Sooner or later HTML5 will not be the most interesting topic to wax poetic about. This is not that day.

I’m usually in sync with the web-related posts written by Jeremy Keith over at his personal site, Adactio. He’s usually saying something I’m thinking (albeit with more eloquence than I could muster), or spouts some gem of wisdom that I wish I’d thought of first. As such, it is safe to say that I respect him and, normally, his opinion.

This weekend, however, he wrote firmly on the topic of HTML5 and its process, in The HTML5 Equilibrium. In doing so, he made a sort of sandwich. The opening and closing of his post were two delicious, carefully toasted buns of high quality. But firmly settled in between them was a rank egg salad segment where he detailed his view on the W3C/WHAT WG “split personality”, ruining my appetite for his creation.

I’ve never been able to stomach egg salad sandwiches.

My reaction was spawned by his discussion of the status of Ian “Hixie” Hickson as the dictator-for-life of HTML5, sitting astride a position of absolute power in how the spec is edited. As readers probably know by now, there’s been plenty of friction lately between the HTML5 efforts and every other W3C group known to man as Ian’s been refuting their expert advice in exchange for his own pseudo-expert opinion on a wide range of topics.

Keith comes to Hixie’s defense by stating that although an unelected autocrat is horrible, it can work quite well. He evokes the power of dictatorship by referencing Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan and quoting Shakespeare’s Henry V. Specifically, he states that by doing so we transfer “moral responsibility” from the populace to the dictator, then goes on to say that Ian has taken this mantle and used it evenhandedly and fairly.

In short, Jeremy uncouples the means from the ends. Leviathan, written in the 17th century, is a text that firmly opposes Separation of Powers and refutes the Right of Rebellion, claims the sovereign’s acts are incapable of being considered unjust, and makes it unjust for the populace to attempt to unseat the sovereign.

In short, do what you’d like, Hixie. It won’t be our fault, because we’ve given you all the power, and from here on out we’re blameless. But at the same time, should we disagree with you, tough for us. It’s all your show now.

And really, that’s what it’s become. The Hixie Show. The amount of “not invented here” mentality that evades the modern HTML5 spec is odious. Accessibility in HTML5 isn’t being decided by experts. Process, when challenged through W3C guidelines, is defended as being “not like the old ways”, in essence slapping the W3C in the face. Ian’s made it clear he won’t play by the rules. When well-meaning experts carefully announce their opposing positions and desire for some form of closing the gaps, Ian and the inner circle constantly express how they don’t understand. This understanding issue has reached a comedic point. When Sam Ruby pressed them on the subject during an objection by John Foliot (as noted here), Ian’s response is a glib “I don’t understand John’s concerns. He hasn’t explained them. He has just made unsubstantiated demands.”

This phrase (“I don’t understand”) is used by Ian so frequently that I’m genuinely concerned. He’s ostensibly a bright man. The usual objections and positions by other parties in the HTML5 dialogue are incredibly well documented at this point, in staggering detail. To claim the inability to understand exhibits one of two traits: Either Ian is a simpleton, or he is deliberately “misunderstanding”.

I don’t think it’s the former. Ian has clearly demonstrated his phenomenal intelligence. Yet, the latter option is part of Ian’s well documented deny, delay, too late methodology for handling people. Engaging in this sort of behavior is disrespectful of his community of peers, and more than discouraging when its coming from our empowered Leviathan.

We must accept this, though. Because it’s the results that matter, right? If we get a HTML5 spec, any HTML5 spec, we should be happy about it. Despite all the assurances to the contrary, I can’t really believe that it’s acceptable to consider a product’s method of construction to be independent from its quality. If so, I should be paying far less for my garments, right?

There’s a thought process here that is so far removed from the 21st century as to be terrifying.

In today’s comic, Jeremy Keith reveals the Leviathan to the Squirrel. Things go badly. But remember, it’s only the Leviathan’s fault, because we’ve absolved ourselves of both power and responsibility.

Right?

One of my regrets for this year was my inability to attend An Event Apart: Boston or @media ’09. I’m sure each conference was full of great speakers, tons of new ideas, and an atmosphere alive with fellow professionals sharing thoughts about what they love about their jobs.

In particular, though, I’m sad that I missed Andy Clarke’s “Walls Come Tumbling Down” presentation (warning, link goes to a very long presentation transcript.) He expressed a good deal of nervousness about how the topic would be received, which implied it was going to be pretty eye-opening considering his usual bravado. It’s something I just had to see… if I had the funds for traveling, attending, and food and board.

As I don’t, I didn’t see it. Which is sad. Fortunately for me, he posted the transcript and slides online (see link in prior paragraph.) It’s a long read, but it’s worth it for every single one of you to go take the time and check it out. It’s good. It’s great. It pushes on a lot on updating the web design process to reflect not only the state of the modern web, but also the state of the modern economy. It’s so good I wish I could build a time machine, go back to earlier this year, and do the presentation myself to sound as clever as he does.

My short-lived attempt at building a time machine ended when I discovered that DeLoreans are slightly beyond my means to purchase. So instead, I had to content myself with creating a 80′s themed comic that portrayed my agreement with what Andy is preaching. I think today’s comic proves two things: 1. Andy Clarke would probably fit in quite well with the pastels and whites of undercover Miami cops and 2. Some things can’t be built with just a picture.

Let me focus on that last one in more detail, because it’s something I’ve encountered in my own career and talked about before, but keep encountering.

In the example listed in the comic, you can’t expect a speedboat to be built from just a drawing. By the same token, there’s a vast majority of products that require a design that is more than just an image. This is something we accept as common sense in our everyday lives. Have you ever had a home built based only on a picture some guy drew, rather than blueprints from a contractor? No, of course not!

So why do we expect modern web sites (which are more often than not actually applications) to be something your developer can make or your client can easily grasp with a static visual proof/comp? Yet, all too often, this is exactly what we show clients. We finish making a pretty picture in Photoshop set to just the right width, then get our clients to sign off on that. It’s then handed over to your developer (or whatever you’re calling the guy making the code) with little to no cues for how the site responds to a changing browser resolution, how it interacts with the user, etc.

As a result, an iterative process begins. The developer interprets the designer’s vision. It goes to the designer, who naturally will find issues caused by a disparity of vision on how the site interacts, or whether it has a fixed width, or whatnot. Then they mark up their preferred changes, and send it back. This goes on until the designer is happy enough to show the fledgling site to the client, who almost invariably will have a problem with it because it wasn’t what they imagined when they looked at the static picture they were shown!

So it gets revised… again.

Finally, it all seems well, until the client’s mother sees the site on their old e-machine running IE6, and they want to know why it looks different. Where are the rounded colors, the transparencies?

Time and again I’ve heard of this happening or experienced it myself. Why is it still occurring? The web is interactive. The web is different from browser to browser. The web is sometimes seen on a screen slightly larger than a postage stamp. We know this. In order to properly design for it, we need to move beyond habits we inherited from print.

Andy proposes designing in the browser, showing the client how it changes depending on a browser’s support, and how it might interact with different widths, etc. For some designers this could be a pretty radical step, as accustomed as we’ve become to using Photoshop’s powerful toolset. But on tighter budgets in an increasingly complex Web, we don’t have a lot of choices in the matter.

I could repeat Andy point for point, but let me just play the role of fan boy and tell you that he’s brilliant. He’s saying what we all understand: We have to change how we design for the Web. It’s even more crucial in this economy than it was a couple years back. Go read Walls Come Tumbling Down. Even if you’re not in a position to adopt all of his suggestions (or even if you disagree) you’ll come away from it improved.

I’ve talked about web career job titles in the past, and how confusing they can be. However, yesterday on Unmatchedstyle’s first monthly design panel podcast (vidcast?), Jason Beaird used a word to describe himself that I’d never heard before: designeloper.

I immediately liked it.

(I also liked the fact that he read a quote from my Cuddling With Cufon post. It made me all warm and sappy.)

I liked the title so much, with its jackalope-like nature, that I tweeted about it. Immediately Jin Yang fired back with the fact that Jason was wrong, and the proper term was devsigner.

As a skills-hybrid (granted, very developer-heavy and designer-light in my case) I like the idea of fun terms to help describe those of us that simultaneously try to comprehend typography use as well as learning the newest AJAX trick. So the question that remains is what term is best? Designeloper or devsigner?

Obviously the only way to know for sure is to put the terms in a cage match on a deserted isle where they’ll determine the fate of two dimensions in a tournament to the death. But since we don’t have that option, I’ve made a poll. Please consider taking the time to answer on it.

(Poll after the jump.)

(more…)

I’m currently at Web Directions North 2009. Unfortunately I’m writing this on my iPhone, so this will be short to prevent me from going insane. Here’s my thoughts so far:

1. RDFa – Yes, the syntax is complicated at first. But the next phase of the web is symantic, and microformats, though convenient, are only a stopgap issue, and RDFa will be a powerful way to express relationships for computers.

What really irks me is that HTML5 won’t support RDFa because Ian Hickson opposes them, and he functions as the sole gatekeeper to the standard. This annoys me on a number of levels: why is a web standard that will effect billions of future sites being controlled ulimately by one person; and why would someone seriously think the leading semantics format we have not be needed for a web that is clearly and rapidly heading towards a Semantic Web?

I’ll rant more on that in the future.

2. Accessibility – there’s a lot of things that I’ve been doing right for accessibility, but Derek Featherstone pointed out a lot of potential pitfalls with AJAX that I need to start payingca lot of attention to.

Ok, the writing on my phone is driving mad, so I’m going to sign off now. More later!

Although recently the trend seems to be more towards fixed widths or flexible percentage-based width layouts, from time to time I’m tasked with building a site with a liquid layout. Thanks to the demands of appropriately-ordered content and the challenges of having one column stay fixed in width while the other flexibly expands to fill the remaining space, these types of sites haven’t been the cleanest to make with CSS. One common technique that I’ve made a lot of use of was written in A List Apart called Creating Liquid Layouts with Negative Margins by Ryan Brill. It does the job, but it’s a semantic mess with a ton of divs.

I decided to try to find a method that pares down the div count, and makes the CSS a bit cleaner and more appropriate to the task. Lightning struck, and my mind put together a technique that feels like a decided improvement on accomplishing the desired task. I wrote about it over at Mindfly’s blog. Go check it out at Get Refreshed: Liquid Layouts with Simpler CSS and Without A Semantic Mess.