Communiqué - Dave Tufts

Bureaucracy at the W3C

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 15:45:23 EDT

The W3C is an international group that develops web standards. Some people accuse the group of being slow and inefficient. Since the W3C's director is the guy who invented the World Wide Web, it's hard to speak poorly of the organization... but I will.

Today's announcement is a perfect example of the how the W3C got their reputation of being slow to define standards.

The W3C announced today that the XHTML2 group will stop working at the end of this year. Starting next year, they'll put all the smart XHTML2 people on the HTML5 team. By doing this, the W3C hopes to "accelerate the progress of HTML 5".

That's great! Unless you're on the XHTML2 team.

Diving deeper into their FAQ, we see that the XHTML2 docs will stop development, only to be published as "Group Notes".

So these poor XHTML2 guys get to spend the next 6 month working on a project that has already been killed — basically just taking notes. What a waste of resources. Is the W3C filled with such bureaucracy that they can't amend the XHTML2 charter?

If they've already decided on killing the group, kill it now. Put the resources to work on a productive project that will actually see the light of day.

Web developers are already excited about HTML 5, but if this announcement represents how the W3C "accelerates", we've got a long wait.

Clients

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 15:54:19 EDT

In the documentary, Sketches of Frank Gehry, architect, Frank Gehry has it figured out.

"I accept the projects based on wether I like them... the people, not the work."
— Frank Gehry

Art critic, Mildred Friedman expands on this thought.

"Frank has figured out that the most important influence on the design is the client. If there's a terrific client to work with, you get a terrific building; and if there isn't, you don't."
— Mildred Friedman, Author/Critic

I agree. Our most successful projects happen to be for really terrific clients.

Bring Back Fun

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 12:06:03 EDT

One of my favorite presentations from last week's An Event Apart was by Daniel Mall. He talked about the allies of web developers. We, as web developers, have long embraced HTML and CSS. More recently, JavaScript crossed the line from an annoyance littering our markup to an unobtrusive hero. We started embracing JavaScript when it became easy to separate script behavior from markup. Jeremy Keith wrote about behavioral separation in 2006. Once that separation became as easy as separating CSS from HTML, JavaScript's popularity soared.

According to Daniel Mall, Flash is still the outcast. Web developers haven't embraced flash. We're still living in the year 2000, when Flash was 99% bad.

Dan Mall made the case that it's not Flash itself that's bad, but the way that we're using it. If we can easily implement Flash in a similarly unobtrusive way as modern JavaScript, it can work it's magic and encourage people to play.

...and we need to play more. Dan Mall asked everyone to remember back to a time when we were blown away by websites — a time before we cared about usability. Almost every web developer was inspired some horribly unusable — but fun — site.

The sites Dan mentioned as inspiring in his early years included Neostream.com, 2Advanced, and Once Upon A Forest. These sites encourage exploration and play.

If we take our same jQuery mindset and apply it to Flash, we might bring fun and playfulness back to web design. Flash allows for even more immersive and interactive progressive enhancement than JavaScript.

Personal Inspiration

The sites that blew me away in my early years were from 1996/7:

Volume One — I was awe-struck by Matt Owen's groundbreaking animated gifs. I vividly remember seasons one, two, and three from '97. By season five he was working with Flash and playing with sound. Around this time, I was so inspired that I had become a full-time web designer.
jodi.org — In 1996 I had no idea what this site was about. I still don't. However, you could spend an hour clicking around and looking at crazy hypertext. There's a Wikipedia page that explains the purpose, but it's more fun to just waste time on http://wwwwwwwww.jodi.org/.
Super Bad — Similar to jodi.org, superbad.com is some artist's playground that I found more fun than a Choose Your Own Adventure book.

All these sites are from years ago. They seem useless and unusable. However, they inspired a generation of kids to become web designers and developers. How? Play.

Questions

What new sites forsake usability for play in order to inspire today's generation? Or are we so caught up in usability that there's no time to play anymore? (Yes, a usable site can be more inspiring than a fun site, it's just a different kind of inspiration).
What were the sites that blew you away and inspired you?

Daniel Mall sees a future — not too distant — where we can work with Flash as easily and unobtrusively as JavaScript, making progressive enhancements more fun and interactive. Fun is good. I hope he's right.

Browsers and Brands

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 10:34:32 EDT

This morning, Rob sent around a short movie from Google Creative Labs.

Google asks 50 people in Times Sq. what a browser is and most people aren't sure.

My initial reaction was surprise. How could these people not know what a browser is? Don't they remember Code Rush from 1998 when browser wars were king? There are web ads, blogs, even TV ads for Safari, Internet Explorer, Firefox, and now Chrome. How could anyone not know what a browser is?

Patrick brought sense to the situation. Why should the average person care what a browser is? Browsers are a commodity. They come with your computer. They're usually free. They all work. People don't think about things that work.

Google's video would be akin to Subaru asking 50 people about their car engine configuration — comparing the common V configuration to Subaru's flat, boxer engine. I personally have no idea how my engine's configured but it works when I need it to.

Is Google's plan to first educate people what a browser is, then sell them on Chrome? That's pretty much what Mozilla had to do in 1998. Or, back to car engines, that's what Chrysler does with the Hemispherical combustion chamber. Neither of those examples were very successful.

Worse, Google now has to deal with marketing a commodity that nobody cares about under their brand. In a recent article, Andy Rutledge talks about how commodity companies — like gas companies — might be valuable, but they don't have a valuable brand.

When Apple markets their browser, Safari, does it dilute their pristine brand? Dodge has a refined brand, but nobody really cares about the hemispherical engine. Is marketing the "Hemi" detrimental to Dodge's brand?

Google certainly puts effort into their user-friendly brand. Could marketing a commodity browser hurt their brand? The people in Google's video all use Google for search because it's accurate and easy. Now Google's talking to them about really complicated computer-y stuff like Browsers.

Hiring: Junior Web Developer, Specializing in PHP

Thu, 28 May 2009 13:22:59 EDT

iMarc is looking for a Junior Web Developer to help us build PHP-driven internet applications.

Learn more about us, view our work, and meet the team. We're located in Newburyport, Massachusetts.

The ideal candidate has a couple years of work experience building web sites and web applications. A portfolio of personal, freelance, or work-related projects is required. While almost all of our work is PHP/SQL based, knowledge of another web programming or scripting language would be a bonus.

Most important, we're looking for someone who loves creating websites, solving problems, and learning.

Key Responsibilities

Write clean, efficient PHP and SQL
Write beautifully semantic markup
Work collaboratively with the creative team and other developers
Brainstorm and work closely with clients and staff
Maintain and edit existing web sites
Contribute to the development and improvement of our code base
Able to commute daily to our Newburyport office. Telecommuting is not an option.

Candidates should understand object-oriented programming concepts. A solid understanding of relational databases and SQL is also crucial to the position. In addition to back-end PHP and SQL programming, this position entails a significant amount of front-end coding. You don't have to be John Resig, but some knowledge of JavaScript will certainly help. Clean HTML and smart CSS is a requirement.

Candidates should have a favorite editor — if you're not up for a good editor war, this job probably isn't for you. More importantly, if you enjoy debating best practices and challenging yourself and your co-workers, you'll fit in perfectly. Basic understanding of how to properly leverage HTTP and concepts such as MVC and REST are not required, but would be a big bonus.

We're looking for someone who works well both independently and in a team setting. If you're organized, self-driven, and curious, you'll fit in well.

What iMarc Offers

Excellent opportunity to learn and grow as a web developer
Attractive benefits package including health and dental coverage
Company-sponsored retirement plan
A fun, creative work environment in excellent surroundings
Challenging, varied projects
Full-time salaried position with a stable, 11-year old company

How To Apply

Send us a link to your online (HTML) resume or email a PDF or plain text resume to careers@imarc.net

Inquiries without links to web-based work will probably be ignored. Resumes sent as Word documents will also likely be ignored.

About iMarc

iMarc is a full-service web development firm located in Newburyport, MA. We provide high quality custom Web sites, online applications, e-commerce, and intranets to discerning businesses. Check us out at http://www.imarc.net.

Debug CSS

Tue, 10 Mar 2009 14:45:42 EDT

Debug CSS is nothing new. Eric Meyer has been talking about them since the 1940's. Still, not many developers use them when building and testing.

I just added a debug CSS to a site that we're working on. Its purpose is to visually highlights 5 markup problems.

Images with a blank alt attribute value, i.e. alt="". This won't cause validation errors, but a blank alt doesn't help with accessibility either.
Images with a missing alt attribute. A strict doc type and Firefox's HTML Validator extension brings this error to light as well. A debug CSS is even better, highlighting the error right on the page.
Undefined links, i.e. href="". This is common when building a site. The developer knows that something is linked but isn't sure of the URL yet. When testing, instead of manually clicking through all the links, a debug CSS can highlight them.
Links to nothing, i.e. href="#". Identical to the item above, but some developers prefer href="#" to href="".
Empty containers. These too aren't technically errors, but why go live with a bunch of empty markup containers?

Here's the simple debug CSS that I like to add.

img[alt=""]    { border: 3px dotted red; }
img:not([alt]) { border: 5px solid red; }

a[href="#"]    { background-color: lime; }
a[href=""]     { background-color: lime; }

span:empty, li:empty, p:empty, td:empty, th:empty { 
    padding: .5em; background-color: yellow; }

Once the site is cleaned up, remove the debug css, or not.

Happy Debugging!

Bringing Business White Papers to the Web

Wed, 04 Mar 2009 11:54:41 EST

Many of iMarc's clients are technical or research oriented business. These companies tend to have a vast library of white papers or print-friendly research articles formatted as PDFs.

We're building a new site for one such client, who recently asked, "What format do you recommend for our white papers — pdf or html?"

While PDF white papers, sell-sheets, or articles are usually well designed and visually compelling, there is still a barrier to reading PDF that many users don't bother crossing. Everyone with a web browser can view PDFs, but most people* would rather not.
* Research only includes me and two iMarc developers.

Whether the PDF downloads or renders directly in your browser, you know clicking that "PDF" link is going to be a significant investment. PDFs take extra time to download or render. They look different from other web pages. They rarely have navigation or links. If a user is moving along, clicking through your site, the last thing you want to do is offer a dead-end PDF where their only option is to go back.

Obviously, some content suites the PDF format — a 20 page article, a technical document that requires precise formatting, a contract, etc. Most business PDFs, however, can be converted to web content. Items like a case study, a 5-page white paper, or a research article should be regular old HTML web links.

Even with the greatest CMS it will be time consuming to convert PDFs to HTML. Here are some rough guidelines for converting business PDFs to online content:

* First, free yourself of all design expectations. Your online content will not, and should not, look identical to the PDF. A web page is a different medium from PDF and content should be optimized appropriately.

* Copy all the content from your PDF and paste it into the CMS. Now remove half your content. I guarantee, you haven't read half of what I've written. If you're still reading this paragraph, you're either, (a) my mom; (b) me; (c) Google.

* Format the content in the CMS, adding bullet lists, bold, italic, headlines, etc.

* If your PDF has images or charts, add key images between the paragraphs. A print-ready PDF might design images as inserts with text running around them or called out in pretty boxes off to the side. If you're focused on optimizing for the web, instead of copying the design of the PDF, just add the most important images between the paragraphs they pertain to.

Assuming you started with a 3–5 page PDF, the end result should be a long HTML page with images sprinkled throughout, similar to the white papers at A List Apart. Compared to PDF of similar length, this article from A List Apart has very little formatting — just nice clean text and some images between the paragraphs.

Embrace how people read on-screen and don't try and mimic PDF layouts in your blog. Content administrators who put in the time to convert their business PDFs to web pages will be paid back by happy users who keep clicking — never encountering dead end PDFs.

Micropayments

Wed, 11 Feb 2009 10:07:20 EST

This morning Jeff shared a great article about micropayments. Micropayments are a transaction method for transferring very small amounts of money.

The article, Micropayments — It Is Time, brings up excellent points that are hard to argue.

Any micropayment system that would be implemented would need to be flexible enough to work across several platforms. Therefore, the one that I use to access selected content on the New York Times should work on ArsTechnica the same way it works on TechCrunch. Anything short of that will make it unpalatable to consumers, and thus stillborn.

Prices need to be kept amazingly low. One cent to read a blog. Five cents to read a newspaper. Four cents to listen to your favorite podcast. Nothing to the user, they would run up a bill of less than ten dollars over a month. Ten dollars a month for amazing, internet wide content? I'll signup for that deal. Works for me. People need to eat, that involves money, so throw them a bone.

— Alex Wilhelm, Micropayments — It Is Time

I'd be willing to pay for web content if it were half a cent or a couple pennies and one click payment. I'm often not willing to register all my personal info or sign up for a full online subscription if I just want to view one article. It's surprising that a widely accept micropayment solution hasn't been implemented yet.

2008 in Review

Wed, 31 Dec 2008 12:30:28 EST

Contrary to the media's description of 2008, iMarc had an exceptional past 12 months. Whether we were lucky, or smart, or a bit of both, we're certainly thankful to be working on great projects for some really great clients. We grew to 20 employees and added a whole new production team

Website Launches and Redesigns

In addition to all the little projects, 2008 saw the launching of a number of full-scale websites.

Newport Restoration Foundation, Doris Duke's charitable foundation
Redstone Properties, a land development company
Aston Martin & Lotus Motorsports, sports car dealership
Massachusetts Biotechnology Council, an association of biotech companies
Mark Magnacca, a business and financial advisor coach
Delaware Society of CPAs, a member organization for certified public accountants
MassBioEd, non-profit organization that promotes science and biotech education
EBSCO's Support, updated the back-end of EBSCO's support portal
Museum for African Art, a museum in New York
Pipettes, a laboratory supply and manufacturing company
Farmington Consulting Group, manufacturing and distribution consultancy
Buckley's Executive Sedan, a limo service near us
Peptimmune, Cambridge based laboratory
Strem Chemicals, a chemical manufacturer located in Newburyport, MA
Currier & Ives, iMarc did flash work, animating a number of historic paintings. The broadcast-quality flash was used in a PBS special.
NEHI,a healthcare organization
Your Tuition Solution, educational financing company
MassWorks, an informational site for homeownership assistance
Ciclismo Classico, an adventure travel and vacation company
Springfield Museums, four museums located in Springfield, MA
Newburyport Public Library, the library in our hometown.
North Shore Association of REALTORS, a local member organization for REALTORS
PermissionTV, online video publishing
MOTODEV, a extranet for Motorola developers
Basho, a sales software and services company
Motorola Solutions Catalog, applications, games, and tools for Motorola phones

iMarc also created a couple internal and intranet sites for Starwood Hotels, as well as launching our own Dragonfly, an internal bug tracking website that we use for testing and QC'ing projects.

Hiring

2008, saw the addition of 2 new full-time employees—Mike Denning, our Sys. Admin, and Paul Kelley, our newest designer. In the summer, intern Alden Michaels came on board.

Other Highlights

We created a third production team led by Fred. After reshuffling existing teams, everyone got up to speed and three teams ended up being a huge success.
We made the Inc 5000.
Two sites were nominated for MITX Awards.
Some iMarcians got engaged (though not to eachother) and one had a baby.
Looking through our intranet calendar I see some gems:
- 40's Friday in February
- group trip to Boston for a ride on Codzilla
- sponsoring drinks for the North Shore Web Geek Meetup in September
- a number of weekly developer meetings dedicated to the unending horror of WYSIWYG editing on web forms.

It was a good year. Here's to 2009...

Inconsistent Web Analytics Numbers: Google vs. The World

Mon, 22 Dec 2008 15:58:23 EST

Over the past 11 years, iMarc has used a number of web analytics tools. Whether FunnelWeb, Webalizer, Urchin, Mint, or Google Analytics, the goal is always to understand how people use the web and make optimizations based on that usage.

Recently, we've been recommending Google Analytics. Of course Google Analytics has its limitation and problems, most notably, Javascript and Cookie-acceptance is required by the end-user. That said, Google's ease of use—especially when compared to other reporting software—made it our choice for most clients.

Once we started moving clients sites from Webalizer and Urchin to Google Analytics, we were amazed at the discrepancies in traffic numbers. Google's numbers were much lower— sometimes half, 1/5th, even 1/10th the traffic that Urchin was reporting. Luckily, though the numbers were inconsistent between software packages, traffic trends were almost identical. Moral of that story: don't change reporting tools.

However, once committed to switching from a log-based analyzer like Urchin to Google Analytics, we were determined to learn more about what was causing this discrepancy.