• Old Browsers Are Holding Back The Web
• It’s time to stop blaming Internet Explorer

Here’s my reaction that I also published as a comment to Nicholas blog:

I will have to strongly disagree with the fellow compatriot although I respect his experience and background. I have a lot less experience that he does, but I think I do have the right to disagree (stating the obvious, but whatever).

First of all the post makes one statement that I think Nicholas didn’t really think through: “IE8 nice, stable browser”. Five words to that: getElementsByClassName.

Second of all complaining isn’t counterproductive; On the contrary, developer complaining has being responsible for browsers pushing the boundaries. Being constantly unsatisfied maybe makes you miserable, but it’s for sure not counterproductive. Don’t take my word for it, just see how it turned out for the Apple guy.

If it wasn’t for web developers and designers, who would actually complain? End users? Most of the computer illiterate people I know can’t even tell the difference between Internet Explorer or Chrome, and only get convinced if you force them to try. Hell, we’d be still using IE7 if it wasn’t for complaining.

Last but not least, Nicholas skips one very important fact in his analysis: The infamous Microsoft yearly browser updates, who are just plain ridiculous with regards to the speed the industry evolves, and Microsoft’s Windows XP / no IE9 policy, which sabotaged not only it’s own “modern” browser, but also the new specs adoption as a whole. (ops, actually those were two facts!)

I’ll add one more point, just to spice the debate a bit more: BAD NEWS folks! Regardless of all the innovation, polyfills, JavaScript frameworks, JavaScript browser engine optimization and so on, we still are far behind native applications performance and stability. So, if you ask me, if we are planning to make some progress, we can’t keep polyfilling and we can’t keep supporting browsers that are four years old. Come on you guys, there’s no excuse. It’s free, it’s fast, and it’s good for everyone. Once and for all the O/S should take full control of the upgrade procedure, make all browser updates silent, and 80% of the users should be on latest stable at any moment. If you’re on Facebook for 5 hours per day minimum, you got time for a minor download once a couple of months. I’d even go one step further and say all modern browsers should be pre-installed in all O/S so they could be more tied to the O/S. Maybe “healthy” competition in this case is not a good thing after all.

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I recently bought and read the electronic version of Adaptive Web Design, written by Aaron Gustafson which was overall a nice -and short- read. Aaron is obviously a good writer, but this is no surprise if one looks at his CV. He also seems like a nice guy -twitter wise-, maybe a bit easier to approach than other folks from the “Zeldman Web Influencers group”. I rarely buy books, but I had a good feeling for this one.

Some of my impressions after reading the book, are, unfortunately, similar with to the ones I wrote about after reviewing Hardboiled Web Design. I don’t think that is entirely due to the book, but mostly because the problems this book tries to address don’t have actual solid technical solutions. In short, we have neither the specs nor the implementations of some existing specs. (take for example the notorious RWD images problem or the persisting IE7 and IE8 percentages). In general, I bought the book hoping somehow to discover new innovative ways of writing my markup and my stylesheets, using media queries and discover things that I might have missed. In general the number of different techniques included in the book were rather small, and most of them I knew already.

Progressive Enhancement – but no techniques

Aaron mentions in his book,

By design, this book is not intended to be an exhaustive compendium of progressive enhancement techniques, so the examples will be brief and focused…

I’ll have to object. As I said I honestly think the principles and theoretical approach of progressive enhancement are well established and popular since quite some time. Our problem today is not the lack of theoretical background, but the need for technical solutions to our problems. But that is not in any way Aaron’s fault.

Semantic HTML

The second chapter is a nice introduction to html5 and microformats, but in my opinion every web designer that hasn’t heard of (or used) HTML5 elements and microformats so far, must be leaving in a cave, and should probably start searching for a new profession. There were many pages also devoted to the alt and title attributes, for which I think is pretty safe to say they’re globally used and respected as means of improving accessibility since quite a while. I would personally prefer some more insight on RDFa and microdata with the latter attracting much attention after the creation of schema.org. Here I’d like to note that I am personally very confused as to which technology one should follow today. These three aforementioned specs seem to serve the same purpose, but I imagine their success depends largely on major search engines adoption.

CSS

Here, I liked the analysis of parsing errors a lot. I admit that after four or five years of CSS writing, I never dived into how browsers handle CSS parsing errors. I read with great interest how one can use basic and advanced CSS selectors in order to achieve progressive enhancement, although I believe Paul Irish’s HTML conditional classes method is quite simpler.

Javascript

The Javascript chapter was more interesting as it covered several details that often are not included in Javascript books.

Accessibility

The last chapter was the most interesting for me, with details about many WEB-ARIA roles that I had not read about before.

Overall, it is a book I wish everyone starting web design would read before he got his hands dirty with the markup and CSS.

In the fourth video of the series, entitled “The Metamorphosis of Ajax”, Douglas Crockford talks a bit about HTML and CSS. He says:

..so HTML was not state of the art when it was introduced in the late 20th century. It was intended for simple document viewers and nothing else. It was not intended to be an application platform… The set of tags is much too small for the things that we’re doing.

.. and started (the SGML people) the mythology of Semantic Markup which is essentially impossible in a system in which you cannot make up your own tags in which you are using a set of tags which was designed for simple technical documents and you’re coding things which have no resemblance to technical documents – there is no opportunity for semantic coding in the system as it currently exists – although there is a lot of belief that this is what we should be doing.

Mr. Crockford is actively involved in the development of the JavaScript language, (and a bunch of other stuff). And I must say, he got me into thinking. Even more when he started talking about CSS and its drawbacks as a language. Most of which I have already realized working as a Front-End: Lack of modularity (you cannot be sure two identical boxes will render in 100% the same way as they might interfere with each other, browser implementation which is often very hard to achieve, constant overloading and redefining of properties etc, etc..)

This morning I run into the Greek DesignMag. The layout was generally pretty cool, but I had a comment regarding the readability of the links and decided to tweet my remark to the person I thought designed it. He was actually an editor in the magazine, and pointed me to the agency that made it. Now, when you see a nice client work layout, you do expect some standard in its creators’ home. Surprise:

As you will see for yourselves if you visit the website, there’s a lovely (sic) flash animation in the background, that 90% of the time has a same or a very similar colour to the font. Contrast = 0. And all I’m wondering is how can these people get clients.

Setup a netvibes account

I think good products stand the passage of time, and since Netvibes has managed to survive my bookmarks for a few years now, it must be good. RSS Feed aggregation, reader, name it as you want, it basically does one thing: It gathers all the things you like to read, in one place. Build your dashboard, and pay special attention to the settings on the top right corner: You can get rid of the Headline on top, the google search and generally you can pretty much change everything you want depending on your needs.

Hope you got twitter

Don’t be fooled that you can stay updated without following specific people that work in the Design industry. Setup your account, and as you will be following a great number of people, try to filter them by using Lists. Personally I just separate general from design-related, but you can go further into separating technologies like CSS, HTML, and so on.

Blogs

Here’s the blogs I follow in Netvibes:
Jeffrey Zeldman presents the Daily Report
HTML5 Doctor
A List Apart
Sam Ruby
Drupal.Org News
Bruce Lawson
Smashing Magazine
Six Revisions

Follow them!

And here you got the people I follow in twitter.

I forgot my password the other day so naturally tried to use the “Forgot Password” link under the login form. I entered a username (not in an username@domain format) and I was forwarded to a lovely page that informing me I did something wrong:

When I finally figured out (somehow) I should put a username@domain format, I faced another challenge: Figuring out the password character restrictions.

The message was asking me to choose an 8-character password, of which at least 1 character should be a number. Easy ha? Not really. After spending some time trying passwords, I figured you basically shouldn’t put more than one number in order for your new password to be valid. True story.

During the last two-three years that I follow Web Design gurus I’ve seen several books being published. Some caught my attention, some not. But no book has been praised and promoted more than Hardboiled Web-Design by Andy Clarke.

Before going into details about the book itself, I’d like to mention that I spend several hours per day reading blogs and tweets from a group of Web Designers, Andy included, that talk about Web Design practices and so on. (I intend to post this list of “web design heroes” soon). This, might be important in order to understand my point of view for to this review.

The first impression when I got the book on my hands was, undoubtedly, positive. The quality of the print, the illustration of the cover, the full-background-color pages for the Case studies and the examples, everything. Ten out of Ten for that.

The initial excitement gave it’s place for some skepticism as I began reading the first part, “Getting Hardboiled”. I got the impression some things were repeated over and over again throughout it. Or maybe that Andy was building up for quite some pages, to end up saying:

“hardboiled web-design redefines graceful degradation for the challenges we face today”

The chapter went on about things I more or less already knew about, such as browser adoption, vendor CSS prefixes, and the “it doesn’t have to look the same” slogan, that I personally feel shouldn’t be directed to us, web designers, but to our bosses/clients. I bet Andy knows that very well, as he mentions it quite often in the book. I guess his goal is to convince us so then we can go and convince our bosses. But in that matter, I would prefer to read a book entitled “Convincing your boss it doesn’t have to look the same”, because, well, I was already convinced.

That said, I by no means want to underestimate the message of the book and Andy’s Hardboiled approach. If Andy with his book alongside with other people of his magnitude can push the industry in such a way that “It won’t have to look the same”, then I’m willing to tattoo the cover of the book on my..back and do Andy’s dishes for a year.

Then came Part II, Hardboiled HTML. I felt that many technologies in this part were already covered either by other more specialized books, or by the websites-homes of the specifications themselves: “Introducing HTML5” by Bruce Lawson & Remy Sharp, the HTML5 Doctor blog ,  HTML5 for Web Designers, all cover extensively HTML5 related stuff, and Microformats are pretty well explained in their own project home. Plus, since schema.org is out, it seems that, unfortunately, all existing Microformats will have to be converted to microdata. Oh and last but not least, I believe that now, after the 4th time, I can recite the HTML story of the last past 10 years while juggling with 3 fireballs on a bike.

Part 4 was the one chapter from which I had lots to learn, mainly because I haven’t yet worked a lot with Keyframe transitions and the CSS Multi-column Layout Module. The most interesting part of the book, technically, were Media Queries. Of course, and judging from the cross-references, Andy was inspired by Ethan Marcotte and his infamous article Responsive Web Design which also became recently a book.

To sum up, I think I would suggest this book to a person just starting in Web Design, someone who cannot go back and track all these articles and sources himself. Andy’s book does a good job in catching the momentum of Web Design, although a book is a book and it will not present more than a specific fragment of time/period. Anything happening straight after the book has been finalized won’t be there. (makes sense)

The question I’m asking myself (and consequently you the readers) is whether traditional print can really catch up to online media considering the frenzy rhythm of innovation today. Every time I see a new publication in A List Apart, I think, “oh boy, there we go again”. I’m not a lot into books, but I understand the excitement, prestige and of course financial benefits involved in writing a book about cutting-edge technologies. I would do it yesterday if I had the chance to. I just don’t think it would be my first choice if I wanted to learn something new.

Helvetica: Developed in 1957 by Swiss typeface designer Max Miedinger. Timeless.