Regardless of the truth of the matter, I won’t be attending. Well, in the flesh. But considering there will be so many iPhones clustered in Austin that some form of AT&T implosion will occur, I’m expecting Twitter, Flickr and the blogosphere to be bursting with updates about the event. So much so that I could likely masquerade as an attendee with related tweets to the effect of “Jeffrey Zeldman is so dreamy in person!” and “Wow, Croft really rocked that song at Cog’aoke!”

However, the truth is, I’ll be likely trying to preserve my sanity and filter the madness out. Today’s comic is an exploration of an extreme strategy to do this, featuring Dave Shea as a fellow escapee. I can only wish I had such an awesome device, but instead I’ll have to consider methods like Dave’s suggestion of temporarily modifying my Twitter follow list.

If you are attending SXSW, then in the words of Abraham Lincoln: Party On, Dudes. But don’t mind me as I hide in a bunker until it’s safe to come out and head to An Event Apart: Seattle.

Joining the hat in today’s strip is Dave Shea and Jeff Croft. These fine gentlemen appear with the squirrel to help present to you a visual gag that points to one simple, inescapable truth: CSS gradients will break your brain.

I’m trying to get up to speed on CSS3, a goal which falls in the same category of absurdity as tasting every variety of curry in India; there’s simply too many modules piling up in that spec. At this point I suspect that CSS3 will not reach a finished state prior to the web being replaced by the psionic slave networks that our future robot overlords will use to broadcast their diabolical commands to the human race.

Nonetheless, I am digging out the fruits of the cutting edge of our darling cascading style sheets, especially the previously Webkit-only features that have been newly adopted by the recently released Firefox 3.6. One area I focused on this past Thursday was CSS Gradients. After all, how hard an a gradient be?

How hard indeed.

I present Exhibit A: my tweet less than five minutes after opening Mozilla’s tutorial on the topic. It starts out easy enough, then they start talking about things like color-stops, linear vs. radial gradients, starting points and angles, etc. It gets worse when you learn that Webkit and Mozilla each approach gradients differently, continuing the spaghetti western tradition of dueling methodologies.

In short order, my tweet was answered by Dave, then Jeff, each adding to my diagnosis: CSS gradients are a pain.

I’m currently working on a tutorial on the topic, something that hopefully explains it in a more digestible format than what I’ve seen thus far. Until then, the only way I can provide you comfort is to inform you that the hat in today’s strip is based in reality. Here is a picture of Dave in the hat.

If you did not spit your tea/milk/soda/liquor/pepto onto your computer screen just now, you have no sense of humor. I almost died of laughter when I saw that picture. Its existence was like a special jewel reminding me that dreams come true.

For the sake of equal treatment, I’ll share with you what I found a few minutes later while getting a reference picture of Jeff to touch up his character’s appearance. I stumbled upon this. Yeah… it speaks for itself. I’m not sure when I can fit that into a comic, but I’m certainly going to try.

If neither photo cracked your head, than I recommend checking out CSS gradients. If you’re feeling woozy, no worries. I’ll get back to you in a few days with some digestible tidbits on how to tackle them.

Today’s comic is hand-drawn, and hastily at that, so please forgive the roughness. I’m breaking in a new Windows 7 machine at work, and have had zero free time at home thus far this week. However, I had to provide a comedic take on designers, ampersands, and their unending lust for one another.

If time permits, this will be re-cast in the forge of vector.

I took my inspiration for today’s frivolty from Dave Shea’s recent tweet on the topic, hence his presence in the comic. Dan Cederholm fits well as what we’ll call Exhibit A. His site’s very banner features an elaborate, carefully cared-for member of this strange, storied symbol. His actions in the comic tend towards the vulgar, but I’m pretty sure that if ampersands walked about, at least one designer would try to jump them in this fashion.

As for me, I find our little “&” friend to be a fun part of our typographic heritage. But I know so little about typography that I haven’t been infected by this particular syndrome (ampersandphilia?). I try my best to fit in amongst those who crave it, like a teetotaler carrying a cup of ginger ale when socializing with drunks, but sooner or later someone’s going to notice that my heart’s just not in it, at which point I’ll need to flee like Frankenstein’s monster ahead of the pitchfork crowd.

Now, bacon on the other hand…

But some, like Dave “Maximus” Shea, aren’t impressed, as he makes clear here.

I get it. We’ve been hit in the face by Internet Explorer so many times that it’s impossible to think well of it. But the increasing speed at which they’ve started to bring out new versions, and the clear improvements of 8 over 7, have me convinced that what they’re doing is a good thing. Yes, there’s no mention of canvas support. Yes, some of these features were supported years ago elsewhere. But they’re trying hard to improve, and more importantly, they are improving.

So, I for one am glad to see this announcement. It makes me happy. Also, I secretly hope that if the version numbers keep going up on IE, certain stodgy corps will be shamed into updating past IE6.

Hey, a guy can hope. Right?

As we’re about to learn, being wise and making wise choices do not always go hand in hand.

Today’s comic imagines Jakob Nielsen and Bruce Schneier intentionally exposing themselves to danger in a gladiatorial arena (overlooked by a Caesar-esque Dave Shea) with the predictable results. Sadly, this scenario reflects reality (with a little editorial excess) in a way that shocks me.

Let’s lay out the recent events.

Jakob’s Suggestion: Let’s Unmask Passwords

On June 23rd Jakob Nielsen proved he’s not done making poor recommendations in the name of usability. This time the victim is not design, however. Instead, he firmly takes a swing at security by recommending that passwords become unmasked, leaving naked all the strange alphanumeric combinations that we strive mightily to remember every time we want to visit naughty sites, check our email or bid on a rare 1920’s lampshade online.

He makes some assertions while recommending this course of action. First, that people rarely look over shoulders. Second, that you’re alone in your office. Lastly, he names two “costs” that these cause, one being that users don’t trust sites that mask password fields and the second that masked fields result in weaker passwords. He ends this list of errors by suggesting we do away with the masking altogether, and dance widdershins under the stars in a deep forest clothed in naught but our own sweat.

For the sake of avoiding a stoning at the hands of security experts, he does make an offhand suggestion of offering a check box to allow masking for public situations, but this is said in an afterthought that shows how little he worries about such a trivial thing as someone with both curiosity and eyeballs noticing you typing things on your monitors.

Dave Shea’s Suggestion: Let’s Have A Smackdown

I might have spent my remaining years ignorant of his “suggestion” (might I take some liberties and call it a mad raving?) of tossing away one of the final barriers of security in exchange for a marginal increase in usability. However, Dave Shea took the impetus to make a comment about Jakob’s strange post on Twitter, for which I thank him.

He then followed with a comment replete with inspiring concepts: “A Bruce Schneier / Jakob Nielsen smackdown would be, frankly, awesome.”

It’s moments like this that I wait for, mouth watering with anticipation as I crawl through the many tweets and blog comments of the web design sphere of opinion. Immediately I imagined a savage competition between these two notables where Jakob’s naivety costs him in a contest against the security expert Schneier. These sort of daydreams translate easily into a comic, and furthermore align with something about which I found myself holding a strong opinion. This sort of conjunction almost always sends me scrabbling to my mad laboratory, where I harness arcane shapes into vector imagery and stamp it with the mad wisdom of the stars.

The Twist: Bruce Agrees With Jakob

However, it was only on July 26th that Bruce did something I don’t think Dave expected when he made his tweet, and certainly wasn’t in my realm of anticipation. He agreed with Jakob.

Thankfully, I was able to adapt this change of circumstance to my comic’s needs.

However, I’m not about to alter my opinion on the topic. Namely, that I think this suggestion is madness.

In short, it appears to me that Jakob and Bruce assume that exposed passwords are a non-issue because firstly criminals don’t hover over shoulders and secondly that privacy when surfing a website is a guarantee.

Problem #1: Enabling Criminals Of Convenience

Let’s cross out the consideration of serious hacker types for a moment. These aren’t the sort of individuals that need to see you typing your password to steal your stuff. They’ve got mad skills, and are probably busy right now taking your credit card information off a hard drive the U.S. Government accidentally sold to a spare parts reseller. But amateur no-gooders and opportunists need all the help they can get. They may not plan on stealing wi-fi access, but if they see you typing a password in the cafe they just might take advantage of it.

Unmasking the passwords by default creates a situation where Average Joes are given a lot more temptation to misuse the information they’re casually overseeing. We’re a curious, slightly selfish race. Give us the chance and we’ll be exploring things we shouldn’t. This is probably why emergency room doctors drink heavily after workdays involving gentlemen walking funny who whisper about the need for extreme secrecy when dealing with their medical “emergency”.

Problem #2: Privacy In The Home Is An Illusion

We’ll jump past the criminal concern, however, to look at the privacy issue. For the average American (and even more so for the average human) privacy isn’t a guarantee, and rarely exists when accessing a computer terminal. On the home front you often have spouses, siblings, parents and children all about as you log onto email accounts, purchase music via iTunes, check your bank account, or make a purchase for a pizza or a movie. Although I’ll pretend that maintaining privacy between spouses isn’t a concern (although I suspect it is) we all know that kids will be kids, and that some siblings are less than circumspect in respecting your stuff.

How would you like to come home only to discover you’ve spent $40 on purchasing a couple of Brittany Spears albums? How about learning someone (probably a young someone) bought access to an adult movie on the cable box with your account? I’m not saying that kids can’t get access to something with enough effort, but I think that it’s a big step in the wrong direction when you remove such a simple barrier to that access, and by doing so it requires no effort on their part to act on a poor decision.

Problem #3: Private Office? What Private Office?

So privacy in the home is an issue. What about the workplace? I have a great job. I don’t work in a cubicle farm. But many office workers do, and have hundreds of co-workers with easily five or six sitting in cubes across the aisle who can see their screens.

School teachers often have their computers in the classroom next to students. Should they trust all their pupils to respect their privacy and not try to access staff-only functions or answers to an upcoming test?

Furthermore, more and more people are accessing websites in non-traditional spaces. When you’re packed on a subway car with dozens of commuters and you need to access a site on your smart phone, do you want to have to decide if you can trust the people squeezed up next to you?

I could come up with dozens of other scenarios. Jakob is trying to cast his recommendation in the light of saving us from “legacy” design by implying that we live in an era where security won’t be risked by removing masking. Bruce seems to agree, stating that shoulder-surfing is an uncommon activity and that the risk is outweighed by the annoyance of typing blind.

The Root Of The Problem: Outdated Assumptions On Where Websites Are Accessed

I say that instead these two are making assumptions about website usage that are outdated. Computers are being used by younger children with more sophisticated skills. Websites are increasingly accessed more by other devices like smart phones, in non-private spaces with dozens of potential observers. Privacy is a vanishing commodity, so to presume that an average scenario doesn’t involve potential prying eyes is foolhardy and risky.

Jakob said the following: “Users make more errors when they can’t see what they’re typing while filling in a form. They therefore feel less confident. This double degradation of the user experience means that people are more likely to give up and never log in to your site at all, leading to lost business. (Or, in the case of intranets, increased support calls.)”

I’m going to call you out on this one, sir. That’s outright backwards. I feel less confident when I am entering a naked password in any environment, and strongly doubt the security of the site in question if required to do so. In fact, I’m likely to not use it at all. Why should I trust their other measures if they can’t even protect the password from passing eyes?

Perhaps username/password security truly need to be replaced by something both more secure and simpler to use. I’m not sure what that replacement technology should be. But I do know that we shouldn’t decide that usability trumps security and retrograde to exposing our passwords to John Q. Public.

No offense, John.

[Edit: Fixed the jump from #2 to #4 in the problem subtitles. Thanks, Elaine!]

I’ll be honest: I cannot be sure that all three things depicted reflect the truth. However, I do know for a fact that Mark Trammell did perform the duck dance. I’m not sure if it’s an ancient ritual designed to summon waterfowl or merely a remnant of the disco era, but it was glorious to behold.

Dave Shea’s hair is seriously something that perplexes me. It seems perfectly sculpted, with this well-mannered shelf that seems to be immune to wind or IE-bugs. I’ve noticed it before in his pictures, but when you’ve seen him in person it’s even more amazing to behold. Seriously. Is it hair gel? Spray? Amazing genes? (Fun fact, in the pre-vector CSSquirrel comic here, the guy running from the demon in panel #1 was meant to be Dave Shea. I’d obviously failed to capture his hair’s look, though.)

Now, re: Jeff Croft’s libido… that may be a bit fictionalized of an event. However, when I last met him he was told about a comic I’d done featuring him, and had mistaken me for the artist responsible for this masterpiece, and not my own humble poke at HTML5 featured here. Now, to prevent further confusions, I can simply state “I was the guy that drew you in bed with a squirrel.”

I’m not sure if that’s something to be proud of, but I bet it’ll be hard to forget.

Hopefully now that this important exercise in documenting the nonsense of WDN09 is complete I can get on with comics involving the usual, such as Opera vikings, IE blunders, and Andy Clarke’s knickers.