This is a response to a blog post by Joe Hewitt, titled Web Technologies Need an Owner.

“Many people seem to assume that the Web will one day become the one and only client computing platform on Earth…”

I don’t think I have ever heard that seriously expressed by anyone. Let alone “many people”.

“…therefore it must not be controlled by anyone.”

Right. It must not be controlled by anyone. Because the goals of the web are lofty. They go infinitely beyond the goals of profit-making organisations creating a platform to make “real developers happy and productive”. The web does not need to compete with other client platforms – its goals are different.

“This is a dangerous assumption. The HTML, CSS, and JavaScript triumvirate are just another platform, like Windows and Android and iOS.”

No they are not. They are different at a fundamental level because of the open and uncontrolled platform that they enable. You don’t have to play if you don’t want to. Take the best of HTTP and go back to iOS, Android or where ever you want. Stop pitching the web in a battle against corporately owned platforms running on corporately controlled hardware and pretending one can win against the other. They’re different things and it’s not going to play out so black and white.

“…except that unlike those platforms, they do not have an owner to take responsibility for them.”

I have many many friends that take responsibility for the web every time they go to work, every time they publish a new article or commit to Github. I trust them so much more than I trust the powers that run your “cutting edge” platforms.

“The Web has no one who can ensure that the platform acquires cutting edge capabilities in a timely manner (camera access, anyone?). The Web has no one who can ensure that the platform makes real developers happy and productive. The Web has no one to ensure that it is competitive with other platforms, and so increasingly we are seeing developers investing their time in other platforms that serve their needs better.”

Much of that’s true, but I don’t see a problem with it. I don’t believe the web will suffer long-term because camera access is still a few years away (the cynic in me would say organisations like Apple and Google are stifling the capabilities of their browsers to ensure longer-term advantages for their native platforms. Sucks to be a web developer, hey?).

The web doesn’t have to ensure anything, because it’s not pitching itself against the things you think it’s pitching itself against.

“My prediction is that, unless the leadership vacuum is filled, the Web is going to retreat back to its origins as a network of hyperlinked documents.”

The web IS a network of hyperlinked documents. It’s not its origins. It’s its present, and its future. Please let it be its future.

“…but it will no longer be your primary window. The Web will no longer be the place for social networks, games, forums, photo sharing, music players, video players, word processors, calendaring, or anything interactive.”

I don’t agree, but I could live with that. I don’t mean to sound arrogant, but I have loftier goals than peddling any of those things you mention.

“Newspapers and blogs will be replaced by Facebook and Twitter”

… Um. I have no idea what that means.

“Let’s face facts: the Web will never be the dominant platform. There will forever be other important platforms competing for users’ time.”

Of course. Other important platforms that push the boundaries. That show standards bodies like the W3C where we want to go, and what might be possible. Much like Flash has done for the past 10 years. This isn’t a bad thing – and as a web developer I’m not scared of it, or wanting to fight against it. I want the web to do the things it’s good at, and I want it to get better and better at those things.

“The Web will be just another app that you use when you want to find some information.”

Just an app that you use when you want to find some information? I don’t want to say more. You’ve said all I could say.

“And so I end on a sad note.”

I’m sorry you’re sad. Don’t worry about the inertial scrolling – it’ll all come out in the wash.

Steve Souders talks about forcing Gzip compression at Google here, and this method assumes there is a significant number of browsers that won’t be able to compress it and will choke. It would be interesting to see Google’s data on that.

What if you took the Google idea:

1. For requests with missing or mangled Accept-Encoding headers, inspect the User-Agent to identify browsers that should understand gzip.
2. Test their ability to decompress gzip.
3. If successful, send them gzipped content!

And changed it to:

1. Send them gzipped content!

Do we have any real-world data that tells us practically, how many browsers would not be able to deal with that, and what percentage of users would get a broken experience?

This came up because Simon Willison tweeted:

S3/CloudFront don’t handle conditional gzip, at all? That’s a pretty shocking omission. The workarounds are really ugly…

Perhaps it is a pretty shocking omission, but plenty of people are serving compressed JS and CSS from Cloudfront, right? So is it as much of a deal-breaker as it might have been a few years ago?

Incidentally, if you like hack days and you like science, you might be interested in finding out more about what’s being planned for this inaugural Science Hack Day. Meanwhile, here’s the idea:

Given an HTML document containing tables of solar system model data, build a stylesheet (using CSS3 transforms and transitions/animations) that can present it as an animated model of the solar system:

• Would be interesting to see what could be done with only HTML/CSS, but realistically might need some scripting to make it a bit more sane. For example, to read data from the table in the first-place.
• Cubes rather than circular images of planets, so we can spin them independently at correct speeds. Might not look so pretty, but means we can aim for a more accurate model. Could use more than 6 faces to get a more ’rounded’ shape, eventually it would look spherical I guess.
• Not sure if reproducing the true elliptical orbits of planets is going to be easy, or even possible. They might just have to be circular, at least in v1.
  • Matthew below has a possible solution for that: using a scale transform to stretch the x-axis.
• Allow for rotating the entire canvas so you can zoom in and out and look at things from different angles using keyboard or mouse controls.
• Need to work out solution for scaling distances vs planets sizes independently so we can fit it on a screen. Presumably there’s prior-art for this. Would be nice to have a few different scaling methods.
• Could do a canvas version too, but probably less fun and actually pretty simple for someone with decent programmatic drawing skills (not me).

Finally, here’s the extremely crappy and ill-conceived 10 minute non-starting point, which I’ve entitled Tiny dots going round a small dot (Webkit only of course). No, none of the table’s data is used in the animations, all the values are hard-coded in CSS, and it’s almost not worth showing. But anyway, if it was all done and dusted we’d have nothing to do on hack day.

See you there?

However, it does mean that any good news is often rebutted with a, “Yeah, but this bit here is still crap”, style of response. Fortunately these comments normally expose a limited scope of experience on the part of the commentator, which makes it very easy for me to ignore them.

I’m not really going to give my take, because it seems a bit tawdry when I was only there for two years and was based in London for all of that time. Fortunately I don’t have to, because Scott Berkun unravels my half-baked thoughts very succinctly in a small part of his recent assessment of the company.

The primary problem at Microsoft regarding good design & innovation is the diffusion of creative authority. The problem is not the numbers of people at the company, or the layers of management, as many gripe about. Layers don’t help, but it’s not the problem. The real issue is the inability to grant creative authority to the few people worthy of it. Microsoft has always been a place that gives way too many people a say in matters of design, vision and user experience, and it shows in the pervasive mediocrity of the majority of its products. Films need directors. Orchestras need conductors. But if you divide things into 30 pieces and ask 30 people to play creative visionary, mediocrity ensues. The better products at Microsoft are the ones were [sic] VPs modify the distribution of authority to create clear creative authority.

I’ll quickly put that in terms that fellow colleagues of mine at the time will identify with.

Teams are encouraged to be accountable for everything that they do. Strategy, planning, design, execution, analysis. There are a dozen little teams running around, all being accountable for their part of the puzzle, without having any idea or thought about how they will link up with their neighbouring pieces to create a plausible end product.

Here follows my prediction for myself and the iPad.

While it’s impossible for me to buy one, I don’t really want one. I certainly don’t need one. There’s no obvious gap in
my computing armour that it will fill.

That is, until the day it becomes possible for me to walk to a shop and buy one. Otherwise known as the UK release date. On that day, I will almost certainly walk to said shop and buy one.

I’m not proud of myself.

An email from Google appeared in my inbox only a few days ago informing of the impending drop of support for IE 6 on the Google Apps product line. Google don’t want to engineer for IE 6, and they’ve clearly made a decision that with Chrome Frame in the wild they are now at a point where they don’t have to.

Chrome Frame is a strategic move which allows them to drop IE 6 support in some of their core products quicker than they would otherwise be able to. It gives them an answer to users (mostly likely their enterprise customers) that can’t upgrade from IE 6 for whatever reason. Presumably the potential loss of revenue from those customers must now weigh in less than the cost of engineering for IE 6.

As a bonus, Chrome also patches some of the HTML5 and CSS 3 support that’s appearing in Webkit into the more modern versions of IE, which are still lagging behind.

The key point is that Chrome Frame paved the way for Google to make this move, and Google dropping IE 6 support is significant in terms of influencing people to move on from it, either by installing Chrome Frame, or by upgrading to a newer version of IE or a competing browser. It might be difficult to quantify this significance, but where Google lead the way, consumers and competitors tend to follow.

I believe that’s one of two main driving forces behind Google developing and releasing Chrome Frame: it frees them up from the pain of IE 6. The other reason is is that it allows their product teams to focus on the future technologies of HTML5 and CSS 3 now. To get ahead of the game. To discover new ways of using that technology. And to build the next generation of web applications while the rest of the world sits around fixing double margin float bugs.

I’ve been a friend of Clearleft from day one, when Rich left me on my own at Multimap to go and start his new venture in 2005. Pretty much from that day I’ve had the thought in the back of my mind of whether I might one day end up working there. To be honest, I thought the right moment had probably past. But when Rich asked me at the end of last year whether I’d like to apply for the job, other events were conspiring to make it exactly the right time for a new start. Those conspiring events are for another post (possibly); but in essence, a lot of things were up in the air, and it felt right that they land in Brighton with a new job at Clearleft.

I’m in my second week there now, and it’s been a lot of fun. I’ve learnt a ton from working alongside Natalie, and have really enjoyed getting to know those from the team that I’d not previously had the pleasure of meeting. It’s exciting to work alongside people that I’ve admired for a long time; indeed, some of the people that inspired me to become a web developer back in the day. I say that totally unashamedly, because it’s true.

I’ve been commuting down from London the last week, which has been a pain. But from next week I should be a permanent resident, enjoying my daily walk to work (walk to work – did you get that?) and meeting the people that make Brighton’s geek scene what it is. If you’re part of that scene, look out for me, and say hello.

So here starts a new chapter. It’s exciting and a bit daunting, but I feel refreshed and very happy to be here. I’m pretty sure Brighton is one of only a handful of places I’d have left London for; and I’m completely sure that Clearleft is the only agency I would have left Microsoft for.

Using your old PC as a development server – May 2005

This was really a guide on how to set up a machine running Linux with Apache, PHP, MySQL, etc, and make it available on a fixed IP on your local network. The kind of thing you’d be more likely to do using a VM these days. I’d recently inherited an old Pentium 2 which had an aversion to Windows, so it became a playground for my first real experiments with Linux and web server technology outside of a shared hosting environment. I never finished writing it.

Working at Google – November 2005

This was a tongue-in-cheek look at the various employee benefits that Google people allegedly enjoy. It started with a few well known and genuine perks and gradually got more silly, with things such as speed-dating nights for geeks that don’t get out much. I don’t think I knew anyone at Google when I wrote this.

JavaScript Libraries – December 2005

Something of a rant about the dangers of plugging JavaScript libraries you don’t understand into your web pages. This was at the time of Prototype’s dominance, and prior to the rise of jQuery. It was inspired by a Carsonified Ajax workshop with Thomas Fuchs that taught Ajax solely through the features and API of Prototype. It was very silly, not least because 80% of the attendees (BBC, Multimap, Yahoo!) couldn’t go away and put Prototype on their websites.

Redesigning MAS – March 2006

I used to do unsolicited redesigns of small but well-known websites in the music business. Along the lines of 37better projects. This was immediately after the redesign of the MAS website (it’s the one you still see to this day), on which someone did such an appalling job that I couldn’t hold my tongue. As a former client of MAS I should say they are a superb operation, but their web presence is, to put it bluntly, crap.

Buying a bed and mattress – April 2006

On moving into my flat in East Dulwich I was looking for tips on how/what/where to buy a decent bed. I probably should have published this one as I’ve never been happy with the thing that I ended up buying.

Ten years of XHTML – July 2009

In the wake of work on XHTML 2 being stopped I wrote up some thoughts on why it hadn’t worked out, why HTML 5 was working out, and how we can rationalise the specifications and recommendations of the W3C (and others) in our day-to-day work as web developers. Could re-hash this and publish, I guess.

Full Frontal – November 2009

Some thoughts on the Full Frontal Conference that I attended. It was one of the best technically focussed conferences I’ve been to in years, but this post was more around what it’s like to be a Microsoft employee (which I was at the time) at an event like that. I didn’t have the company name on my badge on this occasion (which I was quite glad of) but it’s interesting how it was generally assumed that no one from Microsoft would be there. Not that I would be standing up for or representing the company in any way, but it would be good for people to know that employees are out there, that they are part of the community, and that they’re not all big, bad, and evil in nature.

The Spectrum of Opinion – December 2009

A piece on how having a strong belief or opinion can warp your objectivity on that subject. Your mind subconsciously looks for and solidifies evidence to support your theory, and dismisses or discredits evidence that contradicts it. There’s probably a well known name for this phenomenon, though I haven’t come across it, and it’s something I find interesting.

Understanding HTTP – November 2009

Some thoughts on this fundamental piece of the web’s architecture and its impact on how web technology is innovated, built, and delivered. Will probably finish and publish this now that I have left Microsoft. If you see what I mean.