Category: Technology

Categories
SVG XHTML/HTML

Whipping boy

I noticed a passing twitter message from Laura Scott. It said One word: standards. Firefox follows w3c standards. Internet Explorer does not. She wrote it in response to another Twitter message from tutu4lu, who was having problems with a web page appearing differently with IE than Firefox.

It is true that Firefox implements more standards than IE, especially in when it comes to some of my favorites, such as SVG. And I appreciate the fact.

Firefox does not necessarily get an A+ for all of its effort, though. In particular, if Microsoft’s lack of implementation of XHTML has been one force against broader implementation of XHTML at web sites, Firefox’s own handling of XML errors in XHTML is another, more subtle force against XHTML.

Here’s an example. I added an ampersand (&) to a URL in one of my posts, which generates an XHTML error. The following are three screen shots from Chrome, Opera, and Safari, respectively, that demonstrate how they handle the error:

XHTML error in Chrome
Opera XHTML error
Safari error

Safari and Chrome are both built on WebKit, which handles XHTML errors by parsing, and rendering, the document up to the error. This has the advantage of providing some content, as well as being able to more quickly find the error when you’re debugging.

Opera doesn’t render the document, but it does provide a display of the source with highlighting where the error occurs. This is extremely helpful when you’re debugging a larger document. In addition, Opera also provides an option to render the document in HTML, rather than XHTML, which is helpful for everyone else.

Contrast and compare these screenshots with the following, from Firefox.

Firefox error handling

The Firefox XHTML error handling is also known as YSOD, or Yellow Screen of Death. It’s harsh, abrupt, and somewhat punishing in nature, with its sickly yellow background, and bright red text. The message is typically cut off by the edge of the browser window, so one can’t easily see where the error has occurred. It’s most definitely intimidating for readers who accidentally stumble on to an XHTML page currently in a broken state.

All four of the browsers do support the XHTML standard, and all stop processing the XHTML when an error occurs, as is proper. But where Safari/Webkit, Chrome/Webkit, and Opera try to provide a useful web page, Firefox picks up a ruler and gives the owner of the web site a good whacking.

It’s easy to fall into the trap of blaming all web development and design problems on Microsoft and IE, and to use IE as a whipping boy—to the exclusion of looking, critically, at the other browsers in the web space. If the lack of support for XHTML in IE is a primary inhibitor of the spread of XHTML, Firefox’s YSOD has to take the second place prize. Support for XHTML doesn’t end at the parser.

Categories
Diversity Technology

Open Arms

Regarding the recent Golden Gate Ruby Conference…

Sara Allan

The second low point was Matt Aimonetti’s talk “CouchDB + Ruby: Perform Like a Pr0n Star.” It is unfortunate that he took this joke too far. What might have been a short, juvenille, eye-rolling bit of humor continued throughout the talk to become increasingly disturbing. Amidst this normally warm, welcoming community, I spent an uncomfortable half hour wondering if I had somehow found myself in 1975.

…

If he had left it at a few introductory jokes, I would be writing a very different post. Instead the porn references continued with images of scantily-clad women gratuitously splashed across technical diagrams and intro slides. As he got into code snippets, he inserted interstitial images every few slides (removed from the slides below). The first time it happened, he mentioned that he wanted to keep everyone’s attention. It had the reverse effect. This technique was distracting and disrespectful to an audience who, frankly, is turned on by code.

Audrey Eschright

Here’s another problem in this tangle: Ruby (and Rails in particular) loves the rock star image. You see it in job posts, how people talk about their work, and the way Rubyists rant on their blogs. It’s macho, it can be offputting to both genders, and it makes it easy in this kind of situation to say, “what’s your problem? I’m just busy being awesome”. It’s also a significant barrier to adoption for people who aren’t already a part of this culture, and don’t find it appealing.

Mike Gunderloy

For what it’s worth, I think the original presentation was an inappropriate and regrettable mistake. However, far more disturbing to me are the reactions to the discussion on the part of some of the Rails community.

Folks, the idea that women are disproportionately underrepresented in engineering and software in general, and open source development in particular, should not be new and controversial in 2009 – anyone who cares to look can find such things as the FLOSSpols findings, or any amount of academic literature on the subject. Anyone who cares to take the time to actually talk to the women who are a part of the open source community will have no trouble getting an earful about how challenging it can be to participate.

…

But unfortunately for me, in parallel to the public discussion there have been private ones. I can’t reveal details without breaking confidences, but suffice it to say that a significant number of Rails core contributors – with leadership (if that’s the right word) from DHH – apparently feel that being unwelcoming and “edgy” is not just acceptable, but laudable. The difference between their opinions and mine is so severe that I cannot in good conscience remain a public spokesman for Rails.

Victoria Wang, in comments

DHH’s attitude seems to say that the more we lower ourselves to the most base level of marketing scum in the name of entertainment, the better, even if at the end of the day there are no more women, or anyone worth knowing, in the room. It kind of makes me want to never touch Rails code again.

Rev Dan, in comments

What chaps my ass about the whole thing is that it’s doing little more but reinforce the bullshit “developers are immature, overgrown 14-year-olds” stereotype. I’m sick to death of that one, especially because I run into that type of jackass more often than I care to.

We kinda have a “chicken and egg” scenario going on here… unless there are more women who attend these things then the few women who do will always feel like outsiders… but if the few women who attend now are offended, then why will more attend?

Matt Aimonetti’s response

In the case of my talk, people knew what to expect, they *picked* the talk, and were warned by the organizers before I started that I would be using imagery potentially offensive to some. The topic of my talk was obvious, and I would have hoped that people who were likely to be offended would have simply chosen not to attend my talk or read my slides on the internet. It’s like complaining that television has too much material unsuitable for children, yet not taking steps to limit their viewing of it. You can’t have it both ways.

We can argue forever about morals, professionalism, ethics, respect, etc., though this is all a distraction from the real problem that was raised by Sarah, namely that we have very few minorities in the Ruby community, especially women. Minorities do need to be more represented!

Ryan Bigg

I fear that it will rip a community apart. A community that should be working together on getting past this issue and bettering themselves, not regressing to childish bickering. That’s what gives this community an “immature” stamp by the [insert other programming language here] groups.

…

All I ask for you guys is to…

Chill.

Sho Fukamachi

Other reactions include pathetic “I am being victimised” attention-seeking, lame attempts at demonstrating how much “I truly care about women” etc, hilarious “I am leaving the Ruby community and re-installing Visual Studio” threats (please do!), and every combination thereof. I cannot help but think that if Matt’s presentation has the effect of getting rid of these disingenuous wowsers then he should henceforth be invited, nay required, to present at every Rails conference.

DHH, the father of Rails



But wait…there’s more…

Alpha Male Programmers aren’t keeping Women Out

You certainly have to be mindful when you’re working near the edge of social conventions, but that doesn’t for a second lead me to the conclusion that we should step away from all the edges. Finding exactly where the line goes — and then enjoying the performance from being right on it — requires a few steps over it here and there.

update

Excellent aggregation of opinions from women in the Ruby/Rails community. Particularly liked Amy Hoy’s take in comments

If you are going to try to be edgy and push boundaries and shit, you should at least be sure you’re good at it and know how to handle that kind of content, first. Otherwise, it’s just destructive.

Categories
JavaScript Technology

Sun sells out and there goes Java and MySQL

I guess I will now be looking at how to port my Drupal installations to PostGreSQL, since Sun sold out to Oracle. The Java issue doesn’t impact me, as I saw the writing on the wall as regards to Java a long time ago.

However, support for MySQL will most likely be completely undercut, if not eliminated. Or it will go through that fine Oracle touch, which means you can’t depend on support for the database in the future—not without it being either bloated, or “monetized” in some way. This is how Oracle works.

I can hear it now: But MySQL is open source. Oracle can’t hurt it, because it’s open source!

Being “open source” will protect MySQL. Yeah, right. And I believe I’m Superwoman and can’t be hurt by bullets, so just shoot me now.

I completely forgot about Sun and OpenOffice. I use OpenOffice for all of my writing. Guess I can kiss that good-bye, too.

I’d like to just kick IBM right now, for transmorphing back into the stupid, clumsy Big Blue dinosaur of days of yore. It let itself down, by not buying Sun. And it let the rest of us down, too.

Interesting reading the old post on Sun buying MySQL AB, from last year.

I think Sun is the best possible buyer, because of the following reasons: (Note that this is of course my interpretation)

  • Sun is committed to open source.
  • Sun doesn’t have an database of their own; In other words, no risk of internal conflicts between similar products.
  • Sun understands what it means to be a virtual company where people work from home.
  • Sun has a good understanding of developers needs and there is a good chance that the integration of the two companies will be relative smooth.
  • Sun has said they will let the MySQL developers continue work as before in their own unit and without big changes (except of course changes for the better!).

Of course, the early founder of MySQL left Sun, and started another open source MySQL company. We’ll see where this goes.

Last update, but the original founder of MySQL, Michael Widenius, has posted a note on the Oracle/Sun merger and MySQL.

The biggest threat to MySQL future is not Oracle per se, but that the MySQL talent at Sun will spread like the wind and go to a lot of different companies which will set the MySQL development and support back years.

I would not like to see this happen and I am doing everything I can do to keep this talent pool together (after all, most of them are long time personal friends of mine). I am prepared to hire or find a good home (either at Monty Program Ab or close to it) for all core MySQL personnel.

The man is probably inundated with resumes right now.

Categories
Social Media Web

My abbreviated self

I discovered that a URL has to be less than 30 characters, or Twitter automatically creates a Tinyurl version of the URL. This, even if the entire message is less than 140 characters.

There’s no way I can create URLs that are less than 30 character and still maintain my subdomain designations. Therefore I’m not going to try, and will most likely be removing any short URL stuff here. With all the recent “one million followers” foo flah, including the breathless designation that one person achieving one million Twitter followers is equivalent to landing a man on the moon and space flight, in scientific importance, I would just as soon stick with stodgy old weblogging.

Weblogging, where no one really knows how many people are following you, most people don’t care, we can actually communicate complete thoughts, and do what we want with our URLs.

From today’s WhatWG IRC:

hsivonen: I can imagine all sorts of blog posts about evil HTML5 raining on the rev=canonical backpattery parade

svl: Mostly (from what I’ve seen) it’s been “let’s all use this en-masse, so html5 will be forced to include this”.

Of all the items in contention with the HTML5 working group, the use of rev=canonical is not high on my list. Why? Because there’s no real argument for it’s use, and a lot of good arguments against its use, and it’s just as easy to use something else.

This all came about because Twitter was built first, designed later. One of the difficulties to keeping a message to 140 characters is that URLs can take 140 characters, and more. Yet there is no URL shortening mechanism built into Twitter. Not only is there no URL shortening mechanism built into Twitter, Twitter, itself, uses another, 3rd party, service: tinyurl.com.

Now, all of a sudden, people are in a dead cold panic about using a service that may go away, leaving link rot in Twitter archives. I hate to break it to the folks so worried, but it will probably be a cold day in hell before anyone digs into Twitter archives. Most of us can’t keep up with the stream of tweets we get today, much less worry about yesterday’s or last week’s.

But there are a lot of other problems associated with using a 3rd party service. Problems such as the recent Twitter follies, otherwise known as Twitter Been Hacked, that ended up being a not particularly fun Easter Egg this weekend. When you click on a Tinyurl URL, you don’t know what you’re going to get, where you’re going, or worse, what will happen to you when you get there. Even Kierkegaard would have a problem with this leap of faith.

There’s also an issue with search engine link credit, not to mention everyone using different URL shortening services so you can’t tell if someone has referenced one of your posts in Twitter, or not. This didn’t use to be a problem, but since everyone does most of their linking in Twitter now, it gets mighty quiet in these here parts. You might think, sigh, no one likes what you’re doing, only to find out that a bunch of people have come to your party, but the party’s been moved to a different address.

So I think we can agree that third party URL services may not be the best of ideas. I, personally, like that we provide our own URL shorteners. Not only would we get the search engine credit, it should encourage the use of the same URL in Twitter, which might help us find the party we lost. Plus, wouldn’t you rather click a link that has burningbird.net in it, then one that has dfse.com? Implementation of our own short URLs should be simple in this day and age of content management systems. All we need to do is agree on a form.

Agree? Did someone say, agree?

As I wrote earlier, I’ve heard too many good arguments against rev=canonical, including the fact it’s too easy to make a typo and write rev=canonical, when we mean rel=canonical, and vice versa. In addition, rel is in HTML5, rev is not, and I’m not going to hammer a stake in the ground over rel/rev. I’m keeping my stakes for things that are important to me.

Note to HTML5 WG: she has a hammer. And stakes.

As for what attribute value to use with rel, whether it’s shortlink or shorturl or just plain short, I don’t care. I took about five minutes to implement shortlink in this space. I implemented shortlink, because this is the option currently listed in the rel attribute wiki page. However, it would only take about a minute to change to shorturl. I even added the short link to the bottom of my posts, which can be copied manually and used to paste into a Twitter post, if you’re so inclined. See, I don’t have to wait for anyone’s approval; I am empowered by Happy Typing Fingers.

Regardless of what we do, I agree with Aristotle: way too much effort on something that should be easy to decide, quick to implement, giving us time to worry about things that are important in HTML5. Things such as SVG, RDFa, and accessibility.

Other discussions related to rel/rev/tiny:

And that’s my 4424 character take on tiny URLs.

Another reason tiny URLs are getting attention is because of the evil new DiggBar. Goodness gracious, people, why on earth do you use crap like this?

Categories
Browsers

A browser is more than script

Chrome released on Linux, and IE8 released from beta. Now people are beginning to question Firefox’s increasingly bigger piece of the blogger pie. Case in point, PC World.

Mozilla have several grand aims, and there’s much to be admired, but they’ve forgotten how to make a decent browser. I feel plenty of loyalty for them, because they’ve done more than anybody else to further the cause of open source software in the real world. But when I tried Chrome, as incomplete as it was, I realized I’d found a replacement for Firefox. As soon as it gets to beta under Linux, I will switch to Chrome. No question. It’s just infinitely better. It’s like when we all switched from Alta Vista (or Yahoo!) to Google back in the early noughties. The king is dead! Long live the king!

I was asked my opinion about the future of JavaScript applications this week, especially in light of the blazingly fast Chrome. I was rather surprised at the emphasis on JavaScript, because a browser is more than just a machine to consume script. A browser must also render a web page, as the designers built her; must display photographs accurately, hopefully using any photographer supplied profiles; to render the more complex SVG, in addition to the simpler Canvas; to handle complex file types, including video files, not to mention supporting different markups, such as XHTML in addition to HTML; to provide the utility to enhance the user’s experience, up to and including any extensions, such as the one I use to collect a page’s RDFa. Why, then, are we reducing the browser to nothing more than a device to to render HTML and JavaScript?

Firefox is working on its scripting engine, but it’s also been improving its graphical rendering engine, including adding in built-in support for color profiles, as well as improvements in support for CSS3 and SVG. Chrome has no support for color profiles, it’s graphical rendering engine sucks, as can be seen if you look at CSS3 curved corners in the browser, and it regularly fails my SVG tests. Try this SVG file in Chrome, but don’t blame me if your CPU spikes. Luckily, it seems that Chrome just aborts SVG files it can’t handle now, rather than fry the CPU. Then try the same page in Safari or Firefox; though both render the page slowly, they do render it—Chrome only rendered the file the third time through. It aborted the page the first two times. And the quality of the rendering? Well, see for yourself.

Look at my photos at MissouriGreen. Most use a color profile. Now, the photos look relatively good in Chrome on Windows, because I’m favoring a sRGB color profile to ensure maximum coverage, but if Chrome is ever implemented in the Mac, the photos will look plain, and washed out, as they do now with Opera. Not so the latest Firefox, and Safari.

Lastly, look at this site, or Just Shelley in Chrome, as compared to Safari, or Firefox, even the latest beta of Opera. I make extensive use of box and text shadows, as well as CSS3-based curved corners. No browser is perfect in its implementation of CSS3 curved corners yet, but the anti-aliasing in Firefox and Safari is vastly superior than what you’ll find in Chrome. I have noticed, though, that Chrome has improved its text and box shadows: it doesn’t plaster them half way down the page, now.

Why, then, do we talk about how “superior” Chrome is? And how Firefox is dying? When one looks at all of the browsers from an overall web experience, only IE8 is worse than Chrome.

I apportion blame for an over-emphasis on fast script over everything else equally between Google and the current HTML5 effort. I found it telling that, at the same time people are lambasting Firefox for “slowing” down, and praising Chrome for “speeding” up, Douglas Bowman is leaving Google primarily because the company relies on engineering practices, at the expense of fundamentals of design. One doesn’t have to stretch one’s intuition in order to see that the “machine” is also the emphasis in Chrome. But the same could also be said about the HTML5 effort: an emphasis on mechanistic aspects, such as client-side storage and drag-and-drop, at the expense of a more holistic environment, such as including support for SVG and ensuring continued support for accessibility—though I think this week, at least, client side storage has been pulled for inclusion…elsewhere.

Speed is important in a web browser, speed and efficiency, and Firefox isn’t perfect. Newer versions have been locking up on my Leopard machine, to the point where I now prefer Safari on the Mac. If I had to take a guess, Firefox has threading issues. It also needs to work on isolating extensions to the point where they can’t harm the overall browsing experience—or at least put something in place so that one knows certain extensions can adversely impact on browser performance.

At the same time, Chrome desperately needs to improve its graphics rendering capability. As this occurs, and as Chrome gets loaded down with extensions, I don’t think we’ll see the same fast speeds when rendering pages we see now.

It’s all a question of balance—the best browsers are the most balanced browsers, and sometimes this means slower page loading in support of better page rendering. As it is, Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Opera are all giants towering over the anemic and disappointing IE8. If we want to talk about a browser “dying”, I have a better candidate in mind than Firefox.