Social Media Club Buffalo: #TacoVinoII

Last night the local Social Media Club chapter here in Buffalo repeated last year's mid-holiday party success by putting on TacoVinoII. Similar to last year, the club teamed up with a local wine bar, Just Vino, and a local food truck, Lloyd Taco Truck.

Lloyd Taco Truck made a batch of its popular duck tacos for the crowd and Just Vino ran raffles all night for $25 gift cards to the bar. Attendees not only got to enjoy wine and duck tacos (along with other Lloyd staples), but they had the pleasure of pairing the two while chatting in real life with the very people they might only chat with online.

An event which started off with only 50 free tickets quickly filled up, and the ticket count got bumped up twice more to 150 people. Throughout the night it was pretty clear they all came through. The cold night certainly didn't stop anyone from waiting in line for tacos, either.

Buffalo.com sent a photographer to capture the evening and posted a gallery of 60 photos this morning for you to look through. My favorite photo in the bunch, of course, is the only one I am in — featuring my finger puns pew-pewing the Buffalo chapter president (#26 in the set).

If you are afraid you missed out on all the fun, you can verify that you did just by checking out the #TacoVinoII hashtag on Twitter.

Credit for this year's event goes to Erin Collins for organizing it and pulling it together, Nicole Schuman, Rachel Gottlieb and Jeremy Juhasz for manning the registration table and generally pimping the club, Kate Wolcott for the updated logo and signage, Ashlei Jachimowicz for on-site tweeting responsibilities, and Anthony Rizzo, who worked the crowd to sell raffle tickets.

Somewhat related —no Foursquare venue was created for TacoVino II, primarily because both Just Vino and Lloyd Taco Truck have their own venues on Foursquare. However, when you have a crowd of social media professionals and hobbyists, it's just a matter of time before one of them creates the venue for you. In this case the "matter of time" was about half an hour.

Previous Events

• Social Media Club Buffalo: #TacoVino, December 30, 2010.


• Twitter best practices panel, October 28, 2011.


• Social Media Day 2011 in Buffalo #smdayBUF, July 1, 2011.


• Buffalo Launches Social Media Club Chapter, September 23, 2010.


• Event Profile: #smdayBUF & #smdayBUF 2.0, August 12, 2010 (posted at City Love Cloting).


• Social Media Day in Buffalo #smdayBUF, July 1, 2010.

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Don't Expect Microsoft's Auto-Update to Kill IE6

Last week Microsoft announced that it is planning to start upgrading users to the latest version of Internet Explorer that their computers can run (IE to Start Automatic Upgrades across Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7). Web developers for the most part were overjoyed with the notion that IE6, the bane of their existence, might finally be brushed aside.

But that's not what's going to happen.

Corporate

IE6 users in a corporate environment generally don't have a say in the browser they use. Typically if they have not been upgraded to a more recent version of Internet Explorer, it's for a reason. This reason can include anything from a customized version of the browser (yes, those exist) to an intranet/extranet application that was built to lean on the features of IE6 itself. When faced with the option of re-writing an entire application or just holding off on an upgrade, imagine which one is likely to win out (especially when weighed between the effort of the full rebuild or the effort of doing nothing). Back in March, ReadWriteWeb ran a poll with results showing that 29% of corporate users are still on IE6 with "no end in sight."

Microsoft makes Internet Explorer 8 and Internet Explorer 9 Automatic Update Blocker toolkits (for IE8 and for IE9) which allow enterprise environments to skip automatic installation recent upgrades. Since IE6 and IE7 aren't given their own opt-out toolkits and the process is still in the planning stages, it's hard to say how those two older versions will be addressed. It is likely, however, that corporate IT departments will err on the side of caution. It's already common practice for enterprises to decline to install updates and service packs because it may affect existing systems. These systems aren't necessarily built in-house, but are from vendors who themselves have not made any efforts to modify them in the years since IE7 came out (or have simply gone out of business). When an organization will not install Windows XP Service Pack 2 (late 2004), it is unlikely it is going to allow a browser upgrade.

Non-Corporate

There are other cases besides corporate environments where you may want to opt out — some assistive technology must be upgraded if the browser is upgraded. For example, upgrading to IE9 requires an upgrade to JAWS, Window-Eyes, Dragon Naturally Speaking and possibly other applications (Remarks on Internet Explorer 9 Accessibility and Compatibility with Assistive Technology). While this doesn't address IE6 specifically, each upgrade of IE has typically required other software updates for anything that relies on IE. These collateral effects sometimes make it cost prohibitive for an organization to upgrade even a free browser.

Microsoft's plan will affect users on Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7. Windows Vista and Windows 7 users aren't running IE6, so they're not going to contribute to any more IE6 market share drop. Some non-corporate users of Internet Explorer 6 are on genuinely old computers and aren't regularly updating their systems as it is. You may not see much of a drop there, if any. Couple this with the fact that Microsoft is not releasing recent versions of Internet Explorer for Windows XP, and those users will continue to languish on a permanently old browser, even if not IE6.

Asia

Microsoft's plan is also unlikely to address the Asian market, where China still sees IE6 running at a 28% installation base (versus 1.8% for Australia and 1.4% for Brazil, where Microsoft is rolling this plan out first). So many of those computers are running unlicensed copies of Windows XP, or are just older computers, that it is unlikely anyone will opt in for the automatic upgrades. While this may not affect most Western companies who don't do business in Asia, it is certainly inflating the numbers for IE6's installation base, and making international dreams for some companies seem a bit more daunting.

Conclusions

I feel like all I do is kill everyone's buzz whenever the coming demise of IE6 is promised. However, I've been killing that buzz for a decade now, so the odds are in my favor.

Microsoft's plan is a good one, and is no more than jumping on the bandwagon pulled by nearly all the other current browser makers. However, because Microsoft has a special place in the enterprise world and with its operating system dominance, I don't see this plan doing much to hasten the demise of IE6.

Related

• Internet Explorer to auto-update at .net Magazine.


• Web Developers Rejoice! Microsoft is Killing IE 6 and 7. at Reddit.


• Microsoft decides to automatically update Internet Explorer for everyone | Hacker News

Not really related, but this handy diagram shows where IE6 fits into the current world of the web:

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Test in Lynx and Print, It's Your Job

I have admittedly not taken the time to attend An Event Apart any of the times it's been held, but I do tend to follow the #aea hashtag on Twitter so I can glean at least a little wisdom from the discomfort of my own desk as I wade through more mundane tasks.

That means I sometimes see tweets like the one below which, taken out of context, get my blood boiling:

I try hard not to Tweet in anger, but sometimes they slip out:

I had just this morning been taking time to review my own site in Lynx after a minor update, as I do after every update, just to make sure my alt text, page structure, content, navigation, etc. were all working the way they should. Lynx is part of my regular testing suite. It also helps remind me that reliance on JavaScript for things that can be handled on the server or with CSS isn't such a good idea.

I can't imagine a testing process that doesn't include Lynx. Lynx is the truly lowest common denominator on the web. It gives you insight into how a page is structured, how assistive technology will approach it, and even how search engines will perceive it.

In addition to testing in Lynx, I always look at how a page prints. I create a PDF from a handful of browsers for every project, targeting the home page, content pages, and some outliers (odd templates, gallery chaos, JavaScript flim-flam, and so on). I think that should be expected of all web developers, though clearly it is not. This particular issue has frustrated me more than once, as I outline in my posts Print Styles Forgotten by Responsive Web Developers and More Samples of Responsive Web Design ≠ Print.

Add together my beliefs about Lynx support and print styles, and I cannot accept that anyone would consider this to be something more than the most basic standard practice. Do we get excited when our pages validate? When we choose the right element? Do we celebrate when Twitter pushes out one of our tweets? When Google Analytics produces a chart? When my email gets to its destination? No, because these are basics we should expect.

Let's stop setting the bar so low and expect more of ourselves as developers. Until we do that we aren't professionals, we're hobbyists. Ego-driven hobbyists.

By the way, in addition to that screen shot of my site in Lynx (starting this post), here's my site when printed:

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Everything Will Be the New IE6

There seems to be no shortage of people making a comparison to Internet Explorer version 6, or IE6, as the simplest way to declare that something is an impediment to progress. Sometimes the criticism is levied with the understanding that at one point IE6 was the bees knees (In praise of Internet Explorer 6), but more and more people forget that and just treat it, and by extension the subject of the comparison, with derision.

Here are some examples with the comparison right in the title, blithely link-baiting the unsuspecting reader:

• Is Google Chrome the New IE6?, December 2, 2011.


• JVM 5 is the new IE 6, October 31, 2011.


• Browser Market Pollution: IE[x] is the new IE6, September 27th, 2011.


• iPad Is the New IE6, January 31, 2011.


• IE 8 is the new IE 6, October 11, 2010.


• The iPhone is the new Internet Explorer 6, says mobile developer, February 8, 2010.

I'm not challenging the validity of these articles, some of them make some very good points and the comparison is apt. Having listened to non-tech people (the ones who use "HTML5" in conversation the way they used "DHTML") start to make these comparisons without any historic context, I think it's about time we as web developers came up with a new metaphor to flog. I kinda wish it was Netscape Navigator 2.

Remember Netscape Navigator 2, which brought us all sorts of innovations such as frames, cookie management, and JavaScript (nee LiveScript)?

People don't use Netscape Navigator 2 as an insult/comparison the same way because that browser didn't last more than 10 years in the wild (despite my best efforts), not to mention far too many people have never even heard of it now. IE6, on the other hand, has persisted thanks to too many developers targeting the browser instead of the standard, making corporate IT departments reluctant to move users to the next release. Let's not count the tie to the operating system and the inherent fear of upgrading from some sub-set of users.

Whatever your gripe with a technology, I think it's about time we only made the IE6 comparison when it is appropriate, not as a catch-all to something we don't like or that we think is making our job harder.

So let's start comparing things to Netscape Navigator 2 (Netscape 2, Navigator 2, NN2, NS2 and whatever other variants you want). Let's free IE6 from this burden and perhaps it will slip away into the night.

Somewhat Related on this Blog

• Microsoft Promoting the Death of IE6


• Enough about the Death of the Web

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Flash is Dead! Long Live Flash!

Re-posted from its original home on the Algonquin Studios blog.

A lot of news has been made of Adobe’s recent move to end development of the Flash player for mobile devices (such as your smartphone or tablet). Even people outside of the tech community have heard about it and are trying to understand what it really means. I wrote up the details last month (Flash Isn’t Going Away, Except from Your Mobile) and tried to remind everyone that Adobe isn’t giving up on Flash, it’s just changing its direction on its mobile player based on industry trends.

Consider that Apple won’t allow the Flash player on its iOS devices, and that the mobile version of Windows is following suit. Consider that web developers are (finally, after a decade now) starting to focus on standards-based web development and accessibility. Consider how many different mobile devices and browser combinations exist, requiring Adobe to develop a Flash player for each.

Much of Flash on the web has been used to deliver rich multimedia experiences that either don’t translate well to mobile browsers (giant file sizes, areas too small to “click” with a finger, optimized for large displays, etc.) or can be replaced with new HTML capabilities which mobile browsers tend to support now without the Flash player (such as the lowly Flash video player).

Add all these factors together and it doesn’t make sense to push the Flash player to mobile devices any more. Adobe is instead using AIR to allow Flash developers to build native apps on the phone, bypassing the hassle of the browser plug-in altogether and still allowing those legions of Flash developers to do what they do best.

Here’s where people get confused — Flash as a platform isn’t going away. Regardless of the hype you hear about HTML5, HTML5 (including CSS3, SVG, and so on) just doesn’t have the capability (whether via the specification or by browser support) to do what Flash does. Flash is the only technology that can currently do what Flash does for such a broad audience. Its ubiquity across the web (98% installation) has guaranteed that users see what the developer wants, regardless of platform; regardless of whether or not what the developer created is any good.

This doesn’t mean we are Flash-crazy over here. Quite the opposite — we have historically counseled against Flash for web sites for many reasons, some of which are simply because it doesn’t address the goal. As we develop sites that are both mobile-friendly and desktop-friendly, we are increasingly coaching our clients on the right technologies to use to achieve their goals. Our position on Flash isn’t changing because of Adobe’s move, Adobe is simply reflecting the trend.

You can expect to see less Flash in web pages on your mobile, but you can also expect to see more of it behind the scenes in apps for mobile devices. As for your desktop browser, Adobe will release Flash players for years to come and people will still develop in it for as long as it takes HTML5 and its related specifications to finalize the rules and for the browsers to support them.

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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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