Notes: Please add your name, if you contribute, to the 'Authors' section at the bottom of this file. DO NOT COPY AND PASTE THIS FILE WHOLESALE. IT MAKES IT SLOW. Export it or save it as text. 16/06/2006 16:30 - 17:30 "Hot Topics" panel There doesn't seem to be as much talk about CSS now as there was a year or two ago. Is taht because it's all been said? MH: We need to find the undiscovered country and push the envelope, especially with IE7 around the corner. Progressive enhancement is a reality. JH: I tend to agree. A lot of what we can say about CSS at the moment has been said. We're waiting for IE7 to catch up. Once browsers catch up a bit, we can move on. JK: Eric, is there anymore gold in that thar mine? EM: How would I know? I think why we're not seeing as much talk is that we aren't having to evangelise anymore. It's mostly over except the training of others. As Jon says, when teh advanced stuff moves forward we'll have mroe to talk about, but we won't have to rehash the whys and wherefores. Anyone who's accepted it has, and those who haven't will be consigned to the dustbin of history. JK: How's the conversation on CSS going? TÇ: CSS is kind of a given now, it's not worth questioning that. We're kinda waiting for another leap forward in dependable featureset. There are a bunch of interesting features coming up and we'll see more coming up. I've some more hacks I've been holding back until browsers catch up… This is one that's been up for a little while as Eric said [showing a honeycomb, a la blockbusters with CSS]. What they haven't got working yet is this [shows pure css circles, rounded, among other things, in IE5:mac] A couple CSS properties, and you won't need Flash. As we move into an era of web applications, how important is it to draw on the lessons learned by GUI designers rather than web designers? EM: I think, based on my experience with software, we reject those lessons. We should pay attention to HCI research, though. TÇ: What's the lesson to be learned? To slow everything down? Make the interface unconfigurable? Lots of whitespace and chrome wasting space? JK: Do you think the web is better for lots of applications? TÇ: Yes, for one reason: user stylesheets. JK: Like Adium, where you can skin things how you like them. MH: The on thing I think is important is that we do know that people behave and respond in certain ways. Conventions are a very good thing in making things easy for all people to use. JK: As Nate Koechley said, if you borrow from the desktop, you need to do it wholesale: if you do drag and drop, you need to do keyboard shortcuts, etc. Selecting: you need to acknowledge shift et al. Jon, how do you design for this sort of thing? JH: There isnt' a tool for this. I was working on a redesign for Rachel Andrews site. I couldn't show Rachel what I meant with a static CSS comp. There's definitely a gap there. MH: John Allsopp has been trying to do that for a long time, which shows how difficult it is. JK: We've got wireframing, how would that work? EM: Go straight into HTML. JH: the great thing with the browser is you can just resize the text simply. You can't do that with software. TÇ: I thought of one lesson, in the realm of interaction design, where I'd like to see conventions adopted from teh GUI world into the web world. There are lots of sites where a box pops up saying 'are you sure'… Undo would be better. There should be no interruption in the UI, it should be seamless for undo-able operations. Most state-change operations have no excuse for using dialogues. JK: The back button equals undo when you're surfing the web, but now that's not necessarily true. JH: One example, like Tantek's is save. Any web interface for writing, your instinct is to hit Ctrl/Cmd S, but that doesn't work. JK: Dean Jackson's web API work… TÇ: Why not persist data right away using Ajax? EM: That's something the browser should do… As the panellists are such great football fans, who do they think will win the World Cup? Molly: Not the US. How can I not say England? JH: The people that produce flags for on cars. Really, though, I'm going to say Argentina because that's who I've picked out of a hat. EM: I like the New York Giants this year. JK: It's called the world cup, not like the world series: it's the actual _world_. EM: Whoever's at the bottom of group 5… Ivory Coast? TÇ: The TV manufacturers are doing well… JK: A team…… TÇ: A country, right? I think to answer this question, I have to design a microformat, then build an aggregator for the predictions. Isn't the recent mass movement of high-profile web designers to large companies like Yahoo and Google a little worrying in terms of objectivity, and in terms of creativity? MH: I'm having a hard time getting around the idea that Jeff Veen is in a cube. He said I feel really happy to be there. There are lots of things he used to do that have been really limited. I wonder what that's going to do to people who've been operating on a high level. On the other hand, there's exciting work going on… JK: Do you trust something you read from someone after they've been picked up? JH: I think you have to take it with a pinch of salt. If you take a job with someone and then slag them off, someone higher in the org is gonna get pissed off. It seems that lots of webapps are created with the intention of getting bought. You're wating to be bought and make money that way, rather than making the apps fill the need. EM: I'm glad I'm not working for Y! or G 'cos it means I can work where I can afford to live. I'm not at all worried in terms of objectivity and creativity. They never are, I'm not. It does mean there will be grains of salt introduced when people start blogging about how awesome their new employer is. In terms of creativity, that's not a problem. What worries me more is their ability to share what they create. I have to say, a lot of Y! and G are taking the stuff they're creating and giving it to the rest of us. These aren't places where ideas check in but don't check out… The Y!UI and Google APIs… There are other companies I'd be more worried about. JK: It seems like it's a battle for the hearts and minds of developers. Even MS and Apple are sharing… You used to work at a little startup in Redmond, Tantek, did you feel constrained, censored…? TÇ: It's interesting: the situation has changed. I'd answer differently when you asked the question. When on IE5: mac, we were allowed ot be as creative as we wanted, so long as it wasn't illegal. We got to do the best thing for mac users. The sky was our limit, we didnt' have some manager saying 'you can't implement that'… Well, they did, because we took that as a challenge. It's interesting comparing Y! and G… They seem to be going different directions. Google people seem to blog less, Y! employees seem to have a diversity of opinion. That speaks for itself. If you';re going to talk about MS, tehy've made things easier to be an outsider now, RObert Scoble was an example. JK: Scoble changed things. Creativity was never an issue when you were there, but they've opened up more now.\ MH: The IEBlog is an unusual thing… MSN shut us down when we tried to do that sort of thing. TÇ: I have to admit, I never asked permission to publish the box model hack. JK: You don't have to convince anybody, you just do it. JH: There's just a point about creativity I'd like to make… If … Can Ajax be made accessible? JK: Lots of people doing lots of testing with this, rather than just ideas. MH: With people like Derek Featherstone on the job, I think it will happen. Ajax itself isn't accessible, it's how it's used. We need to hone in on what's causing the problems. JK: Ajax should be accessible out of the box, but we're stuck with what we've got. DF is leading the way, James Exwards is doing stuff, … EM: So the answer is yes, they've done actual testing, and things worked. Basecamp. JK: … Tasks were made trickier by presence of Ajax. Audience (James Edwards): The problem is _how_ we make the stuff accessible. Gez Lemon: Ajax can be accessible, but multiple changes are a big issue. The protocols and formats WG are addressing that with a live region role. At the moment, the problem is with UAs rather than screen readers. When events fire, they're not picked up by the screen readers. You need to give rolling state to the screen reader. JK: It's a complex task. There's a myth about having to turn JS off to make things accessible. The question is how to make it work. Who programmed watchlist on Technorati? It's an excellent example of Hijax. TÇ: We try to stick to the JS off situation working. Especially when you think of other devices with poorer DOM support. In general, when you're creating dynamic areas, that doesn't obviate the need for semantic markup. If you use markup signifying something dynamic - like a link - then there's a good chance you can do something sensible. JK: Whose job is it to make this stuff accessible? JH: As a front end designer, I don't think about how I design Ajax… It's easy for me to think 'this will happen magically'. I tend to see it more as the JS developer's side. I don't really know what can and can't be done. I'll ask if we can do things. I'd see it more their side. JK: The roles are starting to overlap… It's not enough to be JS guy or HTML guy or CSS guy… Molly, d'you think people need to know about every aspect? MH: I think that's always been true. A sthe web began to evolve, people still needed to think on both sides. There's a known gap between the way people think and work. Certain people are more adept at working in both worlds. I'm sure many people have argued over that trench. It's always been that way. One of the best things we can do in these 'silos' is always listen and pay attention to other areas. This is reality: the web is going to continue to challenge our knowledge, we're going to have to learn constantly. The best thing we can do is to be aware. Keep your ear out there and know what's going on. It's not an easily solved problem. The way we're educated is base don our strengths, not our weaknesses. If I show aptitude in science, I'm streamlined for that rather than shoring up my weaker areas. We have to take responsibility for that. It's better for yourself. Do we need a formal structure, such as qualifications, or a professional body, to identify the understanding and abilities of web designers? TÇ: I've had some experience with this. It's a big challenge. I think our field is expanding too fast. Any time you have that structurnd beurocracy, it can't keep up with the real world. If anything, the web is evolving faster than it was. How we do things is finally changing. JK: Would they be applying breaks to that? EM: I think the answer is no, we don't need this. It would be a futile thing. It might even put the breaks on things. I know in the US, most web design courses are using books written in the last century. What they're being taught is 'here's how DW/GoLive/FrontPage works' two versions ago. I'd like to see a lot of current formal structures blwon away. JK: How do people know to choose you, Jon, over some kid in his bedroom? JH: We're seperating ourselves from the FrontPage salesmen. For example, Mark Boulton is a member of the International Soc. of Typographers, it's a body that is recognised and respected, that will pick you out from a crowd of others. You can't come up with a list of criteria for what makes a good, well designed website because whatever you write this year is out of date next year. You have to blog, you have to talk about what you do, but if you can do that, it helps people recognise what's different about you. MH: THis has come up with WaSP many times. Do we do a WaSP seal of approval? Time and time again, we've said 'no'. I think this is dangerous. There was an org called World Org of Webmasters that tried ot come up with certs that, within weeks, were obsolete. -------------------------------- Authors: Steve Marshall: http://nascentguruism.com/