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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 (11)

Tuesday 2 June 2009

The Real “Why XHTML” Discussion

The previous post was a document on XHTML2, sent in error. I noticed that Steven’s document didn’t match our conversation, but I made an honest mistake thinking what he sent in error was what he wanted to use to address the concerns.

So, I’ve left the other post up, but please know that this is the real discussion, and has lots more detail and insight than the other document, which is more of an overview of XHTML2 core principles.

Forgive me, and readers, Behold! It’s the real “Why XHTML” overview!

The following information is kindly provided courtesy of Steven Pemberton, CWI, Amsterdam, and W3C.

Why XHTML

Molly Holzschlag asked me if I’d try and clearly and simply explain why XML parsing is advantageous and why XHTML still is relevant. This was my answer.

Firstly, some background. I sometimes give talks on why books are doomed. I think books are doomed for the same reasons that I used to think that the VCR was doomed, or film cameras were doomed. People present at the talks make the mistake of thinking that because I think books are doomed, I want them to be doomed, and get very cross with me. Very cross. But in fact, I love books, have thousands of them … and think they are doomed.

Similarly, people make the mistake of thinking that because I am the voice behind XHTML, that I therefore think that XML is totally perfect and the answer to all the world’s problem, etc.

I don’t think that, but

I was chartered to create XHTML, and so I did
XML is not perfect; in fact I think the designers were too print-oriented and failed to anticipate properly its use for applications. As Tim Bray said “You know, the people who invented XML were a bunch of publishing technology geeks, and we really thought we were doing the smart document format for the future. Little did we know that it was going to be used for syndicated news feeds and purchase orders.”
I have often tried to get some of XML’s worst errors fixed (not always successfully).
I believe that you should row with the oars you have, and not wish that you had some other oars.
XML is there, there are loads of tools for it, it is interoperable, and it really does solve some of the world’s problems.

Parsing

So, parsing. Everyone has grown up with HTML’s lax parsing and got used to it. It is meant to be user friendly. “Grandma’s markup” is what I call it in talks. But there is an underlying problem that is often swept under the carpet: there is a sort of contract between you and the browser; you supply markup, it processes it. Now, if you get the markup wrong, it tries to second-guess what you really meant and fixes it up. But then the contract is not fully honoured.

If the page doesn’t work properly, it is your fault, but you may not know it (especially if you are grandma) and since different browsers fix up in different ways you are forced to try it in every browser to make sure it works properly everywhere. In other words, interoperability gets forced back to being the user’s responsibility. (This is the same for the C programming language by the way, for similar but different reasons.)

Now, if HTML had never had a lax parser, but had always been strict, there wouldn’t be an incorrect (syntax-wise) HTML page in the planet, because everyone uses a ’suck it and see’ approach:

Write your page
Look at it in the browser, if there is a problem, fix it, and look again.
Is it ok? Then I’m done

and thus keeps iterating their page until it (looks) right. If that interation also included getting the syntax right, no one would have complained. No one complains that compilers report syntax errors, but in the web world there is no feedback that it has an error or has been fixed up.

It was tried once with programming languages actually. PL/I had the property of being lax, and many programs did something other than what the programmer intended, and the programmer just didn’t know. Luckily other programming languages haven’t followed its example.

For programming languages laxness is a disaster, for HTML pages it is an inconvenience, though with Ajax, it would be better if your really knew that the DOM was what you thought it was.

So the designers said for XML “Let us not make that mistake a second time” and if everyone had stuck to the agreement, it would have worked out fine. But in the web world, as soon as one player doesn’t honour the agreement, you get an arms race, and everyone starts being lax again. So the chance was lost.

But, still, being told that your page is wrong, even if the processor goes on to fix it up for you, is better than not knowing. And I believe that draconian error handling doesn’t have to be as draconian as some people would like us to think it is. I would like to know, without having to go to the extra lengths that I have to nowadays.

So I am a moderate supporter of strict parsing, just as I am with programming languages. I want the browsers to tell me when my pages are wrong, and to fix up other people’s wrong pages, which I have no control over, so I can still see them.

There is one other thing on parsing. The world isn’t only browsers. XML parsing is really easy. It is rather trivial to write an XML parser. HTML parsing is less easy because of all the junk HTML out there that you have to deal with, so that if you are going to write a tool to do something with HTML,
you have to go to a lot of work to get it right (as I saw from a research project I watched some people struggling with).

Let me tell a story. I was once editor-in-chief of a periodical, and we accepted articles in just about any format, because we had filters that transformed the input into the publishing package we used. One of the formats we accepted was HTML, and the filter of course fixed up wrong input as it had to. Once we had published the paper version of the periodical, we would then transform the articles from the publishing package into a website. One of the authors complained that the links in his article on the website weren’t working, and asked me to fix them. The problem turned out that his HTML was incorrect, the input filters were fixing it up, but in a slightly different way to how his browser had been doing it. And I had to put work in to deal with this problem.

Another example was in a publishing pipeline where one of the programs in the pipeline was producing HTML that was being fixed up but in a way that broke the pipeline later on. Our only option was to break open the pipeline, feed the output into a file, edit the file by hand, and feed it into the second part of the pipeline.

Usability is where you try to make people’s lives better by easing their task: make the task quicker, error-free, and enjoyable. By this definition, the HTML attempt to be more usable completely failed me in this case.

XHTML

The relevance of XHTML also starts with the statement that not everything is a browser. Because a lot of the producers of XHTML do it because they have a long XML-based tool pipeline, that spits out XHTML at the end, because it is an XML pipeline. Their databases talk XML, their production line produces and validates XML and at the end, out comes XML, in the form of XHTML. They just want to browsers to render their XHTML, since that is what they produce. That is why I believe it is perfectly acceptable to send XHTML to a browser using the media type text/html. All I want is to render the document, and with care there is nothing in XHTML that breaks the HTML processing model.

But there is more. The design of XML is to allow distributed markup design. Each bit of the markup story can be designed by domain experts in that area: graphics experts, maths experts, multi-media experts, forms experts and so on, and there is an architecture that allows these parts to be plugged together.

SVG, MathML, SMIL, XForms etc are the results of that distributed design, and if anyone else has a niche that they need a markup language for, they are free to do it. It is a truly open process, and there are simple, open, well-defined ways that they can integrate their markup in the existing markups.(One of the problems with the current HTML5 process is that it is being designed as a monolithic lump, by people who are not experts in the areas they need to be experts in.)

So anyway, the reason behind the need for XHTML is that the XML architecture needs the hypertext bit to plug in. It was a misunderstanding by many that XHTML 1.* offered next to no new functionality. The new functionality was SVG, SMIL, MathML and so on.

And my poster child for that architecture was Joost (alas no longer available) which combined whole bunches of those technologies to make an extremely functional IP TV player and you just didn’t realise it was actually running in a browser (Mozilla in that case).

Anyway, out on the intranets, there are loads of companies using that architecture to do their work and having then to do extra work to push the results out to the world’s browsers by making the results monolithic again.

What I anticipate is that we will see the emergence of XML javascrip libraries that will allow you to push your XML documents to the browsers, which are then just used as shells supplying javascript processors and renderers, which will process the XML, and make it visible. HTML will become the assembly language of the web. HTML is just not addressing the use cases of the real world any more. We need higher-levels of markup.

So in brief, XHTML is needed because 1) XML pipelines produce it; 2) there really are people taking advantage of the XML architecture.

Filed under: HTML, HTML5, XHTML, standards, w3c, web design and development
Posted by: Molly | 15:10 | Comments (28)

W3C’s Steven Pemberton on XHTML2

Please note that the XHTML2 document was sent in error. The correct document has been forwarded along and Steven’s response to my query is now published as The Real “Why XHTML” Discussion.

With all the fuss about HTML5 at Google I/O last week, the question of “what about XHTML2?” keeps coming up in conversation. In an effort to better understand the answer to that question, I asked Steven Pemberton, W3c Chair of HTML and Forms Working Groups, who graciously took the time to chat with me about it and who then provided this overview to answer the question for the Web designer and developer public.

The following information is kindly provided courtesy of Steven Pemberton, CWI, Amsterdam, and W3C.

Why XHTML2?

Based on the experience we have with HTML, XHTML 2 is an attempt to fix many of the extant problems.

The areas that are being addressed include:

Make it as generic XML as possible

Advantages:

All the ones that you can imagine, because XML is a Good Thing (tools,
interoperability, etc).
If XHTML 2 gets accepted it will draw the web community further into
the XML world.
Much of XHTML 2 works on most existing browsers already (as an example
see http://w3future.com/weblog/gems/xhtml2.xml).

Less presentation, more structure

Make documents more semantically meaningful; make CSS responsible for the presentation, not HTML.

Author advantages:

Easier to write your documents
Easier to change your documents
Easy to change the look of your documents
Access to professional designs
CSS gives more presentational possibilities than plain HTML
Supports single-authoring: write your document once, supply different
stylesheets for different devices or purposes
Your documents are smaller
Visible on more devices
Visible to more people

Webmaster advantages:

Separation of concerns: authors write the text, graphic designers
design the look
Simpler HTML, less training
Cheaper to produce, easier to manage
Easy to change house style, without changing your documents
More control over the look of your site
Reach more people
Search engines find your stuff easier
Visible on more devices

Reader (Surfer) advantages:

Faster download (one of the top 4 reasons for liking a site)
Easier to find information
You can actually read the information if you are sight-impaired
Information more accessible
You can use more devices

More accessibility

The design should be as inclusive as possible. This includes finding a replacement for the unsuccessful longdesc and making forms more accessible. Device independence and increased structure help here too.

Better internationalization

It is a World Wide Web.

More device independence

New devices becoming available, such as telephones, PDAs, tablets, printers, televisions and so on mean that it is imperative to have a design that allows you to author once and render in different ways on different devices, rather than authoring new versions of the document for each type of device, or limiting your design to a single type of device. This includes creating a more flexible event handling system to allow for new sorts of events that new devices might generate.

More usability

Try to make the language easy to write, and make the resulting documents easy to use. According to research, usability is the second most important property of a website (after good content), so it is important that the technology supports this. This includes:

observing how people currently write HTML documents, and designing content-models around these needs
finding a better approach to frames than the current one. Usability experts advise authors not to use frames (http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9612.html); yet frames clearly have a useful functionality. Problems of frames include:
- The [back] button works unintuitively in many cases.
- You cannot bookmark a collection of documents in a frameset.
- If you do a [reload], the result may be different to what you had.
- [page up] and [page down] are often hard to do.
- You can get trapped in a frameset.
- Search engines find HTML pages, not Framed pages, so search results usually give you pages without the navigation context that they were intended to be in.
- Since you can’t content negotiatiate, <noframes> markup is necessary for user agents that don’t support frames. Search engines are ‘user agents’ that don’t support frames! But despite that, almost no one produces <noframes> content, and so it ruins web
  searches (and makes builders of such sites look stupid!)
- There are security problems caused by the fact that it is not visible to the user when different frames come from different sources

More flexibility, future-proofing

As new technologies emerge, it is desirable not to bind documents to one particular technology but to allow flexibility in what can be accepted. For instance:

HTML binds the document to the scripting language used, so that it is hard or impossible to write a document that works with different scripting languages. Technologies used by XHTML 2, such as XML Events, allows the separation of document content and scripting, so that documents can be made that work on different user agents.
Fallback mechanisms allow a document to offer several equivalent versions of a resource and let the user agent decide the most appropriate to use, with a final fallback being to markup in the document. This makes documents more fault-tolerant — since if a resource is not available the document is still meaningful — and more accessible.

Less scripting

Achieving functionality through scripting is difficult for the author, restricts the type of user agent you can use to view the document, and impairs interoperability. We have tried to identify current typical usage, such as navigation lists, and collapsing tree structures, and include those usages in markup.

Better forms

HTML Forms were the foundation of e-commerce. Improving forms covers many of the points above: return XML, more accessible, more usable (such as client-side checking), more device independent, less scripting.

Filed under: HTML5, XHTML, standards, w3c, web design and development
Posted by: Molly | 13:28 | Comments (8)

Saturday 30 May 2009

Molly’s Top Five Tips to Gaining Twitter Market Share

The other day I was asked by someone how I was gaining “market share” on Twitter. Apparently, they were impressed by the number of followers I’d gathered, and wanted to know what it was I was doing to get them.

So here are Molly’s (aka @mollydotcom in Twitter speak) top suggestions on how to gain market share on Twitter.

Create a user CSS file that sets the Twitter Follower link to display: none;
Choose a Twitter client that doesn’t show how many followers you actually have, or makes it difficult to find that information
Never, ever seek out your numbers or stats using Twitter stats tools
Only follow those people you genuinely are interested in
Don’t believe the hype. It’s love, not money, that makes the world go ’round

Yes, it’s really that simple.

Filed under: Twitter, blogging, community, policies, society, software
Posted by: Molly | 02:26 | Comments (13)

Wednesday 27 May 2009

DailyShow HTML for Video

Dear Jon Stewart,

I am an adoring fan who has followed your career since you first started doing talk shows on the Comedy Channel some 15 or more years ago.

You are a funny, well-educated, articulate man whom I consider to be a true American Hero.

All the fangirl worship aside, can you use your political influence to improve The DailyShow Web site? While HTML might not be your forte’, oh holy moly this code is so filled with bad bad things that it requires immediate diplomatic assistance.

Love always,
Molly

And now, the code

Now, dear readers, what do you think of this lovely embed video code? I mean, really.

<table style=’font:11px arial; color:#333; background-color:#f5f5f5′ cellpadding=’0′ cellspacing=’0′ width=’360′ height=’353′><tbody><tr style=’background-color:#e5e5e5′ valign=’middle’><td style=’padding:2px 1px 0px 5px;’><a target=’_blank’ style=’color:#333; text-decoration:none; font-weight:bold;’ href=’http://www.thedailyshow.com/’>The Daily Show With Jon Stewart</a></td><td style=’padding:2px 5px 0px 5px; text-align:right; font-weight:bold;’>M – Th 11p / 10c</td></tr><tr style=’height:14px;’ valign=’middle’><td style=’padding:2px 1px 0px 5px;’ colspan=’2′><a target=’_blank’ style=’color:#333; text-decoration:none; font-weight:bold;’ href=’http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml?videoId=225113&title=the-stockholm-syndrome’>The Stockholm Syndrome</a></td></tr><tr style=’height:14px; background-color:#353535′ valign=’middle’><td colspan=’2′ style=’padding:2px 5px 0px 5px; width:360px; overflow:hidden; text-align:right’><a target=’_blank’ style=’color:#96deff; text-decoration:none; font-weight:bold;’ href=’http://www.thedailyshow.com/’>thedailyshow.com</a></td></tr><tr valign=’middle’><td style=’padding:0px;’ colspan=’2′><embed style=’display:block’ src=’http://media.mtvnservices.com/mgid:cms:item:comedycentral.com:225113′ width=’360′ height=’301′ type=’application/x-shockwave-flash’ wmode=’window’ allowFullscreen=’true’ flashvars=’autoPlay=false’ allowscriptaccess=’always’ allownetworking=’all’ bgcolor=’#000000′></embed></td></tr><tr style=’height:18px;’ valign=’middle’><td style=’padding:0px;’ colspan=’2′><table style=’margin:0px; text-align:center’ cellpadding=’0′ cellspacing=’0′ width=’100%’ height=’100%’><tr valign=’middle’><td style=’padding:3px; width:33%;’><a target=’_blank’ style=’font:10px arial; color:#333; text-decoration:none;’ href=’http://www.thedailyshow.com/full-episodes/index.jhtml’>Daily Show<br/> Full Episodes</a></td><td style=’padding:3px; width:33%;’><a target=’_blank’ style=’font:10px arial; color:#333; text-decoration:none;’ href=’http://www.thedailyshow.com/tagSearchResults.jhtml?term=Clusterf%23%40k+to+the+Poor+House’>Economic Crisis</a></td><td style=’padding:3px; width:33%;’><a target=’_blank’ style=’font:10px arial; color:#333; text-decoration:none;’ href=’http://www.thedailyshow.com/tagSearchResults.jhtml?term=Republicans’>Political Humor</a></td></tr></table></td></tr></tbody></table>

Did you enjoy that as much as I did? Knew you would.

Filed under: HTML, WaSP, accessibility, css, javascript, standards, w3c, web design and development
Posted by: Molly | 20:15 | Comments (12)

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 links

List of Linked Names:

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

Thursday 19 March 2009

Which Browser do You Use?

Today is the official IE8 release date. I’m here at MIX09, where conversations about IE8 CSS 2.1 implementation and IE8 modes are in full swing. Since I’m on a fact-finding mission while here, I shall reserve my comments until I’ve had a few more meetings.

Last night at the Tao party I was interviewed by a fellow from Prague who asked some great questions, one of which was “Which browser do you use, Molly?” This strikes me as a particularly funny question, because there can only be one answer for a person in my job, which is “all of them.”

Of course, there’s a difference between use and prefer, but we’ll shy away from that for a moment while we answer the question: Which browser do you use?

Extra love from me (and maybe even an Opera beer cozie) for a few points as to why (for example, interface, CSS features, extensibility, tools, etc.)

Filed under: browsers, ie8, microsoft, molly asks you, opera, software, standards, web design and development
Posted by: Molly | 16:17 | Comments (103)

Wednesday 18 March 2009

CSS3 Panel Slides from SXSWi

These are the CSS3 panel slides from SXSW Interactive. As the moderator, I apologize to the 40+ people who could not get into the room. It was a really informative and fun panel, so we’ve made these slides available to the public at large to extend that information.

David Baron, Mozilla (XHTML format)
Sylvain Galineau, Microsoft (PDF format for download)
Håkon Wium Lie, Opera (HTML format)

Please enjoy and be sure to try things out in a variety of browsers. Feel free to share your comments and thoughts here.

Filed under: CSS3, conferences, ie8, innovation, microsoft, mozilla, opera, software, sxsw, web design and development
Posted by: Molly | 14:25 | Comments (15)

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