Facebook, WordPress and HTML5

 

Last month, Facebook updated its iPhone/iPad mobile apps, opting to create native apps instead of the new HTML5 standard. Users (this one included) complained about the painfully slow loading app, so Facebook engineers solved the problem using a different programming language. Some saw this retreat as “a blow to HTML5” as a standard. This week, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg reinforced the meme when he declared that “betting on HTML5″ was the company’s biggest strategic mistake.

If you ask me whether the HTML5 standard took a blow in this affair, I’d have a fairly unqualified ‘no.’ My reasons are both technical and philosophical.

From a technical, practical standpoint: Well, first, it’s really unfair to call HTML5 a programming language. Let’s be real–we’re mostly talking about tagged text here! I don’t know how much Facebook relies on the rich media pieces of HTML5 (video, audio, and animations). I will suggest that the terrible performance of the Facebook mobile app is more about browser support in the early days of the standard, and browser support, even on mobile devices, will always get better. (In the short-term, some have also noted that Apple doesn’t allow the “Nitro” JavaScript library that might have speeded things up.)

This brings me to the more philosophical reasons that underlie everything Facebook does, including dissing HTML5: Why does Facebook even matter to supporters of the open Web? Facebook is creating a walled garden that is designed to control its users’ experience, and force them to stay within its borders, where all the fun happens. Oh, and provide its advertisers with the appropriate number of eyeballs.

What you need to remember is that people have always chosen the open Web over walled gardens. The last company that tried to defeat the Internet was America Online (AOL). Like Facebook today, AOL in the 1990s was a place where people got their feet wet with electronic communication and entertainment. They built their membership base so well that AOL actually bought Time Warner (perhaps you thought it was the other way around)! But the more people heard about the Internet and the World Wide Web, the more they clamored to get access to it. Today AOL is little more than a purveyor of free email addresses.

I’m no business analyst or pundit, but let me suggest that there’s a real reason walled gardens fail in the end: The Internet generally, and the World Wide Web specifically, was built for three fundamental purposes: to allow human beings to get informed, communicate and collaborate with each other. HTML5 and other web standards continue to further these goals. To the extent that Facebook, or any other company, puts those goals first, they will prosper in the long run.

One reason I’ve been a WordPress supporter all these years is because this community has always been a backer of the open Web. It will prosper too.

Climbing off my high horse now to deal with more mundane issues. This rant was partially sparked by the research I’m doing to prepare for Tuesday’s Milwaukee WordPress Meetup on WordPress 3.4 and Web Standards. We’ll be at Bucketworks September 18 at 7PM. Paul Sanchez will also be talking about WordPress accessibility. See us if you’re in the neighborhood.

Related articles

• Zuckerberg’s Biggest Mistake? ‘Betting on HTML5′ (mashable.com)
• Facebook’s Zuckerberg: ‘The biggest mistake we’ve made as a company is betting on HTML5 over native.’ (venturebeat.com)
• Facebook never bet on HTML5 (groovecoder.com)
• Everything You Always Wanted To Know About HTML5* (*But Were Afraid To Ask) [Slides] (techcrunch.com)

 

Some Quick Hits: openSUSE Strategy, WordPress Upgrades, and Some Pointers

It’s summer in Milwaukee, and I haven’t been spending too much time in front of a keyboard lately. You’re surprised?

Anyway, I do have a lot of things on my mind, and here are some of them:

• openSUSE Strategy Vote: This is directed at the 267 formal Members of the openSUSE Community who have not yet voted on the proposed strategy document: As I write this, you’ve got less than 24 hours to cast your ballot.  The proposal has a 90% approval rating right now (and I voted Yes, if you care what I think); but unless at least 35 more members vote, bumping turnout over 50%, the strategy won’t be adopted! The statement doesn’t take long to read, you can vote No, or even abstain if you like, but please make your voice heard!
• WordPress v3.2: In the offhand chance you haven’t heard: WordPress released v3.2 (aka Gershwin) over a week ago! There’s even been an update already! Much more to say about this soon, but goodness knows if you haven’t upgraded yet, what are you waiting for?
• Some Personal History: If you’ve read my About page, or checked out my main website, you know that I’m a technical writer by profession. I wrote a brief account of my “Adventures in Publishing: Finding a Gig as a Computer-Book Author” for the webzine associated with the venerable Technical Writing mailing list (TechWr-L). You may find it interesting.
• Getting Yet More Social: You may have heard about this new little social network called Google+. It’s really been flying under the radar, don’t you think? I’ve been playing around there this week. If you’re there, connect with me here. If you’re not there, and are anxious to learn more, my Invite button is still showing. Drop a line with your name and email address to gplus-at-michaelmccallister.com. I’ll see what I can do.

That’s all for now. Expect to be hearing more from me on these and other riveting topics as the summer presses onward.

Following up on recent posts: Support and HTML5/CSS3

If you haven’t heard already, openSUSE 11.3 was released last week, to mostly rave reviews. I’ve been running some of the pre-release versions in VirtualBox, and am planning to convert my laptop Linux from Kubuntu to openSUSE 11.3 this weekend. Will let you know how that goes.

In the meantime, there are a few items to share with you:

• I can’t resist telling you about an interesting thread on the differences between forums and mailing lists that developed on the openSUSE mailing list today. Felix Miata had a pretty perceptive explanation (if you overlook his lack of distinction on the quality of answers):

In many many years on the internet, I’ve found people tend to prefer one or
the other.

Forums:
1-invariably mousetype (rude, tiny text; certainly applicable to forums.opensuse.org)
2-higher ratio of unanswered questions to answered questions
3-higher ratio of good answers to unhelpful answers
4-better moderation
5-subject miscategorization widespread (leads searches in wrong directions)
6-pulled (more work to get, but get no processing forced)

Mailing lists:
1-displays text legibly and comfortably at users preferred size
2-better ratio of questions asked to questions answered
3-better ratio of good answers to unhelpful answers
4-poorer moderation
5-topics lack categoration within particular lists (hard to narrow searches)
6-pushed (less work to get, more work to process)

This ties in somewhat with my post of a few weeks ago on learning about KDE, etc. My completely unscientific poll seems to indicate that forums are pretty popular, but did not address specifically the quality of answers you get from a particular venue (BTW, you can still vote in the related poll–Click the link at the top of this paragraph). What do you think? Comment below.

• Let me give you a few more links related to HTML5 and CSS3, discovered this week:
  • I found the TinyMCE Advanced plugin, which adds some excellent standards-compliant features to the WordPress default Visual Editor. Unfortunately, some WordPress 3.0 users are complaining that it doesn’t install. See Comment 964 for a possible workaround. This plugin does not address HTML5 directly, but perhaps with a few persuasive notes, that can change.
  • The fine folks at SitePoint are offering cheap online classes for HTML5 and CSS3, starting next week. John Allsopp, one of the founders of the Web Standards Project is teaching them, and it sounds really interesting. The two-week HTML5 course begins July 26, and costs just $9.95, and the three-week CSS3 course that follows is just $14.95. Take ‘em both, and it’s just $19.90. Even though I will be on vacation for part of this time, I think I’m signing up.
  • Over at the About.com HTML site, they’re taking a poll on interest in CSS3, with a few links highlighting some of the features you can use now.

WordPress and HTML5: It’s Coming Along

So at last week’s Web414 meeting, Arlen Walker gave a great talk on “HTML5: The State of the Dis-Union.” (The links to resources mentioned in the talk are here)

Afterward, my buddy Pete comes up and says WordPress must have all kinds of stuff ready for HTML5. I had already assigned myself the task of finding out how HTML5-ready WP was, as I really didn’t know. A week later I know a bit more, but am perhaps a little bit disappointed with what I found.

(Before I get to the meat of this post — and I know you’re probably wondering when that’s going to happen already — let me offer an unsolicited testimonial: If you’re looking for a speaker on a range of issues related to making web sites, you could do a LOT worse than Arlen Walker. Smart, organized, and quite opinionated, I try not to miss him when he’s on a program. </digression>)

Perhaps all you’ve heard about this new web standard is that “it’s gonna kill Flash on the web!!” Journalists love stories with conflict, so often the best way to write about the dry process of standards creation is through the lens of real or incipient corporate battles. There’s so much more to HTML5 than multimedia, especially when you consider that this area is the most technically difficult/unresolved issue.

If you need a primer on HTML5, Arlen’s slides are a good place to start. To see what really floats my boat , scroll down to slide 39: Thinking in HTML5. Herein begins the discussion of … outlining (yes, I’m really this dull). You see, as a technical communicator, I’m all about structure, styles, and logical progressions. It really aids people’s understanding of things when the explanations follow those logical progressions.

Software user assistance has long been traveling the road to more structured, topic-based writing, to keep up with the generations of users who have gotten used to getting their information from the web. Nearly all my career, I’ve been hearing about separating content from presentation. On the web, that separation is enforced through cascading style sheets (CSS). HTML5 also takes us more down the road to the Semantic Web ideal by adding more descriptive tags. This will make information more findable, which is good for everyone.

Which brings us to WordPress, and my vague disappointment. But first the good news: You can get WordPress themes today that support HTML5 (and usually CSS3 too). I’m told that WordPress 3.0′s default “2010″ theme supports HTML5. Just four themes come up in a search for “html5″ in the Theme Directory. Similarly, just 28 plugins come up with an html5 search (with a dozen of those tagged html5). This will certainly change as the standard becomes widely adopted.

What’s really disappointing is that TinyMCE, otherwise known as the WordPress Visual Editor, doesn’t support using the new semantic tags, even for standard text. Currently, the editor does some curious things when encountering unfamiliar tags (which Nicholas Gallagher describes, and helps resolve, here).

TinyMCE forums indicates that some support for basic HTML5 elements (such as section, article, header, footer) is planned in v3.4; the editor is currently at v3.3.8. We don’t know when that update is planned, though.

This post just scratches the surface, and I hope to return to the subject soon. Are you using HTML5 in WordPress yet? In your other web work? What problems are you encountering? Or is this topic just rubbish? Let me know in the comments!

Writer River: A Social Media News Site for Technical Communicators

Tom Johnson just can’t sit still, I guess. Tom is a technical communicator who hosts a blog and a podcast, is active in his Society for Technical Communication chapter, and Twitters pretty heavily as well.

Last week, we were both at the STC annual conference. I’m not sure whether he had as good a time as I did, but his review resonated with my experience at least to some degree. But he indicated that he was getting tired of the whole interview-based podcast thing, and wanted to do something different.

Being much more decisive than your humble correspondent, two days ago Tom launched Writer River: A Social Media News Site for Technical Communicators. It’s a Digg clone; using Pligg as its engine. You can learn more about how the site was built here. If you like a story you read here, Float it up the river till it hits the front page. If you don’t, you can Sink it too.

If you think technical writing is all about grammar arguments and Word vs. FrameMaker duels, you may be surprised by the site (even if an interview with Grammar Girl did make the front page on Day One). There’s a lot of material touching on Web 2.0 stuff, the business case for Twitter and assorted other tech topics. Fundamentally, what’s there will depend on its readers, of course. So if you find something interesting and relevant, submit it, or cast your vote.

Thanks, Tom. I think this is going to be a great service to our community.

Tags: WriterRiver, techcomm, digg

More on the Advanced Side of DrupalCamp

Here’s another look at DrupalCamp Wisconsin from Larry Garfield’s GarfieldTech blog. He seems to have had as much fun as I did.

As befits someone of his standing in the community, he spent most of his time in the Advanced track, so if you’ve read my notes, you’ll get a more complete experience reading his comments.

Now to tackle my own Drupal site. It has suddenly become much closer to reality after this weekend.

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DrupalCampWisconsin: A Summary

What a terrific day it was at DrupalCampWisconsin yesterday! An excellent turnout from all over the Midwest, fine sessions, and good company all day long, and into the night.

If you weren’t able to attend (and maybe even if you did), you’ll find interesting stuff on the wiki. The Flickr feed is here. You can view a bit of the video feed at UStream as well.

For your convenience, here’s a list of my session notes of the “newbie track,” liveblogged yesterday. I’ve cleaned them up a little, and added pertinent links.

• Live at DrupalCampWI
• The Drupal Ecosystem
• Drupal for Users
• What is the Content Construction Kit?
• Drupal Views in Depth
• Podcasting with Drupal
• Ubercart: An e-Commerce Module
• After Dinner: Web Standards 100
• Drupal Theming 101

A full day, by anyone’s standards. With more stuff for the more advanced folks.

It was great to meet so many folks, and talk Linux, Drupal, and other geeky topics. Thanks to the Web414 crew who organized it, the sponsors who fed us all often and well, Bucketworks for hosting the after-party and everyone who came out in the cold.

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Drupal Theming 101

(Update: This is the last in a series (except for the summary) of live posts from DrupalCampWisconsin, with a little cleanup and added links.)

Blake Hall presents.

The professor ran late, so no break between 100 and 101. Blake made this presentation to the Madison PHP Meetup a few days ago. Also stolen from Pro Drupal Development.

Three Theme Engines in Drupal: PHPTal, Smarty (CiviCRM), TPL (Core)+Template.php

Blake is porting a WordPress theme into Drupal. See blakehall.org for what’s “nearly there.”

Every time I hear Blake give a presentation, he always says “the next version is way better.” So it is with Drupal v6, especially in theming.

Larry Garfield picks up with “what’s new in v6.”

Aim: Theming Nirvana. Not there yet.

v4.5: Theming Hell
v4.6: Purgatory, aka Xtemplate
v4.7: Limbo, aka PHPtemplate. Page, node, block and comment templates. Currently the dominant engine.
v5.0: No changes
v6: Pure CSS themes, drive toward separating out presentation. Info files create themes.

Displays the structure of Info files: Stylesheets, scripts, regions, features.

More granular control over content. Data sanitized; fewer inadvertent security holes.

Some code comparisons. Way better.

v6 offers theme inheritance. Set base theme, make whatever changes you want. Use well-named classes to identify areas (though not yet complete).

Template engine is now just a set of tags.

Time to show some code! (Writes 4 lines into demo.info) This is a naked Drupal. No Divs, no Tables, a semantic page. Adds another line: base theme = garland. Looks like Garland (standard theme).

Adds another line to reference a stylesheet. To override an existing stylesheet, reference the same name as the existing stylesheet in the Info file.

Default node template: node.tpl.php. Copy file into your site and modify (un-comment) as you wish.

Cool stuff!

There is one more session scheduled, but this reporter’s brain is getting full. I believe I’m going to call it a day, blogging-wise. I’ve got some summary ideas, which I’ll share when I get refreshed. I’ll also add links and otherwise make pretty. Thanks for reading along. Please comment as the spirit moves.

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After Dinner: Web Standards 100

(Update:  This is the eighth in a series of live posts from DrupalCampWisconsin, with a little cleanup and added links.)

Steven Merrill, Bradley U professor presents.

After a fine pizza dinner, we are having joint sessions on theming. It begins with a web standards lecture from Prof. Merrill.

References:
Zeldman (Designing with Web Standards)
Web Designer’s Reference
Save the Pixel

Sites:
A List Apart
CSS Zen Garden
CSSBeauty

Basic review of HTML history, from Vannevar Bush’s Memex to Tim Berners-Lee.
DNS, IPv6

HTML Page Structure: Head and Body. That’s it.
HTML Grammar: Tags and Attributes

Page titles are important, especially with tabbed browsers. Google also searches page titles.

Point behind web standards: Understanding the separation between HTML (Structure), CSS (Presentation) and JavaScript (Interactivity). Peruse CSS Zen Garden to see how different stylesheets display identical HTML text and tags.

Ooh, screen shot of the original Mosaic home page.

Browser feature wars makes HTML more presentational, less semantic. Also made pages work in only one browser. Web standards represent the backlash: Semantic HTML.

Switchy McLayout: JavaScript handles many different screen sizes. From A List Apart.

(Crowd agrees: presentation so far too basic. Moving on to advanced elements)

<Typist’s Aside: Is there a real purpose to GiantURL.com?>

CSS Positioning: Floating, fixed, and something else.

<Typist’s second aside: Missed some of the important stuff due to being pinged on IRC. I admire those who can multitask in this fashion. Meanwhile, must look at video later.>

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Ubercart: An e-Commerce module

(Update:  This is the seventh in a series of live posts from DrupalCampWisconsin, with a little cleanup and added links.) 

David Needham, a Bradley University student presents.

Ubercart works with PayPal to drive purchases.

Single package includes a core set of fields, with -extra, -fulfillment and -payment options.

Pet store example

Product Catalog: Dogs, other
Create options (Leather and Gold collars)
Create a Dog: Dalmatian. Include image, define a SKU, list price, cost, height, weight, etc.
Add Options to Product page.

Can create roles for a store, like a “member” who registers for discounts. Tried to find the setting that notifies the expiring member to renew; not in Notifications, but it’s here somewhere.

Set access control by taxonomy for “members only.”

Add Shopping Cart block to page.

Shows his PayPal Test Accounts.

Store Management in Ubercart activates the page, pointing to the PayPal Sandbox (test account).
PayPal Test Store page is customizable.

“Hey, I’m a member!”

Visit davidneedham.net/drupalcampwi to see the store.

Google Checkout: Not supported yet.

Pete Prodoehl notes the Ubercart docs are excellent.

You can create bundled ‘product kits’ for multiple items. Should work for tickets too.

Ubercart handles inventory management.

Both David and Pete couldn’t get core e-commerce module to work, and went to Ubercart instead. Others found OSCart much more hassle. ZenCart “just about impossible to train” (James Carlson).

You can also visit livetest.ubercart.org to try it out.

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