Easy for whom? - a minor rant about help from frameworks

Some people think that programming should be hard while others, like me, quite like the idea of anyone being able to build things, especially web sites. To me the fact that either of my housemates (non IT types) could probably build a website this evening if they so choose is great. And to be honest if they did I’d be unlikely to complain about the code or the programme they chose to build it with (Ok, I would, but that’s me and I’d like to pretend I wouldn’t.)

It’s pretty unlikely however that either of them, or any beginnner, would go along the route of choosing say ASP.NET or Ruby on Rails for that first site. Which leads me to some sort of assumption – that both of these are for experts and professionals. There are other facets which could be used to back up this argument but I dont want to go on – rails making use of the command line (in very cool ways) or ASP.NET requiring IIS configuration for a start. Not something I fancy talking non experts through to be fair.

Using that assumption brings me nicely to helpers. Both are frameworks that try (and in may places succeed) in making life easier for developers. This is a good thing. What’s not so good is where this goes too far, in my opinion. ASP.NET linkButtons are simply Evil. No questions. At All. Stop using them. Now. Rails wades in as well with it’s reliance, when it comes to certain controls, on inline Javascript. Did someone not get the memo?

As good web standards people we have divided content from presentation. Behaviour from both (sort of). Now we have great (in both senses of the word) frameworks coming along and riding roughshod over our labour of love to make the web a better place. Making the developers life easier, but impacting negatively on the end users. Such wide ranging and powerful tools for experts need not treat all users as experts in everything. ASP.NET (or Ruby on Rails) does it so it must be OK? cannot be allowed to undo good works.

Lots of similar talk abounds at the moment, with certainly some light in some of these areas showing through. Visit Dan and Jeremy for more.

end Rant – mmm Rails

One Conference Down

Well, yesterday was the long awaited Carson Summit which seemed to go pretty well all in all. Lots of reviews and notes around at the moment but I’ll just throw a couple of my personal observations into the mix.

The presentation where all good, but nothing mindblowing. Most had something going for them; whether enthusiasm, numbers or a special announcement

I liked Tom Coates diatribe about clean URLs, it something I’m fairly keen on too, I’m uming and arring over whether I too am a URL Fetishist

The Google vs Yahoo show was entertaining and interesting. Reading that Google tend to be more academic with Yahoo being a little bit more unhinged/entreprenurial is one thing – going to a conference where the guy from Google came across as something of a mad german professor with something of an axe to grind, compared to the Yahoo mob who ranged from a self confessed hippy to Cal and his three quarter length trousers. It’s appears all the rumours are true.

I did a couple of stints of SubEthaEdit collaborative note taking with Simon which was fun and interesting at the same time. The who’s going to write the next part bit was quite amusing – at times writing the same things down, then everyone deleting them, then a pause.

The after show was, as always, good fun and fairly drunken. The pub was nice, but whomever suggested it on the wiki was playing a cruel joke. A conference with 800 geeks and a pub about 3 people wide at it’s widest point is not sensible. Neither was Patrick’s suggestion about not eating, but it all worked out in the end.

Was good to meet up with lots of people, both those I had met before and those that I hadn’t. Hope to see everyone again soon, if not it will have to be @media.

Molly in Newcastle

Not so subtle hint in the subject line, but without further ado, Molly (yes, that Molly) is coming to Newcastle for a talk.

All the details are still being confirmed but we are talking:

15th February Room 149 Northumberland Building, Northumbria University, City Campus, Newcastle, NE1 8ST 5-7pm

After talk drinks and food to be confirmed. Probably going to be along the lines of “Webstandards and Usability” with some time for a Q&A session as well.

Big up to Tom Simcox here. He’s been threatening for a while and with Molly in the country she’s agreed to come and visit little old us. Mark (of sunderland uni and NEUA fame) also sorted out the venue, amongst other things. Good job everyone.

We need people along for this so tell you employers, whoop to your colleagues, threaten you employees and be there.

I’ll post more details as they are confirmed. If your from outside the region and want to come along let me know. It’s short notice but sometimes these things are – and you know you dont want to miss out.

To help us gauge interest a little it would be grate if you interested to leave a comment below. If you cant come along because say, it’s your birthday, then what questions would you like asking?

Small Software

Of late I’ve found myself making quite a few smaller purchases of software. I’ve always been a fan of Open Source (and before that shareware – mainly on the ZX Spectrum) and still use lots of open source apps (anyone say Firefox) but for some really specific jobs it’s nice to have something you know is maybe a little more polished.

I dont know if it’s just me getting older and having more disposable income, or a greater appreciation of what it takes to make really good software (probably a bit of both) but it’s sort of snuck up on me? Anyone else finding the same? I know Jon has been mentioning some cool new apps he’s using. What about everyone else?

Recent purchase have included the following, nearly all bought with PayPal as it happens:

• Airfoil allows any sounds (mainly music) to be send round the house to speakers connected to my AirPort. Lovely.
• PSPWare Like iSync but for my PSP. Also converts movies.
• radioShark Ok, software and hardware but useful at times.
• Mint I’ve mentioned before. Lovely stats.

I’m also evaluating (and at the moment being impressed by) a few other apps. Upcoming purchases probably.

• QuickNews RSS reader (and podcasting app) for Palm OS.
• PocketTunes Good quality audio player for Palm OS, much better than the bundled Real Audio.
• TextMate The missing editor for OS X? Maybe. It’s toying with me at the moment to sit aside SubEthaEdit

On a blog related point, I’m aware I’ve been blogging more technology related stuff of late. I’ll be back with alot more web design and development banter soon, and some things happening up this neck of the woods (including a revamped newcastlenewmedia site hopefully) – it’s a matter of having the ideas but not having the time! Hope it’s still all interesting to everyone.

The Meaning of Scale

I’m quite a numbers person and have something of a penchant for statistics As if you couldn’t guess from the site name. So it is with Google (who also have a mathematical inspired site name). But unlike me they have more people (it’s just me) and lets face it, more computing power (only so many computers I can get in my house without getting told off).

So they bring us something of a large, automated, study (including some decent analysis) of what markup is actually being used, interestingly also including common class names. I’d love to do something like that – over 1,000,000,000 sites analysed!

On a standards front seems to be good news and bad news, some of the common classes are things like:

• footer
• menu
• title, header, top
• small, smalltext
• text, content, main, body
• nav
• copyright
• search
• date

Most of those I can see use for. They Mean something for a start. Although some of the other top entries included things such as:

• white
• link
• button
• style1 (my personal fave)

Which maybe aren’t as well chosen.

On the other hand there are still lots of weirdness, proprietary tags and bizarre attributes. iWeb might be using crazy nested divs but it’s still valid.

Being Google it’s all written fairly amusingly, including a few digs at competitors with applications which generate nightmare markup. Overall, a good read. There are probably a good number of other useful nuggets of information burried in the document as well. Anyone coming across anything of particular relevance leave a comment.

Meme Warning! Enter at Own Risk

Help! I’m not sure what to do? I appear to have been set upon by nearly published author simon in an attempt to spread a deadly meme. Oh well.

Four jobs I’ve had in my life

1. Paper Boy
2. Kitchen Porter
3. Packager of Shower Fittings
4. Front End Architect

Four movies I can watch over and over

1. Black Hawk Down
2. Serenity
3. 28 Days Later
4. Impostor

Four places I have lived

1. Bradford
2. Durham
3. Belmont (not to be confused with Belmarch)
4. Newcastle

Four TV shows I love to watch

1. Alias
2. The Wire
3. The Shield
4. The West Wing

Four places I have been on vacation

1. Cornwall
2. Rome
3. France
4. Denmark (Lego Land)

Four of my favourite dishes

1. Sausage Casserole with Guinness Gravy
2. Seabass
3. Falafel, Spicy Chutney and Chilli Rice
4. Wild Mushroom and Real Ale Pie

Four websites I visit daily

1. Google
2. Newsgator
3. Del.icio.us
4. Newcastlenewmedia.org

Four bloggers I am tagging

1. Steve Woods
2. Phil Lindsay
3. Pixeldiva
4. Lee

Here endeth the lists. I’d be intrigued to see a rather cumbersome tree diagram of this meme thang in action. You know, track it back to it’s source, looking at relationships and all that jazz. But it’s late and I’m tired.

A Foundation to Build Javascript On

Like probably quite a few others I’m doing more Javascript of late, both professionally and at play. It’s not just the whole buzz around it, all the way back to Jeremy using Javascript for Good not Evil but I moved away from doing backend development when I moved jobs, Javascript is most definately in my client side job remit.

As an avid reader I’ve got hold of a few good quality Javascript books that have come along and was on the lookout for more when I came upon Foundations of AJAX from Apress’s black and yellow experts voice series. I haven’t read enough to give a full conclusion but I’ve been impressed with other books in the series and it looks promising so far. A few chapters did stand out (I jumped in and read them first) that had little to do with AJAX, concentrating instead on setting up a proper Javascript development environment.

I’m not a fan of bloated IDEs so the lack of one for Javascript doesn’t bother me as much as it does some. However debugging by browser is a pain for simple scripts, never mind larger applications. Firefox’s Javascript Console is mighty handy here, as is the DOM inspector and the view rendered source extension. There is also the Windows Script Debugger but I personally haven’t had much luck with that as yet.

Projects should have documentation and code should have comments. But it’s time consuming (honestly). Automatic generation of docs from source comments both makes you comment more efficiently and comprehensively and saves time. Everyone’s happy, at least as long as they are using the JSDoc perl application to do just that. Anyone familiar with Java will have come across JDoc and the name isn’t the only similarity. It’s now installed and ready to be used next time I write any Javascript.

Another area of interest recently has been application design, analysis and methodology, so I’d come across the idea of test driven development before and experimented briefly – but not with Javascript. The idea is that you write tests that can be run automatically on your finished code before you write the code, it makes you design more which cant be a bad think. Anyway, Javascript has JSUnit, a nice unit testing framework. Again, installed and ready to give it a whirl.

Hopefully this brief list will prove useful to anyone else making more use of Javascript recently and looking to be more productive. Anyone else with any other useful tools do post a comment, or is their a mythical application that you just wish existed to help you with your Javascript woes?

books

I’m something of an avid reader and, making use of the nice Amazon API I’ll try to keep my reading list up to date on here. I’m just including books that are maybe a little relevant to the web – otherwise this will get out of hand. I’d like to include some brief reviews if the time ever comes along, though dont hold your breath.

Music and Web Standards sitting in a tree

I’ve quite a music fan, I used to be more so but have been catching up recently with various bits and pieces. I tend to stick with more web centric posts on here but, while loading lots of music into iTunes I thought what the hell. I’ll touch on a few points of web goodness just in case.

I’ve noted quite a strong link between music and web standards style blogs for a while. Lots of end of year posts touched on music and simon even has his music monthlies My guess here is that the amount of time spent on the computer (both in and out of work) and a tendency to be male tends to lead to some musical interest or other. Having said that alot of the same bands seem to crop up as well. It seems to be lots of indie, newish brit popesque, garagish bands. Guitars. Men. That sort of thing.

A number of other instances spring to mind. A discussion a long while back on designersinhouse about listening to music at work, Jeremy Keith’s in a real band and visiting a certain Rock night after an accessify meetup with Patrick a few months back.

Where is all the music related web software produced by all of these people though? last.fm is nice and I keep meaning to get into it a little bit more than I have. iTunes and Amazon cater to most mainstream buying tastes but from very much a mainstream angle. I’d love to see, or get involved in, something that combines some of the cool aspects of flickr and del.icio.us et al with music. Time to come up with some ideas, or look around for interesting new sites me thinks.

Oh and while I’m at it the new music I’m listening to at the moment includes:

• Benton Falls – Fighting Starlight
• Boy Sets Fire – Before the Eulogy
• Dead Red Sea – Birds
• The Starting Line – Based on a True Story
• The Early November – The Room’s Too Cold
• The Arcade Fire – Funeral
• Various (Deep Elm) – The Hope I Find Inside

Sorry, the about the last bit. It’s quite cathartic listing my musical leanings on here. Not sure why but I’m in good company as already noted. What music, or music web tools, do you swear by? Please note that I reserve the right to edit posts which seem to advocate music I dont like. You probably know who you are.

More to come/statement of intent

More of a statement of intend, for posterity’s sake hopefully. Something I can look back on and think “Oh, yeah, I meant to do that” later in the year. Also so I dont forget, or just decide I couldn’t be bothered. Why this all of a sudden? Well, it’s the start of the new year anyway, but in particular the first meetup of people from the Newcastle New Media list got me thinking. And in particular more than thinking, wanting to act on existing thoughts.

So, without further ado, here is a brief list of thinks I’m going to do this year – fingers crossed, in no partricular order and missing several things that no one reading this will care about:

• Get as much out of the Future of Web Apps Summit as possible. I’m pretty interested in the design of applications at the moment.
• Not still have a hangover for the Clearleft Ajax training session with Jeremy two days after the summit.
• Get an article written and published in something I read.
• Package up the feed syndicator code base under a decent name and release it for anyone to use.
• Produce a real application using Rails.
• Somehow get to all four (or is it five, I can’t remember) of the `media themed nights out – as well as as many of the workshops and presentations one personn can get to without
• On the back of our first real local meetup get a few projects moving. Everyone put email addresses to faces, which I think was important, and should make getting together doing something active easier from now on.
• And finally something vague; (note that this isn’t me with an idea under wraps, this is as far as I’ve got!) Design and build something of use to the wider web community.