Thoughts and ideas of a dyslexic designer/developer
I'm going to start using Microformats a lot more from now on forward. I've setup Wbloggar with a load of custom tags and hope to use them when blogging. I want to use it as a experiment to see how practical it is to use Microformats in everyday life. I even looked back into XFN, for describing relationships. I'll come back to how well it goes, but I'm considering using ecto instead as I heard it can have scripts which mean I could put in a real form instead of just code.
So Ben Metcalfe asks the question Does presentation matter anymore?
This is exactly what me, Miles, Harry and Dave talked about one night over dinner. Honestly I think it does but as Ben identifies its moved around the chain now. If we take it that RSS has a huge audience and that its not changed a lot from its current form (aka no JS, CSS, Ajax, etc in RSS or ATOM) for a moment. The presentation shifts to feed promotion and the news reader style. For example Great News which I'm using for my desktop aggregator supports CSS and I can actually define a style sheet per feed if I want to. This was useful today when Google news was delivering me all the WorldService and ArabicTV stories, as I could use the brief stylesheet to show a lot of entries on one screen. While I use the readability stylesheet for reading Ben's blog and most of RSS content.
But it goes deeper than that, design isnt just about presentation. A designer should have a hand in the structured elements of the RSS feed, the useability of how its pushed and pulled around the internet and the accessability of the feed and its content. Its what I prefer to call the whole process the Flow of the content. Its part of what I do and I feel its part of the emerging role for new media designers. I mean is it too much to ask for a designer to build a client side XSL page for a RSS feed?
Just stepping away from the world of huge RSS audiences now. There something which smart designers understand well. The media, there designing for. web media isnt print media. Sounds obvious, but were talking about the vision for how the site should look and work being thrown out the window. I'm not talking about just browser quirks, screen resoultions and font size differents. I'm talking about the range of toolbars, extensions and the like which deconstruct the website beyond the control of the tightest web designer. Then if you go down the Greasemonkey path, you have something where you can actually share your deconstructions. Smart designers understand and embrace this and actually push for CSS driven sites to make this even easier. There are a few even testing the waters with Client side XSL transformations for all content with CSS for style.
I've included a screenshot of how I currently see BBC news story pages and how its meant to look. I custom built this simple script because it makes loading up bbc news stories from my RSS reader quicker and is easier to read for myself. Others would disagree, but then I would suggest you write your own greasemonkey script.
So back to the question, yes presentation does matter and the role of a designer is very important but like everything, roles shift with the times and media. Branding is another issue which I wont go into right now either…
I found this great little post about WIndows Longhorn/Vista's redline designs. Ryan suggests Redlines are a throw back to another generation of design, and I have to agree. Dactylx asks this question in the comments
I'm down with that idea, but then how do you as a designer communicate how the design should be rendered to a developer? What can we use to replace the redlines?
and Ryan replies with a slightly optimistic but good answer.
Here is the first step. Do not separate the teams. There should be no technical team and design team working separately (on different floors or on different continents). They should sit right next to each other and *understand* the problem just as great as the designers. Design is manifested in code, so if the coders don't understand, then the product is inevitable to fail.
I'm once again in total agreement, in my experience the best projects are always when everyone is involved in the problem. Not passed around like a rugby ball on a winters day.
I think a few of us (okay, maybe all of us) wish that this process was going faster, but its worth putting things into perspective. Two years ago, I had to explain to most programmers I worked with what SVG was. A year ago, I had to explain to most non-programmers I worked with what SVG was. Today, companies are hiring SVG developers, SVG is on our phones, is moving into our browsers, is appearing in embedded display systems on our trains and planes. This did not happen in a vacuum. It occurred because you took the message of SVG, of open standards, into your workplace, into your schools, into your government offices.
And thats the only the start. Kurt later runs through different points which he feels add to the changing landscape of the net. One of the key points I feel is his one about the rise of domain experts and platform independence.
Rise of Domain Experts, Not Programmers. XGUI based systems separate the abstract representation of applications from their implementation, which means that increasingly (likely using tools) specialized programmers will be replaced by domain expert non-programmers. This is already happening in fields like GIS. GUIs for designing such XGUI applications will similarly look more like flash editing tools or web layout tools with a few “access points” into scripting exceptions than they will complex IDEs. This doesn't make programmers obsolete, but it does increasingly push them into a component developer role.
Data/Platform/Language Independence. XML is increasingly abstracting the form of data access, turning complex and arcane queries (and updates) against LDAP servers, SQL databases, web services, mail services and so forth away from dissonant technologies and towards common XML ones. XML based XGUIs abstract the underlying platform interfaces and turn them increasingly into XML-oriented virtual machines that can degrade gracefully in the face of more limited capabilities, and makes such religious issues as Java vs. C++ vs. C# vs. flavor of the month language irrelevant – you use what works on the system to implement the abstraction. This doesn't eliminate the need for software – you still need to have those component implementations, and many of them may be extraordinarily complex and specialized in the back end, but it goes a long way toward eliminating the need for re-engineering the 90% of actions that we still do using the web now, from gaming to e-commerce to communication.
I have to say this is key! XSLT is so powerful once your able to get everything down to a XML level. Proprietary ways are moving aside while bridge applications are being used to open the data into XML. I actually remember when I first started using Cocoon and my fear was that there would not be enough XML sources to really make use of its ability. Boy was I wrong. I'm seeing lots of new web API's built on a RESTful interface, Bridge Apps for IM, email, newsgroups and even operating system information stored and generated in XML. SVG adoption has indeed been slow but its growing and it will be just another common place namespace.
Its well worth reading the whole of Kurts entry yourself, I actually found it quite moving….
I'm seriously douhting if OPML is the right thing for the task. Uche goes one step futher and suggests XML formats for outlining are complete rubbish. Danny Ayers also gets the boot in on OPML. Honestly he has a point but offers up a couple of others which I had not looked into before. OPL in reaction to the ugliness of OPML. Looking at the spec, I'm not sure it goes quite far enough. XBEL on the other hand looks too wildly different but useful for outlining. Uche also did a follow where he reviews. I like the idea of XoXo but prefer the idea of using XHTML or RDF which is easily parsed and integreated into other processes.
Then I found Wikipad… and had high hopes for a pocketpc version like this palm version or even this mobile phone type version. Wikipad doesn't have the name of something like Voodoopad but it certainly does do a good job of notetaking for now…
Shoshannah Forbes and I have been sending emails back and forth about the issue of RSS adoption in Right to Left languages like Hebrew and Arabic. It fits so closely with what I'm going to say tomorrow at XTECH (where I happen to be right now actually) its almost uncanny. I asked Shoshannah if I could blog her reply to my question about her RSS feeds. Basicly her RSS feeds include the HTML attribute dir to indicate direction of the text. Which makes it invalid and may break quite a few of the RSS readers out there. Anyhow here is the email complete with my new agreements and additional comments. Please remember as usual these comments are my own views and not BBC World Service's views (my employer).
Shoshannah Forbes wrote:
> The problem I am facing is simple:
> If I use valid RSS with no dir=rtl, then 99% of the RSS readers will display the text block as LTR, with punctuation digits and English in wrong locations, making the whole thing unreadable.
> When adding dir=rtl, at least I can get about 50% of the RSS readers to display the post body properly (titles are still a mess).
Agreed, but I feel there are two ways of looking at the problem. From your point of view it makes sense to include dir=”rtl” because very few software developers are going to change there code to take this into consideration. For us (the BBC World Service) we have the might to speak to developers and get them to change there code. Even if we do not do it for ourselves, we owe it to our audience (my own feelings).
> I don't use unicode control characters for a few reasons:
> * They are a real pain to input- it is like entering the control characters for CR/LF or < font > tag manually (but worse)- there are just to many places to enter them.
Yep totally agree
> * Most keyboard layouts do not have a direct way to enter them.
Yeah were using virtual keyboards for some languages and there a nightmare!
> * They make a mess of the text- they are only used for the RSS, and unneeded for the editing or the html display, and can produce unexpected results when entered into the text.
Yep, agreed
> * There are many clients that incorrectly display them as visible characters in the text.
Yeah, its a shame and that will change but its too much trouble at the moment
> * They make the text much more difficult to edit- if you change the text, you need to go back and change them as well. And since they are invisible, you get an awful lot of trial an error.
Indeed! You really need to understand them to edit with them. This would require extra training for our language services
> * They force me to use explicit directionality, which complicates things and makes the text less portable.
Yeah, there is a idea of reuse through out our language services. This is tricky already, who knows how much more tricky it would be if text was unicode directional too
> * My web app that creates the RSS from my HTML does not know how to add them automatically.
Yep, I know my Blogger app (Blojsom) supports Unicode Directionality IF i put them in at the start but then were back to the editor problem of virtual keyboards and sticking in hidden characters! The same is true of the BBC World Service systems. We use XSL with Saxon so if the characters are there, it should (not tested by myself) pass through to the RSS.
> * Since they are rarely used in other contexts, I can't focus on the content when writing, and have to start thinking more closely about the presentation.
Yeah indeed! Our language services are already busy as hell, unicode directionality would just add a level of complex on top of a already stressful job.
> * Moving from me to other users- most Hebrew/Arabic users don't know about them, and don't want to know. You try to explain to your mother that when she is writing in her weblog, she can't write in here usual manner, but has to enter this strange codes in a foreign language which have complicated rules (I have seen many pros get confuses with these characters, I don't expect laypeople to understand them).
Right on the nail! One of my points for tomorrow is unicode directionality is too damm difficult and very confusing! i expect some will challenge me about this tomorrow and honestly I will just admit its too difficult for me its even more difficult for others. Plus we should be making things easier for people not harder. The barrier for entry should be at a level where your mum or my mum could use it and write it.
> * It doesn't scale- think about a an Israeli blog hosting service- they want to offer RSS feeds for all the blogs, with minimum work for the users. Relaying on unicode control characters just doesn't do it.
Yeah plus from the Israeli blog hosting point of view, you want to get people going quick and easily not putting them off with complex editiing. Its the reason why Blogger does so well, 3 steps and you got your own blog.
> * Since they are complex, it is difficult to create a GUI for entering them (unlike general RTL/LTR controls, which are available everywhere).
Yeah its almost needs to be just like the direction attribute in HTML. I'm suggesting tomorrow a attribute like this for RSS.
> Not having the dir attribute in RSS gets rid of some markup- in favor of lower level much more complex control characters. A bad deal, IMO, and one which is a major cause for the problems when dealing with Hebrew/Arabic RSS.
Indeed, it was a ideal solution but the real world use is too painful
> I think that the root of the problem is that bidi is part presentation and part structure. And since even in the best of cases (for example, the automatic bidi control in recent QT or GTK applications on Linux) there are still many many cases that can *not* be covered reliably by the display algorithms of the software, I tend to think that for practical prepossess, bidi is more structure then presentation.
Yeah agreed, theres lots of push to put bidi information inside of CSS instead of HTML even, which is correct if you see bidi as presentation.
> I sure wish there was a way in RSS to tell the client “this element is RTL” or “this area is LTR” without resorting to HTML hacks. But at the moment, those hacks are the only practical tool I have to get at least *some* of the readers out there to display the text properly (more like “mostly properly”).
I feel your pain and I'm not even writing my own content in a right to left language! Its such a shame that HTML hacks are the only way we can move forward on this. The crux of my presentation and paper is that developers and content providers need to work much closer together and the RSS specificiation needs to make full use of attributes like xml:lang and maybe some other kind attribute for direction.
I have been meaning to blog about the structured blogging idea for quite some time now. The idea is this…
Structured blogging is about making a movie review look different from a calendar entry. On the surface, it’s as simple as that – formatting blog entries around their content.
On another level, it’s a bit more complicated – what we want to do is create structure (in the form of XML) around each of these types of entries, to organize the data inside and to let machine readers – other programs, sites, and aggregators – better understand the content.
Yep great can not disagree with that. Greg from Blogdigger has been thinking about this too. The overall concept is a interesting one for myself, but I see lots of connections with the semantic blogging idea which has been pioneered by the great guys at HP Research Labs, for quite some time now. Generally Semantic blogging for me seems to be adding machine readable meta-data to the content of the blog entry. Blojsom for ages has had meta ability for years now, which I have not really made full use of yet. But theres lots of work already moving ahead in this area around FOAF, XFN and Tagging or Folksonomy.
With Friend of a Friend (FOAF) its easy to put a link to a persons name and there FOAF profile. I'm sure it would be trivial to add a rel attribute to the link for more context. Which leads nicely on the XFN idea which is exactly that. Using rel attributes and a classification of types to represent human relationships using hyperlinks. Works well but I would like to get rid of the classification and go more fuzzy like tagging. The best examples of tagging full stop has to be Del.icio.us, Flickr and others but tagging on personal blogs is still quite new. Oreilly's radar points to whats possible with a little time and lots of meta-data in entries. Technorati makes this possible via there site. For example I have tagged semantic blogging and structured blogging in this entry and sent them a ping to make sure they pick it up. Theres nothing special in the links besides the rel attribute which is set to tag.
I also have to agree with Greg about what happens to the meta-data beyond the blog. I really want to see RSS feeds with the same meta-data making its way towards aggregator via namespaces and rdf. GRDDL is good and well worth looking into for the future. But once again this is all covered in the semantic blogging ideas. It has been a long time in coming but I disagree that the time is right. Blogging Clients need to change to reflect these changes otherwise no one except a handfull of people are going to manually put in meta-data into there posts. I will because i'm jazzed
about meta-data and semantic blogging, others will not. Even if the benefits are different looking entries on there own blogs.
For quite sometime I've been talking and pushing the use of Open RESTful API's. Its so easy now, sign up get a API, Development, Session, etc key and your pretty much away. The only question then is what framework you choose to develop in?
I personally use Apache Cocoon because it allows me to do almost anything I like and its completely dependant on XML technologies like XSL. One of my aims back in 2002 was to use XSL as a tool for almost anything I needed to do again and again. Well it that aim is very real now. For example I was creating quite a few emails with slighly different information in each one. Well I thought about using copy, paste, find and replace. But no need I just wrote up some really simple xml files which contains parts of the infomation then a sitemap in cocoon using a little bit of simple logic to read the URL string and certain parts as a variable for the XSL. Before you know it (timed myself, it took only 45mins with instant message interuptions) I had what I wanted. The only thing which was missing was for the pipeline to send a email at the end. I still had to copy and paste the result into a email. So how would I solve such a problem?
Well from my understanding of Servlets, it shouldnt be too difficult to send messages/streams from Cocoon to a SMTP JAR which sits in the same servlet container? But I'm still a little unsure of how this is exactly done. The other thing I could do is to create a email file which Thunderbird would pick up and send or at least put in the outbox with little user interaction on my part.
Anyhow, one of the issues with cocoon for the longest time was getting content in to it. Yes you have many different neat ways like the Directory reader, Zip reader, standard xml reader, image reader, JSP reader, hey there was even a Database reader which would create a connect to any SQL database. But theres so much more needed in this area, for example a while ago I was looking for a way to analyse lots of CSS and in the end we had depend on a Perl lib which understands CSS and then had to be written to XML before it could be pulled into cocoon. Now theres nothing wrong with this method but you would think a CSS reader would be useful. Along with a EXIF reader which I swear would be so great. All the metadata is sooo useful!! However its all changed now thanks to webservices. I could upload all my pictures to Flickr and use there REST API to pull the metadata out and into Cocoon. And this is the thing, its pretty true of a lot of things now. Want to get the weather in Tokyo? Just grab it from somewhere else, I bet its also more effective than doing it yourself too. And I wonder where things are going with this? Will we get to a point where it will be more effective to get the date or even the time from a webservice?
So the input side is covered, the internal transformation is pretty much there now with XSL 2.0 and Cocoon. But what about the output? Cocoon can output or serialise to almost anything you can think about including SVG, PDF, OpenOffice, Zip, Text, XML, HTML, XLS, etc. But this is the thing which needs the most development at the moment. The user interface for services are still pretty poor. So what options do you have? Well my fav is still SVG but still there very few browsers which support this natively. Which will always be a problem. Then theres the whole Flash thing, which I still really really hate but have accepted a tiny bit in the absence of SVG for some things. There's also tons of Javascript + XHTML solutions being used now, which I'm actually thinking is not so bad now (A lot of these solutions are using standard DOM's which makes them work across all new and coming browsers). XML.com has a really good piece about client side processing using Sarissa which I have been messing with recently. XMLHttpRequest has made a huge difference to what can be done on the client side and has issued in things like google maps and google suggest.
Then of course if you want to get really rich theres a whole host of technologies just on the horizon including XUL, XAML, XForms, WebForms2, sXBL, etc. Being a opensource kinda of guy, i'm gunning for XUL with Xforms and sXBL with SVG for my own applications. Can't help be interested in XAML though…
Following on, I've been reading a couple of thoughts from others out there. http://www.Peej.co.uk dispells the meme that REST is not ready? Theres a great little quote from Mark Baker in the same entry.
The same tools that create Java servlets could be used to build REST-based Web services, Baker says. “They follow the HTTP specification, and by following it, they implicitly are following the constraints of the REST style,”
Bang on the money! I was explaining to David the other day over a drink why PHP is great but Servlets are just well different. You cant really compare them, it would be better to compare JSP with PHP but servelts are logically different and simple just like RESTful services. It fits perfectly with the next generation of web 2.0.
I have been meaning to blog about Stephen Downes' community blogging presentation for quite some time now. I've already touched on the Long tail stuf through the blog and recently in the Why I still listen to Dave Slusher's podcast entry. And Stephen's presentation was the spark for me adding more metadata to my RDF RSS feed. Anyhow here's some great quotes which should spur you to listen or read the presentation.
in Canada we have socialists and socialists always say, “We represent the working class” and that's kind of like the socio-economic way of saying “We represent the long tail.” And they come out with these platforms and these policies that identify with the working people. Ask any of the working people, they don't want to be working people. And so, they're more likely to choose policies that support the rich people, because they all want to be rich, and when they're rich, they don't want to be pushed back into that long tail again. So I don't see a virtue in the long tail.
Because the meaning of a post is not simply contained in the post. And this is where we have lots of trouble with meaning, because we all speak a language and we all understand words and sentences and paragraphs, and we think we've got a pretty good handle on how to say something about something else, and we have a pretty good handle on how to determine the meaning of a word. What does the word 'Paris' mean? Oh, no problem, right? 'Capital of France.' Right? But, you know, it might also be, 'Where I went last summer.' Or it might also be, 'Where they speak French.'
When we push what we think of as the meaning of a word, the concepts, the understanding that we have, falls apart pretty quickly. And the meaning of the word, or the meaning of a post, is not inherent in the word, or in the post, but is distributed.
We can't just blast four million blogs, eight quadrillion blog posts, out there, and hope Technorati will do the job, because Technorati won't do the job, because Technorati represents the whole four million things and I'm not interested in three million nine hundred and ninety-nine of those. What has to happen is this mass of posts has to self-organize in some way. Which means there has to be a process of filtering. But filtering that is not just random. And filtering that isn't like spam blocking. Filtering has to be a mechanism of determining what it is we want, because it's a lot easier to determine what we want than what we don't want.
So how do we do this? We create a representation of the connections between people and the connections between resources. The first pass at this I described in a paper a couple of years ago called “The Semantic Social Network” and the idea, very simply, is we actually attach author information to RSS about blog posts. It kills me that this hasn't happened. Because this is a huge source of information. And all you need to do is, in the 'item', in, say, the 'dc:creator' tag, put a link to a FOAF file. And all of a sudden we've connected people with resources, people with each other and therefore, resources with each other. And that gives me a mechanism for finding resources that is not based on taxonomies, is not based on existing knowledge and existing patterns, but is based on my placement within a community of like-minded individuals.
Great stuff, well worth reading and theres tons of links to learn more from in the page. Very cool presentation, even though I dont totally agree with everything said. The emergence of tagging is something well worth considering into the future. Even Miles has talked at great length about community driven tagging with aggregation playing a role in bring sense or even meaning to resources. Honestly we're not that far off the semantic web in my eyes.
I just added a whole load of extra metadata and content to my RSS 1.0 feed (RDF). So first thing which you will notice is comments and trackbacks are added so there is no need to visit the XHTML site unless you actually want to comment back and even then you could use the WFW:comment system, which I honestly have never really looked into. I also added a comment count before the actual comments, so you can skip around the RSS easily. This will also mean I need to get harsh with spam as I dont want spam in my RSS too. So I'm turning off trackback autodiscovery if I get any more spam.
Then I added the Creative commons licence to my RSS feed, which was easy enough. Ben Hammersley has a complete guide on how to do this with RSS 1.0. But this is where I got stuck, I was listening to some podcasts from Northern voice and heard Stephen Downes' Community Blogging session which talked about alot of things to do with the longtail, tags, metadata and emergence. But he also suggested people should link or put FOAF content into there RSS feeds. And I just thought this was fantastic! It makes so much sense, so I went about trying to link my FOAF profile into my RSS 1.0 feed. Well its not as easy it would first seem. I tried to work out how to link rather than just add FOAF to directly into the RSS. And in the end came up with this.
< foaf
erson rdf:ID=”Ian Forrester” >
< rdfs:seeAlso rdf:resource="http://adrenalin-online.demon.co.uk/profile/foaf.rdf"/ >
< /foaf
Which sits in the channel block. While this may not be ideal, its seems better than anything else i've seen. Now if I can only get feedburner to pass on the feed without interfering with the metadata.
Update – My friend David showed me evidance that my new changes to the RSS feeds are causing problems. So I've decided i'm going to remove the extra comment and trackback fuctionality from the RSS 2.0 and ATOM versions. Which means if you subscribe to the RSS 1.0 version, you will get trackbacks, comments and lots of other juicy bits and bobs. The change back should happen tonight which will be the morning of the 2nd March for most of you. Till then, my feedburner one is still turning out standard RSS combined with my bookmarks. Thanks David, if anyone else is having problems please leave a comment…
Oh I'm in such a funny mood after listening to Harry talk about the joys of Mac for 30mins earlier last night. And its getting very late now, but I had to write something about these contact sharing services which are bouncing up everywhere.
Bebo, Plaxo and Ringo is one of the three on the tip of my toungue which I remember. How much of a pain is it to use these services when they do not interoperate at all. Hello Gap in the market. Wouldnt it be great if there was a service which interoperated with not only your outlook contacts but your mozilla, ical, etc contacts and stored them in an interopable format like RDF (yes you can see where I'm going with this) Friend Of A Friend has been used in social networks for quite some time now, why dont these contact services use FOAF profiles which people put on there blogs? Why should I need to enter in the same contact information into different services? Hell why do I need these services when I have a FOAF profile? As someone once commented Here's to owning your own data
Update, I just finished listening to a IT Conversation podcast titled Lessons Learned, Future Predicted by Marc Andressen and Dan Rosensweig. One of them (i think it was Marc) talks about how the client walled garden is a mistake and the real walled garden is now the data.
Roughly this is the key point, Not a blockquote sorry…
Its striking if you list the amount of things you can't do. There's no personal service on the internet, yahoo or anyone which allows you to get your personal profile out and import it into some other service. Theres no job service which allows you to do that. All the search engines which track your search history and take that somewhere else. You can't take your Amazon recommendations and take them somewhere else. Your ebay repurtation, or even your mail. You can't take your online mail from one provider to another. its difficult or impossible. Its striking the pattern which is being setup, the level of lock in which is being setup which makes perfect sense from a business stand point. But it is some kind of propitery lock in which is as strong as the lock in you use to have at the software level.
Marc – It is the form of locking for the next 10 or so years…
. Doug Kaye later presses both the panel guests about open data and attention data. but does not really get a answer worthy mentioning. However someone talks about FOAF and how a couple of services support it for importing and exporting. I can also say Audioscrobbler also supports FOAF exporting now. Here is my FOAF profile from audioscrobbler which is nothing like my own personal FOAF profile. Enough said really… By the way Its also interesting that Bebo and Ringo are running on the same software or are the same company!. I guess this strikes myself as the example Dan talked about, where AOL would not allow interop between AIM and ICQ even thought they owned both services! Crazy! own your own data because these services cant even get the simple things right.