brvty++ ?
by admin on May 19, 2012
Discussion. Responsive images. Picture too much? Srcset weird syntax? Brevity argument. Typing hard. People lazy. Let’s go shopping?
In other, more human, words: in the wake of the current discussion about responsive images and solutions using a picture element or the srcset attribute I came across an argument that always annoys me. And I fear that the more we use that argument the more we alienate ourselves from what the web is and how it became what it is now.
It is the argument for brevity in code above everything, especially markup. Shorter is better as it means people can type more and faster and there is less opportunity for doing things wrong. I call shenanigans on this.
XHTML’s failure was not the amount of code
The argument is based on the assumption that XHTML failed because it was far too much to type and too much work. HTML5 is considered superior as we only type what we need and we can even omit a lot of “optional” code as browsers are superb and will fix our omissions for us. We write much less and it still works. We call this pragmatism. Except it isn’t. It is laziness and the arrogant assumption that we write code for browsers to execute instead of people to read.
XHTML did not fail because of the amount of things you had to write. It failed because of the redundant things you had to write, its over-complexity and that it wasn’t supported the way it was meant to in the most used browser at the time.
And even that wasn’t the issue as nobody wrote all these overly complex constructs by hand – we have editors, templates and snippets for that. Code autocompletion is quite common. We were happy adding truckloads of Object/Embed code for movies until video came around and we never typed any of that by hand. We had tools for that.
Be productively lazy
Good developers are lazy in the sense that they don’t want to repeat themselves. Instead of doing the same boring and tedious task over and over again by hand we write a script to do it for us. This is what programming is for: allow humans to do better things than the repetitive tasks computers were made for.
If you write a lot of code and it never gets used that is frustrating. Very much so. It is also pointless work. However, the mistakes of XHTML should not push us into the other extreme of writing code for computers instead of writing code that executes and is easy to understand for people who want to learn or people who will have to maintain what we wrote.
Markup is different to other code
I love markup. I love the idea of – get this – marking up a document. Adding those funky bracket things around text and URLs is not about shifting bytes, accessing a chipset or setting an interrupt. They are there to give meaning to the texts and to the URLs they contain.
Think of them as highlighting texts with a marker and writing lots of explanations in the margins explaining the meaning of the highlighted texts. Think of them as the little booklet you get with Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar explaining to you what political, social or historical tidbits the author talks about that you would never get as you don’t live in that time.
Good markup brings meaning to text. Don’t take that away from the web for the sake of brevity and technical use cases that are possibly very short-lived.
The web we all work in right now isn’t the result of writing very clever and beautiful code nor is it the result of squeezing the last byte out of our documents to make them work perfect in a certain environment. Most of the atomic micro-optimisations and performance testing and tweaking we do can be undone by a single, badly coached and still well-meaning maintainer.
The web is easy to get into – let’s start with a clean slate
The web we have right now is the result of it being the most accessible media out there. You wouldn’t know how to put your photo and a big heading with your name in the newspaper or TV. But you can learn in a few minutes flat how to write a:
<!DOCTYPE html> <html lang="en"> <head> <meta charset="UTF-8"> <title>Chris' page</title> </head> <body> <h1>Chris rules!</h1> <img src="http://example.com/chris.jpg" alt="Photo of Chris" title="that's me, that is"> </body> </html>
Why the doctype, the head, the charset definition and the body? Surely the browser will do that for us?
Because the code above should be the result of someone caring about the web telling you that:
- The doctype ensures predictability in displaying your page
- Defining the language means search engines have it easier to index the page and blind users don’t suffer hearing text pronounced in a different language
- The UTF-8 means that if you need international characters they will show up instead of rectangles or question marks and
- The head and body makes a clear distinction where your visible content and the instructions for the browser go.
All of this can be violated with intelligent and amazing tricks and still be valid HTML5 and cool. I am quite sure that a few people twitched at the last point and disagreed as you can style title to be visible and scripts can go in the body and there are use cases for inline styles and so on.
The point though is that none of the above hurts a web developer to write and all of it has a purpose. A structure like that makes it easier for people to learn the basics of what we do. It makes our work predictable, clean, maintainable and – at least to me – professional workmanship instead of crazy and cool geek stuff. We get tied up in the latter and one-up each other showing just what is possible and we forget that people are watching and don’t spend the time to learn the basics. Case in point? The excellent learning resource Codecademy lately added a HTML 101 course, omitting the doctype and alternative text for images in the first steps. We start to see teaching as “showing the quickest way” rather than “showing the cleanest way that explains and yields results”.
We value instant gratification over working for achieving a goal. And the gratification you feel when you achieve something you had to work for lasts longer and feels better than the fast variant. This includes making mistakes and learning from them. Giving people an environment that is incredibly forgiving as the first barrier to entry doesn’t help people grow or reach the goal on their own terms.
Fostering a new generation of webmakers
At Mozilla we have a very interesting thing going: we set a goal for ourselves to foster a community of web makers. We do workshops with journalists on how to use the web as a platform for news and entertainment. We show Popcorn as a way to produce news items that can be maintained without re-shooting. We talk to children and find playful ways to get them into making the web rather than ploughing through apps buying them, playing them for a day or so and discarding them to buy the next one. For this, we use markup and a live editor in the browser. Check out the web arcade to see what I mean.
The next generation of people coming into our market should not be virtual couch potatoes who want everything to work magically and discard it when it breaks or gets slow. Tinkering with the web is what got us where we are. Playing with the open technologies and learning from what others did made us the developers we are now. The next generation should be allowed to feel the same excitement about making that we feel now.
Be brief, but stay comprehensible
Writing not much to achieve something isn’t cool. Writing the least amount possible, getting your message across and making it easy for others to build on what you did is. It means you are free to do other, better, and – for you – much more interesting things.
Let’s focus on tools instead of muddling the basics
If you really want people to write less and achieve more, help improve and build tools for creating in a way that shortens the distance between creation and seeing the result. There is a lot of exciting work being done in this field and we need something for those who don’t want to write code. As people in the know we scoff at the Dreamweavers out there, but it is also our fault when bad code ends up on the web as we were too arrogant to help those who simply want to get their content onto the web.
Juicebox Lite – Free HTML5 Image Gallery (With A Desktop Builder)
by admin on May 19, 2012
Image galleries are part of almost any website around whether it is about displaying the portfolio, products or personal albums,we simply use them a lot.
Juicebox Lite is a free-to-use (branded) and HTML5-powered image gallery for creating good-looking galleries very easily.
Galleries build with it works everywhere; desktop, tablet or mobile and handles different screen sizes well (responsive).
Images can be browsed either with keyboard, mouse or touch (swipes) and they can be viewed in full-screen.
There is an -optional- control bar which is shown on hover and allows us to view/hide thumbnails, switch to full-screen mode or load only the image file displayed.
Juicebox Lite has a unique feature: a cross-platform (Adobe AIR-based) desktop gallery builder.
The "Builder" is perfect for creating the galleries with no coding. Drag 'n' drop the files to it, thumbnails are automatically created, preview your gallery and the HTML-CSS-JS is generated instantly. Afterwards, if you wish, you can manipulate the code.
That's not all. Besides displaying local images, it can use Flickr as the source too. Just define the Flickr user and tags you want and you get a Flickr gallery.
P.S. There is also a "Pro" Juicebox version which is not branded and comes with more configuration options, support for audio/uto-play/watermarking/unlimişted images and a JavaScript API to control the gallery as you wish.
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Infragistics jQuery Controls – Impressive & Professional jQuery Toolset
by admin on May 17, 2012
There are lots of jQuery plugins around that handle specific tasks and, for JavaScript-heavy apps, we may end up in using many of them.
Working with such many different resources at the same project is sometimes hard and can be time consuming as they all have their way of coding, different APIs, styling support…
Infragistics, a creative company focused on building user interface development tools, has a professional and complete jQuery Toolset that solves many JavaScript-related tasks beautifully.
The toolset is HTML5-powered and works cross-browser/platform with support for mobile + all of them are optimized for high performance.
What is inside?
Charts
First of all, it has a full-featured charting library with support for 15+ chart types (pie, bar, line, area, bubble, radial) where they can be used side-by-side too.
Charts are interactive, they can respond to events like hover or click and can be zoomed to better see a specific range.
Grid
The Infragistics jQuery Grid is definitely one of the most flexible grids around.
It has all the features expected like pagination, sorting, filtering or search. But, there is more like the ability to rearranging columns by drag 'n' dropping or even hiding them, displaying lengthy data inside tooltips and hierarchical views (grids inside grids). Simply, it is pretty powerful.
WYSIWYG Editor
A complete HTML(5) editor with formatting capabilities, inserting/managing tables/images/links/lists, source view and clipboard support (cut, copy, paste).
HTML5 Video Player
The player uses the HTML5 video tag to play streaming video in major formats including WebM, Ogg Theora and H.264.
Videos can be viewed in full-screen mode, a detailed control bar exists for managing the video and any part of the videos can be bookmarked for sharing a specific second of the content.
The others
Are these all? Definitely not. There are also:
- slick tree control with unlimited sub-levels (nodes are searchable)
- date picker
- mapping control (for easily integrating maps and interacting with them)
- specific data type editors (masked inputs, spin-buttoned number entry, currency handlings, etc.)
- star ratings
- listbox (with filtering)
- modal boxes
- templating engine
And, thee is a handy DataSource component which is the core behind data operations and manipulation. It allows us to feed any component with formats like oData, WCF, RESTful Domain Data Sources, JSON, XML (with and without namespaces), local arrays or pre-existing static HTML tables.
Conclusion
Infragistics jQuery Controls certainly bring a lot to the table. Not only they are high-quality but also consistent which means each item inside works with similar principles (which is a real time saver).
They can be themed with ThemeRoller. Theme once and all of them are changed (again a real time saver).
Also, there is quick, professional support which is again good to ensure that you'll get a working product.
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HTML5 adaptive images: end of round one
by admin on May 17, 2012
After The Great Vendor Prefix Hullaballoo of April 2012 comes The Great Responsive Images Brouhaha of May 2012.
Adaptive images are the next unsolved mystery of Responsive Web Design. Do you send large high-res images suitable for retina dispays, which are scaled down on smaller, lower res devices and which therefore waste bandwidth? Or do you send low-res images, whch look grotty when scaled up to large screens or high-res displays? Authors have had to rely on elaborate hacks to send different content images (that is <img> in HTML rather than CSS background images) to different types of devices.
By November 2011, I was so frustrated that no specification body was considering the problem that I proposed a strawman <picture> element that re-used the mechanism of HTML5 <video> with its media queries to swap in different source files:
<picture alt="angry pirate">
<source src=hires.png media="min-width:800px">
<source src=midres.png media="min-width:480px">
<source src=lores.png>
<!-- fallback for browsers without support -->
<img src=midres.png alt="angry pirate">
</picture>
Around the same time, others independently came to the same idea and were advised to set up a W3C community group to discuss it which they did. However, in January, the HTML5 editor, Ian Hickson, had said
What’s the use case for doing it for images in <img> elements? Typically <img> elements are for content images, where you don’t usually want to adapt anything.
Those web authors in the W3C Resposive Images Community Group soldiered on in frustration that they were they being ignored because the problem itself wasn’t seen as a problem. Then this week, Edward O’Connor of Apple suggested another method, using a new srcset attribute on the <img> element. This complemented a similar suggestion of his from February for img-set in CSS that is already being added to WebKit:
<img src="foo-lores.jpg"
srcset="foo-hires.jpg 2x, foo-superduperhires.jpg 6.5x"
alt="decent alt text for foo.">The numbers “2″ and “6.5x” tell the browser the relative resolutions; foo-hires.jpg is 2x the resolution of foo-lores.jpg.
Only a few days later, a variant of Apple’s suggestion was added to the spec.
There are two major differences between <picture> and srcset. The most obvious is that srcset uses the <img> element, which is great because that’s the natural place for images, adaptive or not. (You can’t re-use the <video> + <source> pattern with <img> because it is an empty element so can’t have child elements. O’Connor’s solution uses attributes, which are fine.)
The other major difference is that it doesn’t use Media Queries. With Media Queries, the author is reponsible for thinking up every permuations of viewport size, orientation, dpi, colour depth, aspect ratio and the like, deciding how to cater for them (if at all), identifing the breakpoints and coding them up. This requires a lot of consideration by the author, and makes for verbose code; a page with 20 pictures, each with 5 Media Queries on 5 <source> elements quickly becomes a lot of code.
O’Connor wrote
Why provide a scale factor and not a media query? Well, media queries are claims about UA state, whereas here we’re asserting something about the relationship between the image assets. Also, User Agents should be free to use whichever asset they deem best suited to their current situation, taking into account not just “media-queriable things” like device resolution but also any scaling applied to the <img> with CSS, its width=”” and height=”” attributes, or even things like the current page zoom level.
I have a lot of sympathy with allowing the browser to make decisions about what it knows of the environment (network speed, latency, pixel density, orientation) to choose the best image for the job. The idea is that the author shouldn’t be expected to anticipate and cater for all those variables. What she can do is describe the things she knows about -the images, their size and pixel density- and the browser will make its choice.
That way, when we’re all living in space and looking a 3D holograms, the proximity to a black hole can be detected by the iDroid3000 device (black holes notoriously cause Web hologram negative timespace inversions) and the right image chosen; we don’t need to invent new media queries for event horizon proximity and retrospectively add it to our websites.
There are two problems with the srcset suggestion. The first is highly subjective, but many feel the same: as it exists in the current, first draft of the spec, the syntax is revolting:
<img src="face-600-200-at-1.jpeg" alt=""
srcset="face-600-200-at-1.jpeg 600w 200h 1x,
face-600-200-at-2.jpeg 600w 200h 2x,
face-icon.png 200w 200h">Of course, this can be improved, and must be. This isn’t just about aesthetics. If the syntax is too weird, it will be used wrongly. As Dr Remy wrote, “Good to see authors have another microsyntax to learn. It’s not like they had any trouble with vendor-prefixes.”
The second problem is that authors don’t want to relinquish control. There are questions of art direction (see the section headed Do I care about art direction?), and many remain unconvinced that the Apple suggestion addresses that; proponents of srcset are convinced that it does address those use cases.
Debate continues, with a full and frank exchange of views. There are understandably hurt feelings, too, because some of those who laboured in the Community Group feel that their wishes and work have been ignored.
As one of those who proposed <picture>, I have a degree of attachment to it. That’s ego. (In fact, I’d be delighted if it were called the <yayBruce> element, but I’m resigned to the unfairness of life.) But I don’t really care which syntax makes the spec, as long as it addresses the majority of use cases and it is usable by authors. I’m just glad we’re discussing the adaptive image problem at all.
So, get involved. Read the discussions and say your piece. And once the dust has settled and the specification is looking stable, we Doctors will write up our diagnosis.
Related Posts:
HTML5 adaptive images: end of round one originally appeared on HTML5 Doctor on May 16, 2012.
New Chrome version + CSS property name change
by admin on May 17, 2012
Chrome 19 was released yesterday, now with support for the CSS calc() construct.
Other recent news include the renaming of the CSS word-wrap property to overflow-wrap, which is currently not supported by any browser (though word-wrap is still allowed by browsers for legacy support).
CoffeePhysics
by admin on May 17, 2012
To hell with browser wars panels
by admin on May 13, 2012
Summary: Browser War panels have become predictable and non-informative. Instead they are there to entertain the audience but cause much more drama than good.
I go to a lot of conferences. I organised events, a conference and a few unconferences and I spoke at a lot of them. Lately I also stepped back a bit to coach people to speak instead of me going everywhere.
I think conferences should do a few things: educate, entertain, allow people to network and make speakers and experts available to attendees.
You don’t need to go to conferences to learn things – all the information is on the internet and signing up to a few good feeds, groups and lists will get you all the info you want.
What conferences do is bring the human factor into it. A good speaker can make a topic come to life and show you an angle you had not thought about and inspire you to play with it. A good workshop gives you guidance how to use a technology and gives you a way in without being overwhelmed by a big scary topic. A conference gives you time out from the day to day delivery and allows you to do things that are not yet on the radar of your company but might be soon.
And then there are “browser war panels”. The original premise of the browser war panels was that an audience could hear the latest and coolest about different browsers and ask questions. The first ones were held at Yahoo and had lead engineers from the different browsers to show how the different products work as that was dark magic back then.
HTML5 defines how a browser should deal with the content it gets – we have a lot more predictability already in the standard. A lot of great information on this topic is out on the web and the accelerated speed of delivery of browsers makes the appearance of platform engineers not happening much. There is no need to repeat the standards, instead the discussions are much more about what makes which browser stand out and in a lot of cases this means what the company wants to promote – not what developers want to use now and get stuck as it doesn’t work.
Browser panels these days get people from companies who are either product evangelists of the browsers or general tech evangelists, advocates, or – in the worst case – sales people. This could be good, they can point out features that are in the browsers people don’t know about and they can show some of the plans for the future of the browser. It can also be awful. As browsers are interesting to the media out of a sudden you see a lot of patterns being followed. Instead of giving information about the browsers, dealing with concerns of developers and implementers or showing changes panelists begin to fall into predefined roles and repeat the messages of the companies they represent.
It becomes predictable to see which company representative will value speed over everything else, which one will praise a great experience in the browser as part of a bigger OS experience, which one will talk about following standards and complain about sites blocking out browsers and which one will point out that the browser is the choice of the user and should keep them in control by being open about everything whilst following standards.
The bigger focus on browsers we have these days makes a panel much less of an educational part of the conference (many a time you will get “I have to go back to the engineering team for this”) but pushes it into the entertainment part of a conference. It is a veiled sales pitch.
Everybody loves a good drama. You could go as far as saying that we have a whole tech journalism market that lives on drama. It is fun to see people disagree on topics and make good arguments about one side or another.
A quite open, unscripted and unplanned format like a panel makes for great drama. It is easy to take potshots at each other and score browny points with the audience with pointing out flaws of the other browsers in a glib fashion. It also gives browny points with the audience to make sweeping statements or deliver soundbites.
Soundbites, being witty and fast are becoming the most important part. If you look at the Twitter stream of a browser panel you will hardly ever find a “oh feature $x will ship in browser $y – so cool” but you will get more “$x of browser $y just called $z out on the $a issue”.
Soundbites are also loved by the press. And as drama brings headlines many a time you will find a sarcastic remark or glib retort show up as “Company representative $x said $y about the competition”. A quick shot to get a giggle out of the audience can cause the communications team of a company to get a lot of unnecessary work. Is that worth it?
I’ve even been on panels where the organisers deliberately asked panelists to find topics to disagree on or seen panel moderators throw out one loaded question after another to entice people to disagree and get the drama going. We call this trolling or baiting, and not a way for conference participants to learn about what is going on in the browser world.
It is not hard to find what is going on in the browser world when you look at the open source engines. You hear much less about the closed ones and to me a panel that has no participant of Apple on it is not a “browser wars” panel as it lacks a massive player who should answer quite a few questions web developers have.
There are exceptions. I thoroughly enjoyed being on the panel at State of the Browser 2 in London and I think as there were no egos and no artificial drama we managed to answer quite a few questions from the audience. But on the whole, these are few and far between and many a “Browser Wars” panel is entertainment and cheap laughs or “wow, did he just say that” moments.
This, in the long run, is not fair to the audience who paid good money (and should get real comedians or entertainers if entertainment is the goal), it is not fair to the platform engineers (as they are misrepresented instead of allowing people to peek under the hood with them) and it does not get us anywhere in the real “browser wars”.
As developers you should not be tempted to build for one browser only and you should not have to build different versions for different browsers. Keeping it all about drama and who shouts the loudest and comes across as most witty doesn’t make that happen. It is a waste of time.
Automated Filler Content For Web Documents: Fixie.js
by admin on May 11, 2012
When working on a new web project, during the HTML coding process, using Lorem Ipsum as filler content is a common approach (yet, there great Lorem Ipsum alternatives).
Fixie.js is a simple JavaScript library (with no JS framework dependencies) that automatically analyzes your semantic HTML5 tags and adds the right type of content inside the related elements.
It is not limited to simple text but can also add links, sections and images. Just add the fixie class to the element you wish and the matching dummy content will be displayed there.
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Recursive Drawing
by admin on May 11, 2012
Demoing and displaying JavaScript at the same time using CSS
by admin on May 9, 2012
When writing documentation or doing examples you constantly run into the same issue: how do you display and demo the code at the same time? You don’t want to have a code display and live code as they will get out of sync (on the other hand I always found that when copying code into a document I also cleaned it up and optimised it).
The easiest way for this are all the “new” services like JSFiddle, JSBin, Dabblet, Tinker.io and others (there seems to be a new one every month now) and you can even embed them into other documents, but it means you need an iframe and load content from another service (which might go down or get forgotten in the future).
The other way of course is to use Ajax/JavaScript to load the code into the page. Back in 2008, I wrote the Ajax Code Display script for that (and subsequently I never used it much).
I was wondering how you can simply demo and show inline JavaScript in a document without needing any extra libraries. The simplest way seemed to read out the innerHTML of the SCRIPT element and write it out into a PRE using textContent (innerHTML would render HTML or greater signs in the script, which isn’t the idea).
However, you can do a simple demo and display of the same script much easier these days using CSS. Check out this demo page for an upcoming Smashingmag article:
If you do a view-source you find no other script in use, yet it displays in the page. What is this sourcery*? Simple, and it was Mathias Bynens who got me onto it: just display script elements as block and add some generated content to show the “Source” text:
script { display: block; white-space: pre; text-shadow:none; background: #333; color: #fff; font-family: monaco, courier, monospace; padding: 10px; } script::before{ content: 'Source:'; color: #0f0; }
Mathias has much more detailed explanations on why that works but I for one am once again amazed just how much easier things are these days with the awesome browsers that we have.
* Sourcery = magical code that does (seemingly) unexpected things.