same for IE. As long as the page is clean, legible, and accessible via IE, it doesn’t have to look the same for IE as it does for the Big Three (Firefox, Safari, and Opera).

So I’d say that Hachamovitch is a player, but only to the extent that Microsoft wants to be a part of a larger community.

In practice, with the web, there’s a bit of a problem: no way to test a web page against the standard, because there’s no reference implementation that guarantees that if it works, all the browsers work. This just doesn’t exist.

Question: can you see this page?

There is no practical way to check if the web page you just coded conforms to the spec.

Question: can you see this page?

There are validators, but they won’t tell you what the page is supposed to look like, and having a “valid” page where all the text is overlapping and nothing lines up and you can’t see anything is not very useful. What people do is check their pages against one browser, maybe two, until it looks right. And if they’ve made a mistake that just happens to look OK in IE and Firefox, they’re not even going to know about it.

I’m trying to untangle this one mentally and failing. What Spolsky seems to be saying is that standards don’t matter, because people don’t test in all browsers, and standards somehow make lines not even up. Or something.

He can’t possibly be saying that standards break the web. Can he?

Actually, he can.

Standards are a great goal, of course, but before you become a standards fanatic you have to understand that due to the failings of human beings, standards are sometimes misinterpreted, sometimes confusing and even ambiguous.

The precise problem here is that you’re pretending that there’s one standard, but since nobody has a way to test against the standard, it’s not a real standard: it’s a platonic ideal and a set of misinterpretations, and therefore the standard is not serving the desired goal of reducing the test matrix in a MANY-MANY market.

DOCTYPE is a myth.

A mortal web designer who attaches a DOCTYPE tag to their web page saying, “this is standard HTML,” is committing an act of hubris. There is no way they know that. All they are really saying is that the page was meant to be standard HTML. All they really know is that they tested it with IE, Firefox, maybe Opera and Safari, and it seems to work. Or, they copied the DOCTYPE tag out of a book and don’t know what it means.

There’s at least four separate thoughts in these few seemingly related paragraphs. First: there really are no standards, because standards are a thing of the mind. Second, because standards are a thing of the mind, one can’t test pages against a standard. One such standards thing is DOCTYPE, which really doesn’t exist because no one knows what it does, and people just copy it, anyway. Therefore…

I must admit to getting lost at this point. Who’s on first?

And so if you’re a developer on the IE 8 team, your first inclination is going to be to do exactly what has always worked in these kinds of SEQUENCE-MANY markets. You’re going to do a little protocol negotiation, and continue to emulate the old behavior for every site that doesn’t explicitly tell you that they expect the new behavior, so that all existing web pages continue to work, and you’re only going to have the nice new behavior for sites that put a little flag on the page saying, “Yo! I grok IE 8! Give me all the new IE 8 Goodness Please!”

And indeed that was the first decision announced by the IE team on January 21st. The web browser would accommodate existing pages silently so that nobody had to change their web site by acting like the old, buggy IE7 that web developers hated.

A pragmatic engineer would have to come to the conclusion that the IE team’s first decision was right. But the young idealist “standards” people went nuclear.

It’s been a long time since I’ve been called a “young idealist”. I wonder how Sam Ruby likes being called a young idealist? I’m surprised Spolsky didn’t pat us all on the heads, offer us a cookie. But wait, it gets better…

Almost every web site I visited with IE8 is broken in some way. Websites that use a lot of JavaScript are generally completely dead. A lot of pages simply have visual problems: things in the wrong place, popup menus that pop under, mysterious scrollbars in the middle. Some sites have more subtle problems: they look ok but as you go further you find that critical form won’t submit or leads to a blank page.

Fancy that…this young idealist’s web sites both worked with IE8, right out of the box. In fact, the only problem I’ve had with IE8 is with Netflix and that’s because of the ActiveX controls and nothing to do with standards.

I think we’ll find that most web sites don’t break with IE8, or if they do, they’re just as likely break with Firefox 3b, and Opera 9.5b, and the latest WebKit. There’s a reason you have a long beta period for a browser–to give people time to make any necessary fixes in order to have the browser work with the page once the browser is released out of beta.

True, there are sites that will continue to break with IE8 once it’s released. If you want to find them, go to the geocities.com web sites, and search on muscle cars. Better yet: “Unicorn rainbow pony”. Heck, even most of them will *probably work.

Some of those pages can’t be changed. They might be burned onto CD-ROMs. Some of them were created by people who are now dead. Most of them created by people who have no frigging idea what’s going on and why their web page, which they paid a designer to create 4 years ago, is now not working properly.

So the web has to stop because a web site has been burned on a CD, or the person who created the site is dead? Isn’t that equivalent to saying, “No, you can’t have blu-ray, because I still have VHS tapes”? Or maybe more in line with, “No, you can’t have that vaccine because there are people in the world who think the plague is caused by evil spirits, and we have to halt our practice of medicine until they catch up.”

You know, it is OK to let old pages break. There is nothing so valuable online today that we have to halt all further progress of the web because of the off chance a page won’t be viewable in a modern browser. If it were truly that valuable, it wouldn’t be that vulnerable.

Leaving aside vapid, sexist twaddles such as, Mmhmm. All you smug idealists are laughing at this newbie/idjit. The consumer is not an idiot. She’s your wife. So stop laughing (speaking of which, it doesn’t matter where the quote arises, Joel, only your use of it to prove a point), Spolsky’s whole pitch is basically a race for the bottom. Crap has happened in the past, and therefore we should continue supporting crap in the future. Not only support old crap, but encourage new crap because, frankly, people are too stupid to learn how to do things right. She’s your wife, indeed.

In response to Spolsky’s writing, Sam Ruby wrote, If people want web browsers that work with actual web sites, they still have three choices. Three good, solid choices, created by three organizations populated by people who don’t believe we have to be stuck with muscle cars, unicorns, rainbows, and ponies forever.

*Do scroll down the page and look at the comment annotating the page view counter.

Categories
Specs

XHTMLate WordPress comments

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I’ve pulled the plug-in. It cleaned out the comment text, but not the name, URL, and email of the person. The email isn’t an issue, as WP ensures the email is clean; the URL and the name, however, are still an issue. A new comment isn’t the problem; edited comments are.

Frankly, if you’re going to serve your pages up as XHTML, your best bet is to moderate comments so you can catch every variation of something that can go wrong. Either that, or get rid of comments, which is also an option.

I’ll post a new version, once I’ve checked those fields, and completed a few other odds and ends.