A couple of weeks ago Jeff Croft made what can be considered yet another controversial post about Web Standards, this time ridiculing HTML5's timeline, which is set for completion in 2022. Unlike various previous posts of his that incite controversy, I actually agreed with him on this one—but with a twist on it.
I posted on Twitter last night that the absurdity of HTML5's 19-year timeline is most evident when you realize that HTML itself has only existed for 18 years thus far. This created a barrage of responses from people quite intent on convincing me that there's nothing "absurd" about it, that it is very carefully planned out and that it makes absolute sense.
Now, I'm not saying that HTML5 is not being planned well — in fact, I agree that it's been planned meticulously well — but the absurdity lies in the expectations that are being set.
For the past six or so years, I have dedicated most of my life to advocating Web Standards and promoting best practices. During most of this time, I've closely followed the ongoing progress being made in specifications for various web standards1. A key proponent to keep me steady on my evangelist legs was the simple matter that progress was looming just around the corner most of the time. For instance, a lot of people were very anxious to see when IE on Windows would finally support Alpha-transparent PNGs. It took longer than expected or hoped for, but here's the crux of the matter: we waited around for that because it seemed like it could be any day now.
If we had been told in 2000 that it would take until well into 2008 before we'd get even close to IE fully supporting alpha-transparent PNGs, my evangelism spirit would've taken a serious beating, and convincing others to change their ways and learn web standards-based development techniques would've been a lotharder.
Jeff Croft's painting off his problem with HTML5 being slated for completion in 2022 as something that's simply funny and that we should all laugh about it, while he and many others will now ignore the spec and focus on getting work done today, using today's technologies that are supported by today's browsers (regardless of where the technologies come from). My problem with the 2022 timeframe is that it does nothing to manage expectations for me. In an industry that's only about 14 years old, really, thinking a whole 'nother 14 years into the future makes me queasy.
I don't want to spend time analyzing new technologies and the feasibility of using them on a 14-year scale, I want to make considerations like "can I use this in the project I'm working on now, or maybe the next project?" Imagine the following: "This technology is amazing; let's grab our 10-year roadmap and see where we can slot this in for inclusion somewhere near the end." That's the kind of talk you can expect in the field of Operating Systems; it's not the kind of talk that makes Web Standards an appealing trade for people who aren't consciously using them yet.
HTML5 is doing a lot of things right, but when it comes to managing our expectations, it's doing a disheartening job. I'm sure Simon, Steve or Ben will tell me that it's really 2012 when the spec will be final enough, and that the remaining 10 years are for testing and making sure every last browser gets it 100% right — but that doesn't matter. It still tells me I shouldn't expect much to change for the coming 4 years, and that's what I have a problem with.
Our industry moves way too fast for that; if change doesn't come from the spec today, it will come to the spec tomorrow.
This may seem obvious to you but I can assure you it's not how a large part of the consultancy world works. Perhaps not in the web standards-related part of consulting, but certainly in others. ↵
One of the many lessons you may learn in life is that you, as a person, are an amalgamation of many different things: some good, some bad. The defining characteristic that will decide the outcome of the rest of your life will, on a recurring basis, be your ability and willingness to acknowledge which parts of yourself that currently define you, are parts that need adjusting in order for you to change for the better.
It is not a matter of abandoning who you are today; it is a matter of redefining who you will be tomorrow. Recognizing flaws in your own character and nature is the first step you need to take if you wish to become a better, more capable person. Change will come to you in life whether you want it or not; it is up to you to decide what to do with it.
When John Gruber linked to a New York Times Infograph about spending statistics around the world, I immediately thought "this could be done with just HTML and CSS." Shortly thereafter I set out to undertake the experiment of recreating those fancy-looking infographs with nothing more than HTML and CSS (and a WebKit browser, admittedly). Not a single line of JavaScript is used.
Rather than painstakingly mimicking the entire infograph in detail, with all the listed countries and exact positions, I replicated the look, feel and functionality of the infograph in a simplified version—and using absolute bogus statistics. In fact, I'm purposefully not even using units.
Before anything else is said, I should stress that it only works 100% as intended in Safari 3.1 (Windows or Mac). It also works in WebKit nightlies, but several of the nightlies of the past week have a fatal bug in them that causes Webkit to crash on this experiment, so be advised if you're running a WebKit nightly from anytime between the 15th and the 22nd of September. Also worth noting: since Internet Explorer still doesn't support the :target selector, the whole thing doesn't do anything in that browser.
So what does the CSS Infograph do differently from the NYTimes' Flash version? First off, it uses CSS Transitions for the animations, which is the key factor in not having to use any JavaScript as well as why it only works in Safari 3.1 & WebKit nightlies. Second, it uses the undervalued :target selector to put the selected list of "statistics" at the top of the view index. Lastly, it hooks into semantic markup underneath (this could have been done dynamically with JavaScript) that's perfectly accessible to screen readers and search engines without a single shred of dedicated effort.
The biggest problem I had to overcome was the fact that, visually, there's only four elements that animate around, but in reality, I'm showing 16 elements. In order to make them transition seamlessly from one into the other, I ended up positioning all 16 elements according to the four visible positions, for each of the four states. The 12 elements not shown are set to a very low opacity, and only the needed elements become opaque while the previously shown set transitions into transparency again. This solution works just fine, although it did highlight some tiny performance issues in WebKit's animation engine. Minutiae, really, but noticeable to the keen observer.
An annoying but inevitable consequence of doing this without JavaScript is that the :target selector prevents me from changing the not-targeted elements around as desired. Since this is merely an experiment in CSS, I'm okay with it.
Here is a screencast of the CSS infograph in action in Safari 3.1, in all its glory:
I've also put up a set of screenshots of the CSS Infograph on my Flickr, showing its rendering in other browsers. Of particular interest is Google Chrome's rendering of it; Chrome supports CSS Transitions as the only non-Safari (but still Webkit) public release browser, but because their graphics engine is still in relatively early stages of developments, the final result in Chrome is, well, abysmal.
Last night the WebKit team formally announced SquirrelFish Extreme, the next generation of their new bytecode JavaScript engine. A key phrase I want to highlight:
As you can see, SquirrelFish Extreme as of today is nearly twice as fast as the original SquirrelFish, and over 10 times the speed you saw in Safari 3.0, less than a year ago. We are pretty pleased with this improvement, but we believe there is more performance still to come.
The trend in the field of Web Browsers today is very clear: JavaScript performance has surpassed security, and for two very good reasons. First, the Web is becoming more and more of anapplication medium than a document presentation medium. We no longer just absorb information from the Web, we interact with sites in increasingly task-heavy ways. Second, with the advent of the iPhone and Google's upcoming Android platform, mobile web browsing is no longer a feature for business people with Blackberries, it is something used by Regular Joe on the street. But mobile devices don't quite pack the computing power of our desktop or laptop computers, so even just to deal with all the existing JavaScript out there on the Web today browsers need to deliver the best performance possible.
WebKit, with SquirrelFish Extreme, has jumped back in the lead among browsers and it'll only be a matter of time before we see the next jump ahead. Some more benchmarks and comparisons to other browsers are available on Cameron Zwarich's blog and on Charles Ying's blog.
Canon has announced their 5D successor, the 5D mark II. Key features include: full 1080p HD movie recording, live view, increased battery capacity and more. However, note that the full 1080p HD movie recording is limited to 12 minutes, and in 640x480 resolution it's limited to 24 minutes. Some of the other feature improvements are good (if not long overdue), others are simply baffling. Or, as a photographer friend of mine put it, "it feels like the marketing department took over for this upgrade."
If this is Canon's answer to Nikon's improvements with the D300, D700 and D90, I feel all the more justified in having switched from Canon to Nikon recently.
Microsoft recently started airing new ads featuring Bill Gates and, in a perhaps somewhat curious twist, Jerry Seinfeld. Curious because Seinfeld was a Mac user on his show, but I guess if Apple can put a Mac user on TV as "PC", Microsoft feels they can (or should) do something similar.
However, when the first ad started airing my initial thought to it was, in less subtle and more colorful terms: "what on Earth is this supposed to say?" The message of the ad was essentially lost on me.
People discussed this premise back and forth; reportedly the purpose of the first ad was simply to set the stage of Bill and Jerry running into each other and hanging out. It started the narrative, if you will.
This seems very plausible when you watch the second ad, wherein Bill and Jerry stay over with a family in a somewhat stereotypical American suburb area. Much to my surprise (the first ad didn't exactly raise my expectations) I actually quite liked the second ad. I thought it was funny, clever, and felt that it continued that narrative pretty well from the first ad.
Mostly though, it felt sincere and humble. I may need to repeat that for some of you so that you know I'm not kidding here: the latest Microsoft advertisement felt sincere and humble.
Fancy that.
The essence of the ad eventually dawned on me after I gave it some thought1 and realized that the take-away message of the ad was that Bill and Jerry had grown woefully out of touch with the average consumer and that "they" were now on a mission to get back in touch with people. It resonated with me. Not that I could tell you why, but it did.
That is, after I gave it all some thought.
The problem with that is that I was actively willing to spend time on figuring out what Microsoft was trying to say with the ad, something that noteveryone is willing to do. And I don't blame them one bit; after all, why should we be expected to dedicate time and energy to figure out what a company is trying to tell us in their advertisement? Isn't the point of advertising that it tells you straight up what to think, so that you don't have to anymore?
Without a doubt, part of Microsoft's plan with these ads was to generate buzz and get people talking. I'm okay with that. I just wonder if that's all they're going for or if this new direction is truly something they're hoping to achieve.
Put in different terms, I wonder if Microsoft is only putting in an effort to get back in touch with consumers via their ads, or if they're truly and honestly planning to improve their products to make them more consumer-friendly. Without that second half of the story, these ads are nothing more than the proverbial lipstick on a pig. Consumers don't win from that, and in the long run, neither will Microsoft.
Update: Simone Manganelli correctly points out that if Microsoft were truly dedicated to making their products more consumer-friendly, doing just that should have been the first step to take, with this Bill-and-Jerry marketing campaign running after the release of such improved products, not the other way around. This is an excellent point that I completely glossed over.
This is where alarm bells should be ringing in your mind. ↵
“Until you spread your wings, you'll have no idea how far you can fly." — Source unknown
Sometimes the best way to do something is the exact opposite of what you've thought was the right way to do it. That's essentially what happened here, but I should take a step back and give you, dear reader to this brand new blog, some direly-needed contextual information.
My name is Faruk Ateş, I am a web developer by profession, a writer and photographer by passion and a 25-year-old half-Dutch, half-Turkish male by nature—literally. Between 2004 and 2007, I ran a website on web development best practices and programming over on kurafire.net. It was a site I had designed myself, I'd created both front– and back-end myself, and I wrote all of its content. To the extent that a website can, KuraFire.net defined me as a person in every way.
I list these things not to show off or to brag, I list them because there is a fundamentally important link between how I created that website and who I am as a person. Also, why I created the site, but that is of lesser relevance right now.
Being a passionate programmer, web developer and advocate of web standards and best practices — as well as a little OCD — I felt compelled to make sure that every individual piece, every component of the website, lived up to my tenaciously high standards.
What that really means is that I was a control freak about my site and my content.
Moving on, in 2007 I effectively laid the site to rest because of a job change and a variety of technical and personal reasons I won't bother you with. I had planned, and still do, to create a new version of my site based on a new back-end framework I had discovered: Django. What has kept me from doing so is a combination of 1) technical reasons with regards to Django and finding a good Django-friendly webhost (although that has changed in recent times), 2) a long-lasting indecision on coming up with a new design that I was happy with and 3) lack of time.
Unfortunately for me, I was getting itchy fingers and, especially in the past few months, I felt the urge to write again get stronger and stronger. Alas, I had no platform to speak on and for some of the things I wanted to write, having a platform was not just important; it was the reason for the writing in the first place.
For months I was stuck in this catch-22 where I was either uninspired or had no time to work on furthering my new design and site, or I was inspired but it made me want to write, and not code or design. Either way, I wasn't interested in using a ready-made blogging system to get a site going — I'd tried them before and never liked their limitations, interfaces etc.
So what's changed? After all, you're reading this on a Wordpress-powered blog with a nearly untouched theme; clearly something convinced me to stop waiting until I had my own site designed, built and ready to go, and just go ahead and write a blog again, using a pre-made solution. What was it that convinced me?
Peer pressure. The good kind, anyway.
At a small social event in San Francisco last Tuesday, four of my friends and coworkers strongly — very strongly — encouraged me to get back to blogging again. I pointed out that I wanted to write my own back-end and create my own design first, but they wouldn't have any of it. They were very persistent in getting their point across to me.
This post is evidence that I listened.
What I eventually realized that night was that my desire for control was a blessing but also a curse. A blessing in that it has forced me to learn all about the finer details of web development excellence, leaving me with a somewhat respectable amount of knowledge in the field; a curse in that it has kept me from spreading my wings fully and dedicating the times I had something to say, or the times I was simply inspired to write, to actual productive writing.
In addition to that, a few events in my personal life also helped convince me to forego my desire for full control, and live my life a little more on edge, a little riskier you might say—personally, I'm just calling it a little healthier.
So here I am, facing a brand new beginning once more. I'm excited, but not enough to warrant an exclamation mark. It's a subdued excitement mixed with anticipation of much greater excitement to come as I get my writing groove back.
Over the coming weeks I will write a bit more about myself and elaborate on that "once more" in full, as there's a bit of a story to be told there. After that, I plan on writing mostly — but never limited to — about my greater passions in life: web design & development; photography; writing and storytelling; social networks, and businesses trying to figure out this fandangled new thing called The Internet. Because many of them treat it like it really is a brand new concept to them—unfortunately for all of us.
On a closing note, I want to stress that this site is currently heavily under development! There are tons of changing coming in the weeks and months ahead, with pieces of the design shuffling around or changing entirely, content and organizational changes and so much more. I'll keep you updated every time something significant changes, especially if it may disorient you as a returning visitor. I'd put a big "Beta" label somewhere if I were a Web 2.0 company, but since I'm just a guy with things to share in written form, I'm going to ignore that one.
As for you, dear reader, I hope you'll enjoy my writing as this blog evolves, and I look forward to hearing from you from time to time.