Spolsky on IE8 and Standards
Joel Spolsky has a long article on the subject of the IE team’s decision to prioritise standards over compatibility in IE8. While he cheekily claims not to be taking any sides, it’s pretty clear he’s with the pragmatists.
37-smug-nals
Jason Fried has a post reporting on various phrases and words that show up in 37signals’ internal Campfire discussions. One report I’d like to see is how many times the word ‘smug’ appeared. That’d be one hell of a big report.
Dare Obasanjo stops blogging
I’m sad to see that Dare Obasanjo has decided to stop blogging. Among other things, I’ve found his coverage of the REST vs. WS-* debate very useful. It was Dare who first brought RSS and blogging to my attention through his MSDN Magazine article Building a Desktop News Aggregator. The code he developed for that article ended up becoming RSS Bandit.
I hope he reconsiders; his forthright writing style is very entertaining, and he’s not afraid to say so when Microsoft have screwed up.
Microsoft screw the pooch again
Oh dear. It looked for a while as though Microsoft was going to make the right decision on compatibility vs. standards compliance in IE8. But they’ve reversed their decision now. Why? The Microsoft Interoperability Principles.
I pointed out the reasons that their original approach was the right one a few weeks ago.
So, once again, a press release trumps common sense. Idiots.
Microsoft finally gets the message on browser compatibility
When Microsoft released Internet Explorer 7 they broke a huge number of sites. Why? They had tried to make IE7 standards-compatible, but had failed to understand how much work developers had had to go through to make their sites work in IE6 in the first place. There was a load of ‘best practice guidance’ guff around how to make your site work in IE7, but the upshot was what I called at the time ‘the browser tax’.
Finally, finally, finally, they seem to have understood the plight of the ordinary web developer. IE8 will work as IE7 unless explicitly told to behave with maximum standards compatibility.
This is what every web developer who understood the issues wanted them to do first time around. Chris Wilson describes it as a ‘painful and unexpected lesson’. Only because they weren’t listening properly.
In essence, Microsoft made this mess and they should let people decide when they’re ready to help them clean it up. It looks like that’s now going to be allowed to happen. About freaking time.
Lightweight vs Heavyweight
Nik Silver has a thought-provoking piece on Heavyweight vs Lightweight content management. As the (former) architect of what you might call a middleweight CMS, I find his argument almost totally wrong. As far as I can tell, it amounts to a false syllogism that goes like this:
- WordPress is a lightweight CMS
- The Guardian use a heavyweight CMS
- WordPress cannot do everything needed for the the Guardian website
- Therefore, a heavyweight CMS is better than a lightweight CMS
I think the argument he’s trying to make is that a well-designed system with a judicious amount of abstraction is better than one without the abstraction. But I don’t follow his argument that any changes to WordPress would necessarily result in unmaintainable code. In fact, there are numerous newspapers who use WordPress, and several very high traffic sites that use it too. His argument is basically a retread of the tired old-skool IT dirge “but this isn’t enterprise software”. I find this surprising given that Nik is an eloquent advocate of agile methodologies and should, in theory, be sceptical of the idea that software needs to be big to be effective.
He says:
Lightweight is often good, but it must have its tradeoffs, otherwise other technologies wouldn’t exist.
Really? He seems dangerously close to the ‘one true language’ trap here – an El Dorado of a language that would be perfect for every job and everyone would agree on. This is absurd. Heavyweight software will continue to exist for a long time in my view, mainly because of the vested interests of the corporations that sell it. And not all heavyweight software is bad of course.
Every single decision you make when designing a software system is about compromise – manageability vs performance, explicitness vs extensibility, productivity vs complexity and so on. Every system you ever use has tradeoffs: not every system needs to be extensible, and not every system needs to be optimised to the limit. I prefer the Pragmatic Programmers’ advice: “do the simplest thing that could possibly work.”
To suggest that WordPress is, out of the box, a viable alternative to an existing bespoke system is faintly silly. Is WordPress the cleanest abstraction possible for a CMS? No – it’s targeted pretty much exclusively at blogging. But to suggest that there’s something difficult about getting ads into a page is a bit weird – check out TechCrunch if you don’t believe me.
Lightweight languages and frameworks (for example, Ruby or Python) are all the rage because they make developers very productive. There are downsides, performance being the most often raised one. Many of these downsides are FUD though. Everything I see at the moment leads me to think that the days of Java and C# are numbered as the ‘enterprise way’. The productivity you can get out of things like Ruby on Rails is so great that people are going to be forced to re-evaluate the ‘heavyweight’ options. The (perceived) performance problems of scripting languages are sure to go away. Remember the days when people hand-wrote assembler because they didn’t trust the C compiler to optimise their code properly?
In 2007 I failed to learn a new programming language, although I dabbled with Objective-C and Cocoa. 2008 will be the year of Python (with a smattering of PHP) for me. There are many places to read more about extending your language knowledge, but I recommend Martin Fowler’s One Language and Improvement Ravine.
From the archive: How to be a Brain in a Brainstorm
[The third in my series of posts that have disappeared with Interesource, but which I would like to keep available. This one was a look at how to be useful and polite in a brainstorm. It was originally published on 2nd April 2007.]
We often run brainstorms for clients here at Interesource. We have a group of experts, who we refer to as ‘brains’, that we call on to help us with these. They’re all expert in some area of the Internet and are all early adopters of the latest and shiniest stuff. You won’t need to explain to them what Twitter is or mashups are, or how Facebook is different from MySpace for example.
Of course this has its downside too: they’re all remarkably opinionated. Now, of course we love opinions because we’ve all got them and exposure to other opinions is the best way to challenge your preconceptions. That’s why clients pay for brainstorms, after all. The brains also tend to be too radical for most practical purposes, but that again is a benefit because ideas can always be toned down for the market they’re aimed at.
We usually mix in a few Interesource employees as ‘brains’ too. After all, we have experts a plenty on the staff. Recently I’ve been called on for two brainstorms. Here are my observations on what it takes to be useful in one.
You have to remember that you’re in the brainstorm for your opinions and expertise, so it’s OK to say things that are controversial and, in all likelihood, not fully formed or even at all practical.
The flip-side of this is that you’re not there to force your opinions or priorities on other people. You’ve been asked to tell people what you think, not suppress what other people think. You have to trust the people running the brainstorm to harvest the ideas and use the best ones. Just because you think it’s an awesome idea doesn’t mean that everyone else does. People who know me will recognise that this is the bit I really struggle with. Hopefully I’m getting better at it.
The two brainstorms I’ve been in recently have both been very positive and useful, but in both there was some behaviour that I felt was unhelpful. The first instance was one of the attendees telling the group ‘you haven’t come up with anything new’. Let’s deconstruct that.
First: you don’t *have* to come up with anything new in a brainstorm. They can be super-efficent ways of transferring knowledge, and that’s a great outcome. Second: a brainstorm group should behave as a team, not a series of individuals in competition with each other. If the brainstorm hasn’t produced anything new and it should have then the whole team has failed. It’s no good accusing the rest of the group of failure and trying to stand outside the failure.
This notion of it being teamwork is why brainstorms often start with trust games. Tim often runs brainstorms here and he usually makes people reveal an embarrassing hobby or fact about themselves to break the ice. This is great because it helps people to relax, lets everyone get some sense of the people they’re in a room with. After all, they may never have met several of the participants before.
I usually feel quite a lot of pressure before a brainstorm because I feel that there’s an expectation that I will say something brilliant or original and that’s difficult to do. You’re in a room with some very bright people and you don’t want to look stupid in front of them. But you have to remember that this is why there is no bad idea in a brainstorm – just say what you think.
You also have to submit to the moderator’s discipline. A good moderator will understand the client’s brief very well and will steer you away from topic areas that are not relevant. It’s important not to be offended by this; it doesn’t mean that the idea is bad, just that it’s better to move on to talk about something else. And for heaven’s sake, don’t keep trying to get your big idea back into the conversation if it’s moved on from there.
Running a good brainstorm is a tricky blend of finding people with egos and confidence who don’t mind shutting up when they’re told or listening to things they fundamentally disagree with without attacking it.
What will 2020 look like?
I have no idea, but Shane Richmond asked me to guest blog for him while he was away on holiday. Here it is.
Basecamp pisses me off occasionally
We’ve been using 37 Signals’ Basecamp to write documents for the last couple of weeks at the Telegraph. All in all it’s a great product, but there are a few things that are really annoying.
For example, when someone writes a comment on a Writeboard that you created or contributed to you don’t get a notification by email, and there’s no way to subscribe to one either.
In fact, Writeboards are very much a second-class citizen in Basecamp. They’re hosted on another site, and because of the way the authentication works between them, the back button quite often ends up just redirecting you back to the same Writeboard again. The Writeboard itself has a URL, but that’s not the URL you should use to share it.
Writeboards are incredibly useful, don’t get me wrong, but they should definitely be better integrated. It would also be very useful if you could export them to PDF or Word format.
I’d probably not mention this, except that 37 Signals are really quite cocky about how usable their software is and how carefully they think things like this through. I wish they’d spend less time showing off, and more sorting issues like these out.
Leopard glitches
I’ve been using Leopard for a while now and, broadly, I like it. But there are one or two things that are really pissing me off.
- The PubSubAgent (used for .Mac bookmark synchronisation) craps itself all the time if you’re behind a proxy
- Disk images don’t always eject properly in the Finder sidebar
- As I mentioned before, AirPort Extreme discs don’t auto-mount or show up in the Finder properly
- iCal seems to have lost the event details panel and has replaced it with an annoying speech-bubble thing
- There are still too many apps with compatibility problems (Pukka and MySQL being the two that are affecting me at the moment)
