Well, in response to all this the CSS3 working group have released CSS Snapshot 2007 as a working draft. CSS3, in theory, has a modular structure. The idea behind this was that individual pieces could be worked up, specified and released without having to work on the whole thing at once. Sounds a lot like iterative development to me. The problem is we haven’t, until now, had a stable release one of CSS3.
At the time this specification enters Candidate Recommendation, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is defined by the following specifications:
CSS Level 2 Revision 1 (including errata)
Selectors Level 3
CSS Namespaces
CSS Color Level 3
So (at least when this document reaches Candidate Recommendation at some unknown point in the future), we can get on and use all those selectors we keep eyeing up. Colors and Namespaces are not particularly interesting, at least to me, but useful non-the-less. CSS2.1 is important as a baseline going forward, especially for the browser makers, rather than being particular interesting for the jobbing web designer.
The problems come when we look at some of the features we want, and the modules they are part of. Andy specifically references text-shadow as something that’s already got more than two sample implementations but is part of the Text module which we won’t see for a while due to it’s complexity. (As a side note text-shadow was formerly part of CSS2.1 but got dropped due to lack of implementations at the time.) Dave Storey summed this problem up nicely over on CSS3.info
I guess this is due to not wanting to put partial parts of a module in this snapshot. I’d like to see another snapshot draft in around six months that includes full or partial modules that have progressed since the time this snapshot was published.
From a quick look at the current work of the CSS working group I count six modules at candidate recommendations, six at last call, twenty three at working draft and six not yet started. If modules really are discrete blocks then this to me looks like a recipe for disaster. If modules aren’t discrete blocks then why are they divided into modules? Rather than focus on shipping modules it appears that the effort of the working group has been spread out across nearly the whole spectrum of CSS3. This pretty much invalidates the idea of a modular approach.
CSS3 is a big project. And specification, like software, is hard. In well organised and managed agile software teams it’s common to split things down into features, or groups of features (modules). The CSS working group did this. In a well managed agile team shipping something early is hugely important. Everyone focuses on that goal, rather than on their favorite part of the project that might not be needed until later on. The CSS working group definitely didn’t do that. But it’s what I think is needed now.
The working group are now starting to talk more openly about what they are up to. And the CSS Eleven are looking to add some support from a web design industry point of view. I’m interested to see what they come up with as suggestions and support. The problem I see is that, unless the working group back down on the strict nature of the modules and define sub-modules or simply go to specifying features then we could hit an impasse. The best course of action (from a complete outsider anyhow) would be to get all the people from the working group and from the CSS Eleven working on one module at a time. Only once a little momentum has been built up maybe they could work on more than one at once, just not thirty five this time. All of that would take some hefty project management and some setting aside personal and organisational politics to get done. Fingers crossed.
I actually think things are looking up, but time is certainly a factor here. Lets assume IE.next is released late next year or the start of 2009 (wild speculation). If the Internet Explorer team implement to the current specs at that time - that could easily not include CSS Snapshot 2008, which would be reaching candidate recommendation around about the same time as they ship. Which could in theory mean it’s four years or more before we see text-shadow well supported. Never mind elements of CSS3 which currently have no reference implementations at all! Anyone else with any bright idea? Or insider info that you want to share?
Fab. It’s that time of year again. Time to start thinking “wouldn’t it be cool if” when it comes to the BBC (even if it’s not your dayjob).
I had the fortune of going along to this years BBC Innovation labs back in March and they’re back on the road again next year, with applications open from the 1st of December.
The basic concept is simple. Through a simple but competitive process of ideas submission the BBC find a handful of companies to dump in nice settings in the middle of nowhere for a week to work on their ideas. They are running four labs this year; in Wales and West Midlands, North East England, North West England and Scotland. If you live in any of these areas I’d strongly recommend finding out more at one of the local events.
Been couped up in a stately home or nice hotel with other oddnice people is great fun. It’s all pretty intense and last years event really got me thinking. It’s also a pretty good business opportunity. You own your ideas whether you get on the labs or not, you get paid for your time attending them and you get to pitch your ideas to the commisioners at the end of it.
For an idea of what goes on, you spend alot of time doing thinks like this:
And if you get really into it you might end up strutting around like this:
It’s not all fun and games though. You might have to spend your time watching BBC employees play snooker on work time or playing the odd game of werewolf:
The briefs are already up that will form the core of the submission process in order to get on one of the labs. I’d recommend having a good read, picking a few you think are interesting and tie in with whatever your interests are at the moment and go from their.
With all that in mind I’m looking for people who fancy partnering up to brainstorm ideas, put together a few submissions and see if we get anywhere. I’m now working full time on freelance and consultancy gigs but the nature of the labs was that you need a team of at least two people. And anyway, ideas flow more freely with a few smart people sat around. So, if anyone fancies sitting around talking through a few of the briefs (and who knows, maybe drinking a glass of wine?) at some point over the next few months before the deadline let me know.
Performance used to be something other people thought about. If you were working on a high traffic site for a large company, chances are they would throw inordinate amounts of expensive hardware at the problem. If you had a personal site only if you got really popular would you need more than a shared host. But the number of web applications being launched by small companies or individuals from their bedrooms is raising the awareness of the importance of performant websites.
Credit to YAHOO! here. Google and Amazon might be the first companies that spring to mine when it comes to thinking about infrastructure but YAHOO! have been publishing lots of useful, practical and interesting information in this area. Steve Souders, the Chief Performance YAHOO! has a new book going into detail about YAHOO!s performance rules. The recent release of the YSlow extension and another upcoming book from Stuart Colville and Ed Eliot cap things off nicely.
Combined files are a way to reduce the number of HTTP requests by combining all scripts into a single script, and similarly combining all stylesheets into a single stylesheet. It’s a simple idea that hasn’t seen wide adoption. The ten top U.S. web sites average 7 scripts and 2 stylesheets per page. Combining files is more challenging when the scripts and stylesheets vary from page to page, but making this part of your release process improves response times.
While all that has been going on I’ve been working with a fewpeople on a Rails project and come across a great plugin; asset_packager from Scott Becker. Inspired by the Vitamin article by Cal Henderson (of Flickr and another good book fame), asset_packager compresses and merges CSS and Javascript based on a prescribed configuration.
I’m also working on a few PHP projects and wanted the same experience in these as well, so I’ve gone a put together a quick release of php asset packager. At the moment this is a CSS only release, with Javascript features coming later, along with all the rest of the features of the Rails plugin and anything else I can think of or need.
First off you define your stylesheet setup. I used YAML as my goal was to stick as close as possible to the Rails plugin.
The above simply states that you want to merge screen and header CSS files together to form a base stylesheet, and merge foo and bar together to create a secondary CSS file.
If the ENVIRONMENT constant is set to production the line includes the merged stylesheet links, otherwise each file is included seperately. This again mirrors the behaviour of the Rails plugin. A command line script is also included in the source to actually merge (and tidy) the CSS files.
The vague plan is to add the rest of the features and then maybe package up as a plugin for whatever software or frameworks I’m working with at the time. At the moment that probably means wordpress, symfony and code igniter. Everything is open source and available from svn over on the Google Code site. Contributions, in the way of code, bugs, documentation or thoughts welcome.
I’ve been busy really getting to grips with Trac recently and thought I’d post up a few details. Trac for those that haven’t come across it is a wiki, issue tracking systems and source code browser all rolled into one. It’s open source and written in Python.
I’ll start off describing my current ticket setup, along with the code I use for reports. In future posts I’ll hopefully describe thinks like setting up users and permissions in a flexible way. I’ll leave describing installation to others, mainly because it’s a pain. I’ll also assume you’ve installed the WebAdmin plugin, or are familiar with trac-admin.
Create a new Ticket
By default Trac comes set up with severity, milestones, ticket types, priority and components and a few default options in each. The problem with all these options is that it takes more time and effort to add and manage issues - so they don’t get logged. Unless you know you absolutely need them I find it easier to remove most of these options in the first instance.
I prefer using Trac soley for issue tracking. It suffers badly in my opinion if used for more project management related activity. Other tools do that job better (and also do bug tracking poorly).
I keep priority in, but by default it’s blank and only has one other options - High. I only assign High priority to issues which are causing major problems, either preventing a successful build or stopping something happening that’s meant to.
Available reports
Trac reports are simple (or not so simple) SQL queries with a few bits of special syntax. I have four reports set up; Open, Closed, Important and My Issues:
Open, not too suprisingly, displays all the open issues. As mixing different components here would be confusing we divide the list with headers for each components
SELECT
component AS __group__,
(CASE priority WHEN 'High' THEN '1' ELSE '' END) AS __color__,
id, summary, owner,
time AS created,
component AS _component,
priority AS _priority,
changetime AS _changetime,
description AS _description
FROM ticket t
LEFT JOIN enum p ON p.name = t.priority AND p.type = 'priority'
WHERE status IN ('new', 'assigned', 'reopened')
ORDER BY priority DESC, p.value, t.type, time
Closed is the reverse of Open (I’m starting to state the obvious here) but with a few differences in terms of the listing. I’m more bothered here about seeing a timeline of closed issues. Good for keeping a eye (or a feed) on to see progress.
SELECT
(CASE priority WHEN 'High' THEN '1' ELSE '' END) AS __color__,
id, summary, owner, component, resolution,
priority AS _priority,
changetime AS modified,
description AS _description
FROM ticket t
LEFT JOIN enum p ON p.name = t.priority AND p.type = 'priority'
WHERE status NOT IN ('new', 'assigned', 'reopened')
ORDER BY changetime DESC
My Issues lists only those issues which are assigned to me (or the currently logged in user) and open.
SELECT
component AS __group__,
(CASE priority WHEN 'High' THEN '1' ELSE '' END) AS __color__,
id, summary,
time AS created,
component AS _component,
priority AS _priority,
changetime AS _changetime,
description AS _description
FROM ticket t
LEFT JOIN enum p ON p.name = t.priority AND p.type = 'priority'
WHERE status IN ('new', 'assigned', 'reopened') AND owner = '$USER'
ORDER BY priority DESC, p.value, t.type, time
Important is an overview of critical issues. Software can have small bugs and be perfectly usable in the vast majority of cases. But some issues either effect lots of users or prevent the system working at all. These High priority issues need addressing first, before anything else.
SELECT
component AS _group__,
(CASE priority WHEN 'High' THEN '1' ELSE '' END) AS __color__,
id, summary, owner,
time AS created,
component AS _component,
priority AS _priority,
changetime AS _changetime,
description AS _description
FROM ticket t
LEFT JOIN enum p ON p.name = t.priority AND p.type = 'priority'
WHERE status IN ('new', 'assigned', 'reopened') AND priority = 'High'
ORDER BY priority DESC, p.value, t.type, time
Interesting bits here include the following line which makes all High priority tasks have a red border:
(CASE priority WHEN 'High' THEN '1' ELSE '' END) AS __color__,
As a side note, I hadn’t written proper SQL for a while (all that hacking on APIs). Suprisingly good fun as it turns out.
Conclusions
The main benefit of this setup is simplicity. Too many bug tracking systems are either way too complicated, or come with defaults which are on the complex side (I include Trac in this last category). Garret Dimon has been writing about the development of a new bug tracking system with a focus on simplicity. Fixx and Lighthouse are other products looking to fill this niche. That’s not to say larger teams don’t need to store more information than this, just that by starting small you can actually find out what you’re missing - rather than guessing and making the whole process of adding and fixing bugs a particularly painful one.
It’s fair to say the last Future of Web Apps (FOWA) event got a little stick due to what was seen as too many paid sponsors on stage lacking interesting things to say. Some designers and developers on the coal face also felt all the talk about startups just wasn’t relevant to their day jobs. So you have to hand it to the gang at Carson Systems +Carsonified for coming back with an even bigger and better event which addressed most of these concerns.
Simon and Brian came in to help with the speakers and at some point the event went for two tracks - the developer stage and the entreprenuers stage. At the same time the sponsors (supplemented by lots of smaller uk startups) moved into a large expo area outside the two stages. All this meant a move to ExCel which is a bit big, soulless and out of town for my liking but hey, how many places can deal with that many people with space to spare?
In the interests of fairness I have to say I ended up helping out, getting there early on the first day and standing behind the desk (with Cristiano and a few other nice people) for the mad rush at registration. I hadn’t worked on a large event for quite a while, I’d forgotten how much fun it can be! I don’t think that makes me biased though.
Highlights for me included Matt Mullenweg on all sorts of interesting architecture bits and pieces learned from wordpress.org, Heidi Pollock with practical tips for mobile web development, Paul Graham on startups in general (and why we all need to be in Silicon Valley apparently), the endlessly entertaining Simon Wardley on ducks (and commodisation of online services) and Matt Biddulph of Dopplr on practical tips for playing nice with social networks. Chatting with Steve Sounders and hearing about how he got the title of Chief Performace YAHOO! was also good fun. The book is on it’s way as I write.
Dave Morin from Facebook was a disappointment. He basically showed everyone facebook (which I would imagine 99% of the audience are already on), talked up some huge numbers and then dodged questions about walled gardens and open data.
I didn’t make it into the entreprenuers stage as much as I should have done. Mike Stenhouse spent most of his time in there I think and had nice things to say about most of the talks. I caught Leisa Reichelt and Dick Costolo, both of whom gave particularly interesting talks to round off the second day of the conference. Although at least some people I spoke to don’t like having more than one track (the same topic of conversation cropped up at @media) I much prefer the choice of sessions. Missing the odd clash is a small price to pay for the larger number of interesting talks.
Overall; lots of interesting content from lots of interesting speakers - many of whom I hadn’t seen speak previously (always a good sign). As for constructive criticism I’d have to say that the half hour slots of the developer track were probably a little too short in some cases and the conference was lacking in real, hands on, practical tech sessions.
One final thing that can’t go without mention; Diggnation. I had no idea what this was all about and quite frankly I’m not sure I do now. I’m still carrying the mental scars. I don’t think anyone can explain that in words so, here’s the video.
Long time no post. Lots of excuses, time away (including a holiday) and work catching up with me. Hopefully expect a few quick fire posts to catch up and then back to normal.
I was in London a couple of weeks back, mainly to help out at FOWA (which can get it’s own post) but also to generally catch up with lots of people about interesting stuff. After using my Monopoly knowledge of London to find the apple store (something some Londerstook issue with) I heard about an event round the corner thanks to the magic of the internets (in this case Twitter, Upcoming and Dave Stone).
Mashup Demo was billed as “a simple and effective way for startups, growing businesses, enterprises and corporates to present themselves to an audience of professionals who would include:- investors, media journalists and bloggers, potential partners and industry influencers”. When first chatting with one of the exhibiting companies they looked me up and down and said “so, are you a blogger?”. Apparently I didn’t look much like a VC. Who knew?
Fifteen lightning presentations made up the bulk of the event, with me taking notes using my handy N800 (another blog post probably), and then followed a good amount of time to wander about and chat with everyone, probably about 100 people all in all. The companies presenting represented lots of the hot topics at the moment shall we say. Anyone not mentioning mobile, or social networking (or both!) had come to the wrong party.
Local Search had a strong showing from welovelocal.com, Rumble, and tipped.co.uk. The thorny problem of local was one of the really interesting discussion topics at the BBC innovation labs earlier in the year and it’s good to see interesting ideas of how to solve it. Although personally I don’t need another social network and also want to be able to define what I mean by local (not just be given a location, or have it based on a pool of friends, or whatever the latest looking glass is).
Identity was suprisingly popular with both Bondai and meecards talking up their applications. Obviously with all the cool kids playing with OpenId and the alpha geeks tinkering with OAuth identity is technologically interesting, but both these companies have spotted commercial opportunities as well. Be interesting to see how this all plays out. I’ve rambled on before about what I called Banks for Data (as apposed to money, which is just data anyhow when you think about it) but not really considered early movers and entrepreneurs in this sector.
A couple of interesting takes on agregators dropped in as well.
fav.or.it was pitched as trying to popularise feeds for everyone else, but looked to me to actually be more of a useful tool for the information hungry crowd. It’s innovative features (inline commenting looked nice) would likely not be that interesting to people with only a few feeds and a few minutes but for people with hundreds of feeds look interesting. Brandwatch was similar to an idea a friend and me kicked around a while back, but never put together. Simply put it finds stories relating to your brand (company, product, whatever) and ascertains the importance and whether it’s positive or negative. You can then track all that over time with useful graphs and charts and the like. At the moment they are indexing about 500,000 sites and it still uses some manual filtering I think. Even so I know of clients past who would definately find the service offered interesting.
A few others caught my eye; an ad network for bloggers based on their blog rolls called rollSense, a service simliar to slideshare but for business documents called Edocr and testcard.tv. Testcard.tv does some really pretty impressive agregation, stitching and searching of online video. Sort of a glimpse of the future, but probably not as pretty. Optimising that for the Wii or PS3 (or keyboard/remote control) would be awesome.
After chatting with a few of the companies, and other people in the crowd, I popped for sushi with the aforementioned Dave for discussions of the freelance life I’ve got myself in to. The event was pretty darn interesting. That the companies presenting were, for the majority, proper startups was interesting. And the fact the whole event was geared around product centric companies and the surrounding eco-system interested me. I get to similar business events up and around newcastle, but these tend to be more service company orientated it seems. All in all Mashup Demo kicked my stay down in London off nicely.
I’ve tinkered with a rather large number of these web application frameworks, in Ruby, Python, PHP and C#, at some point over the last few years. But I’ve never really settled on any of them - mainly because my day job didn’t need me to and also because I like playing with new toys. I even tinkered with my own homage to Web.py in PHP which a few people have picked and are running with.
Right now though I’ve been doing some work with a fewpeople on a Rails project. Their are some seriously nice things in Rails that I don’t see elsewhere; really good testing support baked in for one, and some serious deplyments for another.
Symfony is another PHP framework but one that only supports PHP5 (a good thing in my book). It’s basically a slick integration of lots of existing mature PHP tools plus some good old MVC and tried and trusted Software Patterns. I also discovered from a few YAHOO’s that they have started using it on some levels within YAHOO.
Having a play around with Symfony it took me a little while to get everything up and running, but I’d kept some handy notes for later. Hopefully they might be useful to someone other than me.
I’ve dropped in a few variables denoted by braces where relevant. The paths are from my MAMP and PEAR based environment and I’m using a MySQL database, though you could just as easily use Sqlite.
First we set up a virtual host in Apache. You have to do this manually at the moment. I already have a script for setting up virtual hosts under apache on OS X which I might extend to do this for me if I end up using Symfony alot.
<VirtualHost 127.0.0.1>
ServerName
DocumentRoot "/Applications/MAMP/htdocs/{project}/web"
DirectoryIndex index.php
Alias /sf /Applications/MAMP/bin/php5/lib/php/data/symfony/web/sf
<Directory "/Applications/MAMP/bin/php5/lib/php/data/symfony/web/sf">
AllowOverride All
Allow from All
</Directory>
<Directory "/Applications/MAMP/htdocs/{project}/web">
AllowOverride All
Allow from All
</Directory>
</VirtualHost>
cd /www
mkdir {project}
cd {project}
Now we dive into the actual symfony commands. We’ll just setting up both a frontend and a backend for this app which I think is likely to be pretty typical. I quite like the idea of seperate entities for these.
That done we can set up our data definitions in /config/schema.yml. Read the documention for all the details but you can probably get the general idea.
All in all not bad going. And that’s basically the same for most of the apps you’re likely to develop. It could probably be a little easier in the database and apache config areas in fairness. Rails’ use of an inbuild webserver really helps here. But the use of YAML to define the model is, in my mind, more straightforward that using Ruby in Rails migrations. I’ve an app in the works at the moment and I’m looking at using Symfony. If that pans out I’ll blog more about the bits I’m interested in - the inbuilt unit testing framework high on my list.
Back from a madcap weekend in Brighton for the dconstruct BarCamp Brighton double header. If I was to write down everything I can remember we’d be here for a week. If I was to write down simply everything then we’d be here longer still. Information packed just doesn’t cover it.
I’ll likely sort some more detailed posts on some particular topics that piquet my interest in the coming weeks or months, for instance user centred design vs agile methodologies (thanks to Leisa Reichelt), some more rambling posts on web application frameworks, microformats for write APIs, OAuth and countless other things I’ve no doubt forgotten.
One thing you can get now is my BarCamp presention which I’ve uploaded to SlideShare. I’ve not used this much previously but I’m smitten and will be uploading a few other past presentions in the next few weeks as soon as I can find them. If you’re interested in RESTful architectures or Rabbits then this might float your boat:
I also took lots of photos (some with Norm’s very nice 1.4f 50mm lens, thanks Norm) whick I’ll get on Flickr when I get a moment. Expect lots of portraits of people (maybe including you?) for once instead of odd abstract architecture and textures.
Final thing I’ll say for now is a big thankyou to anyone or everyone who sorted all this out. The 600-700 geeks descending on brighton all got fed, watered/beered and educated without anything appearing to go wrong (except when the hotel bar ran out of beer - I blame Steve Marshall). I’m looking at you clearlefties and Glenn and everyone from Madgex. Good job everyone involved.
More interesting Newcastle centric news, although this time partly releveant to everyone else - well, as long as you live in Oxford, Brighton, Leeds or Manchester that this.
Natalie Downe has spent some of her copious spare time (having left the agency way of life and gone all freelance too) cooking up Geekvenues. It’s an attempt to map (using Google Maps) any and all geek related venues around the UK. Local meetup places perhaps, regular venues, or just geek friendly pubs with wifi.
I’ve been adding some venues for Newcastle and they can be found over at newcastle.geekvenues.com/. If anyone knows of any other ones let me know. And if anyone is thinking “I want it to cover my neck of the woods” then get in touch with Nat, ideally with a link to a KML file of locations. I’m looking at Alan and John from Edinburgh in particular here.
OpenCoffee Newcastle is a new, open, informal and regular meetup for technology entrepreneurs, designers, bloggers, developers, geeks, investors and anyone else who’s interested.
We are going to meet every Thursday morning, between 10am and 12pm, at The Side just off Newcaste Quayside.
The first event will be held on September 13th. So come and share ideas, demo, get to know each other or just have a coffee.
With all that out of the way a little bit of background and some geekier links. I’d been meaning to get an OpenCoffee event up and running for a while and after a couple of chats in nice pubs with Sam and a trip to The Side we had a date and a vague plan. Worst case is it’s me and Sam just meeting up but hopefully a few more people will make it along. We should have wireless as well for any demos.
Note I’ll likely be somewhat wired. I might be up in edinburgh the night before for FOWA roadtrip and in any case I’ll have been up all night at barcampbrighton.
You can register for the event on upcoming or even register for the group. Or you could just turn up. See you there! Any questions post a comment (either here on on upcoming) or drop me an email.
