Featuring Remy Sharp, Tantek Celik and Bruce Lawson, today’s comic would make the perfect premise for a sitcom. I think “Three Developers and a Squirrel” would have a very nice ring to it. The comic also looks at the stinky mess we’re going to put ourselves into if we fail to recognize the problems of the past so that we can avoid repeating them.

In a move that threatens to undo over a decade of hard work to drag web development out of the horrors of the “Great Browser War” and educate developers to make forward-compatible, standards-compliant websites, the CSS Working Group recently discussed the idea of all browsers adopting -webkit CSS properties. Yep, you heard that right. IE, Opera, Firefox… all using -webkit properties.

This step appears to be intended to guarantee that their browsers will properly render websites being made by short-sighted developers who only bother using -webkit properties for advanced and experimental features in their websites even when the other browsers have their own test implementations such as -o, -moz and -ie.

Short version: They’re considering giving up and handing the browsers of the world over to a bunch of standards-blind morons for short term compatibility gains in exchange for long term problems that will make the current version of Webkit be the IE6 of tomorrow.

I’m not a member of the old guard. In the nineties I was in high school and pretending to be in college while making personal websites that were just short of visually hideous but definitely counted as nauseating. I didn’t know better. But thanks to the efforts of too many dedicated and educating web developers to name I was exposed to the concept of “web standards” and went about the process of learning how to do things properly.

I also landed a sweet job at Mindfly and became a member of the professional web world. All thanks to web standards.

As someone who’s been working on websites professionally for the past five years I’ve had my share of struggles with IE6 compatibility. I hate that browser more than I hate most other things on the planet. Intellectually I know it was the bee’s knees in its era. I don’t care. Its era was a long time ago and being forced to keep sites compatible with it due to the lack of standards in its era is a direct cause of hundreds of hours of suffering on my part. I’m grateful that it is now all but extinct, letting me concentrate on dealing with modern or near-modern browsers with a lot less cussing, sweating and crying.

As it stands now, Webkit is a pretty decent browser engine. Chrome is snappy. I like it. I’m using it right this second. But it’s also only as good as it is today. If we stop bothering to properly style our websites with a forwards-compatible approach, using all available browser extensions for experimental properties as well as the non-extension version of the properties for when they becomes available, then we’re daft. We will be putting ourselves at risk of making today’s Webkit the rotting zombie in the room that we’ll be screaming at in terror ten years from now. We, or developers after us, will be wasting countless hours and drinking more heavily in response to dealing with thousands of poorly-made websites that require compatibility with the -webkit properties we shortsightedly hung everything upon.

We need to stop this.

Need more information? Need inspiration on how to help? Lucky for you I’ve got a list:

• Read Daniel Glazman’s Call For Action. He’s co-chair of the CSS Working Group, and he knows that this is a very bad thing that needs to be stopped. He even suggests how to do it.
• Also read Remy Sharp’s article on the topic and his suggestions on how to help.
• Take direct action and help Chris Heilmann Pre-fix the Web, rooting out Github projects that have gone down the dark side and get them forked back into the light.
• Get Bruce Lawson’s perspective on the vendor prefix issue, taking advantage of the wisdom he’s gained in trying to educate against this exact sort of problem. Also see the first reference of the dreaded vindaloo fart.
• And please read Eric Meyer’s pessimistic, but perhaps realistic, assessment of the issue in Unfixed.

Whatever you do, don’t be apathetic. Don’t think to yourself that -webkit only sites are professional or even remotely acceptable. Because they’re not. It takes very little effort to guarantee forward-looking, cross-browser websites with the vast majority of most modern CSS properties. Doing anything less for the sake of ease is lazy, unprofessional, and going to cost someone a lot of money and effort in the future.

If you do decide to only use -webkit prefixes, watch out, because Bruce Lawson will vindaloo fart on you.

Edit: Roughly twenty minutes after I posted this, the W3C took action on the issue, insisting that the <time> element be placed back into the specification. You can read about it here. But please read on. It’s a good primer for the next time something like this happens.

Contrary to what you may have already heard, the <time> element hasn’t disappeared from HTML.

Yes, officially <time> is currently not part of the HTML spec. (Thanks to the muddle that is “HTML Living Specification” I’ll be honest and admit I’m not sure if is no longer part of HTML5 or it’s in some sort of Schrodinger’s Cat quantum-zombie state of existing in HTML5 but missing in the “ongoing HTML” that the WHATWG is proud to keep rolling down the conveyor belt.)

That doesn’t mean it’s not being used by authors (how’s Drupal builds, 2.6 million WordPress installs and the Boston Globe for you?) nor does it mean that is it not being used by user agents (ever-plucky Opera supports it).

What it means is that a single human being has decided that he doesn’t care for time one wit, and that a rather vague element called <data> can replace it instead.

This human is none other than Ian “The Benign Leviathan Dictator For Life” Hixie, editor for the HTML specification.

I could give you an explanation on how this scenario came to exist, but two Brits who are far more informed than I am (and likely slightly smarter) have made their own summaries. If you like knowing what’s going on (and I do) then go read them. These pair of fine gentlemen, Jeremy Keith and Bruce Lawson, both guest star in today’s comic as the good Doctor thanks to a little spot of regeneration, where they’re fighting the good fight against Hixie’s <data>leks.

Virtually every problem I have with a single person wielding so much power over such a fundamentally important pillar of the web as HTML can be summed up in this incident. <Time> is officially out, despite the lack of merit or consensus in that decision. And it took just one man to make that happen. Either through a lack of awareness or a genuine disregard for what authors are already doing, Ian has claimed incorrectly that <time> isn’t seeing adoption, isn’t useful, and should be canned. And because the only balance to his power is a rather tedious process to oust him, there’s no official remedy to bringing <time> back into the HTML fold than trying to convince him that its existence is a good thing.

From what I understand, it’s easier to keep red shirts alive on away missions than it is to change Ian’s opinion on something.

Fortunately, there’s a big difference between having no official remedy and having no remedy whatsoever.

As “authors”, we are the 99% of HTML5. We can follow Jeremy Keith’s sage advice:

We can make a stand and simply carry on using the time element in our web pages. If we do, then we’ll see more parsers and browsers implementing support for the time element. The fact that our documentation has been ripped away makes this trickier but it’s such a demonstrably useful addition to HTML that we cannot afford to throw it away based on the faulty logic of one person.

So as I said, <time> hasn’t disappeared from HTML. It’s still there on millions of sites already. And nothing is stopping us from putting it on millions more. It’s our chance to send those <data>leks packing. As soon as this post is finished I’m going to edit my site’s theme to make use of <time>. Hixie can go stuff it.

Occupy HTML5.

The site’s pretty slick, as well.

Today’s comic relates to this new logo, in a roundabout way, featuring Jeremy Keith, Bruce Lawson (or perhaps it’s Super Bruce) and Remy Sharp (Or is it SuperHTML5Rem?) in their guises as HTML5 Super Friends, attempting to save the web from itself. It also refers to a slippery terminology slope.

The FAQ page for the new logo (yes, it gets its own FAQ) includes a little mention about what the logo represents. Which is obvious: HTML5, right? Well, apparently HTML5 doesn’t stand for Hyper Text Markup Language anymore. But apparently its all for “a broad set of open web technologies, including HTML5, CSS, SVG, WOFF, and others.”

Say what? I’m with Jeremy and Bruce on this one. The logo is pretty, but the intentional use of HTML5 as a blanket term for other modern web technologies is a crock. Newspapers making merry with the term is one thing, but a web standards organization? We rely on these groups to keep our handy developer toys in nice, cleanly demarcated buckets so that we can easily educate ourselves and the next generation of developers on what toy is used for what job and how.

I could rant on this for hours. But I recommend reading at minimum Jeremy’s bit on the topic. He manages to be far more eloquent with his words and has earned his place as a bit of an authority on the topic. So maybe you’ll value his two cents more highly. All I know is that when I used to say “HTML5″ people knew what I meant. At least in my own community of website creators. But now it’s as meaningless as “doohicky.” As in, “Are you talking about the doohicky that I style pages with or the doohicky that I make the structure with?”

TL;DR Version: Love the logo, hate the term-squishing.

As a parting shot, I object to Karl Dubost’s characterization of term-blurring opponents’ commentary as “vapid“. I’m sure Jeremy Keith is capable of a lot of things when writing, but even if you disagree with his viewpoint on the topic, his well reasoned rhetoric doesn’t merit such a label. Shame on you, Karl.

I hope you’re able to follow the metaphor I’ve created, as I don’t think I can devise another way to repeat what I just said above.

Frequent readers may be aware of the fact that I have not been too kind to Opera in the past. Typically, these tussles have dealt with how they’ve handled conflicts with certain competitors. Today,  it’s a different story.

What Matters With Mobile: Speed

I own an iPhone, a device that comes pre-installed with Mobile Safari. Safari is a great modern browser that renders most (non-Flash) websites beautifully and accurately. And when I’ve got a decently strong connection, it even does it in a time-frame approaching (but not reaching) quickly.

The fact is however that my phone’s provider is AT&T. And when I’m at home, my WiFi access is through Comcast. Despite their many bold claims and lovely commercials stating otherwise, neither vendor provides what I’m going to refer to as a fast connection. Quite the opposite, I’m positive that there are several times in any given day where a 28.8k modem would more quickly deliver me the information I am seeking to consume.

Tell me, why as a society is it acceptable to charge people for a speed that they might, but usually won’t, receive from any given service, rather than the speed that they actually are receiving?

Regardless, these modern day robber barons aren’t making my service any better anytime sooner, so experiencing the web through Safari on my iPhone is similar to experiencing a milkshake through one of those really tiny coffee stirring straws. Yes, sooner or later you’ll get the shake, but it’s not exactly at a speed that’s enjoyable.

This is where Opera Mini comes in. Yes, it’s a less-capable browser in the rendering sense. But if I want to wait for a minute or longer per page,  I can certainly do so for my rounded corners. Usually when I’m on a mobile browser, I want data quickly. Very quickly. So Opera Mini serves me just fine. Better than fine, in fact. It’s very fast. Which makes surfing the web effortless again. Which I dare say is how it is supposed to feel.

Addendum: Privacy & Security

A few days back, I made the following pro-Mini tweet: “Speed matters. Especially on mobile. And that is exactly why I’m using Opera Mini more than Safari, despite the rendering deficiencies.”

Ben Adida offered the following question as a counter: “Does privacy matter? Cause Opera Mini proxies all of your connections, even SSL, via its servers.” It’s a valid question, especially considering his expertise in the field of privacy and security. Not being an expert on how Opera does things, I poked at both Bruce Lawson and Molly Holzschlag, both Opera employees.

Both of them said “If you don’t trust us (Opera), then don’t use the service,” and then each followed up with more details.

Molly backed up the security conversation with this gem: “Regarding proxy serving in Opera Mini? We are a public company in Norway, which has some of the most stringent privacy rules.”  as well as the very honest tweet: “As such if you cannot trust based on the integrity of a product or its company, no matter who, then don’t use that product!”

Well said.

Bruce gave us reasons to trust Opera with two security-related links. First, he indicated that Opera Mini is actually more secure on public WiFi than other browsers (with this link to back his claim) as well as linking to a post about how well Opera scored with security according to Symantec (here’s the abridged version: very well.)

So is Opera Mini fast? Yes. Is it secure? Yes.

That’ll do, moose. That’ll do.

It serves two purposes. The first is to look back at the fun I had participating in SitePoint’s podcast “HTML5 is a (Beautiful) Mess“, and pay homage to the gentlemen I had the pleasure to speak with: Canadian Kevin Yank (as one of the fellow speakers put it, is there a Kevin Canuk in the US somewhere?) and Brits Ian Lloyd & Bruce Lawson. Such fun, idyllic moments like debating HTML5′s wrecked politics are too delightful to go unchronicled.

The other purpose relates to Kevin’s first joke in the podcast. He asserts (falsely) that we’ve gathered to discuss the recent troubles plaguing NBC’s late night line up, in particular the Leno vs O’Brien issues of the Tonight Show. This joke threw Ian and Bruce, who aren’t plagued daily with American late night talk shows, but it sparked in me the remembrance of a tweet I once received from one @GeekGamerGirl that made my heart sparkle: CSSquirrel is The Daily Show for web designers. Don’t stop, we need you to make up for all the bitchy little girls out there.

So today’s comic is more of an announcement. I am in the process of devising a “late night” talk show that the Squirrel will host, featuring interviews with cartoon representations of various web designers/developers/standardistas. It’ll draw from the mighty traditions of the Tonight Show, The Daily Show and Space Ghost: Coast to Coast, and in theory will be a plug-in free experience brought to you in part by HTML5, JavaScript and vector tree-climbing rodents.

So, screw Leno or Coco. I’m with Squirrel. (For those who miss the reference in the last panel, it’s a play on the “I’m With Coco” badge by artist Mike Mitchell).

Yes, the shameless self-promotion is concluded. Enjoy your day.

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.

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 is one of those little jabs at everyone’s favorite European browser maker. I’ve got issues with Opera that this comic makes light of (while wishing squirrel snogger and Opera employee Bruce Lawson a belated happy birthday). Yes, Opera is a far smoother experience for modern web features than Internet Explorer. That’s not in question. But I’m getting a bit exhausted by the relatively slow adoption speed of CSS3 features by the browser in comparison to the increasingly popular Firefox and Webkit-based browsers.

Rounded corners are, admittedly, largely a non-issue. If visitors using Opera get square corners in a design, I’ve taken steps to ensure it’s at least a good looking square design. It’s an example, though, of a slew of features that Opera’s failing to keep pace with. Due to this lack of universal browser support (in the modern browsers, at least), It is hard for me to sell adoption of these designs to clients when roughly 1% of a customer’s visitors are getting a bad experience as a result.

Take for example, Jonathan Snook’s text-rotation tutorial. It provides a way (via filters) to get even IE to come to the ballgame with producing vertically-oriented text. Everyone, except Opera, can play with this toy. Even if IE couldn’t, thanks to conditional comments, I could provide a fallback solution for that browser. But as Opera lacks such (and I’m not recommending they adopt conditional comments), there’s no way with just CSS to provide an acceptable fallback that makes the browser not create something hideous with the text out of place. (I’ve concocted a JS-based solution, but I don’t want to have to rely on that to get CSS to work).

Opera’s not alone in the modern browser category in being the last to adopt a given feature (I’m looking at you, Firefox), but there’s definitely a lot of seemingly basic CSS3 techniques that the browser’s fallen behind on. Just because you can wait on adoption, gents, doesn’t mean you need to do so. The future isn’t coming any more slowly, and designers will have to jury rig solutions that would be solved much more cleanly with CSS if you’d keep pace.

Or, even worse, there could be more situations such as when I’ve suggested to some people who’s sites don’t have any notable Opera traffic that they just not sweat Opera support at all. With as small a market base as you have, it’d serve you better to keep pace (rather than not sweat the details, as Microsoft can afford due to its market share).

Curious about a browser’s support for various features? Check out When Can I Use.

The sequence of events that inspired this micro-drama is as follows: Firstly, Jakob Nielsen decided to talk about iterative designs in tweets (or as he likes to dress them up: “stream-based postings”). He guides us through a process where in only five easy steps he has drained the blood from a sample tweet, leaving a dried husk that will rise in thirteen days to join the legions of humorless drones that find the useit.com design both fascinating and useful.

After this, Jeff Croft cuts through the meat of Jakob’s ‘findings’ with a tweet that probably did not require five iterations: “An article by Jacob Nielsen on how to take all the spontaneity and humaneness out of your tweets in five easy steps…”

Granted, at least one iteration more might have helped in his case to get Jakob spelled right.

The fact is, Jeff hit it on the head. If you’re writing down your tweets and re-writing them repeatedly to maximize some sort of marketing message, you’re not tweeting. I’m not sure what you’re doing, but I’ll bet that most people that see the message can see what it is, canned artificial crap. You don’t have a medium of micro-messages just to waste all the time and effort of a proper e-mail or blog post on a single sentence. Spending that effort on the message not only is contrary to the purpose of the medium, it’s counterproductive when the end result is what Nielsen presents, complete with shouting-style caps, months in parentheses, and different wording to make it “punchier.”

I’m going to say Jakob Nielsen does not know what “punchier” actually means. If he did, useit.com might not look like a canary got stuck in a mid-90′s school administration newsletter.

Tweet how you like, but if you spend a half-hour at a time maximizing your tweets in some sort of business formula, don’t be surprised when people stop paying attention to your massaged marketing attempts.

This comment by John sent me down several interesting paths of consideration. Firstly, it made me think that Mr. Allsopp might spend more time writing in other people’s blogs than his own, much like Jeff Croft (who I had the fortune to see at Refresh Bellingham last week) appears to spend more time in every other city in America than the one in which he lives.

Secondly, I briefly thought that I’d start spelling “ton” (American spelling) like “tonne” (which appears to be the Australian, and I’ll bet also the UK spelling). I quickly discarded that plan, since it’d just limit my word count in Twitter. Which made me wonder, do Japanese users of Twitter get to use kanji in their tweets? If so, that seems highly unfair. They could fit a War & Peace sized comment in a single tweet that way. (Note to self: learn Japanese.)

Finally I really got to the meat of what he said in that sentence (one of many that expressed his thoughts on the mess topic Bruce had posted about). Why should you or I bother with figuring out how the hell to send an email to the proper mailing lists for the HTML5 WG? Or the WHAT WG? Heck, I’m not even sure which group is more relevant. The former has more technical authority, but the latter is actually making all the calls. RDFa, ARIA, and other fruits of the loins of other W3C chartered working groups are being disregarded by the HTML5 people consistently, or being carefully argued away with a pleading for use cases, a suggestion that their expertise is flawed, or that alternate solutions (read that: the WHAT WG’s solutions) are the better option.

People who’ve spent decades in service to their fields are being shot down by non-experts. Consider the issues with accessibility. Laura Carlson recently sent a proposal (signed by a lot of notables including accessibility guru John Foliot and HTML5 doctor in residence Bruce Lawson) that suggested the audacious idea that there be a formal procedure that describes how HTML5 will seek accessibility guidance from the W3C WAI groups.

HTML5 editor-for-life Ian Hickson evaded the issue by listing all the unanswered questions he has waiting on such topics instead of addressing the proposal. Sam Ruby one-upped Ian by expressing his disappointment that the proposal even existed.

In a situation like this, where motivated, caring experts in their fields are being ignored or deflected when using the official channels, why should your average John Everyweb even consider unraveling the process involved enough to attempt to address concerns, knowing the almost certain result of such efforts?

I can’t think of any motivating reasons.

Today’s comic features John Foliot (representing accessibility efforts) submitting such a suggestion to the HTML5 group(s), with my squirrel alter ego looking on in horror at the results. Consider it a softened metaphor that reflects my own growing dismay at the direction HTML5 seems to be heading when working with others.