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Episode 146 of The SitePoint Podcast is now available! This week the panel is made up of Louis Simoneau (@rssaddict), Kevin Dees (@kevindees) and Patrick O’Keefe (@ifroggy).

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• SitePoint Podcast #146: Patrick Accidentally Installs Chrome (MP3, 32:29, 31.2MB)

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Episode Summary

Here are the main topics covered in this episode:

• Scripting News: Could Bing seriously challenge Google?
• Official Google Blog: Search, plus Your World
• JQ.Mobi Is A Mobile-Optimized HTML5 Rewrite Of the JQuery Framework
• jQ.Mobi – Home

Browse the full list of links referenced in the show at http://delicious.com/sitepointpodcast/146.

Host Spotlights

• Kevin: visualizing.org – Make Your Data Interesting
• Patrick: Fotoshop by Adobé on Vimeo
• Louis: Making Love to WebKit — Acko.net

Interview Transcript

Louis: Hello and welcome to another episode of the SitePoint Podcast. This week on the panel Stephan is away, but we do have myself, Kevin and Patrick; hi, Kev, hi Patrick.

Kevin: Howdy, howdy.

Patrick: Hey, guys.

Louis: How’s it going?

Kevin: It’s going okay.

Patrick: Doing good, listening to some Bach (laughter), you know, keeping it real, it’s busy times.

Louis: We did some comments from users about the temporary typo in the title of the last post, it was spelled Bachbone.js, and I suggested — we were talking before the show and I suggested that we should — someone should write Bachbone.js just to make that make sense, make it about composing Baroque music in JavaScript, it would be awesome. Anyway, I spent the weekend at Rails Camp out in Adelaide, that was a lot of fun.

Patrick: Oh, yeah?

Louis: I spent the weekend hacking in a cafeteria full of other nerds, it was lots of fun.

Kevin: Cool.

Patrick: Very cool, very cool. Did you make any meaningful new connections or meet any new cool people?

Louis: Yeah, absolutely, I met a lot of cool people there. I spent the weekend sort of working on — I don’t know if you remember the Google AI challenge, the most recent one with Ants?

Patrick: Okay, yeah.

Louis: You saw this thing? Yeah, so someone put up a server on the first day, they built this little server in Rails that you could upload a button; they’d play against each other, so a few of us started hacking at that. I started out as being, oh, let me have a quick look at this and see how it works, see how the bots work, and then 16 hours later I hadn’t moved (laughs).

Patrick: Wow.

Louis: Then I went to bed. So I spent the whole weekend, yeah, pretty much working on getting an ant to be able to find out where it was going.

Patrick: Yeah, it sounds like it was quite an event because the website says, “Starts on the afternoon of Friday, January 13th, and runs until midday Monday the 16th,” so it must really have been running constantly and keeping everyone busy.

Louis: It pretty much was. Not a lot of us slept very much, let’s just say that.

Patrick: Well, I guess depending on how you camp.

Louis: Yeah.

Patrick: If camping includes sleep for you then it might not have been a camp, but if camp is just constant, you know, slumber party energy and no sleep, then that’s what this one was.

Louis: Yeah. So, anyway, if anyone out there is interested in Rails or Ruby and there’s a Rails Camp coming up near you, I strongly recommend it, it was a lot of fun and you get to meet cool people, so check it out.

Patrick: Yeah, their website is railscamps.com.

Louis: Yep, absolutely. Alright, so with that aside maybe we can dive straight into this week’s stories. Who wants to go first?

Kevin: I’ll go first if you’d like me to.

Louis: Sure.

Kevin: Alright, cool. So, my first link for the day I guess is my only link since we each do one link, but it’s an article on whether or not Bing can seriously take on Google as a search competitor, and I mean obviously they are competitors, but a serious competitor is what we’re looking for here. This is an article on scripting.com, and I found it via John Gruber, and he had linked to this and it was talking about basically the clutter that Google is kind of becoming. You know it’s original intent was it was clean, it had one logo and a search box, which they have held true to on the homepage, but once you dive into the search it’s just — it’s really nasty, and things like DuckDuckGo and Bing may be able to take advantage of this weakness in that Google has kind of become what Microsoft was on the OS, and kind of still is; so, thoughts?

Patrick: Sure, so this ties a little bit into Google Search Plus, your world feature that they announced earlier last week I want to say, or the end of the week before that, and we’ll talk about that in a little more detail because that’s my story, but, you know, it’s an interesting point to make. But here’s the thing, Google is not hurting, I mean the market share shows that Google is not really threatened in any way, and maybe there’s a comparison to be made between Apple’s growth, let’s say on the desktop versus the market share, Microsoft still owns which is almost all of it still. So, what is a threat to Google, like seriously challenging Google? It’s so tough to see because it’s not even like if you consider like IE, for example, IE6, and kind of the stagnation that was the development of Internet Explorer and how other browsers kind of came up behind it and eventually made a serious dent in the market share; even now Internet Explorer is still the majority player. So, you know, is Google that vulnerable, are they as vulnerable as IE was? It took many years for that to happen and it’s difficult to see it.

Louis: Yeah, and moreover there was a reason for people to switch over from IE, right, I mean everyone they knew who was even slightly technically inclined was clamoring at them to change browsers, you know, it was known to be slow, some sites started using new features that it didn’t support, a lot of sites told you you should upgrade your browser, Microsoft pushed updates on their side but that didn’t really help, and a lot of people were concerned about the security. So a lot of reasons to switch, whereas if you’re a Google user now, like the only reason you’d want to switch is either your search is slow, which it isn’t, or you’re not finding the things you’re looking for, and I don’t find that that’s the case, you know, you’d need to actually be dissatisfied with your search engine for some reason, or for some other search engine to have a killer feature, and a killer feature is hard to imagine in the search space because it’s such a simple competition, right; the only thing you want is probably one or two relevant web pages, and if the thing can find those quickly then that’s all I need, I’m done.

Kevin: Right, so I mean but what do you guys think about the clutter of Google, do you feel like it’s becoming more cluttered and that you go there and now they have the map on the side of the page and they just added their new logo dropdown menu thing, and, you know, the weather at the top of the page; they’re adding a lot of elements and a lot of different things that can kind of pull your eyes in different directions as far as design goes, and so this is kind of what the article is talking about is that.

Louis: But it’s not enough to overwhelm. Like, first of all, Bing at the moment has more clutter.

Kevin: Right.

Louis: And it has since the beginning, it’s got a lot of stuff on the page, and it’s not exactly obvious what’s going on. DuckDuckGo, that you mentioned, is definitely less cluttered, and I find it does do well for certain types of search, it’s very effective and it’s capable of doing a bit of semantics that Google doesn’t necessarily do, but, sometimes searches are a little weird, they’re not exactly what you’d expect to find. And the other thing is it is comparatively a lot slower than Google.

Kevin: Correct, that’s true.

Louis: Something like search when it’s not, you know, I’m just going through this to find the thing that I’m looking for. And a lot of times, and we know this, a lot of people use Google to go to pages they already know exist but they just want to get there, right, and I don’t remember the address.

Patrick: Right.

Kevin: Right. It’s a search box, yeah.

Louis: And when you’re using it that way, speed is the most important thing, right, because it’s faster to look it up on Google than it is to try and remember where it is, right.

Kevin: I think you have a really, really valid point there, and that is that speed is the number one factor when it comes to search because you just want to find what you’re looking for, like you’re saying.

Patrick: Yeah, and I like what Google’s doing in search, and I’m a Google user as most of us are; when I compare it to Bing, I just pulled up Google and I pulled up Bing, and I searched for SitePoint, you know, and when you switch off the personal results, which is the Plus search results, and just compare on that basis, you know, the normal search versus normal search of Bing, realistically all that’s on the SitePoint search, and of course this will vary, if you search for location you get a map, if you search for a math equation it will often tell you the answer, that sort of thing, but if I’m just searching for a company or a website, all I’m getting right now is text listings for sitepoint.com, Learnable, Facebook.com + SitePoint, and so on; Bing has the same basic listings and the same basic format, except for some reason I have automatic Facebook integration, and it tells me that me, someone else, and Kevin Yank all like SitePoint, which is the first link. So, you know, on the basis of just comparing those default results, really it looks pretty similar at this stage.

Louis: Well, there are a couple of other things I’d point out about Bing. First of all, as I mentioned, a bit more clutter at the moment, I find those related searches, the related searches on the left-hand side are completely useless and they’re always sort of random; I can’t imagine if I was looking for one thing and what’s it tell me, oh, you might want to search for, you know, when we search for SitePoint, for example, I get related searches of SitePoint, PTYL, like Proprietary Limited, SitePoint Books, SitePoint CSS, like I know what I’m looking for, you don’t need to tell me that other people — I’d be curious to see if they have user analytics of people actually clicking on those links.

Patrick: Right.

Kevin: Yeah.

Patrick: I searched for Louis Simoneau, I got no related search results, that stinks; I was hoping to see what other people would have typed in with your name, but there’s nothing there.

Louis: I get related searches on — well, see, this is exactly it, right; when I search for Louis Simoneau on Bing the related searches are Megan Simoneau, Joanna Simoneau, Brenda Simoneau, Guy Simoneau, Rachel Simoneau, Monique Simoneau, Simoneau Sports, and Simoneau Vineyards; like how is that at all helpful Bing?

Patrick: I wonder why you get that and I don’t.

Louis: You don’t get that?

Patrick: No, I get no related results on Bing; I get nothing suggested at all.

Louis: Are you signed in to Microsoft or something?

Patrick: No, I’m not, but it is doing some automatic Facebook or something or another, I’m not sure if you get that on your end. Let me see what happens when I sign out of Facebook, because I’m thinking if those are real people you just read off that are connected to you, maybe that’s how they’re getting the data through Facebook, but –

Louis: Those aren’t real people, I’ve never heard of any of them.

Patrick: (Laughs) Okay, they’re all fake people Microsoft made up, you freakin’ liars!

Louis: I’m not saying they’re not real people; if Megan Simoneau is listening to the show I apologize, I’m sure you’re a real person.

Patrick: And we love you.

Louis: What I meant to say was that I don’t know them.

Patrick: Okay.

Kevin: I think the core point of this, the article, was that Google is becoming a little more cluttered than it used to be, it’s not just plain text search results, and that the competitors can key into that and become a little bit different; instead of trying to copy Google they have this area where they can become niche in.

Louis: Yeah, I understand the point I guess, but I’m gonna stick to my original point which is that unless people have a reason to switch away from Google they’re not even going to look at the competitors, and right now there’s no reason to switch away from Google, unless you start not being able to find what you want quickly, and I don’t see that happening. You know there was a problem with some spammy sites for some searches for a little while, but that seems to have improved significantly with a few recent algorithm changes, so yeah, I just don’t see that happening.

Kevin: Yeah, I can’t see it much happening myself just because like when you brought up the Internet Explorer thing, nobody’s bugging you to switch your search engine, they were bugging you to change your browser but not so much the search engine, so people stick with what they know, and I think Google will, as you say, win out.

Louis: Yeah.

Patrick: Yeah, and that ties in really well with what I wanted to talk about, and really what is kind of the catalyst for this discussion from Dave Weiner at Scripting.com is the announcement of the Google+ Your World feature, the Google Search + Your World feature, which was posted on the Google blog on January 10th, and in that post I’ll provide a brief summary of what the feature is. So, essentially there are three new features that are introduced, the first is personal results, I’m gonna quote from the post, “Personal results which enable you to find information just for you such as Google + photos and posts, both your own and those shared specifically with you that only you will be able to see on your results page, second feature, profiles in search, both in auto-complete and results, which enable you to immediately find people you’re close to or that might be interested in following, and, thirdly, people and pages which help you find people’s profiles and Google+ pages related to a specific topic or area of interest and enable you to follow them with just a few clicks, because behind most every query is a community.” So, really it’s Google+, the social network, infiltrated the Google search, and so when you search for something and you’re logged into Google and you have a Google+ account, it will now show you Google+ posts that you wrote, Google+ posts that people you are connected to wrote or shared with you right in the search results. So, when you search for a location if someone you’re connected to wrote about that location it will come up, you’ll see photos from your albums, you’ll see photos from you friends’ albums, and they could be private posts and private photos, just ones that are shared with you. Obviously this is kind of a privacy thing, and that’s part of the reason people are concerned about it, but Google says that security-wise they have SSL and personal results are clearly marked as public limited and only you, and they are offering a public toggle, which you can easily change from the personal results to the regular results, and you can also go in the settings and turn it off so that it’s by default the normal search. So, first of all, guys, have you played around with this at all? Have you seen it impact your Google results? What do you think?

Louis: No.

Patrick: No, you haven’t. So you haven’t seen it or you haven’t used Google?

Louis: I haven’t seen it, I’m pretty sure I’ve used Google since, when was it, it was the 10th.

Patrick: The 10th.

Louis: Yeah, I’m pretty sure I’ve used Google since then, so I haven’t noticed anything.

Kevin: Yeah.

Patrick: Okay.

Louis: I don’t really pay attention to what Gmail account I’m signed into, and because we use Google Apps at work I might be signed into my Flippa account which isn’t linked to a Google+ account, so that might be why I haven’t noticed it.

Patrick: Yeah, that might be. So let me give you an example of what I see when I search for SitePoint right now. So the first link is sitepoint.com, and Kevin Yank shared this, it would be number one anyway. So the second thing that shows up, though, is a Google+ post I wrote about the podcast, the next result is the same thing, farther down images for SitePoint is shows four pictures, the first three are from Louis’ photo albums of I believe some sort of SitePoint social gathering, and the fourth one is from Brad Williams, who used to be a host on the show in our live show, at a conference a year or two ago, and then it goes down from there. So I get a few posts I’ve written and I get then photos from Louis, Kevin?

Kevin: Yeah, I was going to say Google has been talking about this for some time, about integrating the Google+ into most all of their services, so that hint of theirs is coming to fruition and it’s interesting to see how it works because I was doing a search just today and I think I typed my name in on the Google search because I was going to my website, but I accidentally ended up in a search box and it popped up my profile where I could — it said my profile was 70% complete, or something like that, in the search. And I was a little bit confused about that but, you know, I kind of ignored it at the same time just because it wasn’t what I was currently wanting to do which was search.

Patrick: Right.

Kevin: But, yeah, I think it’s an interesting take on search and where it’s going, and I don’t know how I feel about them integrating the Google+ into everything.

Louis: I do like the social integration, and that has been there for some time; if Google has some way of knowing that your –

Kevin: The plus one button, right?

Louis: Well, no, not the plus one button, I mean the, um, either Twitter or Facebook; I don’t exactly know which ones. No, it must be Twitter because I was seeing posts from people I don’t know on Facebook, so it would happen pretty often that I would do a search and I’d see such and such a person has shared this on Twitter, and it was someone I’m connected with on Twitter, and I do find that useful sometimes, if I’m looking for something and I see that some other developer that I respect or that I follow has shared that post then it does give me a little bit more trust in the content.

Patrick: Right.

Louis: So that I actually do find useful, adding Google+ to it is nice. It was more useful to me because it was Twitter, because I follow more people on Twitter than I do on Google+, but I do think the social aspect of search can be relevant in certain contexts.

Patrick: Right. And this feature has caused a bit of a, I guess, hubbub of sorts which Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan wrote that, “The change emphasizes Google+ over-relevancy,” which he says should be Google’s primary job, and it introduces anti-trust concerns because it really is just pulling in data from Google+, and Sullivan actually asked the gentleman who wrote the blog post, Amit Singhal, and he said, “Facebook and Twitter and other services, basically their terms of service don’t allow us to crawl them deeply and store things.” Google+ is the only network that provides such a persistent service, of course, going forward. If others were willing to change we’d look at designing things to see how it would work,” and this is especially relevant because Twitter is pretty publicly complaining about this new search feature that Google released, and they essentially said the change makes it so that not enough exposure is given to status updates on Twitter where news is often broken. Of course it’s also worth noting that they decided not to renew their Firehose deal with Google last summer and instead they partnered with Bing, so that might have been powering the feature you referenced, Louis, which I remember as well that tied Twitter or status updates or what had been shared with the search results; I don’t know if I’ve seen that recently or not.

Louis: Right. So if that’s been turned off then I do take issue with this, because I’ll gain a lot more usefulness out of Twitter integration than I would out of Google+ integration.

Patrick: Eric Schmidt said this as well, that Twitter opted out of the deal, if they wanted to talk they’d be happy to discuss it again, but TechCrunch’s Josh Constine said something interesting which was that according to sources familiar with negotiations, and those negotiations, Twitter did so because they were concerned that people would opt for Google search over Twitter search, where Twitter could control the advertising and monetization, so they may have been the reason Twitter decided not to allow Google to continue to have access to that Firehose of data that enabled them to use that feature. I don’t know if that’s — I mean Danny Sullivan was kind of incredulous about that comment saying that robots.txt gives Google essentially the right to index that, but Schmidt pretty openly disagreed with him.

Louis: Yeah, I mean I do think that’s interesting. I don’t think from Twitter’s perspective — I don’t think that a Twitter search is that useful for a lot of these things, right, I mean if I’m looking for a JavaScript framework, for example, right, I’m not going to go to Twitter and necessarily search because I don’t know if people will have used those words necessarily, what I want is a website that uses those words and someone I know to have linked to that website, right, and Google knows what words the website uses, whereas the person on Twitter might’ve just said this is a really cool shortened link, and that’s useless from a search perspective.

Kevin: Yeah, I agree.

Louis: But Google was in that position where they had both the content of the webpage that was being linked to and the social network of me being connected to someone who shared a link to that. So if I searched for JavaScript framework then it will find pages that have that, that people I like like, which is really useful to me.

Patrick: Right. And I’m like you, I like the social features and I like the Google+ integration because I use Google+ and I like the Twitter integration, I do find it useful and it’s easy to turn on and off. Now, I mean are these legitimate antitrust concerns? I read that they’re prepping to some sort of FTC complaint, and Google holds 91.32% of the search market worldwide, according to Statcounter, through December of 2011, now they’re essentially pushing their social network on the results and at the exclusion, some would say, of the other networks. Is this a legitimate problem or is this just a company pushing their solution on their own service?

Louis: Yeah, I’m not a lawyer (laughter), and I’m especially not familiar with U.S. law, but –

Patrick: Does it concern you?

Louis: No.

Patrick: Okay.

Louis: I just don’t see as, like, there’s strong competition in all spaces, I think Google+ is actually probably third in market share of social networks, if not lower than that.

Patrick: Right, I saw a story today that said MySpace was still bigger than Google+, I don’t know, it was just a headline.

Louis: And, you know, I think even Orchid might be bigger than Google+, and the Chinese one as well, so it’s possible that, you know, it’s a pretty minor service, it sucks that they exclude Twitter from their search results, but that’s their call and that information is still out there and it may be space for someone else to be able to build a useful tool that sits on top of your Twitter graph accessible by the API and adds that to your search results via like a browser plugin, which seems like it would be doable.

Patrick: Well, I guess we’ll have to keep an eye on it and see if it becomes a real problem for Google searchers.

Louis: Alright, yeah. Well, my story this week is I guess still breaking, is one way to put it, it starts in a post on ReadWriteWeb, I managed to say it this time, really proud of myself, so it was a post posted on January 16th, which was yesterday. So, the post is about jq.mobi, which bills itself as a mobile optimized HTML rewrite of the jQuery framework, so what that means is that it is a library that does the same things as jQuery, so it has a similar interface, allows you to select items on the page, manipulate the DOM, it also has a set of UI elements which are similar to jQuery mobile, we’ve talked about jQuery mobile on the show before. What differentiates jq.mobi, according to the people who made it, is that it’s specifically targeted for HTML5 on modern WebKit mobile devices, namely IOS and Android, which allows it to be a lot smaller than similar frameworks, so it’s about half the size of zepto.js, which is already a mobile optimized version of jQuery, and it’s about nine times smaller than jQuery. So, pretty considerable, the people who make it also post a video comparing jQuery, yeah, jQuery mobile with the new jq.mobi and with Sencha JS for user interface, and it looks impressive, it looks impressive because if either of you have played with Sensha or jQuery mobile before, especially on Android devices, there’s a general feeling that you get using them that they’ve been designed for IOS, and that if something sort of works on Android that’s good enough for the developers, and they sort of call it a day and go home, whereas jq.mobi seems to have put a much bigger emphasis on making things work exactly the same and with the same degree of performance across both platforms, so very impressive, at least in the video. However, there have been some concerns raised in the community, and the reception is still very skeptical, so I don’t want to come out endorsing this straightaway, I’m going to link in the show notes to an issue on GitHub, it’s the second issue opened against this project, and the issue says simply no unit tests, followed by if you’re honestly suggesting people use this I’d suggest adding some unit tests for everything. And then a lot of people in the community, including Addy Osmani, who I had on the show last week, and Rebecca Murphy who a lot of you probably know, came out and sort of said, look, if you want people to seriously consider this you need to have solid test coverage that makes is comparable and people can have confidence that it does the same things that jQuery does. So, still in development, the developer came back out and said we will have unit test in 1.0, but that remains to be seen, so I guess it’s a wait and see, but it’s something that I think is potentially really interesting if you want to do JavaScript on mobile.

Kevin: It looks really interesting. It’ll be nice to go and play with this and see what it has to offer as opposed to the other systems.

Louis: Yeah, it looks like it has pretty much all of the same things, so if you’ve looked at jQuery mobile, you know, sort of transitions between pages, native looking widgets, and all of that, it’s all there; except that it looks like it works solidly on Android which the other leading mobile JavaScript frameworks don’t really at present.

Kevin: Right.

Louis: However, without tests it’s hard to say, it might be buggy; it’s still in beta and so that’s a fair defense, although it is somewhat concerning the developer didn’t think that automated testing was important enough to bundle into this before, before opening that up and releasing it. Obviously the project is on GitHub, so if anyone wants to try and write some tests for it and contribute to it I’m sure that would be well received by the developer, so it’ll be interesting to see what happens, I’m definitely in wait and see mode on this one, but given how much smaller it is and how much smoother it looks like it works based on the video I think it’s definitely a serious contender in this space. Any other thoughts?

Patrick: Hmm, trying to rack my brain. What’s everything that I know about jQuery?

Louis: (Laughs)

Patrick: Uhhhh, okay, there it is, done! Sorry, Kevin, do you have a thought?

Kevin: I’m just looking through the documentation now, and let me see, because I haven’t really taken an in-depth look at this I can’t comment too much on it, but it looks like the documentation is okay, it’s not jQuery.com.

Louis: Yeah, I mean it definitely has the smell of a very immature project that someone sort of — it looks like a lot of effort went into making it work well, but that’s only, as you point out, part of the way there. Like if you want something to be taken seriously by the community, a strong set of unit tests and a solid documentation effort are going to be just as important as having a library that works well.

Kevin: Yeah, I agree. I mean just by looking at this it doesn’t look like I could just go in and start using it unfortunately; I just don’t know where they would want me to start, to figure out how this thing works.

Louis: Well, it’ll be very interesting, I might give it a play the next time I have to do something mobile, at least sort of dive in and give it a shot and see, I think you’d be able to figure out within an hour or two whether it was doing what you needed it to. There is a — if you go to jqmobi.com/testdrive, that’s j-q-m-o-b-i.com/testdrive, that’s actually a sort of running instance of it which has all the different little functions, so if you go to that on your phone you can see it in action on the phone, and with respect to that it looks like the proof is in the pudding, it looks like it does everything nice and smoothly, it’s got things that are traditionally kind of difficult to do on web pages in mobile devices, including a fixed header and footer and sliding transitions for everything, even on Android, which older versions of Android are pretty buggy as far as that goes, so that’s been difficult for other frameworks to get right. And, again, like I was saying, to me it’s the willingness to not just say, okay, it works beautifully on IOS and it’s a little shaky and flickery and buggy on Android but who cares, which seems to have been the approach of just about every other mobile framework so far, so it’s nice to see someone really going for cross platform compatibility on a serious priority.

Well, so that brings us to the end of today’s show, let’s quickly go around with some spotlights, what do we got this week?

Patrick: So I’ve got a video from Jesse Rosten, I think that’s how you pronounce his name, and it’s on Vimeo, and it’s Fotoshop by Adobé, did you guys see this video?

Louis: Yeah, I saw that.

Patrick: Okay, so this video was awesome! I mean Louis knows.

Louis: It was pretty good. Yeah, it was good. It’s one of those things that suddenly came at me from every direction at once on the day it came out, like I had four people in my Facebook stream, a dozen people on Twitter, everyone was sharing this video around.

Patrick: Right; and it’s got 2.8 million plays, so you may have seen it, but there are a lot more people in the world than 2.8 million, so maybe there are some people listening to this show who haven’t seen it. Moreorless it’s a commercial for Adobe Photoshop that is set up like a cosmetics commercial, so it basically treats Photoshop as a cosmetics product as far as how it improves photos, improves the look of people, and I won’t ruin it too much, but suffice to say the tagline is, “Maybe she’s born with it,” and then the voice changes to, “No, I’m pretty sure it’s Fotoshop,” (laughter). So definitely check it out.

Louis: Yeah, absolutely, it’s a lot of fun.

Kevin: Cool stuff.

Louis: Alright, Kevin?

Kevin: My spotlight for today is visualizing.org, it’s a site where you can check out other people’s designs of data, so what this means is if you’ve ever see like a pie chart or something like that, of course you’ve seen a pie chart, but it’s people’s different techniques of displaying the data, so it’s visualization of data, and if you go to the site it’s just a huge gallery of information on how other people have displayed their things, it’s kind of a creative outlet to go to when you’re having trouble thinking about how to make something that’s not interesting, interesting. So, go check it out and I think you’ll like what you see.

Louis: Yeah, I really like it; it’s a well designed site, easy to navigate, and definitely lots of cool stuff in here. If you go to Visualizations and then sort by most popular you get some really, really cool ones.

Patrick: Yeah, it is really nice. And, like you said, it makes stuff that’s boring interesting, like this podcast, bah-dum-dum.

Louis: Oh, Patrick! I thought you were a fan. That hits home.

Patrick: I love us! I am a fan of us, although that sounds awfully conceited.

Louis: (Laughs)

Kevin: I’m going to block Patrick from my Twitter now.

Louis: Alright.

Patrick: One of your five followers.

Kevin: Ouch!

Louis: (Laughs)

Patrick: I’m kidding.

Louis: A little harsh today. Alright, my spotlight for today is a recently redesigned site which is really, really impressive, makes great use of three-dimensional CSS, so it is acko.net, that’s a-c-k-o.net, the thing only works in WebKit at the moment because WebKit is the only thing that has 3D CSS, so you’d want to see it in either Chrome or Safari or on an iPad, but if you are using one of those browsers go to acko.net and just scroll down the page and watch as everything sort of moves around, and it’s one of the best scrolling effects I’ve seen on the web ever; really, really, gorgeous. And he’s got a blog post about how it was designed and how it works, and the idea apparently is very simple, apparently if you put a div or any kind of DOM element in CSS or apply 3D CSS to it, its perspective remains the same as you scroll down the page, so, in fact, the perspective, sort of the paradox scrolling happens moreorless automatically, I’m sure it’s more complicated than that, but there’s a whole blog post explaining sort of the design process and how the code behind it works, so check it out.

Patrick: Yeah, and this post actually reminded me of something, big, big news that I should’ve led with because it lists the browsers that are compatible, some of them anyway; I finally downloaded Chrome.

Louis: Oh! (Laughter)

Patrick: So I mean that’s like — that should have been the lead story; I buried the lead (laughter). But you know how it happened, I downloaded Chrome, and it’s a long story, but I was installing a program that I like and you know how the Chrome, you can signup and you can install it like in the installer, you know how they get paid for it if you install Chrome or you tick the box to install this toolbar, well, I forgot to uncheck it, so how I got Chrome was through installing something else by clicking next too fast.

Louis: Alright.

Patrick: So, anyway, I’m able to view this page now thanks to that accident, and this is the first time I’ve actually opened Chrome, and you’re right, it is — that is really neat, it reminds me of like a skyscraper or something towering down and then the text presents itself.

Louis: Yeah, I especially like how the post itself is kind of angled off to the side when you’re at the top of the page, but as you scroll down it sort of swings out into full view, and it really fits in just natively with the scrolling, it’s very nice, and if you want to play with it and have fun you look at when you’re at the top of the page and the post is sort of faded off to the side, like the text in it is still selectable, it still behaves exactly like text on a page, it’s just slanted and rotated out to the back.

Patrick: Yeah, yeah, this isn’t something you’d like to see in most websites you visit daily, but, it’s like above the fold — take this! Above the fold.

Louis: Yeah, I’ve been scrolling up and down this page and my laptop feels like it’s about to liftoff in outer space, my fan has kicked up to the highest degree, so probably not something you’d want on your everyday website, but a very cool demonstration of what’s possible with the latest tools in CSS.

Kevin: It’s very engaging.

Louis: Alright, so I guess that’s a wrap for this week, let’s just quickly go around the table.

Kevin: I am Kevin Dees, you can find me at kevindees.cc, and you can see me on Twitter if you’d like @kevindees.

Patrick: I am Patrick O’Keefe for the iFroggy Network; on Twitter @ifroggy, i-f-r-o-g-g-y.

Louis: And you can follow SitePoint on Twitter @sitepointdotcom, that’s sitepoint d-o-t-c-o-m, and you can follow me on Twitter @rssaddict; go to sitepoint.com/podcast, which is the place to go to keep up with the podcast, it’s got all of our past episodes, the RSS subscription link, and you can leave a comment on this show or any previous shows if you want to get in touch. Another way to get in touch with us is by email at podcast@sitepoint.com. So have a great week, I will see you all next week in the interview show, thanks for listening.

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Thanks for listening! Feel free to let us know how we’re doing, or to continue the discussion, using the comments field below.

Episode 145 of The SitePoint Podcast is now available! This week our regular interview host Louis Simoneau (@rssaddict) interviews Addy Osmani (@addyosmani) about his free online book about the Fundamentals Of Backbone.js and how using javascript frameworks can really help when building a front-end Web app.

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Download this Episode

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• SitePoint Podcast #145: Bachbone.js Fundamentals with Addy Osmani (MP3, 34:16, 32.9MB)

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Episode Summary

Louis chats to Addy Osmani (@addyosmani) about backbone.js.

Browse the full list of links referenced in the show at http://delicious.com/sitepointpodcast/145.

Interview Transcript

Transcript To Follow

Theme music by Mike Mella.

Thanks for listening! Feel free to let us know how we’re doing, or to continue the discussion, using the comments field below.

Episode 144 of The SitePoint Podcast is now available! This week the panel is made up of Louis Simoneau (@rssaddict), Kevin Dees (@kevindees), Stephan Segraves (@ssegraves and Patrick O’Keefe (@ifroggy).

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• SitePoint Podcast #144: Freemium Schmeemium (MP3, 30:52, 29.6MB)

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Episode Summary

Here are the main topics covered in this episode:

• Google To Pay Mozilla Almost $300M/Year in Search Deal.
• Let’s get honest about uptime – (37signals)
• Keeping up with the 2012 U.S. election with Google.com/Elections
• Done with the Freemium Business Model

Browse the full list of links referenced in the show at http://delicious.com/sitepointpodcast/144.

Host Spotlights

• Kevin: 1000 Doors – Public Art Installation
• Patrick: Steven Tyler, Alice Cooper, Weird Al – Come Together
• Stephan: Why Best Buy is Going out of Business…Gradually
• Louis: Domo Arigato, Mr Roboto – Android’s New Font

Interview Transcript

Transcript to follow.

Theme music by Mike Mella.

Thanks for listening! Feel free to let us know how we’re doing, or to continue the discussion, using the comments field below.

Episode 143 of The SitePoint Podcast is now available! This week our regular interview host Louis Simoneau (@rssaddict) interviews Bruce Lawson who is a member of the Web Standards Project’s Accessibility Task Force, works at the Opera team and contributes to HTML5 Doctor.

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• SitePoint Podcast #143: Happy HTML5 Holidays with Bruce Lawson (MP3, 37:44, 36.2MB)

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Episode Summary

Louis sits down with Bruce Lawson to talk about HTML5 semantics, usage, developed, packs, workarounds, polyfills and everything in between.

Browse the full list of links referenced in the show at http://delicious.com/sitepointpodcast/143.

Interview Transcript

Louis: Hello and welcome to another episode of the SitePoint podcast. As it happens it’s the last episode of the SitePoint podcast for 2011, and with me on the show today I’ve got a suitably fantastic guest, Bruce Lawson. Bruce is a member of the Web Standards Project’s Accessibility Task Force, he works on the developer relations team at Opera, he’s a legend really in the fields of accessibility and web standards, an expert on HTML5 and a contributor to HTML5doctor.com. Have I forgotten anything? And hi and welcome to the show, Bruce, while I’m at it.

Bruce: Hi Louis, hi everybody, no, you haven’t forgotten anything that summarizes me, although possibly the Wasp Accessibility Task Force, I’m kind of a emeritus member of that, I haven’t done a great deal with that for a while.

Louis: Right. So, yeah, I wanted to have you on the show for a number of reasons, there’s all sorts of stuff going on, obviously HTML5 has been a major topic in the web design and web development world for a little while now, and you’ve certainly got a lot to say on that. In fact, the second edition of your book on HTML5 has just been released if I’m not mistaken.

Bruce: That’s right, yeah, I think it came out, I don’t know if it hit Australasia yet, it came out in the UK about a month ago I think, it’s quite exciting for Remy and me, so lots of typos and bits of utterly oblique language corrected and opened up and a whole new chapter on how you can actually use this stuff now because that’s why everybody came up; at conferences and things people will sidle up and up and say, “Oh, sounds great, but how can we use it now?” And it occurred to us that we’d very cleverly omitted to mention anything useful like that in the first edition, so it’s in there now.

Louis: Yeah, there was certainly a lot of trepidation, I want to come back to this and sort of ask about the new edition because it is, if I’m not mistaken, the first second edition of an HTML5 book, so that’s got to be some kind of landmark for the maturity of the specification of the language.

Bruce: It may not be because my chum, Peter Lubbers, and some colleagues of his from Kaazing wrote Pro HTML5 Programming, which may have come into second edition before ours, it’s certainly out as a second edition, I don’t know who was first but we’re not competing.

Louis: What I was saying is we’ve reached that point where there are now second edition books about the topic, so that does say something about HTML5 and maybe its staying power and that it hasn’t petered away.

Bruce: Well, it may not be indicative of the maturity, it may be indicative of just how much the whole thing is shifting sands and things are being changed from under our noses so we have to go and rewrite stuff, I wouldn’t necessarily say that it’s indicative of maturity, put it that way.

Louis: Hmm. So, talking about the second edition of the book, you said one of the things you focused on was a chapter on putting the stuff into practice, and I know I worked on the HTML5 and CSS3 book for SitePoint, and that was something we had in our minds when we started working on it because your book and Jeremy Keith’s book were already really strong on sort of that, you know, explaining the specs and the process by which they came about and what they really mean, and we wanted to try and maybe just do something a bit different and focus more on the practical aspects. But are there any other things that you’ve had to change, for example, things that have just flipped around on you and you’ve had to actually go in and change?

Bruce: A fair few. I changed my mind on the semantics of using the nav element. Originally I was marking up everything that looked like a link to somewhere else in the website as nav, and I was actually doing a workshop at the BBC and talking to some of their web developers, and they convinced me, or I convinced myself, I don’t recall how it went, but we kind of convinced each other that I was being a bit overzealous and had suffered nav-itis for a year, and so I changed my mind about that. The time element disappeared and then came back (laughs) or it will be in a modified format so it won’t be, as we say, in the book, but it will be in the spec. A lot of new stuff with multimedia, so in the first edition I put together a dirty, dirty hack to do our timed transcripts, timed captions to video, and by the time the second edition was out the spec was pretty much sorted on a new format called Web VTT which is Video Timed Text which will be probably the easiest way for web authors to add subtitles and captions to audio and video, so it was really great from my accessibility background to be able to say goodbye dirty hack is the official way, and point to some pretty damned great polyfills that you can just grab off the shelf and employ now. So if that’s your thing you want to look up Playr, p-l-a-y-r, which is kind of a nice quick and dirty way to do rapid prototyping but it doesn’t work in IE10 yet. There’s also a really great polyfill called mediaelement.js, and this is totally fab, at the moment it relies upon jQuery but I think that dependency will go soon. But what mediaelement.js does is it adds subtitle support, etcetera, as a polyfill, but what it really cleverly does is it fakes all the JavaScript HTML5 API’s for audio video and implements them in Flash, so if you’re using IE6, IE7, IE8, you get a Flash movie instead of native movie but you can still interact with it using all the JavaScript API’s because it fakes it. And because our community is so brilliant and generous all these things are open source and you can just grab ‘em and use ‘em and that’s deeply marvelous.

Louis: Yeah, that’s fantastic, I was unaware of that sort of wrapping of the Flash movie with the API, I can exactly see how that would come in handy, you write your JavaScript once and it just interacts with the movie the same way whether it’s a Flash movie loaded in or not.

Bruce: Exactly.

Louis: You were talking about the new subtitle specification and sort of presenting some polyfills for it; is there any actual browser support on the ground for that yet?

Bruce: I think there’s a Labs release of IE10 supporting it, they said they’re going to support Web VTT, which I said was the easiest mechanism for web developers to subtitle stuff, but it’s not the only mechanism, there’s an existing standard called TTML which is a far more sophisticated XML based subtitling method which a lot of the big, big houses like from the top of my head Netflix and the BBC have already been using, and Microsoft is going to support TTML, but because it’s XML based it’s harder for Mr. or Ms Joe web developer to bung on their sites. Chrome have said they will support Web VTT, and I work for Opera so I can tell you that we are in the process of implementing it, but I don’t have a release date for that yet, whether Safari and Firefox are I couldn’t say, but I would imagine they are.

Louis: Yeah. But, again, if there are good polyfills out there that at least tides us over and we can start using the stuff –

Bruce: Precisely.

Louis: — and wait and see what happens with the browser support. Just talking about the browser landscape, I was looking through your recent tweets in the lead-up to the interview, and I saw you made an announcement about the recent release of Opera 11.6, which I’d missed, did you want to talk a little bit about what’s new in there.

Bruce: There’s a lot of really cool things. The coolest thing, which for a web developer of a certain vintage is insanely cool, and to everybody else it’s entirely yawn-arama, but it’s the HTML5 parser, and I show this to people and deliberately build it up as the coolest demo of HTML5 you’ll ever see, and then I show some markup which is b i, close b, close i, with the mis-nested text, and HTML4 as a spec told browsers what to do with good markup, but it had nothing to say about what to do with markup that wasn’t good, and we did some research in 2008 when we looked at three million randomly generated URL’s for a projected called MAMA, Opera MAMA, and we discovered that 96% of the Web surprisingly was not a valid markup. So the trouble is, is that the browsers didn’t know what to do with invalid markup, but all browsers are very forgiving beasts and don’t want to show you a blank screen so they do their best to render stuff. So what they’ll do with that mis-nested b and i is different things; IE and Safari behave one way, and Firefox and Chrome and Opera behave another way, and nobody’s right and nobody’s wrong because it was undefined. And if you’ve ever written JavaScripts that have to go around a DOM that you can’t predict and do stuff in a web app or a web based word processor, or whatever, you’ll know there’s a world of pain associated with the fact that you don’t know what an individual browser’s going to do with the same markup because of this problem. So HTML5 defines unambiguously and completely what to do with any variation of markup no matter how broken and twisted it is, every browser that implements the HTML5 parsing algorithm will produce the same DOM, and this might not seem glamorous to a newbie web developer, but to those of us who’ve been in it for ages the idea that you’ll get the same DOM across all browsers is a wonderful thing, and this isn’t just a theoretical benefit either, it’s great for consumers because nobody uses just one web browser anymore. My poor Mrs. who has to use IE6 at work will use Safari on her iPhone and then Opera on the home computer, so the idea that one website will work on one or two of those browsers but not the third, it’s mad, you know, and it’s utterly stupid of any business to have a website that won’t work on all browsers across devices, and the HTML5 parser is a step forward in interoperability between the browsers which is a massive win to the consumer who’s never even heard of HTML.

Louis: Yeah, absolutely, I can see the impact of it. Is Opera the first browser to sort of fully implement the parser as its specified?

Bruce: No. I believe it was in Firefox first, although it was an option, then it was in Chrome, so I think Opera is the fourth and then IE10 will have it I believe, although you can’t speak for unreleased versions yet. And, of course, once IE10’s got it this is a giant win for the interoperable web there, and we’re still of course going to have to take care of old browsers because not everybody has the luxury of being able to upgrade, that’s another thing that I feel very strongly about; it’s all very well telling people you appear to be using a crap old browser, please go away and upgrade.

Louis: Yeah, there was sort of a bit of a kerfuffle on Twitter about this a few weeks ago, I don’t know if you caught wind of a brief pitched argument with John Allsopp and few other people about this, the idea of supporting all browsers and older browsers inclusively, and John wrote a really excellent blog post about it.

Bruce: And I’m with John, you know; if you are a web developer it’s easy to forget that there is a world out there using old web browsers with no real end in sight to that. I believe the net apps stats show that 49% of the world is on Windows XP, and for whatever reasons they have Microsoft has decided that you won’t be able to use IE9 on Windows XP, and you certainly won’t be able to use IE10 on XP, so, 49% of the world will stay on XP and we know that most people don’t upgrade or install a different browser, so there’s gonna be if we’re not careful a web of haves and a web of have-nots, and that’s in my personal opinion entirely antithetical to the idea of a worldwide web.

Louis: But of course the people who have made that argument a lot of times this stuff gets inflamed over Twitter, and this is something that constantly comes up, because I like to bring up these sort of arguments and debates between the various factions in the world of web development in my interviews, and what always comes up is that people will say things on Twitter and provoke a debate because they had to compress their point of view into such a small amount of space that they made it much more absolute than it sounded. I did an interview with Jeremy Keith which entirely came about as a result of we had a discussion on a show about something that he had said in a blog post that we, you know, that seemed very absolute because he’d written it in that kind of manner, in a kind of provocative manner, and obviously people do that deliberately, but I don’t think anyone has been disrespectful in any of these debates, and that’s one of the things I really like about this community, and I think we can all agree on that is that people are very respectful even when they disagree.

Now, going on, let’s see, while we’re on the topic of controversial, I got a couple of recent articles that you sort of responded to on your blog, one in more length and one in lesser, so you’re very much a semantics guy and you’re really excited about the idea of semantics and that comes through a lot in your book and in your writing, and you’ve talked a lot about the issues with the time element when it was first dropped, and so there’s a recent article that I read and I thought was very interesting that Divya Manian wrote at Smashing Magazine which was sort of a deconstruction of the idea that — or maybe pointing out that a lot of web designers and developers spend a lot of time paying attention to semantics and maybe that’s not necessarily a good use of our time. And I thought it was really interesting because I saw a lot of different reactions to it, but personally I kind of felt, yeah, I get that, you know, I get that there’s been a lot of fuss about HTML5 in the sense of, oh, should we be using a section or an article or an aside, you know, and in your work and your writing at HTML Doctor you’ve encountered a lot of this when you’ve had to sort of rewrite articles when sort of the opinions about things have changed, and you even mentioned with regards to your book sort of changing your mind about nav.

Bruce: Yep.

Louis: And I thought this was interesting because a lot of people sort of came out and said oh, no, semantics that’s the most important thing or you can’t just do away with it, but I did think that maybe some kind of moderate consideration might be worth pursuing. So I wanted to know what your thoughts were on that because you did sort of respond to it in another article that you wrote for Smashing Magazine, even though it wasn’t a direct response you did sort of present a defense of semantics.

Bruce: Yeah, I mean I didn’t write that article as a response. Vitaly from Smashing Mag had asked me to summarize my Frontiers talk, but that happened to be a defense of semantics. I mean Divya’s right, if you spend an idea, you know, I have endless talks with Dan Cedarholm because he put a cite inside the anchor and I was putting the anchor inside the cite, and who was right and who was wrong, and actually of course if doesn’t much matter, what’s important is it’s consistency, in the same way with the nav element, I’ve always said think about who’s using it at the end; if every link inside the site is nav then the people who actually need the nav element, people with assistive technologies, everything’s a nav and so nothing’s useful to them. So it’s a matter of moderation and balance, and I’m certain that’s what Divya was writing, and I’d agree.

Louis: Yeah, I think some of it might come from, you know, we’ve had the same set of semantic elements which have had very limited semantic value for a very long time just using pretty much divs and spans everywhere with a few little highlights of semantic value here and there, and suddenly we’ve got this smorgasbord of elements with HTML5.

Bruce: Sure.

Louis: And like you said with nav, I think a lot of people might just get a little bit high on the fumes of semantic value and start throwing this stuff all over the place without really stepping back and thinking oh, well, I can use this the same way I’ve always used these little semantic touches like cite and like block quote.

Bruce: So, yeah, we’ve got this smorgasbord of new semantic elements, but we only have I think it’s 105 or thereabouts; if you think how many words we use in English to express ourselves it’s tens of thousands, so a hundred elements in our vocabulary means that there is nowhere near enough to express every nuance of your content because it’s about marking up your meaning and your meaning is the words and the intention, so inevitably there’s grey areas where no particular element seems to fit or two elements seem to be equally applicable, and the answer is, no, don’t sweat it, choose one and use that consistently throughout this site, and if you realize you might not have been perfect don’t sweat it, just do it better next time, it’s not worth getting a semantic knickers in a twist about. If somebody said to me what’s more important, correctly deciding between article and section or making sure that this works on IE6, I would say make sure it works on IE6, you know. Semantics are vital but they’re not the only game in town, and I know that Divya and I totally agree on that.

Louis: Yeah. This kind of leads in nicely, you were talking about the sort of limited vocabulary that we have in HTML, and that sort of leads into I wanted to get your view on what happened with the time element because we’ve sort of talked about it on the show before, but I think you might have a pretty interesting perspective, you wrote about it both when it was initially removed and when it was re-added. So my understanding was the initial idea was Ian Hickson removed the time element because he said, one, it wasn’t being used or it hadn’t gotten a lot of traction and, two, something similar could be accomplished with a more generic data element, sort of thinking, look, time is just one type of machine readable data so why give it a special place over all the other types of machine readable data you could have in your pages.

Bruce: So the history of time’s interesting. It was dreamed up because the micro format’s people were abusing the abbreviation element to markup dates and times, and this wasn’t a semantics knickers in a twist, this was a problem because certain screen readers with verbocity settings readout the totals of abbreviation element, and that in the micro formats world was being turned into an incomprehensible string of numbers and letters that people would hear instead of a human understandable date. So what was happening is that people with assistive technologies were actually not being able to comprehend the content given to them because there we no adequate way to markup dates or times in HTML. So, HTML5 gave the micro formats people this time element, but they crippled it by not allowing you to have a fuzzy date, by which I mean you could markup the 19th of February 1867, but you can’t say February 1867, and you can’t say 1867. And this is a problem for historians or people who run museum websites, and I know this for a fact because some of my friends do this, because of course you don’t necessarily have the absolute date, and also you couldn’t markup dates before the Christian era, so anything — even though you know that Julius Cesar was murdered on the 15th of March 54 BC you couldn’t write that because it’s before the Christian era. And so the micro formats community didn’t use the time element because it was crippled like this right from the inception, and then Hickson saw that nobody was using it and so removed it. And, yes, time is just one form of machine readable data, but it’s a special form of machine readable data, I mean my bugbear, or the bee in my bonnet, is the fact that most things on the Web are related to who, what, when and where, you know, who’s doing something, when are they doing something, where are they doing it. So we have a time element because the when is obviously important, we don’t have a location element, yet, although we might do, and that would have latitude and longitude as mandatory attributes and potentially an altitude attribute.

Louis: But, again, even if you’re — sorry, coming back to that now, just want to get your opinion on this, when you say latitude and longitude as mandatory attributes that, again, sort of precludes you from using a more fuzzy term like, say, Melbourne or Australia when you’re describing a place and you want to be able to mark that up semantically as referring to a place, right?

Bruce: Yes, I’m not saying that it needs — I’m not implying any kind of degree of precision here.

Louis: Right.

Bruce: I mean there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be able to say approximately 54 north or something, I don’t know, but it seems to me that there are certain types of machine readable data which are more prevalent and more common and it’s easier to see use cases or being able to access them through an element. So the trouble is with marking up a date or a time with the data element is that the attribute there’s no way for a machine to know that this attribute is a date or a time because it’s just some random data.

Louis: Right, and then to react to that and enhance it in some way by providing you with a richer set of metadata or interactions, yeah.

Bruce: Precisely. In the same way that why invent a header or a footer, why not just stick with div. Well, these are more specific, more obvious use cases, I’m not suggesting that we have a length of nose tag (laughter) and a circumference of eyes tag, and a distance from forefinger to elbow tag, because there are some use cases that are more important than others, and that’s why we only have 105 words in inverted commas in our vocabulary; HTML has to be a general markup language which means that you can’t cover every use case with it, but it means that it has to be easy to learn, and I’m a great believer in the Web remaining a place where it’s relatively easy to write and publish content, and I often used to worry that XHTML was heading to a place where you needed some kind of special, specialist training if you just wanted to write a blog post. I think we’re getting back to the degree of simplicity now, which is useful, although I acknowledge that most people don’t hand code HTML anymore, they use some kind of CMS.

Louis: Yeah, absolutely. But I mean I do agree with you that the idea of making it simple enough that anyone can write it, and even I would have a much easier time hand coding an HTML5 page than I would’ve had four or five years ago coding an XHTML page where I would’ve had to look up both the doctype and the various meta tags. Now I’m fairly confident that I could do the thing from scratch were I stranded on a desert island with nothing but a stick I could write my SOS in HTML, in valid HTML.

Bruce: Well, you’d need to; if you wrote your SOS in some kind of proprietary format then loads of IOS might not be able to display it, who knows about its SEO, you know, HTML is the lingua franca.

Louis: Absolutely.

Bruce: But I’m a great believe in the fact that the Web is the most democratic medium that we’ve ever had as people. I’m getting all poncy on your now, but I think it has to be easy to consume so you don’t have to have the latest three thousand dollar Macbook Pro just in order to be able to read a website, you don’t have to have a super, super-duper Wi-Fi connection, and neither should you need to have a computer science background to author the Web. There’s billions of people on the planet with stories to tell and pictures of kittens to show, and I want to make sure they can continue to show those things and everybody else can continue to access those things even if they don’t have the latest, greatest Smartphone over an industrialized nation’s Wi-Fi infrastructure.

Louis: (Laughs) and even then not all industrialized nations.

Bruce: I’ve been to Australia.

Louis: (Laughs) ah, yeah, still bitter about that one two years in. So those are great words and fantastic and inspiring stuff.

Bruce: Maybe you could dub in some angels like humming Silent Night behind this (laughs), but yeah, it is a nice outake.

Louis: I did want to briefly touch on the — because you released for the release of Opera 11.6, you posted a YouTube video of yourself playing a guitar and singing a Christmas carol about the new features in Opera 11.6, and I just wanted to specifically give you props for your rhyming of Gabriel with radial (laughter), as in the angel Gabriel with radial gradients, I thought that was fantastic, I listen to a lot of hip hop and that’s still one of the best rhymes I’ve heard all year.

Bruce: Thank you, sir.

Louis: So huge props for that. On to some more serious things, so you briefly mentioned in there that the democratic nature of the Web has a lot to do with the availability of bandwidth. And what I want to get to here is that obviously the big topic in web design over the past year, I think if anyone had to say what the topic in the web design sphere for 2011 was, we’d all agree that responsive web design was the clear winner. But people seem to have come up against one particular thorny issue in attempting to do responsive web design, and I noticed this because, first of all, because 24Ways — if anyone listening is not familiar with 24Ways you still have time, go to 24ways.org, it’s a sort of an advent calendar of great web design articles that comes out each December, it’s been going since 2005, fantastic stuff, and this year I’ve noticed that there have so far, even though we’re not even halfway through the month, there are so far already been two articles about responsive images. And I also noticed that you’ve recently written a short blog post sort of suggesting an alternative way of handling responsive images, and that kind of touched on this idea of bandwidth, right, because you’re doing a responsive design, great, it can fit all content, but if all you’re doing is adapting this one giant image to a number of different screen sizes that’s a huge bandwidth hit for most of your users, and a lot of those might not be seeing that giant image.

Bruce: Yeah.

Louis: So there have been a bunch of different alternatives suggested, and you’ve sort of proposed an interesting, maybe a more fundamental change that could take some cues from the video element.

Bruce: It just seemed to me that HTML5 gives us a video element which because of the debacle with no single codec working everywhere has the ability to pull in different source files using the source child element, and it struck me that if we had some kind of new version of image, and I call it picture but it could be called anything you like, then you could have source elements below it and a media query on those source elements, not in the CSS because it isn’t about layout, it’s about pulling and actually different sources, and then it could be handled declaratively. Because it seemed to me that if you can get something as cool as video and pull in different videos for different media queries, which works now in Opera and IOS, it seemed odd that for something as simple as an image we should have to resort to really clever and brilliant hacks with noscript and spacer gifs or mucking about with HTaccess and PHP and generating things on the fly. And I don’t want people to misunderstand me, I think the brilliant workarounds that people are coming up with are a testament to the excellent lateral thinking of my friends and my peers, but fundamentally we shouldn’t have to be doing those, it should be easy, and as you know I’m not a designer so I can’t do CSS, and I’m no longer a programmer so I’m too thick for JavaScript, so I’m very fond of simple declarative ways of doing obvious and basic web pages. And bringing in an image and making sure that you don’t nuke your mates bandwidth seems to be a basic use case, it should be basic HTML and shouldn’t need limbo-ing under HTaccess’ and shimmying weird deferred scripts, and maybe I’m wrong. And I have a great deal of sympathy with the idea that this should be negotiated between the client and server, so in other words, you say I want this image here and the browser should say to the server, well I’ve got low bandwidth at the moment, and of course that could change in a session, but at the moment I’ve got low bandwidth so send me the smallest in file size version of this image you have and then the server goes and looks to find out which one is its smallest version and sends that. And maybe actually this shouldn’t be something that web developers have to worry about, maybe this is something that machines should do, and this is an idea called content negotiation; my colleague and friend from Montreal, Karl Dubost, is a great believer in this. I think Carl is right, I think it should be done auto-magically, but we know that designers would prefer that fine-grained control rather than trusting auto-magic discussion between the silicon in your phone and the silicon on the server. So, I think we have to give a way for designers to do this, but again, I’ve got every sympathy with people who say okay well make up a new HTML6 picture element, but it’s still ten lines of code to put a responsive image on a page, isn’t that too much, and I think, well, if you think it’s too much let content negotiation deal with it and we’ll have to deal with a mechanism for that, but if you want the finer-grained control then you can do that in a simple declarative way. But, you know, yes! bandwidth matters, and at Opera we know this because we have all kinds of mechanisms for squeezing compression in pages to make things appear faster, but actually most people in territories or nations where bandwidth is either very slow or very expensive, because they’re paying by the megabyte, they’ll just turn images off anyway; every browser has a setting ‘don’t show images’, so you can bust a gut getting responsive images, but a lot of people just turn your images off anyway, and then of course that is back to basic good practice of making sure your web pages are accessible so that if people turn off the images they see the alternate text that tells the user what the image means.

Louis: Yeah.

Bruce: And if the image doesn’t mean anything then it shouldn’t be an image it should be a background image in your CSS. So, you know, it’s the thorny issue de jour, but ultimately it just comes back to basic good practice of semantic HTML with alternate text for images that are part of content or putting the prettiness and all the eye candy in the CSS because ultimately your users want the content, and we see this all the time and I know that loads of designers are now marching upon Birmingham UK to kick my head in (laughter) when I say that CSS is just prettiness, but, you know, in the vast majority of websites it is.

Louis: Yeah.

Bruce: Sorry designers.

Louis: (Laughs) I was just interested to talk about this because looking at your, it’s not really a proposal, but your just sort of quick sketch of how this might look, I thought, oh, that looks pretty good, makes sense, I would use that. And I had already looked at these two articles on 24Ways, and in both cases been kind of like uh-huh, not so much; definitely in the case of the sort of server side handling because I work on large enough websites that having a PHP process run for every request for an image is just not an option for performance reasons. And then the other one, the sort of the mix of comments and no-scripts and hacky JavaScript, I thought yeah, you know, that works, that’s very clever, I could consider using that and some kind of script based image loading. But, yeah, I was impressed by your idea and I hope to see something like that coming in, as you said, perhaps HTML6. But, yeah, as you said, the key, and we see it all the time, a well designed mobile site that when you pull it up on your phone it loads really, really snappily, even on Australian 3G, is a joy, and it’s something that a lot of people do, it just needs a little bit of care and stripping out the excess.

Bruce: Absolutely. And with the putative picture element, whatever it’ll be called, I know that this stuff is starting to be discussed, and when I published that blog post some biggish names in the ‘Responsive Design’ community got in touch with me, and bizarrely I duplicated a proposal they’ve been working on privately between themselves, even calling it the picture element.

Louis: Right.

Bruce: And so I know that they’re going to be putting a proposal to their working group pretty soon, so hopefully it’ll be discussed and acted upon. Again, nobody’s saying it needs to be called a picture element, nobody’s saying it needs to be exactly like I suggested, that was a straw man to say let’s have a simple way of doing this where you don’t have to know JavaScript and PHP and some really quite nasty hacks, because it always seems to me when you’ve got nasty hacks like that there’s something fundamentally lacking in the language.

Louis: Hmm-mm.

Bruce: That degree of complexity says to me that we need another wave of linguistic development to get back to the simplicity again.

Louis: It’s fantastic t to have reached an era when we can look at a hack like that and say what you just said which is, oh, if we need this kind of hack we’re probably doing something wrong, when we were doing this for rounded corners for seven or eight years and nobody said a word. Yeah, yeah, this is fine.

Bruce: Ah, but we weren’t’ doing anything wrong. What it was is that we didn’t have the necessary tools for the job. Jake Archibald’s 24Ways thing with no script and spacer gifs is not doing it wrong, he’s got a brilliant workaround for the fact that we don’t have the necessary tools; I really want to get away from the idea of hacks being something wrong or hacks are –

Louis: Absolutely.

Bruce: — brilliant creative workarounds where there’s an obstacle.

Louis: Yeah. I guess all I was trying to say was that it’s interesting that we now think about it somewhat differently than we used to, we used to see a hack and think, oh, that’s great, that’s all we need, end of story; now we see a hack and say, oh, that’s great, clearly we need to do something with the underlying specifications to make this possible without a hack.

Bruce: I think it’s because we’re seeing movement on the spec again, and we’re actually seeing the fact that — one of the things that HTML5 gave us was the fact that the spec was being written based upon what people actually want to do, and we know they want to do it because they’re doing it, you know, we know that people were using div id = footer, div id = header, so let’s put it in the language, that’s the great thing; the spec was based upon real world needs and problems, and it seems to me that still continues to be the case. But I just wanted to make sure that nobody thought I was dissing Jake because he’s a lot bigger than me and he’s from the Northeast of England and therefore he’s really nasty when he’s had a pint or two.

Louis: (Laughs) Alright, let it be, let the record show that no disrespect was intended. Alright, well I know you’ve got a meeting in just a few minutes, so I’m gonna let you go, but I wanted to obviously thank you very much for taking the time to come on the show and talk about this stuff.

Bruce: Thank you for inviting me.

Louis: It’s been a lot of fun, and it’s a fitting end to my year of interviews; all this stuff is so much fun and I’ve had a great time talking to all these people about the stuff that’s going on, because it’s interesting to be in an industry where nothing was going on for a long time and now lots of stuff is going on.

Bruce: Absolutely (laughs).

Louis: So I think everyone seems to be energized and it’s been great seeing everyone across the industry, regardless of what their opinions are, everyone’s energized and everyone’s excited about this stuff, and I hope our listeners are as well.

Bruce: I hope so too.

Louis: So, thanks again, and have yourself a great break if you’ve got a bit of time off coming up for the holidays.

Bruce: Thanks, Louis, and you too, and to all the listeners have a great 2012.

Louis: Awesome. Thanks very much, Bruce.

Bruce: Take it easy.

Louis: Take care.

Bruce: Bye, mate.

Louis: And thanks for listening to this week’s episode of the SitePoint Podcast. I’d love to hear what you thought about today’s show, so if you have any thoughts or suggestions just go to Sitepoint.com/podcast and you can leave a comment on today’s episode, you can also get any of our previous episodes to download or subscribe to get the show automatically. You can follow SitePoint on Twitter @sitepointdotcom, that’s sitepoint d-o-t-c-o-m, and you can follow me on Twitter @rssaddict. The show this week was produced by Karn Broad and I’m Louis Simoneau, thanks for listening and bye for now.

Theme music by Mike Mella.

Thanks for listening! Feel free to let us know how we’re doing, or to continue the discussion, using the comments field below.

Episode 142 of The SitePoint Podcast is now available! This week the panel is made up of Louis Simoneau (@rssaddict), Stephan Segraves (@ssegraves and Patrick O’Keefe (@ifroggy).

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• SitePoint Podcast #142: The Last Panel of 2011 (MP3, 38:18, 36.8MB)

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Episode Summary

Here are the main topics covered in this episode:

• Chrome Becomes the World’s Second Favorite Browser
• Is Firefox Doomed?
• inessential.com: The Pummeling Pages
• JQuery Shutters Plugin Site

Browse the full list of links referenced in the show at http://delicious.com/sitepointpodcast/142.

Host Spotlights

• Patrick: SNL Digital Short: Batman
• Stephan: Do You Suffer From Decision Fatigue? – NYTimes.com
• Louis: Knyle Style Sheets — Warpspire

Interview Transcript

Louis:: Hello and welcome to another episode of the SitePoint Podcast, we’ve got a panel show this week, Patrick and Stephan are on the line with me, hi, guys.

Stephan: Hey, Louis:!

Patrick: Hey, Louis:!

Louis:: Our newest member of the panel, Kevin, could not make it this week so there are only three, but we’ve got a lot to talk about so I reckon it will be a good show.

Patrick: Yeah, we didn’t like him so we kicked him off the show, no, (laughter), just kidding, just kidding.

Louis:: That’s not true.

Patrick: No, that’s not true.

Louis:: Kevin’s great and he’ll be back next panel show which I believe will be in the New Year because next week I’ll be doing an interview and then we’ll be taking two weeks off for the holidays.

Patrick: Yes, two weeks vacation that we get every year (laughter).

Louis:: Well deserved, it’s been a great year of podcasting.

Patrick: Excellent, yes. You joined the team, so.

Stephan: It’s hard to believe it’s been a year.

Louis:: I don’t even remember when I came, when I started doing the podcast.

Patrick: I don’t know, we’ll have to look that up, but –

Stephan: We’ll have to look that up, yeah.

Patrick: It was in 2011 I’ll tell you that.

Stephan: (Laughs) Thanks, Patrick.

Louis:: It was #110 on the 1st of May 2011.

Patrick: May 1, 2011, excellent. So a good seven months into the show come January 1st. And of course you had been kind of the interview host in some ways; Kevin had secretly snuck you in.

Louis:: Yeah, I’d done a couple of shows before that.

Patrick: To do some of his work (laughs), and then we brought you on officially, so, excellent!

Louis:: So this makes it the last panel show of the year so the pressure’s on, but we gotta kill it.

Patrick: Yes, absolutely, let’s kill the show.

Louis:: (Laughs) with that in mind I’ll throw it to you, Patrick, for the first story.

Patrick: Cool. So my story is about Firefox, and Firefox is my browser, I still have not yet downloaded Chrome. Actually I said on this show that I was going to finally download it, and to test a bug, but the person emailed me back and said the bug has resolved itself (laughter), so I still didn’t need to. But plenty of other people are downloading Chrome because according to Statcounter.com it became in November the second most popular browser in the world, behind IE, and got ahead of Firefox; it has overall the market share of 25.74%, Firefox, both versions 3.7 and 4.0+ are down to 25.24%, so Chrome is up .5%, half a percent, and Firefox lost a full percent of ground, more than a full percent of ground in just one month with Chrome gaining .69, and I guess, finally, it’s been on a steady ascent, achieving that number two browser mark. And I guess one of the things I’m wondering about Chrome is does it have the metal, I guess you could say, to challenge Internet Explorer. Internet Explorer did see a gain in November as well, it went from 40.18 to 40.63, it say a marked gain in the U.S. going from 46.11 to 50.66, so a 4% gain in the U.S., but then again Chrome hasn’t lost in months and months it seems, it just continues to go up. So, can Chrome challenge Internet Explorer?

Louis:: To me the interesting thing here is I always see the Chrome and Firefox use as sort of being championed by the more techie crowd, and they’ll get all their family and friends to upgrade their browsers and to switch away from IE, and I wonder if that’s going to be slightly less the case with the new IE, right. From IE9 and IE10 we’re seeing great performance, good security, good support for standards, and I’m wondering whether if someone gets a brand new Windows computer tomorrow would you be less likely to try and get them to upgrade or switch their browser than you would have been five years ago when someone got XP with IE6.

Stephan: That’s a good question.

Patrick: That’s a fair question. I don’t know the answer to that question.

Stephan: Well, it’d be really great if we could see the numbers on how it did with the conversion, it’d be awesome; I’m sure Google wishes they knew what the conversion rate was on different things because I notice in certain plugins that Google has, like Google, I think it’s Analytics, they — I’m using it in WordPress, and if I use Safari it pops up and tells me that I’m using and outdated browser, the AdSense, or the Analytics plugin for WordPress. So, I find that interesting, so do you think like people that are publishing websites using WordPress or some kind of plugin that Google makes are getting these popups and going, hey, I’m gonna go download that because it’s from Google or do you think that it’s really family members that are driving this?

Louis:: Yeah, maybe, there’s something to be said, I mean Google did put out a pretty significant marketing push for Chrome, they did some ads, they did some TV ads, and I think the Google name resonates for a lot of people with respect to the Internet, and it gives you an impression, of speed at least, that was considerable I’d say a year or two ago; I think the other browsers have sort of caught up now. Yeah, I’m not sure, I mean personally like you, Patrick, I’m a Firefox user, and I’ve switched to Chrome on my work machine because I have a lot of stuff open and it’s kind of a little slightly underpowered machine, and I find that Chrome does better on limited resources, but on my home machine which is a pretty powerful box I use Firefox because I just prefer the feature set. To me it seems like it was definitely a hugely important thing for the Internet and for us as web developers to have at least one browser that wasn’t put out by a private company with ulterior motives. And I think Firefox is super important on that respect because the Mozilla Foundation’s only goal is trying to make the Internet better and trying to advance standards, so I think it’s super important that they stick around at the very least, so hopefully Chrome won’t put too big a dent in.

Patrick: Yeah, it’ll be interesting to see what exactly I guess the plateau is for Chrome because looking at the chart I mean it’s just been up, up, up, up, up. It has gained year over year about 13%, 12 to 13%, and that’s come directly from Firefox and IE; Firefox has fallen 6% and IE has fallen about 8%, so 8+6, 14, 13% gain, I mean it’s coming right from it, so I don’t know what the plateau will be for Chrome but it’ll be interesting to watch I guess.

Stephan: The gain is about to be the Chrome version number, I mean once they hit 15% gain, you know, we’re on Chrome 15 now, so; every show I bring this up, any show that we talk about Chrome I gotta bring up the version number because they’re like on version 15 and we’re on IE8, you know (laughs).

Patrick: Maybe that’s how they have to dumb it down, that’s how they have to dumb down the marketing. Is IE on version 9, version 10, what is that, those are pitiful numbers, we’re on 30 America, the world; we are double what they are!

Louis:: Chrome doesn’t really advertise its version number at all, like you have to dig a little to even see what version, you go onto the website and you just download Chrome and it updates itself in the background, you don’t even know you’re getting a new version.

Stephan: Exactly.

Patrick: Yeah, that’s a good point, good point.

Stephan: Isn’t that the way Firefox has kind of gone?

Louis:: Firefox is doing that but it’ll still tell you, it’ll still, like it told me recently we’ve recently updated to Firefox 8, you want to restart and it’ll be running. I still think the background way of doing it is probably the best because it allows them to push across updates rapidly and transparently without disrupting users.

Stephan: Yeah.

Patrick: Right, yeah, just to draw a conclusion to the numbers, I mentioned the U.S. numbers, IE’s like 50.66, Firefox is still number two in the U.S., 20.09, and Chrome is third at 17.3, and where Louis: is, Australia, IE has a 40.72, Firefox
23 ½ almost, and Chrome just almost 21, so, Firefox is still number two in the U.S. and in Australia.

Louis:: Where are those gains coming from for Chrome?

Patrick: Well, Chrome is strong in the UK, I know that, I pulled up the numbers for the UK as well, IE is 42.82%, Chrome is number two, 24.82, and Firefox is 20.56, so Chrome has been number two in the UK for a few months, since July; so that’s one country where they are strong. I don’t have an easy way to look at necessarily which countries they’re the strongest in, but the UK is certainly one area that they are leading the way and are just, looks like, 18% below IE. So, yeah, I guess part two of this discussion that I wanted to bring up is an article about — at ReadWriteWeb by John Paul Titlow, the headline was, Is Firefox Doomed? And there are two reasons he asked this question, first, of course, is the market share slip, and then second is that Mozilla’s three year partnership with Google is coming to an end or has come to an end in November. Back in 2008 they signed a three year deal for Google to be the default search engine in Firefox, and Google has contributed about 84% of Firefox’s total revenue during that span. Three years is up, the deal is up, haven’t heard any news about it being renewed, so you have a sizeable chunk of the money that, I guess you could say powers Firefox, may disappear. Now, he says Microsoft might just jump right in line to pick up if Google lets that lax and take that default search engine mark from Google, but right now there’s no news about that. So, is Firefox in trouble or did Firefox accomplish its goal?

Louis:: Like I said before, I think it’s hugely important that there be an independent browser on the market, so I think that for us as web developers and for geeks and people who love the Internet I think it’s a huge benefit to have something that’s not driven by the need to sell advertising or the need to convert customers. I think already even the Chrome new tab pages has changed a little bit and is kind of gradually edging into the direction of trying to get you to install Chrome Apps or to use Google products, and that’s kind of a concerning slip away from just being a tool that you access the Internet indiscriminately with. So for me it’s hugely important, but, so when you said that 80-something percent of the revenue, is that 86% of the revenue coming into Firefox or that Firefox generates or is that of the Mozilla Foundation’s operating revenue in its entirety?

Patrick: So, where that number comes from is ZNet’s Ed Bott, and he mentions in an article that in 2010 84% of Mozilla’s 123 million in revenue came directly from Google, that’s roughly 100 million in funds that will vanish or be drastically cut if the deal is either not renewed or is renegotiated on terms that are less favorable to Mozilla. So, I don’t know how you want to read that necessarily, if it’s 84% of Mozilla’s revenue is what he says, but 84% of Firefox’s money or 84% of Mozilla’s money, either way I guess it’s still a sizeable sum.

Louis:: Yeah, that’s huge. It seems like what you were mentioning that this is an opportunity for another competing search provider to jump in and snap up that partnership. It sounds pretty reasonable, right, I mean as far as I can tell Bing is still somewhat struggling, and this would be a great way to bump up the share. The question is would that be acceptable to Firefox users, you know; if you download Firefox and suddenly you’re on Bing, is that somewhat of a jarring experience if you’re a Google user.

Patrick: Does Firefox signing a search deal with Google, with Microsoft or with whoever, fly in the face of the idea that we need a browser that doesn’t need to sell ads and doesn’t need to sell things if they’re selling the default search engine, or I guess do we understand the need for them to have money, or how does that, I guess, coexist?

Louis:: I don’t know. It feels to me like it’s a pretty minimal item, right, I mean there’s going to be a default search engine one way or the other, right, and it’s pretty much guaranteed that that search engine would be either Bing or Google because those are pretty much the two major offerings, sorry to all the other players in the search space. So, you know, if they can get a deal and get some money out of it I think it’s a win-win. The thing is that’s not influencing any other aspects of the code, and they’re not changing the user interface in response to these pressures, so I still think they have a stronger independent position than the other browsers in the market.

Stephan: As long as they don’t sign a deal with Yahoo I think they’ll be okay (laughter). Sorry, had to insert a little humor there, you know.

Louis:: That’s alright, that’s alright, that would be hilarious. I can imagine loading up Firefox 10 and suddenly Yahoo is the default, what’s going on? (Laughter)

Stephan: Delete, delete!

Louis:: I can’t find anything, where am I?!

Patrick: Whoever will give them the hundred million.

Stephan: I don’t think Yahoo has a hundred million to do it.

Louis:: Is that the amount; is it a hundred million dollars?

Patrick: Well, that’s the estimate if you take 123 and 84% of 123 million is about 100 million dollars, so, and I think that’s the end.

Louis:: Wow. Sorry, I’m just testing Yahoo, wow, that’s awesome. I just searched for SitePoint on Yahoo because I hadn’t done it in forever, and the first result is a sponsored ad for eBay.com.au/guitar, which says bargain SitePoint here, bid and win SitePoint on eBay Australia.

Patrick: SitePoint’s available, finally! And it’s not on Flippa?

Louis:: And it’s ebay.com.au/guitar so I assume, oh no, it’s actually SitePoint items, that is weird. Anyway, just a moment of passing nostalgia for the Yahoo search engine there. Alright, I apologize to all our Yahoo listeners; you got a lot of great products.

Stephan: (Laughs)

Louis:: Oh no, wait, they sold Delicious (laughter).

Stephan: Ha, ha, ha, ha, snap! They still got Flickr.

Patrick: I gotta step in now and say that, you know when I was coming up and developing websites for the first time I loved Yahoo, and I still hold hats and glove for Yahoo because they do have some good products. Now, put Delicious aside, they’ve always been strong in like Yahoo Finance, that’s a strong product, Yahoo Sports is a strong product.

Louis:: Oh, yeah, that’s true. Yeah, that’s a good point.

Patrick: The fantasy sports stuff they do, they have these niche products that are very strong that I’ve always used, and then of course they do so many different things and a lot of things they don’t well, and that’s really the problem I guess, but, you know, Yahoo, I hope Yahoo comes back and these strong products get the shine that they deserve I suppose.

Stephan: Bring back Pipes.

Patrick: (Laughs) bring back Pipes.

Louis:: Is Pipes dead?

Stephan: It’s not dead it’s just not, I don’t know, it’s not up-kept really well.

Louis:: Right. That’s a good — it’s a good product, it’s a great idea.

Stephan: I still use it, it’s just that –

Patrick: It’s still there.

Stephan: They haven’t put a lot of use, they haven’t done a lot to it, like they’ve just given you this — like there’s so much more they could do to it. Anyway, I’m getting off-topic, sorry.

Louis:: I think we’ve been off-topic for a little while here.

Patrick: No, we’re already off-topic, this is the Yahoo segment! (laughter).

Louis:: Alright, maybe time to move on to the next story. I’ll take this one. So this is something that I spotted on Hacker News yesterday, and what has happened is that the jQuery plugin site is offline and has just been shut down by the jQuery team. Now what the comments here on the post on Hacker News, there’s a couple comments by some of the core team at jQuery and mentioning that they’re working on a new plugin site and they’re gonna blog about that in the next few days. But basically what happened is they were concerned with a lot of sort of spam in the plugin site, so this was at plugins.jquery.com, so if you go there now you see just a simple message saying “The plugin site is currently unavailable, we’ve been looking to provide a high quality spam-free experience for some time, and we’ve just decided to temporarily shutter the existing site and will be providing more details on the new site soon.” So basically they’ve just shut the whole thing off and said, look, we’re working on a new one, but basically as we were working on the new one we came to the conclusion that a lot of the content on the current one was so spammy that rather than just try and clean it we’d turn it off, so it’s a pretty drastic move.

Patrick: Yeah, and by the time we do another show a month from now or there around they’ll probably have the new site up, so we’ll probably be talking about that.

Louis:: Yeah, I’m interested to see what’s going to come out of it and how it’s going to differ from the previous one. I have to say I didn’t really use the jQuery plugin site very much, usually a lot of times when you search for a jQuery plugin for something on Google the results you’d find would actually be the developer’s personal site where they posted the plugin rather than on this central location. But there are definitely other examples of this kind of thing done well, if you look at WordPress, WordPress’ plugins and add-on site and Mozilla’s add-on sites are really well done, and they’ve got a good way of floating the quality content at the top and curating it by the community reviews. So it’ll be interesting to see what the jQuery team’s put together, but I just thought it was an interesting move rather than wait until the new one was ready and do a switchover and like, hey guys, we got this new plugin site, they just went, oh, yep, the old plugin site is crap so you can’t use it, and we’ll build a new one eventually but we’re not gonna tell you when.

Patrick: Well, when you put it like that, yeah (laughter). Because in my head is was like, well, you know, we didn’t like what we had so we’re gonna take it down for a few days, it’ll be back soon, and we love you; that’s how I read it, I don’t know.

Louis:: (Laughs) Well, I think there are a couple of different ways to read this, right, and it seems to me like a bit of a blog post rather than suddenly hitting — I don’t think there’s actually even a blog post on the jQuery blog about it, yet; they said there was gonna be a blog post about what happened soon, but basically some developer was just working on this and decided, well, you know what — I mean I know we’ve all had those days, right, when you’re looking at the thing and thinking ‘this is all crap, I just want to tear it down’.

Patrick: The podcast sucks, my life is ruined, shut it all down, it’s garbage.

Louis:: Yeah, right, you have those days, but it looks like someone really carried through on this one.

Patrick: Is that an ultimatum of a dare? I’m just kidding.

Stephan: Wow, I’m just reading through some of these comments, it’s just, you know, it’s funny to see people get really upset, and there’s other people like trying to justify it, and then there’s other people giving the technical reasons; comments are hilarious, I love comments (laughter).

Louis:: I love comments in some places, it’s not always — if you ever find yourself reading the comments on like a major news outlet’s website that will make you hate humanity in record time.

Stephan: We’re gonna get to that. We’re gonna get to that in my story, so don’t jump the gun yet.

Louis:: Okay, I won’t jump the gun, but comments, I mean obviously on Hacker News and Reddit, you know, these sites thrive on the quality of the community, and you get great insight and great trolling as well, even, you know, even when they’re trolling they’re entertaining.

Stephan: Nothing like good trolling. Nothing like good trolling (laughter).

Louis:: Well, on that note, do you want to just jump into your story?

Stephan: Yeah. Yeah, so, Brent Simmons who runs Inessential.com has a blog post up called The Pummeling Pages, and it’s quite a good read just from a perspective of you reading a website and what the Web has become in the past, oh, I don’t know, five years, six years. And he really talks about how his use of Reader, in the Reader button in Safari, and how quickly he’s using it when he goes to different websites. Just from the idea that you know there’s all these ads, there’s comments everywhere, there’s just junk all over what used to be useful pages, and it’s not just run-of-the-mill blogs, it’s news sites that we actually use, and he draws a comparison to the merchants war where this was predicted before; lower class people would be subjected to a ton of advertising while upper class people were being insulated, and I don’t know if that’s actually true, but I know that we’re being hit with a lot more advertising for what amounts to not better content, right. So, it’s a good read about just getting rid of the junk off your page. And I just want to know what you guys think.

Louis:: Well, I think like I was saying before, there’s a distinction here between the way mainstream publications approach this versus the way sort of Internet publications approach this. So, a traditional newspaper site that’s been ported into the Internet definitely tends to suffer from this problem where you’ve got a thousand share buttons and widgets and comments, and it’s like a 1200 word article split onto seven pages that each take about seven seconds to load. I love the first sentence of this essay, by the way, he starts the whole thing off with, “I made the mistake of going to a website today,” period; great way of kicking into it, so I really like this essay. But there are a lot of specialized blogs out there targeting a specific niche or just, you know, that started this Internet publication that are a lot leaner. And do you think maybe it’s just because these traditional publications have leases on offices and have all this staff that they need to support, and as they’re declining revenues from their print publications they’re constantly under pressure to jack-up the amount of money that they can bring in through the sites where a lot of the newer generation of Internet based content providers were sort of lean from the start, and whatever money they make from their ads by providing quality content that differentiates them from the rest isn’t enough to cover what they need to pay.

Stephan: Well, he kind of touches on this, and he talks about he worked for a company that worked with a bunch of publishers, Taplinks is the name of the company, and he said that the number three thing that they had in common, that all of these different publishers had in common, was the unanswering, unswerving faith in supreme value of analytics. So they would look at their numbers and say, well, that article got a lot of hits, let’s write another one like that, right, and that’s the totally wrong way to do it, right. I mean if we’re writing articles just to get hits then we’re doing the wrong thing, we should be writing articles because there’s something to be written, not because we want ad money, so maybe that’s the first step.

Patrick: Well –

Stephan: But you need money, right, Patrick?

Patrick: Awkward laugh. Right, I mean I don’t know — if that’s wrong then I would say a lot of people are doing it wrong right now. And I think it’s — I don’t think it’s all bad to write articles that people want to read, I don’t think. Because that’s another way to read that sentence, that’s another way to say that same thing is that people are writing content that people come for, right?

Stephan: Eh, but I don’t know about that, though, because to me you can make –

Patrick: In some cases.

Stephan: — money without forcing people to look at a bunch of ads for a good article, like why do you have to fill the page with a bunch of junk.

Patrick: So this is a tough discussion because I’m not sensitive to advertising, ads don’t bother me, really, they don’t; ads on the Web don’t bother me at all. The only thing that bothers me is, and it’s only occasionally, is when there’s sound that plays automatically in-ad, that is decidedly rare on most publications that I read.

Louis:: But what about when it affects the load time significantly, and when they artificially –

Patrick: That doesn’t bother me.

Louis:: — try and inflate the pageviews for those advertisers by paginating the article needlessly.

Patrick: Okay, so that, the paginating, great word, is, uh, you know, I’ll confess to being maybe a little bothered by that, slightly perturbed perhaps (laughter), but it just doesn’t bother me that much because, you know, when most people complain about ads on a website I look at that site and I say that’s no big deal, because I look at content and I look at ads in percentages, most pages that I visit don’t have ads in even 30% of the page, and/or even 30, 35, 40%, more than half the page is other stuff, content, logos, navigation, etcetera, and that’s what I try to weigh on my sites, which I would say have less than average volume of advertising versus let’s say similar sites or other websites on the Web, because that’s where websites are, on the Web. So, I almost feel just to — I guess to present the counter to this is that there’s a sense of entitlement that shows its ugly head sometimes because there’s such a subjective thing that goes on with these comments where some people feel these ads are too — or there’s too many, they don’t like the type of advertising, they don’t like what the ads about; these publications have to make money to sustain themselves, and it’s not always one ad a page or a couple ads a page, and it’s not always going to be targeted to the topic. If it isn’t showing nudity, right, or cigarettes or alcohol, and it’s not popping up and it’s not playing noise, then I don’t have a problem with it for the most part, it doesn’t bother me.

Stephan: But that’s kind of the point though, Patrick, I think is that in some of these places they are popping up.

Patrick: But that’s rare though.

Stephan: But these are supposed to be reputable sites some of them.

Patrick: I mean that is so rare though on news sites to have a popup ad these days for the amount of pages that I visit.

Stephan: You’re saying you never get — like I’ll be on my phone and I’ll go to a link that I see on Twitter and it’ll be to some news site, some reputable news site, and instead of me being able to go to the article I get a little popup that keeps me from scrolling through the content, and I gotta wait five seconds.

Patrick: Right, so an overlay or an interstitial, yeah.

Stephan: Yes!

Patrick: I get those ads and honestly they don’t bother me. I can see why they bother some people, but they just don’t bother me all that much. Not so much that it makes me hate the Web or hate the publication or want to find a way to screw them of that revenue by viewing their content in some other means, it just doesn’t push me that far. I understand it pushes some people that far, but, I think that this is a case where this is an issue people complain about, but instead of complaining show me how I can make the same revenue through another method, show me that; if I can’t then we have a problem because people want to make more money, they want to do it more often than not in a way that’s appropriate for their audience, show them a way to do it, and if you can then you’re a genius and you’ll be a millionaire. If not then it’s one of the challenges we have to face today as a publisher online.

Louis:: I think, Stephan, coming back to the original point, it seems like this is a divide that’s maybe always existed in news, right, if you look at traditional newspapers, right, the division between sort of, what, the tabloid approach and a broadsheet approach, is pretty much that, right, I mean the tabloid papers have traditionally gone this same route of analytics, and you know this headline will sell more copies and it doesn’t matter how good the content is we just want a headline that’ll sell more copies, and if that happens to be trashy celebrity gossip then that’s what we’re gonna print. And there’s always been space for both approaches in print media, and I think there will be space for both approaches in online journalism as well, in online content publication of all kinds you’ll have people with the attempt to create good content with an attention to design, and there’ll be other people who are driven by analytics to just cram the whole thing full of ads and headlines that’ll get the most clicks, and paginate out the content and do all these other dodgy tricks to try and get more ad revenue. And maybe the jarringness, though, comes in the sense that some of the businesses that were on one side of the line in the print world have gone over the other side of the line in the digital world, right. So, you know we’ve seen a lot of traditionally, what you said, reputable or respectable news sources that have sort of embraced this more tabloid style approach to their online presence. And like what I was saying earlier, I think that a lot of the newer, the newer generation of dedicated online publications, a lot of them have taken the approach of really just focusing on the design, providing quality content, and a few targeted ads with partners that give them good rates based on conversions instead of just pageview banners from old print advertisers, if that makes sense; that was a bit of a rant.

Stephan: No, I agree. So do you click on ads, though, when you go to new sites?

Louis:: No.

Stephan: I’m interested.

Patrick: He’s gonna say no. He’s gonna say no, no, everyone says no.

Stephan: Do you click on ads, Patrick?

Patrick: No one ever clicks on ads. I will click on an ad if I find it interesting, I mean the funny thing is, and I have this conversation with people who are technical, I’m sure you guys do too sometimes, and no one ever clicks on ads, they don’t look at ads, they don’t know ads, they just don’t see them. And my response to that is always, sure you do; unless you have them blocked through Ad Blocker or something similar, if they allure on the page advertising will have some impact on you, it might be minor, but, advertising isn’t there just to be clicked on either. Let’s not forget there’s other forms of advertising besides cost-per-click, CPM ads and ads that are meant to establish a company or for branding or whatever, and even if you don’t click on ads, ads still have value for the advertiser, for the publisher and possibly for the viewer. And, I mean, yeah, so that’s my thought on that. I have clicked on ads before and I’ll click on ads where they’re interesting, and what I always tell people, though, is to vote with your feet, right?

Louis:: Yeah, I mean I agree with you, I’m not going to say I don’t click on ads ever. I don’t click on ads on these mainstream news sites because most of the time they’re crap.

Patrick: Right.

Louis:: Most of the time they’re ads for cars or new phones or shopping or, you know, just –

Patrick: Nothing that you partake in.

Louis:: — mass market crap. Whereas if you look at design or development sites that I read, if they have ads they’ll be for either books or courses on web design and development or new tools or things like that, that even if I don’t intend to buy it I might want to find out what it is or what it’s about, so I’ve definitely clicked on ads in a niche, it’s just that usually the stuff on the major news outlets are just not stuff that I have any interest in so I tend to ignore it. But as I was saying earlier, I don’t regularly read on those sites either because the experience, as this essay has put it, is so unpleasant that it makes it really not worth the while.

Patrick: Yeah. Just to comment on what I was saying about voting with your feet, what I mean is that if you like someone’s content then visit their website or subscribe to it in the means that they provide. I don’t necessarily believe in the idea, though I know many do, that if I like someone’s content I’ll find some other way to read it outside of ways they allow and do what I want to it. A lot of people do that, a lot of people feel that way, I don’t feel that way; if I don’t like the experience they provide and it bothers me enough then I don’t feel that I’m also entitled to consume their content. That may seem idealistic, I suppose, but that’s just how I view it; if someone does do that to their website where they butcher it so badly or there’s ads I don’t like or the experience is so poor that I can’t enjoy the content then I don’t visit the website and they lose traffic, that’s the approach that I recommend that people take.

Stephan: See I’m not saying people should go out there and start stealing content, I think for me, you know I use Instapaper, I’ve said that before, and so sometimes I will grab an article on a news site because it won’t load fast enough on my phone, I’m just like I can’t wait for this so I just download it to Instapaper and then I’ll read it later. So am I stealing the content, I don’t know, I still read the website when I can get on my computer, you know, like the New York Times, I’ll still read it on my computer, and I’ll still look around the site, so am I stealing the content, I don’t know. What do you think, Patrick, give me your moral opinion on that.

Patrick: (Laughs) Uh, no, I don’t think so. I don’t think you’re stealing the content. We’re at a crossroads, I think, and we’ve been at the crossroads for a while, and I don’t know who’s winning or losing or what the longterm effect is going to be, but you know there are a lot of tools out there that are used to circumvent advertising, and those are concerning just because people want to think that there’s a limitless way to make money online, but there’s not, right, there’s essentially — everything goes back to two main things, either get money from the people who enjoy your content or you get money from the people who want to reach the people who enjoy your content, and from there there’s a lot of division. But, it’s essentially always those two things, so there’s one or two parties you’re getting money from, and it’s definitely challenging and getting harder and more difficult I would say to, in some ways, and less difficult in others, because advertising online the revenue spend the companies are allotting is going up, so that’s a good thing, but there are more companies out there and there are more tools that people are using to circumvent the advertising, whether it be Adblock or something else. So it’s definitely challenging, and what I encourage people to do is just to, you know, if they enjoy someone’s content support them and do what they can to make sure they’ll be here tomorrow.

Stephan: So here’s a question for you guys, just kind of a theoretical question. If you had a donate button on a site for someone whose content you really enjoyed, would you prefer to do that or would you prefer to click on an ad for them, which is more genuine?

Louis:: Oh, the donate is definitely more genuine, it’s definitely a clearer expression of, hey; it’s a tip jar, right? You know, this is great content and here’s two bucks or here’s whatever; clicking on an ad I’m sort of indirectly supporting them by supporting someone else, and maybe it’s disingenuous because I click on the ad and then not buy the thing. If I’m clicking on the ad just to provide them with revenue then that’s needless, right, that’s costing this other company that’s advertising money to make the site look less pretty so that I can give a small fraction of money to the person that I like their content, right, that’s needlessly circuitous, but does it work better than donate, and I guess it depends on how direct and how personal a connection you have with your readers. There are some people whose blog I read that if they asked for donations I would definitely give it to them because they’ve established themselves as a clear personality that’s doing this because they love to do it, and I like their website and I like the content they put out and I know who they are, I’d give those people money, but there are some other organizations that I just don’t have that connection and it might be a bigger leap to click donate, right?

Patrick: I agree with Louis: about clicking ads to click ads, that’s a bad thing, don’t do it, it throws the whole value proposition out of whack for everyone, it inflates numbers for publishers, it inflates numbers for advertisers, it’s just bad. So you don’t wan to click ads just to support a publication, click an ad if you have any interest in it; if that’s why you’re clicking it then it’s genuine and do it. You know and as far as like donate, donate buttons, donate buttons to me I would never add one because they look desperate to me, and maybe this is just a matter of verbiage, right, and a semantical thing I’m saying, but instead of having a donate button play with micro-payments however you can. Now maybe that is subscription, maybe they can subscribe to your content for exclusive content or to see it first or to see it without ads, you know, make that sort of thing available, three dollars a month, five dollars a month, ten dollars a month, depending on the value of what you provide and how much you think you can get; I think it’s good to have that. Now as far as what would I do, you know, right now I don’t subscribe to any publications like that, and I am in a place financially where I don’t necessarily want to do that right now, but when I’m not in that place I would definitely consider it. If given the choice between viewing ads or paying something, I would say I’m more likely to want to just view ads or have ads on the page, and have myself be counted in whatever analytics program is serving the ads, and then I’ll benefit them in that way as well, but if you can you know it’s great to provide options to your readers.

Stephan: So maybe I’ll do a little experiment and say support my writing and have a little donate button and just see what happens on my site.

Patrick: (Laughs) for badice.com?

Stephan: Yeah, yeah, I don’t know, maybe I will.

Patrick: (Laughs)

Stephan: We’ll see. What’s so funny about that?

Patrick: I might just give you money.

Stephan: (Laughs)

Patrick: I don’t know; you got to have regular content.

Stephan: I do have regular content now; I’ve been blogging a lot more, thank you very much.

Patrick: Now? Okay, yeah.

Stephan: Yeah, see; see you don’t even read it so it doesn’t matter.

Patrick: No, no, I’ve subscribed, November 30th, November 29th, November 13th, November 4th, four posts in November.

Stephan: Yeah, that’s pretty good.

Louis:: That’s not bad.

Patrick: (Laughs)

Stephan: It’s quality stuff, man, it’s quality; quality over quantity (laughter).

Patrick: Put up a pay wall!

Louis:: Alright, I think we should wrap this up and go to spotlights because it’s turned into kind of a long discussion.

Patrick: I’ll go first, good discussion, guys. My spotlight is a skit that was on Saturday Night Live on this past Saturday, it is called Batman, it is an SNL digital short, Andy Samberg as Batman, Steve Buscemi as Commissioner Gordon, what else do I need to say (laughter), I think that sets it up perfectly, and if you haven’t seen it yet go check it out. Let’s say Batman is a little too attached to Commissioner Gordon.

Louis:: (Laughs) Ah, that’s terrifying. I will have a look.

Stephan: I can go next. I have an article in the New York Times called Do You Suffer from Decision Fatigue. And it’s just a good read about all the decisions we make everyday and kind of the toll it takes on us mentally, physically, physiologically, just some interesting stuff, and I’d say we all need to read it just so, you know; everyday you’re making tons and tons of decisions, and it does play a part, it does stress you out without you even knowing it, which is interesting.

Louis:: Awesome. I love this kind of stuff; I’ll definitely give it a read. My spotlight this week is surprise, surprise, web development related. One of the designers, I believe, at GitHub, Director of Design at GitHub, sorry, posted this just today which is this Ruby based library that has the purpose of generating documentation for CSS. So it’s a lot like these other documentation generators for programming languages except for CSS, and it can be used either with plain CSS or if you’re using a preprocessor like Sass or LESS, and obviously it’s just been released on GitHub so it’s a brand new project, but I was having a look at it and someone who has a pretty constant inability to organize my CSS in any way, shape or form, it’s just one giant file filled with stuff, and I pretty much use control F to find the thing I want to edit, this looks like a really good way of organizing and providing clear documentation, sort of saying, alright, so this dot star is a button that lets you favorite your content and it looks like this, and in a hover state it’ll look like this, and it generates out some pretty good-looking documentation. So definitely keep an eye on this as it develops.

Patrick: Sweet.

Stephan: What’s this written in?

Louis:: It’s written in Ruby, so he’s written — he wrote a specification for it which is just how to write your documentation, which obviously is just in your CSS as comments at the top of each declaration, and he’s written a Ruby library which takes that and generates sort of an HTML documentation file from it.

Stephan: Yeah, that’s cool, that’s really nice. And in the corporate world documentation rules, so.

Louis:: (Laughs) And looking at the — so he’s got an example screenshot, I don’t know if you saw this, Stephan, of what the sort of the output style guide looks like.

Stephan: Yeah.

Louis:: And it really looks fantastic. I’m like if I came unto a new project and had to write CSS and I had a style guide like this, that would be, you know, a dream.

Stephan: Yeah, I mean that’d be really helpful, and I’m not even really into CSS, but I could see where this is really useful for someone new to a project, it’d be great.

Louis:: Awesome. So that’s a wrap for this week. I think we lived up to our expectations for the last panel show of the year, I think we really killed it, congratulations (laughs).

Patrick: It’s dead.

Stephan: It’s dead.

Patrick: There will be no more.

Louis:: Yeah, so it’s been a great year, guys, thanks for all your warm welcome on the show, I’ve had a lot of fun.

Patrick: Awesome. Thank you, you’ve done a great job.

Louis:: And I’ll be back next week with an interview show, and then we’ll be seeing — we’ll be, I don’t even know how to say this; we’ll be seeing the listeners in the New Year in some way, shape or form.

Patrick: We’ll be coming back with a vengeance, as I told Kevin (laughter). That was my guarantee; you’ll be back with a vengeance in January! Yes, dramatic.

So let’s take it around the table. I am Patrick O’Keefe for the iFroggy Network; I blog at managingcommunities.com, on Twitter @ifroggy, i-f-r-o-g-g-y.

Stephan: I’m Stephan Segraves, you can find me at badice.com, and I’m on Twitter @ssegraves.

Louis:: You can follow SitePoint on Twitter @sitepointdotcom, that’s sitepoint d-o-t-c-o-m, and you can follow me on Twitter @rssaddict. If you want to find out more about the Podcast go to sitepoint.com/podcast, that’s where you can find all of our past episodes, leave a comment on this show to let us know what you thought and also subscribe to the feed if you want to get it automatically, and if you want to hit us by email that’s podcast@sitepoint.com. Thanks for listening everybody, and to Patrick and Stephan wishing you both a happy New Year and I’ll talk to you again in January.

Patrick: Happy holidays.

Stephan: Yep, have a good one.

Theme music by Mike Mella.

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