Jeffrey Zeldman's Blog, page 39

Big Web Show № 112: Responsive Images Get Real with Mat Marquis

THE GOAL of a “responsive images” solution is to deliver images optimized for the end user’s context, rather than serving the largest potentially necessary image to everyone. Unfortunately, this hasn’t been quite so simple in practice as it is in theory.

In Big Web Show № 112, I sit down with Mat Marquis, chair of the W3C Responsive Images Community Group, to discuss guidelines for responsive images in multi-device design. We talk about the history, theory, and multi-leveled challenge of responsive images, the path to standardization, and what browsers will do next.

Enjoy!

URLs in this Episode

@wilto
Wilto on Github
Filament Group
Responsive Images—Cloud Four
responsiveimages.org
A List Apart
jquerymobile.com
Mat Marquis articles on A List Apart
Mar Marquis on The Web Ahead

Big Web Show № 111: Web Design Comes of Age with Andrew Clarke

IN BIG WEB SHOW № 111, Andrew Clarke and I discuss ten years of web design history, approaches to public speaking, running a successful freelance design business, the importance of writing, CSS3 easter eggs, growing your small studio, responsive web design, and more. Enjoy!

Sponsored by Squarespace and Hover.

Big Web Show № 110: CSS and JavaScript: Can’t We All Just Get Along?

IN BIG WEB SHOW № 110, Nicole Sullivan and I discuss CSS Conf, building scalable systems that won’t break, designing for speed and performance, learning Ruby, Object Oriented CSS, a CSS Style Guide, Type-o-matic, practical takeaways from stunt CSS, pairing as a work method, sexism and racism tests, and setting aside biases when selecting conference sessions. Enjoy!

Sponsored by Typekit.

The Page, The Stage

EVERY YEAR I give a new talk at An Event Apart. And every year I panic.

After nearly two decades, public speaking no longer frightens me. But deciding what needs to be said gets tougher, and more terrifying, each year.

In 1998, when Hasan Yalcinkaya hired me to give my first public web design talk in, of all places, his glorious city of Istanbul, I wrote a speech for the occasion and read it aloud from the stage.

The following year, when Jim Heid hired me to keynote Web Design World Denver, I intended to do the same thing. But a fellow Web Design World speaker named Jeff Veen (who was also a colleague on The Web Standards Project) persuaded me to throw out my speech and “just tell stories.” I did it, it worked, and I’ve done it ever since.

For all my An Event Apart presentations since starting the conference with Eric Meyer in 2005, I’ve designed slides outlining the parameters of what I intended to talk about, and then spoken off the cuff.

But this year, inspired by the rigorous (and highly effective) speech preparation regimes of my friends Karen McGrane and Mike Monteiro, I’m once again writing a speech out word for word in advance. I will polish it like a manuscript. Only when it is perfect—logically structured, funny, passionate, persuasive—will I design accompanying slides.

I may read the speech out loud, word for word, as Mike sometimes does, or I may revise and practice it so often that I no longer need to see it to say it, like Karen. Either way, my talk this year should be tighter than any I’ve given in the past decade. Hopefully, that’s saying something.

I’m grateful to all my friends for their inspiration, and delighted that the panic and terror I felt at the start of this year, while contemplating creating a new AEA talk, has turned into the inspiration to approach the task a different way.

How do you approach public speaking? And if you don’t speak, what part of you is holding the rest of you back?

Big Web Show № 109: Bring Me The Head of Tim Berners-Lee

IN BIG WEB SHOW № 109, Robin Berjon and I enjoy a calm, rational conversation about EME, DRM, the MPAA, and the W3C. Enjoy.

The episode was sponsored by Squarespace. Links mentioned:

“Please Bring Me More of That Yummy DRM Discussion” by Robin Berjon

About Robin Berjon
Robin Berjon (@robinberjon) on Twitter
“We Are Huxleying Ourselves Into The Full Orwell” by Corey Doctorow
News of the MPAA’s W3C Membership reaches Colonel Kurtz
Web platform tests on Github
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
Test The Web Forward blog
Test The Web Forward W3C announcement by Robin Berjon
The Main Problem With The Invention of the Internet

The joy of content creation (and the hazards of building in someone else’s sandbox)

AN INSPIRING STORY of content creation, which is also, although this particular tale ends happily, a warning about the hazards of building in someone else’s sandbox.

Stampylongnose makes wonderful videos about Minecraft (among other things) and is the first independent content creator in my young daughter’s world. She follows him like you followed your first favorite blogger.

In “1 Million Subscribers Special – From Then To Now,” he shares how he became an independent video producer on the web—how he lost everything when Google arbitrarily pulled the plug—and how the community that loved him, and one great Google admin, fought to restore his work.

“The independent content producer refuses to die.”

It’s 2014. Is Web Design Dead?

IN A RECENT article on his website, Web Standards Killed the HTML Star, designer Jeff Croft laments the passing of the “HTML and CSS ‘guru’” as a viable long-term professional position and urges his fellow web design generalists to “diversify or die.”

The reason the Web Standards Movement mattered was that the browsers sucked. The stated goal of the Movement was to get browser makers on board with web standards such that all of our jobs as developers would be easier.

What we may not have realized is that once the browsers don’t suck, being an HTML and CSS “guru” isn’t really a very marketable skillset. 80% of what made us useful was the way we knew all the quirks and intracries of the browsers. Guess what? Those are all gone. And if they’re not, they will be in the very near future. Then what?

From my perspective, the web standards struggle consisted of two phases of persuasion: first we convinced browser makers that it was in their interest to support current HTML, CSS, and JavaScript specifications completely and accurately; then we evangelized the accessibility, findability, and portability benefits of lean semantic markup and progressive enhancement to our colleagues who made websites and their clients.

Evangelizing true compliance, not mastering workarounds for compliance failures, was always the point. Evangelizing was key. Browsers weren’t going to stay standards compliant if nobody made use of that compliance; likewise, W3C specifications weren’t going to advance unless designers seized hold of technologies like CSS to push type and layout on the web as far as they could go—and then complain that they didn’t go far enough.

It took a village of passionate browser engineers, designers, front-end developers, and generalists to bring us to the web we have today. Does the movement’s success mean that many of those who led it will become jobless, like Bolsheviks after the Russian Revolution?

Jeff Croft is correct when he says “the goal of the Web Standards Movement was for it to not have to exist.” But we should take this a step further. The goal of the web standards movement was to remove needless complexity and absurdity from the process of creating websites so we could focus our attention where it should be: on design, content, and experience. Evangelizing standards to browser makers and our fellow designers was not a career path, and was never intended to be—any more than aiding a wounded buddy turns a soldier into a physician.

Interestingly, once web standards made the web safe for design, content, and experience, the web’s capabilities—and, thus, the work required to create certain kinds of websites—started becoming more and more complex. To help cut down on that complexity, some front-end developers began sharing chunks of code (from Eric Meyer’s CSS Reset to Mark Otto’s Bootstrap) which paradoxically set in motion another level of complexity: as Jeff Croft points out, familiarity with these and dozens of other tools is now expected of job applicants who could once get hired on nothing more than a solid understanding of HTML and CSS plus a little JavaScript.

HTML “gurudom” was never a career path for anyone, aside, maybe, from a couple of talented authors. Same thing with CSS trickery. Doing black magic with CSS3 can get you a slot on a web design conference stage, but it’s not a career path or proper goal for most web designers.

Fascinatingly, to me, anyway, while many of us prefer to concentrate on design, content, and experience, it continues to be necessary to remind our work comrades (or inform younguns) about web standards, accessibility, and progressive enhancement. When a site like Facebook stops functioning when a script forgets to load, that is a failure of education and understanding, and all of us have a stake in reaching out to our fellow developers to make sure that, in addition to the new fancy tricks they’ve mastered, they also learn the basics of web standards, without which our whole shared system implodes.

This doesn’t mean “go be an HTML guru.” It does mean cherish the lessons of the recent past, and share them with those who missed them (or missed the point). Wisdom is not a job, but it is always an asset.

Never fear, web design generalists: many companies and organizations require your services and always will—from universities still seeking “webmasters,” to startups seeking seasoned folks with multiple areas of understanding to direct and coordinate the activities of younger specialists. But if jack-of-all web work is feeling stale, now may be the time to up your game as a graphic designer, or experience designer, or front end developer. “Diversify or die” is overstating things when the world needs generalists, too. But “follow the path you love” will always be good advice.

The Black Hole of The Valley

STOP ME if you’ve heard this one: Guy goes into a venture capital firm, borrows money. Uses money to turn neat idea into product. Gives away product (or sells well below cost) to build a following and thus a demand.

Customers love product, imbue it with their life energy and creativity. Community grows, but not cashflow, because money was something to be figured out later. More investors throw more money at the product, on the theory that what it needs is fancier offices or fifty designers united behind no vision in particular.

Surprisingly (at least to the participants), several rounds of throwing cash and bodies at what was once a neat idea fail to generate ludicrous return on investment. Capitalists demand that product idea be changed.

Change of idea fails to generate ludicrous return on investment. Customers, no longer sure what product is about (or even that it has a future) become less passionate.

Usage falters, then rapidly hits event horizon.

Guy starts shopping no longer loved or interesting product at fire sale price.

Eventually big internet company sucks product and product team into itself, where both disappear forever.

Cloudy With A Chance of Blueballs

I RECENTLY SHARED a positive view of what’s happening at Adobe. I’m still a huge fan of the company’s image editing software, and I remain optimistic about their new direction. But I’m unhappy about the two-device limitation Adobe Cloud places on software.

While the company is more liberal than it used to be (e.g. a license to use Adobe software on the Mac is also a license to use it in Windows, and vice-versa), the Cloud’s refusal to let me use software I’ve purchased from Adobe on more than two devices feels like a relic of the past. It’s a restriction that might have made sense for print designers working in corporations in the 1990s, but it is out of touch with the reality of remote and freelance workersdesigning digital sites and applications for a multi-device world.

I have an office iMac, a home iMac, a home laptop, and an office laptop. I use all of them for my work. My set-up is not unique. Everyone I know who works in this industry has something similar going on.

Apple gets this reality but Adobe does not. For instance, my copy of Lightroom 4, which I bought via the App Store, works everywhere. Not so Lightroom 5, which I purchased (rented? licensed?) as part of my annual Cloud subscription. As a paying Adobe Cloud customer and a photography and Lightroom fanatic, I should be chomping at the bit to upgrade to Lightroom 5. But I see no point in doing so if I’m only going to be able to use Lightroom on two machines.

You might ask why this is is a problem. Here are three times I use Lightroom: to edit business, family, and vacation photos on my laptop while traveling; to edit business photos on the computer in my design studio; and to edit family and travel photos on the computer in my home. Adobe Cloud will let me use Lightroom 5 in two of these situations, but not all three. That makes it useless to me. Lightroom 4, which I bought in the App Store, has no such restrictions. I can use it on as many machines as I own. (To be fair, Apple can be liberal with software licensing because it makes its money on the hardware I buy. Adobe does not. I get that, but understanding doesn’t solve my problem.)

Likewise, I need to use Photoshop when I’m traveling on business (laptop), when I’m working in my design studio, and when I’m burning the midnight oil at home. Adobe will only let me use the product in two of these contexts. Stymied, I use an older, non-cloud version of Photoshop on one or more machines—and when I do that, I run into compatibility problems.

Although I love Photoshop and have used it professionally for nearly two decades, I can’t help noticing that Pixelmator does pretty much everything I need Photoshop to do, costs a fraction of the price (US $29.99), and can be downloaded onto an unlimited number of computers I own.

Why should Adobe care? Because the current restriction is not sustainable for them. The frustrations the restriction creates for me every day actively encourage me to stick with Lightroom 4 and abandon Photoshop for a much more affordable competitor. In short, the one thing that’s uncool about the Cloud is actively unselling all the Cloud’s benefits. And that can hardly be in Adobe’s long-term interest.

What can Adobe do about it? Well, the company could offer a “pro” or “gold” version of Cloud service that removes the two-device restriction. If the difference in price is reasonable, I’d be happy to sign up. Even better, from a public relations as well as a love-your-neighbor point of view, would be if Adobe simply removed the restriction at no additional cost. Or set the restriction higher, allowing you to register Cloud software on up to five devices you own, for example—at no additional cost.

They have to do something. We want to keep working with Adobe software, but Adobe needs to work with us, too.

This is a Website

LAST NIGHT at dinner, my friend Tantek Çelik (and if you don’t know who he is, learn the history of your craft) lamented that there was no longer any innovation in blogging—and hadn’t been for years. I replied by asking if anyone was still blogging.

Me, I regret the day I started calling what I do here “blogging.” When I launched this website in 1995, I thought of what I was doing as “writing and publishing,” which is the case. But in the early 2000s, after Rebecca Blood’s book came out, I succumbed to peer pressure. Not from Rebecca: Rebecca is awesome, and still going strong. The peer pressure came from the zeitgeist.

Nobody in the mainstream had noticed a decade of independent content producers, but they woke up when someone started calling it “blogging.” By the way, what an appalling word that is. Blogging. Yecch. I held my nose at the time. But I also held my tongue. If calling your activity blogging was the price of recognition and attention, so be it, my younger self said to itself.

Did Twitter and Facebook kill blogging? Was it withdrawal of the mainstream spotlight? Did people stop independently writing and publishing on the web because it was too much work for too little attention and gain? Or did they discover that, after all, they mostly had nothing to say?

Blogging may have been a fad, a semi-comic emblem of a time, like CB Radio and disco dancing, but independent writing and publishing is not. Sharing ideas and passions on the only free medium the world has known is not a fad or joke.

We were struggling, whether we knew it or not, to found a more fluid society. A place where everyone, not just appointed apologists for the status quo, could be heard. That dream need not die. It matters more now than ever.

Yes, recycling other people’s recycling of other people’s recycling of cat gifs is fun and easy on Tumblr. Yes, rubbing out a good bon mot on Twitter can satisfy one’s ego and rekindle a wistful remembrance of meaning. Yes, these things are still fine to do. But they are not all we can do on this web. This is our web. Let us not surrender it so easily to new corporate masters.

Keep blogging in the free world.