Tuesday 5 January 2010

Bob Dylan Meets HTML5

Inspired by Shelley Powers who quipped “HTML5, it is a changing” on Twitter, I in turn said I was gonna write a Dylanesque song about HTML5. Of course, between that time and the time I got to the next available WiFi point, Jeff Allen wrote the song.

We offer it up here for your enjoyment, and encourage you to post your own creative take on HTML5, which of course, is a spec that is in fact changing.

Update! Friend and colleague Daniel Davis (@ourmaninjapan), Web evangelist and ukelele player extraordinaire, provides this rendition so we can all sing along!

HTML5 – It is a Changin’

by Jeffrey G. Allen

Come gather ’round coders
wherever you roam
And admit that internet
Around you has grown
And accept that soon
A new spec will stand on its own.
If your skills to you
Are worth savin’
Then you better starting learnin’
Or you’ll sink like a stone
For HTML5 it is a-changin’.

Come designers and developers
who prophesize with your blog
And keep your mind wide
this chance won’t come again
And don’t speak to soon
For the spec is still in spin
And there’s no telling who
will be recodin’.
For the early adopter now
Will be later to win
For HTML5 it is a-changin’.

Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don’t sit on your thumbs
In the gathering hall
for he that gets lost
will be he who has stalled
There’s a spec in the works
And it’s changin’.
It’ll soon trim down your code
And add meanin’
For HTML 5 it is a-changin’.

Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
Learn to use content filters
And help to fight spam
Your sons and your daughters
Have gone mobile
And you’re old ways of surfing
is rapidly changin’.
Please get off the new one
If you can’t understand
For HTML 5 it is a changin’.

The spec it is out
It is Working Draft
The current one now
will later be past
As the new one
will venture to last
The spec is
rapidly changin’
And the current one now
will later be last
for HTML5 it is a changin’.

Filed under:   HTML5, humor, standards, w3c, web design and development, whatwg
Posted by:   Molly | 21:22 | Comments (13)

Tuesday 29 September 2009

The Painter, The Shoemaker

I am a painter, but my house has no paint.
I am a shoemaker, but I cannot make shoes.
I am a web designer, but I cannot design.
I am a software engineer, but my start-ups often stop.

A painter has paint
A shoemaker makes shoes
I am painting my shoes
and shoe-ing my paint

All for the sake

of loving you.

Filed under:   blogging, community, creativity, humor, just fun, personal
Posted by:   Molly | 07:28 | Comments Off

Tuesday 30 June 2009

HTML5: Best of the Minute

Damn, you cannot please all the browsers all the time. Funny, those browser beasts. They do stuff, then they do it again and change it. Or, they do it and you can’t talk about it.

If my Baloney has a first name, it’s HTML5! This is the best I can do at the moment, please and thank you.

Some sort of realistic support charts on a few HTML5 things I think are interesting.

Just remember, I didn’t lie and tell you I was right. Because as I quoted from Cowboy Wisdom in my #atmedia talk recently:

Never trust a man who agrees with you. He’s probably wrong.

Comment at will.

Filed under:   HTML5, browsers, conferences, cults of personality, humor, software, standards, w3c, web design and development, whatwg
Posted by:   Molly | 01:48 | Comments (16)

Thursday 30 April 2009

I’ve Been Having an Affair

Ha, gotcha! Thought I had some sizzling gossip about my love life? I’ve learned the hard way that the less sizzling and the more loving, the more lively I feel.

So now that I’ve grabbed your attention, what I really want to address is the fact that this poor blog is so abandoned of late, and in real need of attention both in terms of content, and technical issues (can you say RSS feeds are still mucked up?). Even a design refresh would be in order. But, as is so often the case, the shoemaker’s kids have no shoes, and the painter’s house is never painted.

Or, has alumininum siding.

I could blame a lot of factors: heavy workload, travel schedule, laziness. But none of that is true. What is true, however, is the time I used to spend on this blog, now close to its 10th anniversary, has ended up being spent instead with another socially oriented technology: Twitter.

Why has Twitter captured my fascination so? I think because it’s made for people like me, who, while quite capable of planning and executing articles, are by nature spontaneous. Twitter has appealed to my stream of consciousness style of unloading thoughts moment by moment in order to make way for the next thought demanding attention.

So yes, I’ve been having an affair. Ah, my dear blog, and dearest blog readers, I think it’s time to find a new model. I don’t want to give up blogging-a true love and passion, but this Twitter thing has kept me distracted for years now, and my attention here is, in a word, shameful. Perhaps it even qualifies as emotional blog abuse.

While I can’t leave Twitter while the affair is so strong, I can’t leave my blog either. So I have to say I’m sorry, and I will work on being more attentive, loving and caring in upcoming months.

Forgive me?

Filed under:   blogging, community, humor
Posted by:   Molly | 23:06 | Comments (23)

Saturday 11 April 2009

Why is this Browser Different from All Other Browsers?

As folks might be aware, there’s a passage during the Passover seder where children ask about the meaning of Passover, using a series of four questions with an introductory question:

Why is this night different than all other nights?

So I’m thinking “hey, this would be great fun to turn into a Passover/Easter game” surrounding your favorite, or not so favorite, Web browsers. So let’s ask the primary question, and you come up with answers.

Why is this browser different than all other browsers?

If you’d like to take it a bit further and play off of the four questions themselves all the more fun we can have!

Maybe if we are sincere enough in our query, a Web standards prophet will come to lead us all to browser freedom.

Filed under:   humor, software, standards, web design and development
Posted by:   Molly | 04:21 | Comments (13)

Tuesday 24 March 2009

One of These Links is Not Like the Others

I was over on LinkedIn adding contacts and updating bio, when on my profile page I noticed a list of generated links “Viewers of this profile also viewed . . .”

The list, as you can see in both the screen shot and listed names, is simply a classic. But I’ll leave it up to you to decide which one of these links is simply not like the others.

List of Linked Names:

• Dan Cederholm
• Jon Hicks
• Jonathan Snook
• Jeremy Keith
• Jeffrey Zeldman
• Andy Budd
• Cameron Moll
• Barack Obama
• Jared Spool
• Eric Meyer

Filed under:   humor, society, standards, web design and development
Posted by:   Molly | 03:55 | Comments (23)

Thursday 9 October 2008

I CAN HAZ TAN!

This is Honey Bunny, insisting on having a tan right in front of my monitor.

Filed under:   family, humor, just fun, lolcats, photos, pop culture
Posted by:   Molly | 03:19 | Comments (27)

Sunday 31 August 2008

Flashback Post: Web Design and Development Personality Indicators

From 2005, for your amusement.

(original post here: Web Design and Development personality indicators)

-=-

I’VE HAD ENOUGH! Frustrated with the range of attitudes and opinions I deal with as a standards-oriented educator, I’ve decided to begin a project (very) loosely based on the Meyers-Briggs personality indicators. So, dear readers, I’m hoping you’ll help me add and refine my categories, but I’m off to a start with the following:

• OFAD. Old Fart Anti-Design. These are the guys (and I mean guys) that were on the Web as early as 1991. Almost all physicists at major research institutions, they’re the ones who helped Tim Berners-Lee refine the Web and were the first adopters. Mostly long in the tooth now, some are still kicking and they can be described as the anti-designers. These aren’t even purists – today’s approaches seem foreign and sometimes frightening to them. They long for the days of Lynx, really, but barring glowing text on a terminal and HTML authored in Vi or Emacs, their idea of Web design is default gray backgrounds, default text, maybe a list, and the apex of old fart visual design: a horizontal rule. Fortunately, this is a very rare breed and usually they can be ignored because unless they’ve progressed somewhat, they have precious little to offer the contemporary, standards-oriented Web designer or developer.
• OSVD. Old Skool Visual Designer. These are the folks that refuse to see beyond their nested-tables-spacer-GIF design. In fact, you can find them at a variety of ad agencies and teaching at conferences all over the world, still excited when they create a design in Photoshop and use the so-called HTML export utility. These designers are often extremely hostile toward standardistas largely because the idea of change or looking at code is so traumatic that they hold on to the Old Skool methodology as if it were a lifeboat on a stormy sea. Unfortunately, this breed isn’t rare enough.
• TTLM. Trying To Learn More. In this category are the good men and women who might still be serving it up Old Skool but are open to learning, open to growth yet struggling with standards related concepts and the snakepit of browser challenges of contemporary Web design and development. These brave souls are not in the majority, but they are to be lauded and assisted for their willingness to venture forth and expand their horizons.
• SAVD. Standards Aware Visual Designer. These people are designing with standards in mind – creating beautiful sites for the screen, working toward achieving accessible sites, examining usability and human factors, and very possibly beginning or already designing for alternative devices and media types. A very rare breed, and if you are reading this post it’s very highly likely you’re either one your own fine self, know all their names or have Zeldman’s personal phone number memorized.
• SASS. Standards Aware Structural Semanticist. These personalities are very code-centric, with little interest (or more often, skill) in presentation but lots of interest in the proper structuring of documents, use of meaningful markup, microformats, Semantic Web and the like. At their most compulsive, they can become purists to the point of having unrealistic expectations of the more worldly Web worker. Also a rare breed, SASS personalities are extremely important to the good of the Web but sometimes need to be reminded that smart structure and semantics can happily co-exist with visual design.
• SACE. Standards Aware Cutting Edge. Whether visual designers or code-centric or both, these are the folks that design first for Firefox, Safari and Opera and work around IE 6.0 only because they have to. Given their druthers, sites would be built using practically no markup and lots of attribute selectors, just because they like the idea. A rare breed worth watching, but also in need of reminders that the rest of the world just ain’t there yet, and in fact, really are lagging behind.

Hybrids are not unusual, either. I sort of live between the SASS and the SAVD personalities, with not enough real design skill to execute great visual designs, but enough savvy to appreciate beautiful, standards-based Web sites. There’s probably a personality type for people like me, but it’s very difficult to assess my own character, so I’ll leave it there for now.

As I’m typing this, I’m on a ship in the Eastern Caribbean teaching CSS on a Geek Cruise. The ship, the MS Zuiderdam, is just in the process of docking at Road Town, Tortola, in the British Virgin Isles. I’m sure you all feel really sorry for me right now.

It’s just past dawn and I’m up at the very top of the ship where there happens to be WiFi at the going rate of 40 cents USD per minute, so you’ll forgive me if I leave you now with the following questions: Are you one of these personality types, and if so, which? Do you have a personality type you’d like to add to my little list?

Filed under:   blogging, flashback, general, how we will be, humor, just fun, molly asks you, pop culture, revolution, society, web design and development
Posted by:   Molly | 01:37 | Comments (31)

Friday 15 August 2008

The Frightening Reality of Who You Are

I will never understand why people think I’m “Too Intense.”

What’s that about?

I live and walk through this world, and there are two responses always:

1). Go Away
or
2) Talk to ME!

I have this thing where I want to be hospitable to everyone

And yes, I prefer talking to real people. I always learn something that I hope makes me a better person.

Including the frightening reality of who you are, whoever you are.

Filed under:   community, creativity, cults of personality, faith(less), humor
Posted by:   Molly | 05:02 | Comments (37)

Monday 14 July 2008

Child Labor Laws Questioned, Holzschlag Says “Start ‘em Young”

In late-breaking news it has been learned that Web standards advocate and educator Molly E. Holzschlag has been found using what appears to be child labor to help solve Web site issues. Here, we see a photo of Holzschlag’s youngest team member, who at 7 months old is hard at work:

“Lil’ P” has advanced skills in HTML, CSS and even is apparently learning some JavaScript. Despite his age, Holzschlag is confident that educating front end developers from early childhood does not equate to mistreatment toward children.

“If anything, starting children in computer technology this young is going to assist in innovative and rapid advancement of our industry. Start ‘em young, and train them right, and a lot of the mistakes we’ve made will be avoided in the future.”

While Holzschlag insists Lil’ P is well provided for, his father, Big P, expresses his own concerns:

“The problem as I see it is that Lil’ P was always a bit big for his britches, and now he’s speeding far past old dad here. How can I effectively raise my child when I can’t even understand the words he uses? Frankly, while the public might question child labor laws for the safety of the child, in a case like this I’m far more concerned about the parental mistreatment that will ensue.”

Clearly the subject of considerable controversy, when asked his opinion on the matter Lil’ P smiled, laughed, picked up a handful of mushy peas and smeared them all over his face. After significant analysis we are still uncertain whether this was a profound statement of Lil’ P’s sentiments on the matter, or if he was just ready for his mid-day snack.

Filed under:   family, humor, just fun, web design and development
Posted by:   Molly | 01:23 | Comments (31)

Thursday 3 July 2008

The Morris Law of Standards

I read this at Tom Morris‘ site and had to quote here:

“However fucked up and crazy something is, someone, somewhere in a standards body is writing a parser, schema or proposal for it.”

Some things are true because they’re funny. But most funny things are just quite simply true.

Filed under:   community, creativity, humor, innovation, society, software, standards, w3c, web design and development
Posted by:   Molly | 06:09 | Comments (13)

Sunday 29 June 2008

Molly’s New Microformat: Microtude

In order to make online communications more meaningful, I propose a new Microformat called “microtude” that, using the class attribute, will have a number of values to enhance the semantics of a given communication.

Let’s say you want to make a sarcastic comment. Knowing that most of your friends and colleagues understand you often keep your tongue in your cheek, it’s not necessary to wave a sarcasm flag in front of them. But what about those folks who don’t know you, and only have your text to help them understand the full impact of your comment? Microtude to the rescue! Consider the following:

<p> Wow, your code is so clean I can eat off of it! </p>

Using Microtude, you’d simply add the class with a value of “sarcasm” to clarify your intent:

<p class="sarcasm" > Wow, your code is so clean I can eat off of it! </p>

Pretty clear. Now I’m starting to work on the full range of allowed values for Microtude and this of course is where you come in. Suggestions and examples most welcome.

Filed under:   announcement, creativity, humor, just fun, molly asks you, web design and development
Posted by:   Molly | 04:56 | Comments (43)

Tuesday 24 June 2008

The Irony That Was the Hooters Geek Meet

Here’s one for the books.

So I stirred up the pot a bit regarding a bunch of Tucson guys who were planning a Geek Meet at Hooters recently.

Opinions, and emotions, ran high. The guys organizing the event immediately changed the venue to Old Chicago, which is a far friendlier place (even pets are welcome on the patio) with great beer selections, a smoking area and a menu that is broad enough to provide something for everyone, including vegans and vegetarians and flesh-eating types such as myself.

Of course, I was beholden to these guys, in light of their being so apologetic and moving locations that clearly I had to show up to the event, which was small but friendly, with good conversations and laughter.

One of the regulars to this event pointed out that this was actually the event that I started years ago and then “disappeared on.” This of course led to commentary such as “Molly went to Microsoft and we all ended up at Hooters.”

It’s a small, funny, world. I like being reminded that sometimes those things we walk away from are the very things we need to nurture all along.

Filed under:   community, food and drink, humor, just fun, professional, society, standards, web design and development
Posted by:   Molly | 02:09 | Comments (17)

Monday 26 May 2008

Andy Warhol Had it Wrong

Fifteen minutes of fame was a good guess, but had Mr. Warhol known about blogging, I think that measurement would have been far greater.

Filed under:   blogging, community, cults of personality, flashback, humor, just fun, pop culture
Posted by:   Molly | 22:32 | Comments (23)

Thursday 22 May 2008

A Patent Parable

Three companies have come together to discuss interoperability between their products. The first company, Mud Corporation, has thousands of patents that, if not protected, risk becoming compromised. Mud could become vulnerable to loss of profits based on what was once a firm ownership of valuable intellectual property.

The second company, Tangerine, typically jumps ahead of the interoperability process in an effort to advance the power of their own innovations. They have great ideas but are perhaps too aggressive – implementing aspects of specifications that haven’t been formally approved. This opens up the opportunity for Tangerine to patent technologies developed in the Tangerine way, outside the specifications, setting up more interoperability problems down the road.

Finally, we have Small and Spongy, Inc. This company has typically done things its own way and has challenged core interoperability issues because Small and Spongy has massive influence. Why? They have their own kind of dynamite in the form of “market share” despite sporting a less superior but far more widely used product.

During the meeting, the primary issue is to figure out how to share technologies and retain those portions of ownership of patented technology that each company deems necessary. The group prioritizes a list of shared goals and deliverables, and begins to discuss each one and how it might or might not weaken or require the surrender of individually owned pieces.

Mud and Small and Spongy disagree about the way a deliverable is written, and an argument ensues. Mud, not willing to jeopardize a strongly prized patent, plays the “take our toys and go home” card, threatening to remove itself from the collaborative group.

Tangerine gets very frustrated because they don’t want to slow down their own growth with such issues. Tangerine representatives quietly leave the room.

Small and Spongy throw up their hands and say “Hey, we have market share, so we don’t have to care after all! Woohoo!” Small and Spongy representatives follow the Tangerines to the nearest bar and begin an eight hour Margarita binge.

Mud representatives, having protected their interests but not succeeded in addressing the interoperability issues, call it a day and join in the drinking, except for the four new fathers who go home to their upper middle class lives, wives and offspring.

The moral of this story is that interoperability threatens too many profits, and this is why we don’t have an interoperable Web.

Filed under:   browsers, humor, innovation, policies, society, software, standards, web design and development
Posted by:   Molly | 00:28 | Comments (18)