Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

Earlier this year, when I was a start-up co-owner, I was trying all sorts of different ideas on how to keep web oriented technology company alive.  One of the ideas along the way was cheap and fast web design, using well-established platform (yes, you guessed it right, WordPress).  This one was among my favorites …

Eventually, the start-up didn’t survive.  And I am not much sad about it.  It was a fair try and I learned a lot from the experience.  But that idea … I liked it so much that it was painful to see it die.

Today, I learned that the idea actually works.  And not only it just works, but it’s a base of a successful business.  These are some good news for me - failing to implement a good idea properly sounds less silly to me than trying to implement a broken idea.

Blogging Pro runs an interview with Chris Garrett, owner of The 449.

A List Apart has a little introduction into HTML 5.  They explain the tough process of crafting the standard, how different parties interact, and what they are trying to achieve.  It all sounds pretty interesting if you have no idea about HTML 5. Also, it all sounds pretty interesting until you get to one of the final paragraphs (emphasis is mine):

Work on HTML 5 is rapidly progressing, yet it is still expected to continue for several years. Due to the requirement to produce test cases and achieve interoperable implementations, current estimates have work finishing in around ten to fifteen years.

Excuse me?  They are working on a standard for the Web, one of the fastest growing, expanding, and developing areas of IT industry, which itself is one of the fastest developing industries of the modern world, and they are planning to finish in 10 or 15 years?!!  Hello?  Wake up!

Just take a look around.  See how this place is different even from two years ago.  See how dramatically different it is from five years ago.  See how it is unrecognizably different from what it was ten years ago.  Try to find a living human being who even remembers how it was fifteen years ago…  Guys, what are you doing over there?

No matter how well you plan things today, no matter to how many people in the field you talk today, there is absolutely no way to predict how things will be in ten or fifteen years.  Trying to predict this will hard enough job for a single head.  Getting a few heads to agree on how this will be is beyond impossible!

If that’s how long HTML 5 will need to come out, we can just drop the effort right now.  If it will even come out, it will be totally useless, because people won’t wait for it.  If you think that we are moving fast now, you haven’t seen nothing yet.  We are just starting.  We are in the 1950s of the automobile industry.  Web is still a very much foreign concept for our society.  Wait a few more years when it will get more natural, and you’ll see what are the real power and speed of development.

Nobody is going to wait for a bunch of guys to agree on something that nobody knows how will come out.  People will just come up with their own solutions to their problems.  They will aggregate, re-factor, and re-optimize those solutions until they solve the majority of problems.  And then they will move on to the next stack of problems.  And will go on and on.  Forever…

How important is HTML 5?  It is needed, yes.  But right now.  Not in five years, not in ten, and not in fifteen. The problems it tries to solve are the problems of today.  If it’s not coming out shortly, you can just ignore it altogether.  There will be another solution…

Here is a question for technical people among your - how much time does a person need to learn HTML?

The reason I am asking is that I gave to one of our newer colleagues a whole weekend (from Friday evening until Monday morning ) to do it.  I promised to unleash all my fury and beat him severely with a stick, if I will find something that he doesn’t know by Monday 09:00am.

Now, before you will call me cruel, I’ll give you a couple of more details.  The person who I gave the task isn’t just a random fellow from the street.   He’s someone holding a Bachelor of Computer Science degree from a known UK university.   He has also studied Computer Science in USA and Cyprus, and even has some experience in the field of programming and web development.  So, yes, I would have expected him to know this stuff already, but somehow it happened that he doesn’t, and now he’ll have to catch up with it.

Also, when I gave out the task, I was as soft as I usually am.  So, I  provided the person with all the necessary learning materials, including digital copies of O’Reilly books, famous web sites, and relevant Google queries.

Am I fair with my timing?   How much time would you need to learn HTML?  Should I beat up the person on Monday even if he learns it inside out?  These are the questions rushing through my head right now…

Cyprus web sites seem to be very sensitive about the weather.  Most of the web sites have an “About Cyprus” page, which often says something along the lines of “Cyprus has more than 300 sunny days a year“.  I do agree that Cyprus is pretty well covered with sunlight through out the year, but I wouldn’t go to any exact number of days.  Whatever.  That thing is just marketing.

But then, most of the same web sites have a weather forecast widget somewhere on sidebar.  What?  What for do you need one?  If it’s 300+ sunny days a year, the question of “What weather is it going to be today (or tomorrow)?” is not one of the frequently asked, is it?  It’s like asking “Is it going to rain today?” in UK.  The answer is always “Yes”.

And then, if you look closely on those weather forecast widgets and actually count the number of sunny days, you’ll get … what will you get?

It is sometimes amazing how people behave.  Especially when they buy something and they get a choice of what they can get for their money.  Given the freedom to “get anything they want”, they often won’t stick with what they need, they won’t usually know what they want, and so they’ll go for as much as they can carry.  This might be a worthy technique for a supermarket, but it’s a bit different with web sites.

Yes, we (at my job) build web sites.  We do design, programming, hosting, promotion, maintenance, and many other things. And, yes, we can stack a web site with pretty much any technology or interface there is - forms, dynamic menus, AJAX, you name it - we can do it.  Can’t name any?  Good!  Because practice shows that if you can name something, you want it on your web site no matter if it needed or not.

It’s amazing how difficult it is to convince people  to stick with the KISS principle or make them understand that “less is more”.  Make your web site functional.  Put only things that you’d want yourself to use.  Study your statistics and see what people use and what they don’t.  Remove things that they don’t use.  Improve things that they use.  Stay focused and specialized - your web site is not an endless trash bin which you can throw everything into…

One argument that I often use, is of Google vs. Yahoo. When asked which company is number 1, Google’s leadership is never questioned.  When I confirm that Google is the authority, I go for examples.  How do you want your web site to look and feel?

Like this:

or like this:

If these examples don’t convince, they at least plant a seed of doubt.  After these, it’s much easier to bend the conversation.