Tag: thoughts

Just ignore HTML 5 for now

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…

IM interface idea

For this or that reason, I’m chatting (ICQ/Google Talk) to a lot of people recently.  Often I do a few chats simultaneously.  It’s easy to get used to after some time.  But one thing I noticed that annoys me, is that chat windows take a lot of screen space and a lot of time on switching between them.  I tried a few ICQ clients before, but all of them seem to offer similar interface.  One chat window per conversation.  Some group those windows into tabs of the same window, but it’s still the same concept.

This concept works pretty well for one, two, three, or maybe even four simultaneous discussions.  The more it gets, the harder it becomes to manage.  Taskbar window captions get smaller, it is not clear anymore who sent you the message.  You just know that you have an unread message to which you need to switch to…

Instead, I think an IRC-like interface could do better.  In most IRC clients you have this one huge area for messages (think channel discussions now), a simple input area, and a lit of people on the channel.   When talking in the room with a lot of people, one is usually required to precede the message with the name of the person to who he speaks.  Also, there is a notion of operators, who kind of look after the order in the room.  They can kick someone out, silence him, warn, change topic of the discussion, and so on.

I think the same concepts could work very well for an ICQ or Google Talk interface.  The user can be an admin of his own channel.  People in his contact list could be shown as a list of people in the channel (fonts, colors and icons can indicate the status of each, with some sorting options).  All messages from all contacts would end up in the same message area.  But that’s only a presentation thing, the actual discussion will still be between two people.  When sending messages, the user would type the name of the person to who he wants to send it.  This should of course support Tab completions, like in most IRC clients…

I do understand that such interface won’t work very well for all sorts of users (especially beginners), but I can see that there would a large number of people who could be interested in it.  Maybe even it was implemented somewhere and I just don’t know or don’t remember seeing it.  Any reminders?

Blogging as it used to be

When she brought the tray and put it on the bed table I thanked her and ate a little of the supper. Afterward it was dark outside and I could see the beams of the search-lights moving in the sky. I watched for a while and then went to sleep. I slept heavily except once I woke sweating and scared and then went back to sleep trying to stay outside of my dream. I woke for good long before it was light and heard roosters crowing and stayed on awake until it began to light. I was tired and once it was really light I went back to sleep again.

Can you guess the author?  Here is hint : these lines were written in 1929.  Yes, you got it right.  It’s Ernest Hemingway, “A Farewell to Arms“, last paragraph of Chapter 13.

While reading the book, I caught myself a few times thinking that it feels a lot like a blog – first person story telling, simple sentences, a few “what I ate for breakfast” paragraphs.  But then again, somehow it feels better than a blog – connectivity, metaphors, a tiny hint of old times.

They say that one can improve his own writing by reading great writers.  Having this book in mind, I do agree with that.  And, it seems, I’m not the only one thinking of what and how to learn from Hemingway for my blogging – Copyblogger published Ernest Hemingway’s Top 5 Tips for Writing Well some time ago.

Growing technological expectations

While reading through this post which discusses several office applications and their approach to group collaboration and offline editing, I once again got amazed as to how fast our expectations of technology grow.  Just think about the complexity of the problem scope – synchronizing a document which has been edited by serveral people, some of who has probably worked online.  And we, end-users, just expect this stuff to work.  More so, we expect it to work in all available alternatives.  And even more so, we expect this functionality to be given to us for free…

I guess I’m just trying not to remind myself of how things used to be five, ten, or fifteen years ago…

Tip for web promoters

If you care about web promotion of your web site, if you post articles titled “10 steps to do XYZ” or “ABC in 3 minutes”, if you want your blog posts to be bookmarked across all social networks, if you follow your incoming links with more attention than your personal hygiene, then here is a tip for you.

Look at the limitations that social bookmarking services impose on their users.  Make sure that you provide a quick way to bookmark your site with sufficient information which is within those limitations.

Take del.icio.us for example. Which limitations does it impose on the users?  There are a few, but the main one is the length of the description.  Whenever I bookmark your web site, I can only post 255 characters of the description.  This is too much and this is too little.

This is too much if I will have to type my own description.  I don’t have the time to describe all the web sites that I bookmark.  For many of them, I don’t even have any idea of what to write, since I bookmark the web site to check it out later… So whenever I bookmark a web site, I look around for a quick way to generate that description.  And the easiest and fastest way is always a copy-paste.

That’s where that description length limitation becomes too small.  Most web sites have an “About” page these days.  But it’s too long for a description.  A couple of paragraphs could do, and I can almost always find those paragraphs to copy-paste, but they almost never fit into 255 characters.  That’s where you come in.

First of all, make sure that there is a piece of text, less than 255 characters long, that gives me an idea of what the article is or post or page or web site is about.  Secondly, make sure that I can find that piece of text easily.  Make it bold.  Put a border around it.   Slap a “Synopsis” or “About” or “In brief” label somewhere nearby.  You can even go as noisy as “del.icio.us users might want to use this as description: …”.

Why would you want to go into all that trouble?  Because this will help me, your visitor, to keep my bookmarks organized and annotated.  I will be able to find this bookmark much faster later on.  And that means that chances of me coming back, of me sending this link to someone else, or blogging about it are much higher.  And that is what you, as a web promoter, want.  Isn’t it?