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

Today’s comic features the year 1991, where a time-traveling Jeremy Keith, a younger John Foliot sporting a ponytail and Vanilla Ice are involved in a pivotal moment of history that would make or break Sir Tim’s invention of HTML.

I am reliably informed by those involved that my version of events is remarkably close to the truth. -cough- Really.

Two things made today’s comic possible. The first is this glorious snapshot of history: John Foliot hanging with Vanilla Ice. You’ll note Foliot had that brilliant mustache even in the early nineties. I also couldn’t help but notice Ice’s immaculate eyebrows.

The second is this post by Jeremy Keith on the subject of Hypertext History, where he discusses wwilfing his way to the early history of HTML and gazing upon the source code of the very first document published on the web. What’s really neat is his discovery that the page essentially validates as HTML5. Gadzooks!

Lest ye think he or I are saying Sir Tim was some sort of web prophet predicting HTML5, consider this response by Zeldman on that very topic. The fact is, HTML5 is meant to stretch backwards to be compatible with the best practices of the past while embracing the future. If that spec works so well with the earliest pages, then job well done, folks.

Both the first website and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2 appeared to the world in 1991. I was fourteen, a coding geek, and a massive TMNT fan. But even at that young age, something didn’t quite sit right with Vanilla Ice’s random musical segment inserted into my turtle movie experience. Yet, as today’s comic implies, maybe that was for the best. Maybe Ice did us all a favor. Or maybe not.

Take a gander and decide for yourself.

Today’s comic continues the storyline started by the last episode in a display of continuity rarely tolerated here. It continues the celebration of my attendance at An Event Apart: Seattle by showcasing many of the speakers of that groundbreaking event: Andy Clarke, Nicole Sullivan, Jeremy Keith, Eric Meyer, Aarron Walter, Jared Spool, Luke Wroblewski, Jeffrey Zeldman and Dan Cederholm. Also making a noteworthy appearance is Naepalm, the chinchilla alter-ego of Mindfly Web Studio co-worker Janae.

It also is my response to Jeremy Keith’s challenge (made at the event) to create an icon for “Push to Dispense Free Cheese.” I dare anyone else out there to do better.

No, really. I want to see that.

For the past couple of years I’ve followed the going-ons of An Event Apart through the Twitterscape. The inaugural comic of CSSquirrel featured AEA: New Orleans 2008 (and Andy Clarke’s underpants.) This year was the first opportunity I had to attend in person. It blew me away.

Let’s start with the speakers. They are top notch, cream of the crop, cutting-edge members of our website-making industry. They aren’t just paving cow paths (HTML5 philosophy notwithstanding). They’re kicking down the door of the future and lighting up places we’ve never been before. Even better, they’re sharing these cutting-edge thoughts with the rest of us.

I am fully incapable of transcribing in a single blog post what I learned there. It took me eight hours of working alongside Janae to figure out how to compress this information into what became four hours of presentation for our esteemed Mindfly colleagues, and that was with access to informative slides. So instead, let me point you towards some online writings that sum up the event and the lore contained within:

• Best AEA Yet (Summary) – Jeffrey Zeldman
• Put Your Worst Foot Forward (Zeldman) – Luke Wroblewski
• Object Oriented CSS (Sullivan) – Luke Wroblewski
• Anatomy of a Design Decision (Spool) – Luke Wroblewski
• The CSS3 Experience (Cederholm) – Luke Wroblewski
• Emotional Interface Design (Walter) – Luke Wroblewski
• Paranormal Interactivity (Keith) – Luke Wroblewski
• Everything Old is New Again (Meyer) – Luke Wroblewski
• Message and Medium: Better Content By Design (Halvorson) – Luke Wroblewski
• Seattle Memories (Summary) – Eric Meyer
• Article of Doubt (A Day Apart Summary) – Jeremy Keith
• AEA Seattle 2010 Flickr Group

As awesome as the speakers were, another amazing component of the conference was the attendees. I live in lovely Bellingham, WA. It’s about two hours north of Seattle, is nicely sandwiched between mountains and the bay, and is a great place to live. It is not, however, literally crawling with web designers in the same fashion as large cities like Seattle or New York. So to be standing shoulder-to-shoulder with hundreds of invested, devoted website-making peeps is a heady experience. With people coming from design studios, universities like UW, and even sites like I Can Has Cheezburger, it made for a great opportunity to talk shop with people of all different web design backgrounds.

At some point in the recent past I saw someone ask on Twitter if it was worthwhile to pay for a conference for information they could get later on a blog. I can say for certain that yes, it is. There is a quantity of data being that is shared in live meetings that any attempt by myself or others to fully regurgitate in writing is incapable of matching. Speakers absorb earlier comments by their fellows, incorporating ideas into their own presentations. Crowds at lunch and after-parties discuss the merits of the ideas discussed, bringing the focus of several hundred minds to the same issues in one short period of time. Friends known online become real concrete people with a firm handshake, a booming laugh, and other qualities that engrave the real feel of who they are.

Note to self: I forgot to actually acquire one of Dylan Wilbank’s excellent business cards. Dang it.

There’s one more comic that will finish this year’s AEA storyline. But knowing the quality of this event, having finally experienced it firsthand, I can tell you it won’t be the last time AEA gets the squirrel treatment.

Meyer, Zeldman and everyone else that made my two days in Seattle so awesome: Thank you.

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.

Today’s comic features a rather large cast of web designers (Eric Meyer, Ethan Marcotte, Dan Cederholm, Elliot Jay Stocks and Jeremy Keith) doing nothing involving the web. Rather, each of them has traveled to the Pilcrow Public House for a tall drink and a leisurely respite.

Although I’m deeply in love with the Internet and its delicious offerings, I find that the 21st century is running at a pace that is accelerating and doesn’t allow for much leisure, even during your leisure time. My own plate is rather full, even outside my work hours, with various online and offline activities that result in my bitter laughter when someone asks what I’m doing with my spare time this week.

If, as a web developer, I were to fashion a pub, I’d probably call it the Pilcrow. I’m blaming all the typography nuts that are in my feed reader. Hence it plays stage for a look at what I imagine leisure would be like in the middle of nowhere, preferably without any wifi or 3G signals, leaving you with no choice but to put down the phone and look at who’s next to you.

True to the premise of slowing down, this comic was inspired by some older posts on the blogs of the notables above. When Dan Cederholm updated the design of SimpleBits, he spoke briefly in his post Woodpress about his desire to start writing posts more often, and not for search engines or tutorials, but for conversation.

Ethan Marcotte picked up the thread in an entry by the same name, complimenting Dan’s redesign and realizing that his “quasi-tumblog” wasn’t entirely cracked up as he wanted it to be.  He then quoted a sentence from this post by Merlin Mann that really hit me where it counts: Jesus, I miss paragraphs.

Amen to that. I love Twitter. It’s a great way to get an idea out quickly, to share links and views among peers when time is short or when dealing with a keyboard the size of my thumb. But sometimes I feel like I’ve lost the ability to take my time and write at length because of that need to get the ideas out quickly.

The clincher for me was Elliot Jay Stocks’ contribution to 24ways.org (the web designer’s advent calender) entitled A Pet Project is For Life, Not Just For Christmas. It’s a great read, discussing the need for our own pet projects as a form of relieving work pressure, collaborating with friends, and improving our quality of life. I couldn’t agree more. CSSquirrel is in essence a pet project, but lacks that collaborative nature that can be so addicting. I need to find some quality geeks and a wacky idea and get rolling. To me, these sort of projects are an equivalent the fixer-uppers in the garages of our fathers. They’re there for some peace and the opportunity to play with your toolset.

So I don’t know about you, but one of my New Year’s Resolutions is to find a way to slow down where it counts, and tinker more where it doesn’t. Or the reverse of that. I’m not sure which.

(Regarding Meyer and Keith’s presence in the comic: Eric Meyer wrote on Twitter about applying to truck-driver’s school on a day off. Fictitious or real, I found it hilarious. I also recently re-discovered the Salter Cane website, featuring a band including one Jeremy Keith on bouzouki. I’ve found the music rather enjoyable, and may have to purchase one of their albums.)

Today, Geocities dies a quiet whimpering death after fifteen years in operation. Along with millions of really bad web pages (such as ones I once made just after high-school involving neon colors and table-based ‘designs’), it dragged screaming into the void no doubt thousands of good web pages. Now, millions of links on the Internet point to nothing, to a void from which nothing returns. It’s not the link rot apocalypse, but it’s a small glimpse into what it could look like.

Jeremy Keith has made it very clear he’s mad about this, much more so than I could ever care to muster. I’m personally glad some of my past embarrassments are now quietly euthanized, but he likes to look at the long picture. This is a picture I can’t really bring into focus myself, but today’s comic (starring Jeremy) posits a future where, tragically, Geocities held a key we needed to save humanity.

When I look at this objectively (rather then in embarrassment at my own past efforts at web “design”) I’d have to say that the tragedy here is the loss of a large chunk of late-twentieth/early twenty-first century information about our society and culture. The Internet is notable for both its size and general lack of backups. The more of it we lose, the less our great-grandchildren will know about who we were. I don’t currently have children, but if I ever did, I’d like my descendants to know I spent a great deal of time obsessing over squirrels.

It’d be more than I know about my own ancestors.