Jan 27, 2012

Is HTML5 causing confusion?

Phil Powell , HTML5, Web 0 Comment

This .net article, follows up on a blog post written by Adrian Roselli in which he rallies against the continued use of HTML5 as a global term for modern web technologies.

On speaking to .net, Roselli said that HTML5 “as a brand versus the name of the version of a particular specification” already causes confusion, not only with clients but also developers. “I suffered through this with DHTML and Web 2.0, and those weren’t even real specifications. I expect to continue to deal with it with HTML5.” He told us that new developers may not even be taught the differences, partly because the educators themselves don’t know.” As these devs come into the workforce and get direction from clients or non-technical supervisors to lean on HTML5 for a project, they may not understand that the marketing term ‘HTML5′ is just the latest variation on ‘DHTML’ or ‘Web 2.0′ and presume they are being directed to use one specification. They may spend far too much time rebuilding capability in script, or perhaps just failing at trying to address it, when a related specification already exists.”

I kind of agree in theory — confusing technical specs with buzzwords can make life difficult for developers in all sorts of ways — but I think this is just a difficultly we’re going to have to live with. I don’t think it’s too difficult, when speaking about the technical aspects of web technologies like HTML5, CSS3 et al, to explicitly make clear that we’re concerning ourselves with the specification of those technologies.

I have conversations with decision-makers on a fairly regular basis, who band around the phrase “HTML5″ to communicate what they’re anticipating for a project, and that’s fine with me. When it comes to actually sitting down to spec a particular project though, that’s when individual technologies are defined and ratified.

In the original post, Adrian states:

I am repeating a request that when we who know better (developers, tech writers, robots named Frank) speak about discrete specifications, we refer to them as such.

I agree with this. But here’s a question: what umbrella term should we use for these specifications? Modern web technologies do represent a major sea-change in the way we’re approaching things, and I feel we need a catch-all term to refer to them, for both technical and non-technical people. Some developers might have hated the terms DHTML and Web 2.0, but at least they gave us a common language which could be understood across disciplines; you could “get” the gist of what was being talked about.

Jan 27, 2012

SoundCloud HTML5 Widget: ready for primetime

Phil Powell , , HTML5, Web 0 Comment

After months of testing, SoundCloud have announced that they are now making HTML5 the default for serving up their embeddable widgets. They’ve also added some great new features to it:

Today we are adding two major new features to our HTML5 widgets – Comments and Likes. This means that from now on you’re able to comment on sounds embedded anywhere on the web and you can save them as a favorite on SoundCloud too.

Also, we are proud to announce that today we are officially switching our default widget to be the HTML5 widget. We also know that our major partners plan to support it in the near future. Of course the old Flash widget will be still available if you need it as an alternative option.

This is great news for the ongoing rollout of HTML5 in the wild and is a great example of what the technology can be capable of. There’s still a Flash fallback too, so it’s not like moving to HTML5 means that any users are locked out.

Jan 26, 2012

HTML5 Please

Phil Powell , , HTML5, Web 0 Comment

Look up HTML5, CSS3, etc features, know if they are ready for use, and if so find out how you should use them – with polyfills, fallbacks or as they are.

Jan 20, 2012

The distribution of iBooks 2 content

Phil Powell , , Applications, Creative, Design, Publishing 0 Comment

Yesterday, Apple announced the launch of iBooks 2, and an audacious initiative to modernise the textbook industry. As part of the launch, they also announced the release of iBooks Author, a free tool for creating and publishing eBooks.

I’ve not had a chance to play with it myself yet, but it looks like a very slick, well-made and easy-to-use tool for creating interactive books — something which has been missing from the market for far too long.

I’ve seen a fair bit of negative talk on Twitter though, mainly about the terms of Apple’s SLA and how books created with iBooks Author can be distributed. The short story is that if you’re planning to sell your publication, you have to distribute it through Apple’s store — you’re forbidden from distributing through any other means. Seems to many like a dictatorial move from Apple, but David Smith has an interesting take on this:

The real story here today shouldn’t be that Apple has ‘audaciously’ claimed ownership of the books make with iBooks Author but that they have created an avenue for non-commercial distribution that would exclude thementirely. That is actually unprecedented.

If I create a textbook using iBooks Author and then decide to made it freely available to the world (à la Khan Academy) I can do that without any restriction. Simple click ‘Export’ within iBook Author and the resulting file can be distributed by any means I choose and then loaded in iBooks. The mind boggles at what things may come out of this.

All Apple is doing with this restriction is saying that if you directly profit from this free tool and platform that we have created, then we deserve our cut. Which seems entirely fair to me.

And John Gruber has followed up on this with an interesting point about the HTML5 foundation of this iBooks format:

Second, it’s about not wanting iBooks Author to serve as an authoring tool for competing bookstores like Amazon’s or Google’s. The output of iBooks Author is, as far as I can tell, HTML5 — pretty much ePub 3 with whatever nonstandard liberties Apple saw fit to take in order to achieve the results they wanted. It’s not a standard format in the sense of following a spec from a standards body like the W3C, but it’s just HTML5 rendered by WebKit — not a binary blob tied to iOS or Cocoa. It may not be easy, but I don’t think it would be that much work for anyone else with an ePub reader that’s based on WebKit to add support for these iBooks textbooks. Apple is saying, “Fuck that, unless you’re giving it away for free.”

Worth noting that Apple pitched their launch event at the education market, and they’re probably already a long way down the road with making deals with educational institutions (Apple has a track-record of quietly making individual, private deals in the education sector). Amazon et al have had a massive head-start in the ePublishing sector, but none of them have been audacious enough (or powerful enough) to make these kinds of bold moves into education.

Apple are doing a very clever thing here: they’re making efforts to put iPads into the hands of young adopters. Talk about brand exposure!

Jan 18, 2012

Are sub-$100 smartphones a scam?

Phil Powell Mobile, Technology 0 Comment

Apurva Chaudhary has posted about the sub $100 smartphone market which is set to boom in India. She quotes Deloitte who say that consumers are willing to make a trade-off on speed, quality, performance and connectivity. Apurva’s take though, is that these devices are a scam:

Sure, for someone who is jumping from a Nokia 2600 to a low cost smartphone, these doesn’t matter. But these are the same people who later get frustrated cause the phone is slow or doesn’t respond. Camera quality is so low that it’s embarrasing to click photos. These are the people, who after using a low end smartphone switch to high performing Smartphone. These phones are just a scam by manufacturers who promise to be a smartphone but aren’t really.

Not entirely sure I agree with this premise. Much of the consumer technology people buy is marketed as being desirable, and with a focus on making people aspire to own a new, better, faster, shinier model. These phones might be low-spec, but I certainly don’t think they’re pretending to be anything they’re not.

Jan 17, 2012

Fragmentation Is Not The End of Android

Phil Powell Mobile, Technology 0 Comment

Really insightful post from Charlie Kindel about how he sees the fragmentation of Android in the context of the current mobile ecosystem:

The fragmentation of Android is very real and very problematic for end users, developers, mobile operators, device manufacturers, and Google. However fragmentation does not mean Android is going to “die” or “fail” as some seem to think.

On the contrary I think we can count on Android playing a significant role in our world for a long, long time. I also am confident that Google has already lost control of Android and has zero chance of regaining control. This post explains why I’m so confident about this.

He goes on to explain his thinking in quite some detail. I found myself agreeing with pretty much everything he has to say.

Jan 26, 2011

The old print model just doesn’t work

Phil Powell , , , Applications, Publishing, Web 0 Comment

In an article comparing the latest crop of paid-for newspaper apps, Rory Cellan-Jones picks up on what is lacking from a traditional approach to publishing on digital devices: He says of The Times iPad app:

What it does not do is take advantage of those things that online products can deliver which a paper cannot. Search, for instance, is absent – trying to find out whether today’s Times has an article on a particular subject means flicking through every section.

More seriously, the app is not a “live” newspaper – what you get each morning is the edition that went to bed about the time you did. Take today’s iPad Times for instance. There is a long article about Apple and the challenges it faces from rivals now that Steve Jobs is taking sick leave.

But not only does it quote a share price that is way out of date – the 6% fall at Tuesday’s NASDAQ opening – it also fails to mention the startlingly good results published at 2130 GMT on Tuesday evening.

This shows exactly why the old print model just doesn’t translate effectively to the digital world — modern-day journalism needs to be responsive; be more relevant.

News groups appear to be groping in the dark, unsure of what readers want from an app.

What readers want from an app is what readers have been getting from the web: searchable, relevant, up-to-date journalism and content. But they want that experience to be enhanced through the use of intelligent, intuitive design which digital devices can provide.

Jan 26, 2011

Publishers aren’t learning from the web

Phil Powell , , , Applications, Design, Mobile, Publishing, Web 0 Comment

Oliver Bothwell ponders the current state of publication apps on tablets, concluding that publishers just aren’t learning lessons from the web:

And now it is quite easy to see why the media apps are failing. They are all difficult to navigate requiring too many swipes, flicks and scrolls to find things. Eureka has a lovely opening navigation and the magazines have contents pages but where are the search bars? Have they learnt nothing from the web? Where are the related articles, tags and comments. They are not taking advantage of the fundamental tools available to them. Instead they are creating gimmicky apps without any real substance. Media companies are changing but without realising what is their best asset, their quality journalism and ability to edit, which they sacrifice to fads and pointless interactive content. Newspaper and magazine sales are down because the internet allows easy consumption and access to lots of information; the only way to start making money is by championing this in their apps and combining with excellent user-interface and editorial design. At the moment there isn’t an app which is better to use than the newspaper or website equivalent and this should be worrying to an ailing industry. The approach is entirely wrong; it is not the content that is the problem, it’s the way it’s being presented.

I’ve, personally, yet to find a media app which feels “right” — even the very popular and innovative Flipboard doesn’t fit the bill, for the may of the reasons that Oliver flags up: too many swipes, no way to effectively filter and search.

Jan 21, 2011

More on the HTML5 branding fallout

Phil Powell , , HTML5, Web 0 Comment

Jeremy Keith gives a nice summary of what the changes to the WHATWG spec mean in real terms:

I think this difference makes it clearer what each group is doing. It was a pretty confusing situation to have two groups working on two specs, both called HTML5. Now it’s clear that the WHATWG is working more like how browsers do: constantly evolving and implementing features rather than entire specifications. Meanwhile the W3C are working on having a development milestone of those features set in stone and labelled as the fifth revision to the HTML language …and I think that is also an important and worthy goal.

Meanwhile, Tantek Çelik passes comment on what this recent hiccup means for the W3C:

This was the perfect opportunity for W3C to stand up, show adherence to principles of precision, clarity, and provide leadership as their mission statement claims they (want to) do. All the things you would expect from a world-class standards organization.

They’ve done the opposite on all counts. Instead of providing precision and clarity, they’ve muddied the definition of HTML5 further with yet another “here’sour bucket of things we like which we’re going to call ‘HTML5′” message. Instead of leading they’ve followed the marketing messages from large corporations.

W3C’s Communications Team has failed us horribly and have only added to market confusion as to what “HTML5″ is.

Jan 21, 2011

So long, Facebook

Phil Powell , Web 1 Comment

For a little while now I’ve been thinking about leaving Facebook. It’s been fun and everything, but when I start to take an objective look at the contents of my “News” feed I started to notice some really unpleasant trends in the kinds of conversations which were going on there. There were a lot of things I didn’t really want to be reading; a lot of diatribes which made me wonder “do you not all realise that your comments are going public, for everyone to see?” It has really started to unnerve me that the “social” element of this “social network” was becoming a warts-and-all, competitive hive of everybody’s subconscious — and, quite frankly, I don’t know if I want to be exposed to that.

But, of course, like most people who threaten to leave and become clean: I realised I was addicted.

And of course, I’ve been clinging on by rationalising my Facebook addiction by using that age-old excuse: it’s an easy way to keep in touch with people. Bu really? A lot of the people I’m “friends” with on Facebook I haven’t spoken to in years — nor do I really want to speak to them. That’s not a judgement on them, it’s just that people move on; friends come and go; some keep in touch, others float away. Why do we feel the need to cling on to everybody, all of the time? I don’t need Facebook to keep me in touch with the people I care about: I have telephone numbers, email, skype, postal addresses for all of those people anyway.

What really swung me though, what really snapped me into cold realisation was reading this essay by Zadie Smith. It’s a fascinating, lengthy read. There’s some really insightful, philosophical thinking contained in there, but this particular passage really got me thinking:

When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility. In a way it’s a transcendent experience: we lose our bodies, our messy feelings, our desires, our fears. It reminds me that those of us who turn in disgust from what we consider an overinflated liberal-bourgeois sense of self should be careful what we wish for: our denuded networked selves don’t look more free, they just look more owned.

With Facebook, Zuckerberg seems to be trying to create something like a Noosphere, an Internet with one mind, a uniform environment in which it genuinely doesn’t matter who you are, as long as you make “choices” (which means, finally, purchases). If the aim is to be liked by more and more people, whatever is unusual about a person gets flattened out. One nation under a format. To ourselves, we are special people, documented in wonderful photos, and it also happens that we sometimes buy things. This latter fact is an incidental matter, to us. However, the advertising money that will rain down on Facebook—if and when Zuckerberg succeeds in encouraging 500 million people to take their Facebook identities onto the Internet at large—this money thinks of us the other way around. To the advertisers, we are our capacity to buy, attached to a few personal, irrelevant photos.

I’ve realised that when it comes down to it, it’s not the content of my Facebook feed which I have a gripe with — after all: I choose who my friends are, and I choose to read or not read what’s going on in my social network. No, it’s the idea of my virtual personality being diluted down to a prescribed format; having my online activities influenced by omnipotent software; essentially, having my online self owned. Facebook has been created as a vision of an idealistic future dictated by one man: Mark Zuckerberg. I find that really quite scary, because history teaches us that one-man dictatorships can have a huge influence over societies, and the authority they wield can make people do horrible things.

So, I’m going to be exporting my data, updating my address book and then I’ll be leaving the hive mind. Don’t worry, I’ll still be able to keep tabs on you all if I like; I can always take one more hit by just running a search for you in Google. It’s likely that Facebook’s default privacy settings are broadcasting your every activity to the wider world, right now.

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