Thanksgiving, Social Media and Tech Support

Does this Foursquare map of holiday travel look like a turkey to anyone but me?

Three years ago I hosted Thanksgiving at my house, tweeting photos of the bird and small brush fire. Two years ago I wrote a post Enjoying Thanksgiving with Social Media and then wrapped my car around a lamppost instead of enjoying it. Last year I ran with the topic again and wrote Thanksgiving and Social Media, Redux, had a lovely meal without crashing, and mourned the coming doom of my favorite photo sharing site.

This year people are trying to make it different, and I don't know that I like all of the suggestions.

My not-so-local grocery store is using social media to help people who might be in a bind, offering to help folks who tweet it with the #Turkey911 hashtag, something that is happening across the country. Having quick access to someone who can help you is far better than calling the real 911, and is something that we just couldn't do very easily a few years ago. At least not without calling the one family member that maybe you don't want to tell that you are struggling.

Wait, what's that typeface? You want to be taken seriously?

Much as I'd like to talk about the typeface used in the photo I lovingly stole from the Atlantic article, Forget Shopping, Friday Is Update Your Parents' Browser Day!, I'm not going to. Instead I am going to marvel in awe at the suggestion that younglings sneak off to their parents' computers (insert grandparents, aunts and uncles, elder host, etc.) and fiddle with them. The article at least counsels the intended saviors (but instead unwitting harbingers of doom) not to move their parents to a new browser, but to at least try to keep them using what they are used to. There are two key problems with this:

1. The browser will work differently, whether within the UI or just from how pages look;


2. Some machines just can't be upgraded without slowing them or upgrading them;


3. Most IE6 offenders (who I suspect the article is truly targeting) are corporate users who can't change it (and aren't hosting you in their office).

Those first two will result in needless frustration on the part of your parents (elders) and deserved tech support hassle for you.

Gizmodo took this creepy photo from True American Dog.

For much of my family they only know that I "work with computers." While it is somewhat accurate (although nearly everyone works with computers nowadays), to them it means I can fix them along with any other electronic device ever invented. Since I tend not to wear my "No, I will not fix your computer" T-shirt to more formal events, I am often assaulted with the kind of help desk questions that make 11-year-olds cringe.

Gizmodo feels my pain and is trying to help with its article How to Keep Thanksgiving From Being a Family Tech Trainwreck. Though the article attempts to keep your hassle to a minimum, it also recommends you upgrade, nay, crossgrade your parents to a whole new browser. Don't be a twit, you'll get calls forever. Otherwise the article offers good advice — answer their questions for them, not for you. Pushing your parents to some new bleeding edge tech is just more hassle for you in the long run. Pay attention to what tech they complain about (is the TV remote to complicated? do they struggle with the computer set-up at their job?) and steer clear of creating an analogous situation.

If you really want to help, make notes of everything you do and pass them down to your children. Then when you are struggling with new technologies in your old age, you can justify your smugness at how new technology has it all wrong and your children can justify their pity for you.

MOAR!

Now go relax. Read The Oatmeal's comic on Thanksgiving as a Kid vs. as an Adult. Prepare for where you'll site using College Humor's Thanksgiving Seating Chart. Take this Map of Thanksgiving Dinner to plan your assault on Crudités Dam. Go over to the Opera site (the folks who make the browser, not the faster-than-light neutrino source) and weigh in on whether or not the lucky bird should live. In short, disregard your family and stare at your computer/phone all day, just like the moody teen we all truly are.

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Perplexing Prefixes

Mostly I wanted a title with a little alliteration (like that sentence). What I am talking about in the title are vendor prefixes for CSS, those little bits of words and dashes that appear in front of what would otherwise be a W3C CSS declaration, but denotes that this one is actually an experimental or beta implementation of the specification by that particular browser.

Continuing with the recent trend of smart people in the know openly and publicly debating issues that do and will continue to affect web developers, Henri Sivonen wrote an article earlier this week with his main point right in the title: Vendor Prefixes Are Hurting the Web. For those of you who are curious but don't want to wade through his entire post, he has a tl;dr version:

I think vendor prefixes are hurting the Web. They are hurting Web authors. They are hurting users of browsers. They are hurting competition in the Web browser space. I think we (people developing browsers and Web standards) should stop hurting the Web. It would also make sense for browsers to implement other browsers' prefixed features to the extent existing content uses prefixed features.

He is kind enough in his post to include some counter arguments and preemptively respond to them, including linking to other counter arguments that are direct responses to him. Alex Russell provides his own tl;dr version in his response, Vendor Prefixes Are A Rousing Success:

Henri Sivonen's arguments against vendor prefixing for CSS properties focus on harm without considering value, which in turn has caused him to come to a non-sensical set of conclusions and recommendations. Progress is a process, and vendor prefixes have been critical in accelerating that process for CSS.

Daniel Glazman provides a point-by-point counter argument in his post CSS vendor prefixes, an answer to Henri Sivonen. He doesn't provide a tl;dr version, so I am using this quote in place of one:

The ineffable Henri Sivonen has contributed a long, a very long, a probably too long post about CSS Vendor Prefixes. In short, he thinks they are harmful and should be dropped. I tend to totally disagree and will explain why below.

My opinion

Nobody has asked for it, but you did choose to come here and read this far, so I guess you deserve it.

I think that prefixes have their place, and codifying their non-standard behavior (as in, there is no standard in place to describe how the feature should work) with a prefix makes for a very readable, consistent method to identify this non-standard chunk of code along with what rendering engine relies on it. Ideally it also makes for a consistent way to run a regex or search and replace to adjust or clear them in the future.

Web developers who implement these pre-standard features run the risk of creating a hassle for future maintenance and need to consider if they are just being bleeding edge or solving a real need. When working with clients or on projects where once it launches it is unlikely to see regular updates, it's unlikely that someone will come through and clean these up until there is an overhaul. When you see these all over a site, it's not the vendor prefix hurting the web, it's the sloppy or short-sighted developer who is relying too much on them and not building a process to excise them down the road when the time is right.

Companies who build vendor prefixes into their CSS/DOM editing tools are doing a disservice to developers. Promoting support for every browser while offering the most cutting edge features ends up putting developers who rely in these editors in a tough situation. Without exposing them to the code or providing an easy way to manage these non-standard features, more of this bloat makes it into the page. The proliferation of abstraction layers compounds the chaos. Removing the developer from the code and failure to educate the developer on the implications of his or her choices is the issue in this case, not the vendor prefixes.

I do agree with the assertion that sample and demo code across the web (such as tutorials) that shows off new CSS features does not get updated, so developers may use it in all its vendor-prefix glory well after a feature has been standardized. These samples need to do a better job of managing the reader's expectation that the standards may have changed and the code may be out of date. It's still up to the developer, however, to choose good and recent examples that are appropriate to the need. Not understanding the code being copied is not an excuse, it should be a clue that the developer needs to spend a few minutes reading.

Removing vendor prefixes can stymie the real-world use case testing of feature implementation that is hard to come by when looked at from a purely academic view. Suggesting browsers support one another's prefixes means if one vendor changes the feature, all the others would have to follow suit, regardless of the existing (or lack of) specification.

I do like the idea of vendor prefixes only in the experimental builds of browsers, but then developers may be disappointed that their favorite new bleeding edge feature won't work for regular Joe users.

This isn't a simple issue, but getting developers to be more responsible and judicious in their use of these new properties would certainly help.

Related

Peter-Paul Koch broached this very topic way back in March 2010 with the post CSS vendor prefixes considered harmful and his follow-up (based on reader reaction) CSS vendor prefixes redux.

While I instruct my team to avoid vendor prefixes, I have warmed to them for experimental projects or sites with a greater likelihood of ongoing updates (where the client expectation has been managed). In my post The evolt.org Logo Using Only CSS2 and CSS3 I make extensive use of vendor prefixes, just to show it's possible. The opening image of this post is pulled from a JSFiddle I made of a CSS3 cube to submit to Chris Coyier's CSS shapes article (although it isn't in there — yet).

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Struggling with Semantics

Now that HTML5 is starting to crack the mainstream, misunderstood and misrepresented though it may be , it makes sense that more and more developers and contributors should start to struggle with the shifting assignment of semantic meaning to the HTML5 elements. I wrote about this on Halloween in my post HTML5 kills [time], Resurrects [u], where I struggle with the changes elements have gone through from HTML4 to HTML5, and even during the course of the development of HTML5.

It makes sense, then, that given all this flux people might start to grapple with each others' definitions of semantics in the context of HTML5 elements. This week has seen a lot of activity around that topic, kicked off by the article Our Pointless Pursuit Of Semantic Value by Divya Manian. Regardless of the title, it's an interesting opinion piece about the process of choosing an element when coding a page. She hits on four main points in the post:

1. The web no longer consists of structured content;


2. Is it really accessible?


3. Is it really searchable?


4. Is it really portable?

The article itself is a good read, but the comments after the article include a lot of well-thought responses, some of which were reformulated and written up as separate responses of their own. Many felt the article itself was too aggressive and made over-generalizations, even to the point that the Smashing Magazine editor-in-chief wrote that the article should have been edited better. I disagree. The tone of the post is what kicked off the maelstrom of debate that has been lacking for some time now on the value of struggling with semantics in HTML5.

Jeremy Keith wrote a response on the same site, Pursuing Semantic Value, where he points out that there truly is a semantic difference between elements:

[...] a div conveys no meaning about the contained content whereas a section element is specifically for enclosing thematically-related content [...]

I disagree with his example of how you can see the difference in some browsers, since it is based on an arbitrary style decision made by a browser vendor and inserted into the default browser stylesheets:

You'll notice that the same element (h1) will have different styling depending on whether it is within a div or within a section element [...] So that's one illustration of the practical difference between div and section.

Regardless, his points clear and a good read for anyone who is struggling with choosing the right element and who might find him/herself giving up too easily and falling into the dark trap of div-itis.

Steve Faulkner weighs in with a comment on the original article that he then converted to a post on his own site, HTML5 semantics and accessibility. He opens up by, as he says, stating the obvious:

Semantics are not just about accessibility, accessibility is not just about assistive technology. But semantic information (name, role, states and properties) carried by HTML elements and attributes is integral to making content on the web accessible, especially for those who rely upon assistive technology to access and interact with web content.

He goes on to cover hgroup, header, hgroup, figure, figcaption, longdesc (the attribute) and even the HTML5 outlining algorithm and reminds us that the browsers have the burden of making these all function as accessible elements, driven by the developer community.

Paul Irish responded to Jeremy Keith's response in his post Semantics in practice and mapping semantic value to its consumers. He distills the struggle between and with accessibility and semantics pretty well, in my opinion, with this statement:

The practicalities of making accessible web content are messy, but important. The fact that we seem to spend more time on div vs article vs. section than on learning ARIA is a crime. (Furthermore, learning ARIA isn't complete unless youre listening to the results in a screenreader.)

John Foliot jumped onto the response bandwagon with his aptly titled post, My Thing About the Thing That Thing Wrote About Thing. His response is much more aggressive on the accessibility side and is far too difficult for me to distill with one takeaway quote. You need to really read through his post to understand everything. He was, however, nice enough to provide a tl;dr version:

Divya is quite confused about web accessibility. I examine everything she says in a detailed, semi-sarcastic, no-holds barred manner. Conclusion: Semantics matter – a lot.

In case you are wondering what that opening image is from, I stole it from CSSquirrel and its post The Value of Meaning. Consider that snippet from the comic to be my selection of a quote from the article.

Recap

Recent changes and chaos in HTML5 are frustrating developers who already struggle with the proper application of these new elements. One article exclaiming this frustration has started a much needed (even if it seems like common sense to many of us) discussion of how we as web developers need to approach choosing the right element for the job. If you are working in HTML5, it behooves you to read these articles and posts, and especially to read through the comments — here are gems of ideas and a treasure trove of links to help educate yourself. Take advantage of them.

Update: November 18, 2011

On some level I think Smashing Magazine has become ground zero for this debate. Bruce Lawson has a new article today on the site, HTML5 Semantics. This article goes into a good deal of depth on semantics and is worth a read.

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Even the Return of [time] Is a Painful Process

Last Monday I wrote about some recent changes to the WHATWG HTML5 draft spec (HTML5 kills [time], Resurrects [u]), which then lead to my post discussing how the process to adjust the HTML5 spec only serves to confuse developers (End of <time> Is Not Helping the Case for HTML5). Then we all heard that our voices as developers were effective in restoring an element we valued to the W3C version of the spec (Well, It's about <time>).

And that wrapped up a nice little story about how, even with a convoluted process within and between WHATWG and W3C, change was affected.

As I started writing this post, <time> had not yet been reinstated. Though the direction from the HTML Working Group chairs was to restore the element [...] no later than the end of day on Tuesday 8th of November, that only happened within the last hour or so (probably around 12:30 EST on November 11).

This day-and-a-half delay isn't much at all. When measured against the whole of the life of the HTML5 specification (which is still ongoing) and considering nobody ran out and dropped <time> from their projects, it seems hardly worth mentioning.

Except it isn't a minor issue when you consider whether this is the normal process that the HTML5 specification will continue to follow.

Steve Faulkner, involved in the discussions from the start, sent an email the day after the promised revert date asking for an update and received this response:

The Chairs are working on this situation. Please be patient.

No expectation management of timing or any detail on what is happening, just a request to be patient. In my office, this is an unacceptable response. To see it come from the W3C and have no recourse to walk down the hall and set someone straight on expectation management is infuriating. Steve Faulkner's statement in the original email rings true with me:

I suggest the appearance of intransigence in resolving this issue only serves to undermine community faith in the W3C's stewardship of HTML.

It is my understanding that Ian Hickson (Hixie) has been silent on this topic, declining interviews, until this post from .net Magazine, Ian Hickson responds over HTML5 getting 'time' element back. This is an interesting statement from that article:

When we reported on the latter [the W3C decision to restore the <time> element], Hickson wasn't available for comment, but he's since kindly decided to answer our questions on the original backlash and the element's reinstatement.

In the interview Hickson makes his case and states the <time> element will be restored and will also take into account some of the new use cases from the recent debate. He also suggests other elements like <geo> or <scalar>, which could handle other highly specific data formats that the proposed <data> element might be too generic to tackle.

People are so fired up that even what I consider an off-hand comment about future HTML development resulted in a series of tweets and even an email to the W3C public mailing list with the suggestion to replace the HTML5 editor, by which the writer means Hickson.

Meanwhile, unrelated to that message, the WHATWG blog (Please leave your sense of logic at the door, thanks!) was updated with this week's news describing the return of <time>. The better news, however, is the return of <time> to the W3C version of the HTML5 specification.

The even better news is that with both WHATWG and W3C restoring <time> (or at least promising to) is that we are now not at immediate risk of seeing the HTML5 specification for into two similar, yet competing, standards managed by two different bodies with two different processes. It's bad enough we have ISO HTML, and look how well that's been adopted.

Seeing this chaos over just the <time> element has eroded my confidence in the process within and between WHATWG and W3C. To be fair, this may be the only process that works for them, but my distaste for it makes me question that. While I may be better off not paying attention to every detail, I am not so confident that doing so will result in a specification that will addresses my needs.

Update: November 17, 2011

The conversation you see in the comments below shifted over to Google+ as the week started. If you are curious, then you can read Ian Hickson's post (and its accompanying comments) and then read Steve Faulkner's response.

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Flash Isn't Going Away, Except from Your Mobile

You may have heard some rumors that Flash is going away. You may read it as vindication for Steve Jobs. You may have decided web development will now change. You may be under the impression that HTML5 can do all the things Flash can. You can be excused when you read much of they hype, including such link-baiting headlines as Jobs Was Right: Adobe Abandons Mobile Flash Development, Report Says, clearly intended to draw Apple fanboys. Some of the news today:

• Exclusive: Adobe ceases development on mobile browser Flash, refocuses efforts on HTML5 (UPDATED)


• It’s Official: Flash Mobile Player is Dead


• Adobe stops developing Flash for mobile

Before we get too far ahead of ourselves, this cessation of development is for mobile devices only (read Adobe's release). I also want everyone to take a deep breath and stop crediting Apple with this. Adobe has long been unable to make a Flash player for mobile devices with a small enough footprint to not feel like you are wading through pudding to see some pointless animation (or worse, a navigation bar). The iOS market share in the mobile space is still below Android's (suggesting to me that Apple cannot kill it on its own), but Flash's ability to play well on anything in the mobile space is still below all of that.

We can expect this to affect how Flash will be implemented on other sites, but not immediately. Web developers worth their pay are moving toward adaptive layouts that scale and reformat themselves for mobile devices. These developers have mostly excised Flash from their toolkit because it doesn't play well with these new approaches. Younger, less experienced developers, along with developers trapped in 2001, will still use the only tool they have (insert hammer/nail metaphor) until they have exhausted it.

As someone who has been resistant to Flash on client projects for years, partly because of accessibility concerns and partly due to its resource demands, there is no love lost here for the platform. I am happy to see it wander off into a corner and yield right-of-way to CSS3, HTML5 and its related specifications. Over 10 years ago, when Flash was already causing stress to web developers and user interface designers, Jakob Nielsen finally got on board with his article Flash: 99% Bad. Today is just another step in a much larger process of web standards development, even if Flash wasn't an official one (de facto has carried it this far).

In the meantime, expect to see Flash persist on the web of desktop browsers and expect to see it persist in old, forgotten sites for years (perhaps most of the restaurant web sites I see). Until HTML5 can figure out what it wants to be when it grows up (End of time Is Not Helping the Case for HTML5) and the debate over video codecs truly ends (Are Patents Killing HTML5 Video?), things aren't going to change for most of us very soon.

I am intentionally skipping the discussion around Adobe's statement to more broadly support HTML5, since it's not really news given its latest products. I'm also skipping the statements from Adobe about using Flash to feed to app development platforms like AIR since I think we all have seen that move for a while now.

Related (on this blog)

• Adobe vs. Apple or Flash vs. HTML5, April 12, 2010.


• Adobe to Drop iPhone Support, Target Android, April 21, 2010.


• More Salvos from Apple and Adobe, to No One in Particular, May 13, 2010.


• More on HTML5 as DHTML, August 8, 2011 (for the Adobe Edge points).


• Thoughts on Muse (Obvious Pun Avoided), August 16, 2011.

Update November 10, 2011

As I suspected, the hype is starting to settle down after a day has passed. Some more news bits with more of an overall perspective:

• Adobe axes Flash for TVs too at CNet.


• Mobile Flash ISN'T dead at ZDNet.


• Some Thoughts On Flash And Devices by Ben Forta of Adobe.

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Well, It's about [time]

The decision to allow <time> back into the HTML5 fold has been made. Just like that, one element is restored. This recent dust-up still tells me that all the elements are always in peril.

You can read the full decision in the email archives. This section of the email describing the process is worthy of a blog post of its own, but I just don't have the energy to trace it all out tonight:

This change is related to bug 13240 [1] which was never sent to the HTML WG since it used a possibly incorrect Bugzilla component. Since WG members were NOT notified of the creation of this bug the Chairs have decided that this change should be subject to the Enhanced Change Control rules in the WG Decision Policy [2]:

"Therefore during a pre-LC review, or during a Last Call, feature additions or removals should only be done with sufficient prior notice to the group, in the form of a bug, a WG decision, or an on-list discussion. This applies only to LC-track drafts and does not apply to drafts that may include material for future versions of HTML."

We therefore ask for a revert of this change to be completed no later than the end of day on Tuesday 8th of November. If this revert is not complete by that time, we will instruct W3C staff to make this change.

You can also read the full bug report (filed because <time> was removed) along with the feedback.

If you are interested in tracking the process itself, you can also read the minutes for the meeting. The minutes don't provide a clear resolution and include nuggets like this which only continue to concern me about the whole process:

mjs: asking for vote to not having time element vs having time element

1 vote to not have it...larger number of people (7) would like to have time element

mjs: asking for data element vs not having data element

... it seems that it's clear (not full working group) favor having both elements <time> <data>

hixie: most of these use case are irrelevant

Yes, I cherry-picked that.

You can also read my other two posts on this topic if you need some context:

• HTML5 kills <time>, Resurrects <u>


• End of <time> Is Not Helping the Case for HTML5

Also, don't forget to see CSSquirrel's cartoon: Can Hixie’s <Data>leks Exterminate <Time>? It's funny because it's true. And daleks.

Update

Shortly after the decision came down regarding the return of <time>, Tantek Çelik put together a proposal for changes to the <time> element with the W3C:

Add the <time> element to HTML5 with all of the following

• the functionality it had before removal


• plus support for year-only dates per [1] (e.g. vCard4 RFC6350 / hCard 'bday' use-case)


• plus support for year-month only dates per [2] ("")


• plus support for month-day only dates per [3] ("")


• timezone per [4]


• duration per [5]

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End of [time] Is Not Helping the Case for HTML5

Yesterday afternoon I posted a general overview of recent changes in HTML5, focusing on this weekend's development over the removal of <time>: HTML5 kills <time>, Resurrects <u>

I thought I was already a little late to the party, but apparently not so. With the start of the week people swung into action to protest the move, even firing up a brand new site, Why no <time>?, working its way across the web thanks to the #occupyhtml5 hashtag on Twitter.

As you follow the hashtag and read comments on Bruce Lawson's blog post and Zeldman's blog post, you can see a trend start to emerge — people are often annoyed because they have already implemented <time> in their own projects. For some it's personal and pet projects, for others it's been done on client sites, and then there are popular sites that have worked it in as well, such as Reddit, The Boston Globe, the default Wordpress theme, and now parts of Drupal's core.

Each of these represents some investment of time, effort and/or cash (I argue all three). These are people implementing it before it's a final specification. They are selling bread when the batter isn't even fully mixed but with the promise that it has no nuts.

In January 2010 I wrote about whether it was too soon to advocate HTML5. At the time I believed it was too soon. As the specification has moved forward and people have found good business cases for leaning on promised features (who aren't confusing them with WebGL, SVG, CSS3, and so on) I have started to warm to the idea.

If you go back to August 2009 you might recall when the HTML5 Super Friends (Zeldman, Jeremy Keith, Eric Meyer, etc.) got together to voice their concerns over elements and attributes in HTML5, even raising points about <time>. Back then the campaign got some resolution and things seemed to stabilize for at least one element — <time>.

This recent dust-up leads me to question just how stable the specification is. Even <time>, after a review and edits, still only got just over two years before it was gutted. Software projects can take that long to implement, so relying on a feature (in this case an element) at the start of a project that might go away before you are done is a huge risk.

If HTML5 is supposed to be a reflection of the current state of web development, as we see in its cavalier approach to attribute quoting, closed elements, proper nesting and so on, then I can't imagine why an element in the wild for over two years gets cut while other derided elements like <u> get a reprieve and are brought back into the fold.

Now let's add the case that WHATWG has made for moving HTML5, the one under its auspices, to a version-less model. WHATWG explains it in the post HTML is the new HTML5:

…[W]e realised that the demand for new features in HTML remained high, and so we would have to continue maintaining HTML and adding features to it before we could call "HTML5" complete, and as a result we moved to a new development model, where the technology is not versioned and instead we just have a living document that defines the technology as it evolves.

We have just witnessed what that means. An element in which significant investment has been made can just go away at the whim of one man. For this reason John Foliot has hit the nail on the head with this tweet when referring to the HTML5 specification:

I am taking a different approach with clients. I am resisting the gee-whiz desire to be bleeding-edge with no business case to support HTML5 implementation and sticking with HTML 4.01. It's amazing how limiting that isn't given all the other great things going on with parallel web standards.

Update November 2, 2011

• To distill the post Timeless by Jeremy Keith, Keep using the time element.


• Oli Studholme touches on these same points and discusses <data> in Goodbye time, datetime, and pubdate. Hello data and value.

Update November 3, 2011

The <time> element has been restored. Read more: Well, It's about <time>

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