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

My grandfather, who unfortunately has been dead for several years, was a man fond of four-letter words to express his sentiments. Once a Navy sailor and a lumberjack, he’d adopted to a picturesque family life a little late in his years. Imagine a charming, smiling old fellow who’d be wearing a nice suit and tie as he shook your hand, then you’d notice “Lloyd” was tattooed on his knuckles. (Hidden under the nice suit was a much larger tattoo of a giant patriotic eagle on his chest.) Midway through a church picnic, he might let slip some colorful language during a tale.

My grandmother did her best to correct his language. One word she’d like to encourage him to use instead was “hooey.”

Today’s comic features hooey. It also features Ian “the Leviathan” Hickson, Google employee and HTML5 editor-for-life (nowadays, he’s more of a generic HTML editor-for-life, which is likely a much sweeter gig) as well as Larry Masinter, Principle Scientist at Adobe.

The hooey in the comic is hyperbole for the effect of comedy; Ian has not outed Larry as a cannibal.

However, Ian did perform some character assassination last Friday when he fired off this blog post accusing Adobe of “blocking” HTML5. He also took the opportunity to simultaneously claim he couldn’t reveal the author of a post for it being in a private list (he chose to use the word “secret”, likely for dramatic effect) while immediately revealing the author’s identity in the very following paragraph (which in this case was Larry.)

There’s a few issues here that point at the continuing mire that is the political process of HTML5, and the resulting decrease in public confidence in the resulting product. First, we’ll look at Ian’s charge: that somehow Adobe is blocking HTML5. This is an absurd statement from Hixie, who’s made it clear that the WHATWG controls HTML5 (in his view) and not the W3C. So for him to claim that a W3C action is impacting the adoption of a spec he adamantly states is in WHATWG’s hand is like saying that the mayor of Osaka, Japan is blocking the Washington state budget from being passed. It’s an act of dishonesty at worst, or emotional manipulation of his readership at best.

(I am not saying the W3C doesn’t have a leadership role in the HTML5 effort. Rather, I’m saying that according to many prior statements by Ian, it doesn’t.)

Regardless, several people caught this “story” and ran with it. Perhaps it’s the Apple/Adobe conflict spawning fanboys and lines drawn in the sand, but a lot of people are willing to demonize Adobe at the drop of a hat. So, rapidly, the word was tweeted throughout the digital realms: Adobe hates HTML. And kicks babies.

I wonder how many of those re-tweeters use Photoshop, Illustrator or Dreamweaver on a regular basis?

Fortunately, some non-partisan cowboys came riding into town and cleared the air with a thoughtful examination on the situation. In particular, I recommend reading Simon St. Laurent’s The Widening HTML5 Chasm and Thom Holwerda’s Teacup, Meet Storm, part IV. Please take the opportunity to peruse their posts for some perspective. Once you’ve received that enlightenment, continue.

Done? Ok. Onwards, then.

Ian Hickson is a Google employee. Which means he’s a smart man. His track record of work speaks to that effect, and it’s worth saying that despite my disagreements with his process, much of HTML5’s good parts have appeared thanks to his efforts as the spec’s editor.

Ian Hickson has a methodology for handling people. It’s documented at his website here. One section on discrediting has some lovely gems that seem to apply to the situation: “Discredit the man who produced the report, off the record.” and “Say that he is harbouring a grudge against your group.”

Also, I’m going to propose that our dear Leviathan has been working on HTML5 for quite some time, and as such has been up to his eyeballs in the process for years. He knows how the process works, clearly, and has historically shown his willingness to ignore said process if that gave him the opportunity to do what he preferred over what the majority desired. (That’s also in his book on handling people: If you don’t agree with a rule you are told to follow, announce your agreement to it in a statement, and in that statement, assert that you intend to follow it in a manner consistent with some other set of rules; or that you will consider certain passages as merely being “advisory”.)

So he’s smart, follows a personal methodology of handling people that involves discrediting them, and he’s familiar with the W3C process. Right?

Very well then. Let me say it: Ian’s insinuations about Adobe were, as my grandmother would say, hooey. Intentional hooey. My grandfather would have used a stronger term. Ian deliberately publicized the identity of someone who posted in a private mailing list (immediately after claiming he could not). He used words like “secret” to provide a sense of conspiracy. He used Adobe as a scape-goat so that we’d all see that HTML5 was being blocked by W3C processes (despite his insistence that the W3C has nothing to do with the actual invention and progression of HTML5).

This is the man who doesn’t like HTML5 politics? This is the man who will be controlling HTML5 all versions of HTML for the remainder of his life?

Well, that’s just splendid.

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.

HTML5 is a mess.

That was a phrase in my Refresh presentation in December, when I was speaking of the dueling organizations jockeying for control of the spec.

At the time of my writing, I did not know how clean it was by comparison to its status today.

Today’s comic features Hixie the Leviathan interrupting a Muppet-show like meeting of the W3C HTML5 group. Blame the parody of Henson’s creations on the commentary of one Mr. Jeremy Keith. Tweets like this are candy for people like me. The comic also features Sam Ruby, John Foliot, Manu Sporny, Jeremy Keith and Bruce Lawson as Muppet parodies.

The fact is that it seems that Ian “Hixie” Hickson, the HTML5 editor, has taken his ball and gone home. He’s started splitting out the HTML5 spec on the W3C side of things into a shredded mess, by his own words with the hope that if the W3C spec becomes a giant mess, people will drift to the WHATWG spec by default. He’s petulantly insisted that microdata (his own creation) is part of HTML despite the recent W3C work that resulted in it being moved out of the spec. He states that the WHATWG spec trumps the W3C spec, so the latter organization has to get over itself and get back with the program. He’s implied that he’d prefer authors (that’s web designers/developers) stop using HTML5 features as much as they have because it’s causing problems. (This further reinforces my belief that Hixie is following an Implementer > Author > User mentality instead of the User > Author > Implementer mentality that HTML was built upon.) He’s made HTML versionless, insisting that HTML5 is a snapshot that he’s already gone past, and is sitting as monarch for life on the continuing evolution of the spec.

All this from a guy who’s catch phrase seems to be “I don’t understand.” Which is, to me, a dangerous trait in a person empowered with absolute rule over the spec.

In short, like Jeremy, I’m frustrated with a lot of the recent HTML-related issues from the front of advocacy. I’ve tried to sell HTML5 (and it’s grab-bag of toys) to co-workers, peers in web design, total strangers, and friends who didn’t escape a conversation early enough. I want to see it used more, so the browsers speed up implementation of juicy features, so I can use it even more excessively, and so on.

But if people don’t even know if HTML5 exists anymore, or the status of the organizations working on it seem to be out of whack, why would they bother using the <video> tag or exploring <canvas>? We need to give people something to work with. Which means we need to not have insane grandstanding by a single individual.

But hey, this is just one squirrel’s view: HTML5 is a mess.

On December 16th, 2009, I had the opportunity to do something I’d been meaning to do for a while. I gave a presentation (in front of an audience, even) about web standards! I was invited to speak at Refresh Bellingham, which was a great experience. Discussing the topics of CSS3, HTML5 and Mobile, I definitely bit off a larger chunk than I needed to (in the future I think I’ll pare the experience down to CSS3 and HTML5 unless it’s for a much longer time format), but by the end of the presentation I felt like I’d done a good job of entertaining the audience and maybe teaching some of them a thing or two.

And, by George, that was a really good feeling.

Entitled: “The Ghosts of Web Standards Present: CSS3, HTML5 and Mobile”, the whole thing ran about an hour and fifteen minutes. Fortunately people laughed at all of my jokes, so it wasn’t too torturous. I talked about the varying level of support in modern browsers for new CSS3 and HTML5 features (and how that shouldn’t matter), as well as my thoughts on the need to be ready for mobile devices today in our designs. If I did it again, I’d probably put more advanced CSS3 techniques and HTML5 tricks in, as I uncovered a whole slew of new things I’d not experimented with before while doing research for it.

Although the slides don’t contain the majority of my witty dialog (I’m so modest), I’ve put them up (after some corrections and modifications) for you to look at if you’d like. The background will flash into it’s proper place two seconds after the page loads, by design (I had some issues with the popdown request for the geolocation interfering with the way the background looked on the slide projector).

The Ghosts of Web Standards Present

Today’s comic is a week or so late to be timely, but I think it’s still topical. It showcases the squirrel about to be launched on a rocket that Hixie insists has reached an appropriate state, even if it seems everyone else degrees.

As you’re likely familiar with my opinion on this topic, I think you can predict the results.

On October 27, 2009, Ian “Hixie” Hickson, editor-for-life of HTML5 (yes, my bias is showing) decided that there were
“no outstanding emails or bugs on the spec”, and flipped the switch on the spec declaring it in Last Call. Just in time to meet the October deadline. Hooray!

As it stands, his status flip may be premature. Or, perhaps, his viewpoint of reality. If you look at the W3C’s HTML issue tracker, you can see it’s got a lot left on it. In response to comments about this difference between the W3C and WHATWG on whether HTML5 had actually reached Last Call, Ian commented “…we have different issues lists and different criteria for going to Last Call.”

Looking at what’s left to resolve, it’d seem the difference in criteria is that the W3C would prefer the job was done properly, as opposed to being done quickly.

I’m inclined to agree with Shelley’s thoughts. Maybe Ian is trying to reassert some control. Maybe he just isn’t concerned with issues like providing unsighted web users with the information they need to understand tables on a website. Either way, it creates the appearance of a move meant to serve himself, not others.

That’s not a reassuring quality to see in our leviathan.