ivantohelpyou

An Event Apart
Boston, Mass.
March 26, 2007

Eric Meyer started the event with a presentation titled “Secrets of the CSS Jedi.” From the beginning, I was a bit cautious. From what I recall, in order to become a Jedi you have to fly to some swampy planet to face down your innermost fears, where if you leave before graduation you’re at risk of succumbing to [deep voice] THE DARK SIDE.

As much as I like the idea of web standards, if everyone on a Web design team has to visit a swamp to learn from a wizened Muppet, it will never sell in the corporate world. Companies don’t need standardization in results. They need standardization in training and equipment. Everyone wearing the same white helmets and body armor, marching in formation, blasters at the ready.

In Eric’s example, he was able to take an HTML page containing a few columns of numbers and then, almost entirely using CSS, he turned it into a vertical bar graph. The process took in the neighborhood of 70 to 100 lines of code. He then showed another version, also hand-coded, with a horizontal bar graph. Now what would it take to make a bar graph using Adobe Flex 2 with Charting or some other non-standard Web framework? Just a few lines of code, once you’re up and running. And if you wanted to turn it into a pie chart or plot it on a logarithmic scale? Change a parameter and you’re done.

So, which approach should the average Web designer choose: The theoretically pure approach with a steep learning curve but impeccable results, or the toolkit-framework approach that gets the job done at the expense of semantic clarity? Or is there a middle ground?

Jeffrey Zeldman spoke well about the importance of good copy, with many illuminating examples. One such example: Basecamp, which instead of prompting for "login," contains the prompt text: "Please log in first and then we'll send you right along." This enhances the brand image as a "fun and easy" tool to handle the "tedious, frustrating and miserable" task of project management. But one audience member pointed out that Basecamp operates as a private label service – in other words, if I want to use Basecamp to manage projects with my clients, I send them to ivantohelpyou.seework.com. Clients see my logo, but with Basecamp's "fun and easy" text. That’s nice, but what if someone wanted the login prompt to say, "Abandon hope all ye who enter here" or some other inspirational quote? Not so easy to do with a hosted service. Which means that the insufferably perky 37 Signals philosophy goes viral along with its software.

Jason Santa Maria went through design stuff while I answered client e-mails. I only caught a small segment involving dancing leprechauns.

Steve Krug promoted the concept of usability testing, including demos of how to use Camtasia and Morae from Techsmith. He may have also mentioned something about a book.

Andrew Kirkpatrick from Adobe spoke about accessibility. It was very code-heavy. My mind started wandering, and I started to wonder whether it would be possible to convert HTML to MIDI, so that a web page could be converted into a catchy tune with lyrics describing the content, and the rhythmic, melodic and harmonic patterns describing the structure and behavior of the site. You’d load a webpage, and the music of the spheres would fill the room; you’d say "pow!" on the downbeat to activate a link, and the music would segue into something new, something wonderful. If you saw me there, my eyes were closed so that I might have some sense of what it would be like to be blind; and if you saw me drooling into a puddle on the hotel banquet table, that was me simulating loss of muscle control. And that smell…never mind.

Dan Cederholm also spoke last month at WebDirections North, at a session devoted to microformats. This time, he spoke about color schemes, typography and favicons before repeating the pitch on microformats. But I wasn’t bored by the repetition – first, it’s an interesting subject, and second, it gave me a chance to listen to how he was saying it rather than what he was saying. He’s an effective speaker, taking what could be a dry topic and relating it in a just-folks, non-techie manner. Yeah, right, he doesn't remember what API stands for. And I think that IPO stands for India Pale Oil.

From my perspective, the main problem with microformats is that I’m too lazy to add them to posts like this one. Sure, it’s easy. But it means that I’d have to go through this very entry and mark-up at least six entries with hCard information, and it has been quite enough effort for me to do this write-up of day one. Maybe if ivantohelpyou gets an editorial assistant, I’d be on board with it. Until then, sweet dreams.

Continued coverage of day two...

Labels: ALA, blogging, NV07, Web 2.0, web design, Web Standards

If you're interested in blogging, you might want to check out a podcast or two from the Northern Voice page on PodcastSpot.

Of those listed, I attended the following:

• How to be a Citizen Journalist
  Just take the picture, dammit. Journalism 101 for bloggers.
  
  
• MooseCamp: Vancouver Transit Camp
  Actually, Joe Clark gave a great presentation on this very topic at WebDirections North, so I'd recommend starting with him if you're interested in what transit systems can do to improve accessibility.
  
  
• Why Do We Blog?
  My favorite session of the event and the one that got me revved up about writing what you're reading. First, photographer Alex Waterhouse-Hayward talked about his daily blogging ritual and how it improved his writing. Then, conference organizer Darren Barefoot walked through the lifecycle of a blog, based on results of his survey of people who have started and stopped blogging. I'd recommend this podcast to anyone who blogs. At the very least, check out this bit of Scorsese-Hinkley trivia.
  
  
• MooseCamp: New Rules for the New Communities
  Wide-ranging discussion of what it takes to succeed as a moderater of an online community. Go to 25:40 for my pithy comment on the difficulty of keeping on-topic when anyone can join the discussion.
  
  
• Holding Paradox in the Palm of Your Hand (slides and audio)
  Hard to summarize but thought-provoking nonetheless.
  
  
• MooseCamp: Hacking the MotherCorp (CBC)
  My 2c: BBC Radio has a much more comprehensive service for accessing radio programmes – music, drama and commentary – that has aired over the past seven days. On the global Internet, the Beeb's the one to beat for English-language audio content.
  
  
• MooseCamp: Hacktastic Wiki Blogging
  Superhacker Luke from SocialText connects blogs, wikis, and his favorite word processor, vi, which he uses with the dvorak keyboard layout.
  D.NNR ,RPNE!
  

Labels: northern voice, NV07, podcast, Web 2.0

After a Northern Voice presentation about Second Life, I thought to give it a try. I joined the "Furries" by making my avatar a dog, a choice which I assure you is merely part of my ALM thesis research on the topic of talking dogs.

In Second Life, communication occurs on several parallel levels. First, there's the real-time interaction between avatars on kinesthetic (through movements), visual (appearance) and textual (instant messaging) levels. Second, there's the communication between visitors and "landowners," who have the ability to create a 3D version of a home page in virtual space. The same way somone can work on a home page to add various layers of content, structure, style and behavior, someone in Second Life does the exact same thing using a different set of tools.

A well-constructed Web page will present the content (plain text) no matter the access device, whether a screenreader, a text-only browser, a browser with CSS turned off, a browser with JavaScript turned off, and so on. This concept is called progressive enhancement, but it works much differently in Second Life than it does on the HTML Web.

First, you need structure, which is the land. If you don't have land, you can't build, and so this is the foundational layer. But just having land won't get anyone to visit, and so the next phase is style. You have to put something on your land, from SL primitives (trees, boxes) to promore complex constructions. Once you have a styled or themed property, you can add behaviors to your objects. Finally, as people interact with your property, you build community. Technically, you could hold a rave on an empty lot in Second Life, or in a public area as a "flash mob." But for the most part, you need structure at a minimum, style in most cases, and behaviors to stand apart in order to attract community -- which in the final analysis, is the content.

• Content: Community
  
• Structure: Land + Location
  
• Style: Appearance, images-video-sound, objects
  
• Behavior: Linden Scripting Language (LSL)

Compare to the Web equivalent:

• Content: Text
• Structure: HTML
• Style: CSS
• Behavior: JavaScript, DOM scripting, AJAX
  

To summarize:
On the textual Web, content comes first. In Second Life, the content arrives only when the audience does.

Key takeaway:
In Second Life, nobody knows that you're not a dog.

Labels: northern voice, NV07, second life, talking dogs