Easy Reader

As some of you have read (or heard), WaSP organized a Round Table discussion on IE8’s standards mode and its default behavior of opting-out any sites that don’t engage in version targeting. We discussed a few different aspects of the issues this presents for standards-aware developers (and progress on the web in general) and discussed a few tacks Microsoft could take to make IE8 more standardista-friendly.

One proposal that, to me, appeared to hold the most promise was one that involved extending IE8’s scheme of automatically opting-in unknown valid DOCTYPEs to also include Strict DOCTYPEs of HTML and XHTML currently in use. The current proposal hinges on the relative popularity (or unpopularity) of a given DOCTYPE: unrecognized DOCTYPEs are assumed to be future or custom DOCTYPEs and will automatically be opted-in to the latest and greatest standards mode of any given future version of IE; that is, until that DOCTYPE becomes “popular” enough to warrant associating it with a given version of IE. This, in a nutshell, means that if a new DOCTYPE were to come along after IE8 launches—say, HTML 5—IE8 would render it in standards mode, but if that DOCTYPE became “popular” before IE9 came out, IE9 would likely act as though it was IE8 when rendering those pages.

Chris Wilson did not have numbers on the relative popularity of Strict mode DOCTYPEs vs. Transitional and Frameset on either HTML or XHTML, but given that most authoring tools do not automatically generate Strict documents, it is a strong possibility that the popularity of Strict mode DOCTYPEs may make them a candidate for being automatically opted-in to standards mode, at least in IE8. That would be great news for standards-aware developers who want IE8’s standards improvements, but don’t want to engage in version targeting.

In reaction to my latest article for A List Apart, on FigureHandler, many folks have boldly claimed that this sort of thing should be done server-side. Below are my thoughts on the matter as posted as a comment in the article’s discussion thread.

Many of you have brought up that this should be done server-side and, while I agree that it could, it would need to be done in the most flexible way possible (which many won’t bother with). You see, what this script allows quite easily is redesign; a designer can change page layout—of an entire site or section by section—without ever having to touch the back-end. It also allows for different columns to receive different figure classification schema.

If this were done on the content-entry side (as some have suggested), the image classifications would be stored in the database (or XML or whatever) along with the rest of the content HTML. That means that if the design were to shift to a wider column (for example), the figures that once occupied a half-column, may no longer continue to do so, making the classifications hard-coded in the HTML incorrect.

The only way to truly do this flexibly on the back end (as far as I can see) is to leave the classification step to be handled by a function which pre-processes the page output, dynamically assigning the classifications to each figure based on values obtained from the CSS for that page. Essentially, the script would need to go through the same steps as the JavaScript, but it would need to be able to go the extra step of determining applicable CSS rules to obtain the column width. Thankfully, most server-side languages support some means of DOM walking (albeit sometimes in less-than-desirable ways), but, as far as I know, none have a CSS parser, so you’d likely need to write that as well. From a server overhead point-of-view, I imagine that preprocessing would be fairly costly (most DOM-related stuff is), but the output for each page could be cached, reducing it somewhat.

If you’re interested in doing something like this, goodonya. I’ve built you a pretty decent roadmap for implementation, but I don’t imagine it will be easy to get it up and running. That said, I wish you luck…it would be yet another great tool for enabling designers to create consistent layouts with figures.

First off, let me preface this by saying I just got back to the East Coast after catching a red-eye from San Francisco on Saturday night, so if I seem a bit incoherent, that’s likely why.

In perhaps the most intellectually-stimulating session at The Rich Web Experience, Alex Russell (of Dojo Toolkit fame) tackled the topic of Standards Heresy.

For those who are not aware, Alex was once a staunch standards advocate who has turned to what he considers, “the dark side.” In truth, he’s sick and tied of the dysfunctional nature of the W3C and other similar organizations and I can’t say I blame him. As his session pointed out, the W3C has 60+ paid, full-time staff and yet we saw literally no movement on either (X)HTML or CSS for over five years. That is a travesty.

In my opinion, fault lies not with the individuals on the various committees and sub-committees, but rather, with the process. And this isn’t just a problem in the W3C, an organization comprised almost entirely of representatives from the various software vendors (Microsoft, AOL, Opera, etc.) which pay tens of thousands a year to take part. Look at what’s happening with JavaScript 2 in ECMA. Or HTML5 for that matter—just because it is an “open” organization which “anyone can join” doesn’t make the WHAT WG any better. They are all flawed because the process is flawed, and I think that is Alex’s main point (despite his assertion that the WHAT WG is not dysfunctional).

So why is the process flawed? Well, for one, spec writing is largely an academic undertaking. In many cases there are invited experts in a Working Group (such as Andy Clarke in the CSS one), but, for the most part, specs are written by people who are not in the trenches. As Alex rightly points out, in fact, many times, the specs are nothing more than an official blessing of some proprietary technique or technology created by a member company. And good ideas that may be very useful to designers or developers are lost because of internal politics or because a browser vendor thinks it would be “too hard” to implement.

Which brings me to Alex’s “heresy.” In his session, he proudly declared himself a heretic because he sees a need for innovation in (X)HTML which is currently unavailable because the specs are not evolving quickly enough. I feel his pain, but I think he is looking at the problem the wrong way. He sees the spec (and web standards in general) as stifling innovation. I see web standards as facilitating innovation. After all, were it not for the firm foundation of well-formed documents and a unified DOM (no matter how piecemeal the implementations), we’d still be writing spaghetti code whenever we tried to do anything with JavaScript. It is because of web standards that we can write clean JavaScript and that we can make truly innovative interactions that take us beyond what is allowed for in the specs themselves.

But back to Alex’s complaint…as his example of how Dojo is heretical, he showed this code example:

<div dojoType="dijit.form.HorizontalSlider"
     name="horizontal1"
     onChange="dojo.byId('slider1input').value=arguments[0];"
     value="10"
     maximum="100"
     minimum="0"
     showButtons="false"
     intermediateChanges="true"
     style="width:50%; height: 20px;"
     id="slider1">
  ...
</div>

The problem that Dojo is attempting to solve here is the inclusion of a slider form control, which does not exist under the current HTML Forms spec. In order to function, the widget requires several custom attributes to be placed on the element to provide information to assist in the creation of that slider. The fact that Alex “cannot” add these attributes to the document and maintain XHTML validity is a major source of annoyance for him and part of why he has decided that validation is no longer important.

But the truth is that Alex could make any or all of these attributes available to whatever elements he wants and still have a validating document by simply creating a DTD (based on any existing (X)HTML one) to include them. After all, the X in XHTML stands for extensible…the language is meant to be improved. Sure, there are some standardistas who think we shouldn’t muck about with the standards, but the powers that be put that extensibility in there for a reason (and I don’t think it was just as a tease). By extending the language to mix in features we desperately need, we drive innovation and, who knows, perhaps someone will take notice and add our extensions into the next version, thereby driving the evolution of the language so many of us desperately want.

The same goes for CSS. The W3C made CSS extensible by allowing for custom properties utilizing the -*- syntax. Chances are, you’ve come across this when implementing -moz-border-radius or -webkit-border-radius (which, honestly, both seem superfluous to me when the CSS3 spec includes border-radius as an actual property…why not just support that?). In my mind, this is ripe for use in extension of CSS, not by individual browser vendors (as that is proprietary and closed), but by us (in an open, cross-browser/cross-platform way) to achieve what we want or need that CSS currently does not offer us. That was the basis for my work on gFSS (an experiment in presentational Flash generated from CSS, debuted at Web Directions North this year) and another project I will be releasing in the next few months.

So, long story, long, I don’t think that Alex is a heretic. I think he can make a solid case for extending the language (and the interface) of the web for his particular needs (or the needs of his toolkit) as long as he backs it up with documentation in the form of a custom DTD.

An aside

I do have one problem with what Alex wants, however (or at least what he chooses as a code example) and that problem is the extension of the language, but rather the way in which it was done (i.e. the DIV in his example will degrade to nothing without JavaScript enabled). Dojo supports WAI-ARIA to improve the accessibility of this and many other widgets, which is commendable, but that extra markup is only generated when the Dojo methods are run. If JavaScript is turned off in his example, no form control is available whatsoever.

What I’d prefer to see is something like this:

<select class="dojo-form-horizontalSlider"
        name="horizontal1"
        showButtons="false"
        intermediateChanges="true"
        id="slider1">
  <option>0</option>
  <option>5</option>
  <option selected="selected">10</option>
  ...
  <option>100</option>
</select>

There’s nothing that could keep Dojo from parsing that bit of XHTML and gleaning from it what it needs to make the slider. And now, when Dojo doesn’t run, there is a degradable interface for the user to adjust the setting. Sure, it may not be nearly as nice, but at least it works. Plus, it allows Dojo to be added as a progressive enhancement, which is what it should be.

And to make this valid syntax, the Dojo team just needs to augment the XHTML 1.0 Strict DTD like this to include the custom attributes:

<!ENTITY % Boolean
  "(true | false)"
  >
...
<!-- attributes for Dojo Toolkit
  showButtons           display buttons (boolean)
  intermediateChanges   display intermediate steps (boolean)
-->
<!ENTITY % dojo-attrs
  "showButtons          %Boolean    #IMPLIED
   intermediateChanges  %Boolean    #IMPLIED"
  >
...
<!ATTLIST select
  %attrs;
  name        CDATA          #REQUIRED
  size        %Number;       #IMPLIED
  multiple    (multiple)     #IMPLIED
  disabled    (disabled)     #IMPLIED
  tabindex    %Number;       #IMPLIED
  onfocus     %Script;       #IMPLIED
  onblur      %Script;       #IMPLIED
  onchange    %Script;       #IMPLIED
  %dojo-attrs;
  >

Sure, it takes a little extra work, but at least it gives users of the Dojo Toolkit the ability to validate their documents, which will help reduce potential CSS and JavaScript conflicts and errors (just one of the many benefits of web standards). Beyond that, it takes advantage of the extensibility of the language to facilitate innovation, and isn’t innovation what we all really want to see?

Over the last two years, I’ve been wishing for just one thing in CSS: rotation. There’s been some discussion about it on the W3C lists, etc. but no one has made a solid pitch for it yet. Inspired a bit by Andy’s modest column-rule-image proposal, I drafted a spec for CSS 3 Rotation [PDF] back in February. I showed it to a few folks at Web Directions North and got some good feedback.

Out of those discussions, I also realized we really needed a text-wrapping property in CSS 3, so I also drafted a spec for CSS 3 Polygonal Margins [PDF]. The idea is based on the polygons we used for image maps back in the day and would allow complete control over how text wraps around an element.

Anyway, I’ve sat on these for a while and I figured now was as good a time as any to unveil them to the world and solicit your feedback. So what do you think? Could you use this sort of control in your everyday CSS work? How would you want to see it work? Do you think the plans I’ve outlined offer enough flexibility?

I just wrapped my presentation at WebVisions and have posted the slides for my talk, titled “Learning to Love Forms,” up on SlideShare. I have also embedded them below (though the formatting is a bit off on some of the longer sidebars).

I’d like to thank everyone who attended and especially those who asked the challenging questions. Hopefully this was a good start to my campaign for getting people to embrace forms instead of running from them.

For those of you who couldn’t attend, enjoy the slides. I will post the audio for the session as soon as it’s available.