CSSquirrel A look at web development and web design by Kyle Weems

Gruber says: “It’s not that Google is worse on net neutrality than other companies with a stake in the mobile phone game. It’s that they made such a show of being better, of being on the side of the public interest — before they had a big stake in the game.”

Word.

This is in reference to this piece by Ryan Singel on Wired, entitled Why Google Became A Carrier-Humping, Net Neutrality Surrender Monkey.

Gruber’s response is short, sweet and quotable. Ryan’s piece is worth the read. Both manage to say, eloquently, reasons that Google’s behavior is poor behavior.

Cat’s out of the bag, Google. No more free passes for being the “people’s champion”.

Ok, the iPad.

Whoop-dee-freaking-doo.

I’m annoyed by all the defense of the device’s failures by my peers who are justifying the shortcomings as features that only mega-geeks want; they say that the mythical ‘average user’, like some strange breed of lobotomized unicorn, is not interested in these issues. (*cough* Jeff Croft’s iPad Thoughts and Jason Beaird’s iPad: It’s not for us are two stellar examples of this ‘average user’ argument *cough*)

Really? Are you patting yourself on the back that much about how awesome you are that you think it’s still 1999 and we’re logging onto the Internet via a series of loud angry screeches? (Oh dialup modems, how I don’t miss you.) Virtually everyone (in America, at least) uses browsers on a very regular basis. Over 350 million people use Facebook. There’s been these little instant messaging programs with names like MSN or gTalk  for a long, long time now. My friend’s grandparents use Skype to talk to their friends in other countries.

What these people lack isn’t a taste for the features we geeks have been talking about. What they lack is the terminology for it. My mom isn’t going to say she wants “multitasking.” She is, however, going to want to have her browser open to look at websites while having access to her IM program to chat with family and friends.

That basic pair of tasks: browsing + chat, does not exist on the iPad. That is a single example that fits the everyday life of millions of people. To tell me that some sort of mythical upper class are the only ones who want to do that is to live a magical life in Narnia, where your friends are mostly talking animals; the majority of which lack opposable thumbs.

One last thing: the App Store. You want to run a program on the iPad? Better hope that Apple wants you to have it. Have fun surfing the Internet without Flash. For better or worse, a good part of the web still runs on it. Apple seems to be pushing farther towards a closed ecosystem, which is the complete opposite of what most of us standardistas believe in. You can’t pretend the device is the replacement to a netbook when it doesn’t have the same breadth and variety of software. Some people celebrate it, claiming the closed ecosystem of the App Store makes it somehow better, filled only with quality software.

Like iFart, which for a time was the #1 app in the store.

The iPad does have a lot going for it (however, the name is killing me.) But let’s not pretend that we’re some rare breed of horse, and that these shortcomings only impact 1% of users. Because that’s clearly a fantasy, and the average person lives in the real world, just like us.

On Wednesday I had the honor and pleasure of participating in a podcast recording session with HTML5 Doctor Bruce Lawson, Beginning Web Design author Ian Lloyd, and SitePoint’s Kevin Yank in a discussion about HTML5, and whether it’s just exploded over all our face.

The end product, “HTML5 is a beautiful mess” is now up at SitePoint. I’d be tickled pink if you took the time to listen.

As you may recall, I discussed ranted about this subject on Monday with the strip The HTML5 Show (AKA a Mess) and the related post.

Mostly, HTML5’s a mess in the political sense. The organizations behind it (W3C and WHATWG) are increasingly in conflict with one another. Additionally, in my opinion, Ian Hickson is increasingly disregarding any attempt at a legitimate process and simply putting what he pleases in the spec, as he pleases.

The podcast touches on that matter, and spins out to the state of the actual implementation of HTML5 itself, whether there’s a challenge in getting designers and developers to start using it, the issues of accessibility in <canvas>, and how delightful it’d be to move past plugins.

If I have one beef with the whole podcast, it’s the fact that I’m talking with a pair of Brits. Which, as every movie-going American knows, instantly sound more clever due to their crisp accents. Also, if the transcript is any guide, my sentences tend to roll off the rail quite a bit, inflicting casualties to adherents to the English language.

So, if you have the time, please go have a listen, and then please come on back here and post any thoughts you had at my butchery of verbs, the points that the participants brought up (or even better, the points we didn’t) and how lovely Bruce Lawson’s voice is.

I wasn’t at An Event Apart: Chicago 2009. But along with other desk jockeys, I followed along via A Feed Apart. One comment that got re-tweeted about seventy million times during the conference was the following quote by one Jeffrey Zeldman:

“Real web designers write code. Always have, always will.”

When I made a comment about the amount of retweets occurring on this post, I got a reply from Molly Holzschlag (who I respect, but am incapable of pronouncing the last name of):

“Bless my pals at AEA but the entire comment is bait or a very misguided statement to make on the brink of 2010.”

When two people who helped define the industry as it is today have a difference of opinion, I’m left on the sidelines wondering which to agree with. One the one hand, I agree with the concept that design needs to occur more in the browser and less in Photoshop, but on the flip side I suspect Molly has some insights that I’m simply not taking into account.

So I’ll throw it to the web at large. What’s your opinion on this topic? Do designers need to start doing more design in (X)HTML and CSS, or are we coders going too far in expecting the to put Photoshop aside in the early design phase?

Today’s comic imagines a scenario where Ian “The Leviathan” Hickson, HTML5 editor, “resolves” an issue as a plumber.

I’ve used quotation marks on “resolves” because the English language lacks punctuation to indicate sarcasm. I can only imagine what such a strange mark would look like, the black sheep that was expelled from the childhood home of Exclamation Point and Question Mark after a dispute with his stern father, Period. What would life on the streets do to such a symbol?

I considered using italics, but I didn’t want to look too sassy.

The @summary attribute has been the source of no little discomfort during the gestation process of HTML5, a token of sorts that is lauded, derided, despised and fought over in what seems like an endless battle. I discuss, in my own rambling fashion, my view of the civility of the issue here, which in turn references Bruce Lawson’s post on the topic, Alternate text in HTML5. It’s been the source of no small amount of contention, which I think John Foliot describes nicely over here.

Despite this, for some reason I’d (perhaps foolishly) thought that some sort of accord had occurred with @summary, allowing it to exist in HTML5 as a non-obsolete, conforming part of the spec (albeit with a great deal of snark involved).

I’d recently learned that not only was peace not occurring, but that @summary had found itself into the middle of another fracas. It seems that in an attempt to get HTML5 to reach Last Call status on schedule, Ian is marking unresolved issues in the bug tracker as “WONTFIX”, insisting that people with problems talk to the chairs, and moving on.

One such example of this in action is available for your reading pleasure in this W3C bug report. For those of you in a hurry, I’ll sum it up: People (such as the PFWG) have issue with @summary being marked in the HTML5 validator as “obsolete but conforming” along with a warning message.  Ian Hickson, man of action, disagrees with the PFWG’s opinion, won’t change the (inaccurate) flag, and has decided that the issue (among others) is resolved and simply marking it “WONTFIX.” Apparently it will keep this status, despite the large amount of opposition to this stance.

This is, as John Foliot puts it (in the same report)  “An affront to the web accessibility community that existing accessibility solutions that the current editor disagrees with have the status of WONTFIX simply because the editor disagrees.”

I’m not sure, in the end, if @summary does or does not deserves the bad rap Ian’s trying to attach to it. But I do know, though, that I’m tired of seeing one “benevolent dictator” being capable of deciding the future of the open web single-handedly by sidestepping all the prior discussions and opposing views regarding HTML5 with a simple “WONTFIX” status.