Dispatches From The Internets

These last two days have been a bit of a whirlwind, but I have had a great time meeting and talking to the attendees (and other speakers) here at the HOW Interactive conference in San Francisco. I gave my talk yesterday on progressive enhancement (of course) and how it can make designing and devloping for mobile a little more sane. Here are the slides (which you can also see and download on Slideshare) form that talk:

I also provided attendees with a reading list. It’s the one I developed for a private training a few weeks ago with Jeremy and one which I will continue to update as I find more useful resources I want to share.

In case you hadn’t heard, Tim Kadlec’s Implementing Responsive Design came out today from New Riders. It’s a fantastic and necessary read for any practicing web professional out there and I was honored Tim asked me to write the foreword. With his permission, I have included it below:

A few weeks back, I flew to Sweden to deliver a talk on progressive enhancement for mobile devices at Funkas Tillgänglighetsdagar, an accessibility conference whose name I will probably always butcher. I really enjoyed getting to know the Funka Nu team, meeting new people, and seeing how countries like Sweden, Norway, and Germany are addressing issues of accessibility in both public and private spheres. It was also nice to see validation for some of the thinking and work we’ve done around issues of accessibility.

Anyway, I thought I’d share my slide deck from the talk in case you’re interested. It was picked up yesterday and today as “Top Presentation of the Day” on SlideShare, so it’s either really useful or a slow time for uploads. Regardless, enjoy!

As a profession, we spend a lot of time thinking of the best ways to protect our users’ data and their privacy. In fact, most sites have exhaustive Privacy Policies detailing what information they collect and what they may do with it. That’s why I find it bizarre that many of these same sites have chosen to hand over their users’ browsing habits to third parties such as Twitter, Facebook, and Google without considering the implications.

A few years back, I wrote a little article celebrating the fact that you could actually apply image-replacement techniques to images themselves. At the time, I was using it mainly for converting black and white printer-friendly logos to colorized or reversed alpha-transparent PNGs, but I postulated that the technique could also easily be used to replace high resolution print-friendly imagery with web-ready graphics (impracticle as that may be). Little did I know, six years later we’d see the advent of ultra-high resolution handheld devices like the iPhone 4 and iPad 3. Hell, at the time I was still rocking a Treo.

In 1971, John Rawls published A Theory of Justice, in which he described the following Thought Experiment he often conducted with students and other groups: The members of the Group were asked to design a society down to the very ethical principles that would guide the relationships of people within that society. They were given free reign and could create whatever kind of society they wanted—monarchy, anarchy, capitalist, communist—it was all up to them. The only stipulation Rawls placed on the experiment (and notified participants of) was that Group members were not allowed to know anything about who they would be as part of that society.

When I opened my inbox this morning, I nearly fell over. According to Daniel Glazman, co-chair of the CSS Working Group at the W3C, browser makers are considering supporting the WebKit vendor prefix (-webkit-*) because the web development community can’t be bothered to use the equivalent experimental properties for other browsers:

WebKit, the rendering engine at the heart of Safari and Chrome, living in iPhones, iPads and Android devices, is now the over-dominant browser on the mobile Web and technically, the mobile Web is full of works-only-in-WebKit web sites while other browsers and their users are crying. Many sites are sniffing the browser’s User-Agent string and filtering out non-WebKit browsers. As in the past with IE6, it’s not a question of innovation but a question of hardware market dominance and software bundled with hardware. But there is an aspect of the problem we did not have during the IE6 era: these web sites are also WebKit-specific because they use only “experimental” CSS properties prefixed with -webkit-* and not their Mozilla, Microsoft or Opera counterparts. So even if the browser sniffing goes away, web sites will remain broken for non-WebKit browsers…

In a recent post, Adrian Roselli ranted a bit about the awkward position we are in with regard to HTML5. Here’s a taste:

The trend continues where I speak to clients, vendors, young developers fresh out of college, and even the teachers/professors who instruct them and they don’t understand that HTML5 and CSS3 aren’t the same specification. I have repeatedly shown an HTML 4.01 site with CSS3 to explain that they are each distinct specifications which can be applied in different combinations of different versions. This is further complicated when JavaScript is folded into the mix—some folks even think jQuery is part of the HTML5 specification.

Late last week, I linked my Forrst followers to Stephanie Rieger’s awesome post “A Plea for Progressive Enhancement” which offered a even-handed critique of a sliding menu interaction on the website for the Obama campaign. The main thrust of her complaint was that it didn’t work on most of the mobile devices she tested, including an iPhone 4 running iOS 4.3.5—one version prior to the release of iOS 5.

When we launched the mobile-first version of this blog, we opted not to include Google+ as one of the sharing options because there was no way to make it work without JavaScript (a fact which undermined both our progressive enhancement philosophy and the privacy of our readers). I tried digging into the (IMHO) over-engineered code that manages the +1 button to find an end point, but after about an hour of digging decided it wasn’t worth it. Thankfully there are others out there who are more persistent than I am and a way to share on Google+ without using the Google-supplied JavaScript is now available thanks to the folks at TechLifeWeb.