23rd World

The newly released Google Doctype is intended to be the Wikipedia of web design. There’s a video introduction on the landing page of Mark Pilgrim explaining what Google has been internally calling the the “Hitch Hikers Guide to the Web”. He’s been working on Google Doctype, said it is supposed to be the cross-platform alternative to MSDN. MSDN? I don’t know any web designers that rely on MSDN as the go-to spot for quality cross-platform client-side code! Maybe they’re targeting ASP.NET developers…and that could explain the very un-wiki linear treestyle navigation.

The Good

My own private wiki, largely comprised of web development documentation for my own projects, code snippits and links to online resources, is invaluable to me - so the potential benefits of an open wiki of this nature is obvious and I’ve often wondered why there isn’t one (with critical mass) out there already. Certainly this project, or at least the idea of it, could be an invaluable tool to professional web designers and client-side developers. Some take-aways:

• “Written by web developers, for web developers” and by that they mean client-side developers…most of the current content is specific to JavaScript DOM stuff and cross-browser CSS considerations. I think this fills a knowledge gap as a lot of CSS and even Ajax resources are designer-oriented (lacking meaty technical details) and many developer resources gloss over or ignore web standards or a lot of the details professional programmers take for granted (like finding a viewport or using javascript to manipulate classes)
• It’s built on the Google Project framework so you can download the whole thing via SVN.
• The licensing is pretty unrestrictive, so you could SVN everything and put it up on an intranet statically or keep an off line copy, as was mentioned in the intro video.
• Discrete code snippets. Rather than a long tutorial with examples that are specific to a given situation, many of the HOWTOs are broken down into more abstracted uses. This style of documentation will help a lot when your stuck on specific area of a bigger project. Personally, I learn more this way - I like the big step-by-step tutorials but when I cut and paste a lot I don’t retain very much.

The Ugly

Google suffers from chronic ugliness (IMHO) and this project is no exception. Don’t get me wrong, I’m GOOG fangirl all the way, but there always seems to be some basic user interface and user experience problems with their apps/portals/projects/whatever. And here’s where I think Google Doctype has need of improvement:

• No indication of off-site links. Not only does a link to MSDN look just like the internal links, there are links to other Google Code project without any indications that you’re leaving Google Doctype, in fact, the logo is still Google Code. Navigation is a little confusing in general.
• Lack of Style Guidelines. There is something to “just putting it out there” and I’m glad they did, but if a lot of people do start adding to this resource it could turn into quite a mess. It would have been ideal to have a written style established that would make sense for an open wiki. For example, statements like “generally, we recommend the following…” and “I’m not sure if this works on IE”. This type of thing would never fly on Wikipedia - now that the docs are open to the whole internets, such statements are ambiguous, lack authority and create a bad example that others are sure to follow.
• Not really a wiki. First there’s the linear tree/node navigation pane (which seems to collapse by itself and disappear or reappear for no apparent reason) . There is no discussion page (although there are comments, sort of like PHP.net), no page history (but you can manually add a free-form line to a log file, if you notice the option), there’s no obvious way to check to see what links to a page, the list goes on.
• Screaming “Fork Me”. A fork may be inevitable, and if a fork emerges using MediaWiki or any of a myriad of much more robust wiki platforms, I would be more likely to invest my time in that in spite of the Google mind share.

A Web Reference To Rule Them All

When I first read that Google published a web design wiki I was thrilled. I tried to think of other, similar resources. There are some great blogs, lists and forums out there but I’ve yet to find the one web reference to rule them all. If you know of one, please let me know! In the meantime I’m looking for domains…webwiki.com is just a db error, webwiki.net is a half-baked attempt at a wiki version of the Million Dollar Homepage. Hrm. If I come up with a load of extra time and a brilliant idea I will let you know. In the mean time, here are a few of my favorite web coder sites:

• W3C.org - start at the top, right?
• HTML Dog - very well organized reference and tutorials for CSS and (x)HTML
• A List Apart - high quality articles published by those web standards freaks at Happy Cog.

Excellent news for web designers…there’s just one sitemap standard to worry about for all the major search engines. Google, Yahoo and Microsoft agreed, this bears repeating, agreed to use the same Sitemaps protocol to index sites around the web.  Visit sitemaps.org to learn how to create an XML file that tells spiders where to go and what has changed. If you’ve already been using Google sitemaps, it’s the same protocol.

Read more on TechCrunch.

I’ve been doing a lot of .NET tutorials but hadn’t yet applied much to the real world. The one .NET app I’ve done for work so far was largely designed to the constraints of my experience, unfortunately. I was curious to see how difficult it would be to design a dynamic ASPX page that lived up to my usual standards - aesthetically, usability-wise and functionally. In this case, I wanted to add a summary table of all the data collected from a web form that was written in classic ASP, XHTML/CSS and Javascript.

Easier than I thought! I created a “new website” in the location of the old asp pages, Visual Studio automatically adds server extensions (an isolated app pool) and, though VS actually warned me, I had to manually set the directory to use ASP.NET 2.0 framework. The solution explorer view automatically included all of the content in the website project. I created a new web form page, copied the framework xhtml from another page in the directory (sans ASP) by viewing the source in a browser (there were a lot of logic loops so it was much easier this way), fixed a couple small errors that VS 2005’s intellisense picked up right away, and then went into design view - dropped an Access (OLEDB) datasource and a datagrid to consume it on the page, configured that, added CSS classes to make it pretty, and walah! I couldn’t flippin believe it
It’s so easy to expose database data and include paging and sorting automatically. That’s the power of the datagrid - displaying data from a database in ASP is no big deal (once you’ve worked out security issues and connection strings in your environment) but extra things like paging and sorting, while certainly doable, are no where near as easy. What surprised me the most, other than the shocking ease of creating a more or less XHTML compliant page using asp.net datacontrols, was how nice Visual Studio 2005 was as a general editor for old ASP pages and CSS files.

It was timely coincidence that an article called Microsoft Visual Studio 2005: Productivity Study appeared on the top of the article stack that is presented to you on opening VS 2005. The article had a big callout stating:

ASP.NET 2.0 developers accomplished 113% more tasks in the same amount of time as ASP developers; ASP.NET 2.0 developers created web content pages up to 357% faster than ASP developers.

I actually thought the first number was low, if in fact they were using experienced .NET developers, as so much is automated, you have a full programming language to use and a plethora of built-in objects to leverage. But then the article continued:

The approach to this study was to recruit experienced developers in each of the development disciplines, ASP and ASP.NET 2.0. This resulted in two equal-sized developer groups, four developers in each group.

And then I stopped reading. I mean, why bother? A total of 8 developers made up their test case? WTF?! This is a pseudoscientific approach that is more like a raffle than a real study you can actually derive meaning from.

From my personal and to date, somewhat limited, perspective - I think it’s the paradigm shift and learning curve that makes new developers (like me) slow as molasses on .NET. There are a lot of developers who are really comfy in classic ASP and having gone from PHP to ASP for work, I can say it’s much easier than going to .NET…initially.

Once a developer has a good grasp on OOP and resources available in .NET framework I would guess the numbers are likely more disparate. Throw in a few different types of programming challenges, a larger test case, and make sure to include some projects the devs don’t already know how to do…then you start to see how much more (or less) developing in .NET is. I would like to read that report when and if it becomes available.

Web Design is not what it used to be. It’s now a sort of nebulous term that encompasses a LOT of technologies. No matter what sort of sites you plan on designing, I feel there’s no substition for a good understanding of standards-compliant xhtml and css. Of course, it helps if you know some graphics programs too, like Photoshop or the cheaper alternative, Paintshop Pro. Notice I didn’t mention any web design programs…well, I said learn web design not make a website real quick and dirty like.

Here’s some of my advice under ‘Learn Web Design‘ at 43things…a place where people tag, discuss and connect about things they’ve done and would like to do.

Getting started.
A word on web standards.

Well, obviously, you first have to have a website that generates over 2 terabytes of traffic a day. Then, you have to have an old and/or poorly designed website, preferably with lots of nested HTML tables for display or over-use of Flash. The answer: Web Standards Redesign.  While most people don’t have the luxury/problem of that much traffic, the fact that switching to web standardards saved ESPN.com 2,000 gigs a day speaks volumes about the advantages of building with webstandards.  So now we standards-luvin’ designers have a large-scale, explicit, metrics-driven example to tell the accountants…there’s no guarantee it will similarly affect fancy visual gadget loving flash-addicts.

Read Interview: The ESPN.com Redesign.

I just finished reading the Selectutorial. (Actually, I’ve read it before but my CSS skills were not developed enough at the time to make any of it relevant enough to me to remember.) I must say, now that I fully understand it, it’s an different sort of excercise in frustration. Why? There are a lot of really, really useful CSS selectors that can’t be used. At least, not on a client’s site. With every new selector my excitement would build, until the summary: "…not supported by Windows Internet Explorer 5, 5.5 and 6, but are supported by most other standards-compliant browsers."

Think child selectors, adjacent sibling selectors, attribute selectors and the :before and :after pseudo-classes are just for CSS geeks? They could be regular part of your web-design diet, simplifying things like adjusting spacing conditionally depending on whether an element is right next to another. I could have used the attribute selectors to make only my little ‘off-site link’ images inline for a recent site instead of applying a class in the structural code to every freggin image tag!

It’s a shame that the worlds richest software company, fueled with hiring power and a presumably very well-educated and/or skilled workforce can’t make their browser standards compliant. If it wasn’t for Internet Explorer’s bad but predominant browser, things could be so much more efficient for everyone. Though I’ve applauded the relative dissapearance of "This site is best viewed in…" statement, I think I would now welcome "Best viewed in a standards compliant browser (Internet Explorer, try Firefox ).

chosun.com reported yesterday that Samsun is planning to release monitors for the color blind:

Samsung announced … it is developing liquid crystal display (LCD) monitors that support color correction technology for people with dyschromatopsia or color blindness and will launch them in the first half of the year. People with dyschromatopsia have difficulty telling differences in color and need stronger stimuli than the normally sighted.

This is great news, not just for those with visual impairments, but for web developers, web site owners and in fact for anyone who develops a product to be viewed onscreen. With the advent of web standards and separation of display and content through proper use of CSS and XHTML great strides have already been made in making the web a more accessible place. The fact that search engine spiders are basically ‘blind’ users, is a major incentive as well. Unfortunately, considerations for those with less extreme visual impairments have been little implemented, though some tools do exist for developing web sites with that in mind, such as VisCheck.

Although at first this upcoming technology may only be available to those with a certain income level, it is still a major step in allowing more access to more content to more people and a comes as a great relief to designers who would like to design with a few fewer restrictions.

If you would like to know more about designing for accessibility, I highly recommend diveintoaccessibility.org. It should be required reading for anyone given publishing rights on any web server!