@mediaAjax day 1.2: But I'm a bloody designer!

The second talk on the 1st day of @mediAjax was an entertaining talk from Mike Stenhouse about the upskilling necessary to be a good designer in a modern web development team and how Ajax makes it even more-so: Ajax means you're designing the user experience and need to know how that's going to interact with the server, which means you need to know some JavaScript, front-end and back-end code etc. He talked about experience using Agile and "scrum" development methodologies, pair development, which differs from "pair programming" in that the designer and developer work together on the design or the code, and the insights that enables. The most interesting bit from my pov was how neatly this ties-in with my interests in combining our "Web Development" field with Design (from a different Faculty) ... web designers and web developers are not such separate jobs these days.

@mediaAjax day 1.1: The State of Ajax

The State of Ajax

@mediaAjax opened with a fascinating comparison with the current state of Ajax wrt the state in 2006 according to Ajaxian (where the authors wanted better/faster JavaScript, offline support, framework consolidation, tools inc. debugging: Speed increases in Firefox and Safari were contrasted with no change from IE, and the tantalising suggestion of a JIT compiler from Adobe from Flash 9 (Tamarin?) and Screaming Monkey (a Mozilla plugin for IE?!) bears further investigation (and drooling...) JavaScript 2 (optional typing, object model, namespaces, packages etc) is the subject of a talk tomorrow but the Ajaxian guys described two political camps -- those who want improvement and change, and those who want stability. Offline JS? Google Gears and Adobe Air. Graphics? <canvas> and SVG are slow but Firefox and Opera have hints of OpenGL acceleration in the pipeline. As for frameworks (Dojo, YUI, Prototype, script.aculo.us, JQuery, Mochikit, ExtJS, GWT, DWR, …), despite Prototype and JQuery moving together the guys' recommendation was throw a dart at the wall to choose between them ;-) Tools? Firebug (yay!), IE dev. toolbar, Safari DOM Inspector.

Referring-to Ran Aroussi's Time Breakdown of Modern Web Design got a deserved LOL so I'm copying it here:

Then they talked about a few of the categories, mentioned WHATWG and HTML5 (where apparently Ian Hickson, also at Google, leveraged the Google search index to look for common class names etc -- this is potentially relevant to a PhD project I'm involved in supervising.) Interaction lag was mentioned (quoting Nielsen: 0.1s delay is noticeable, 1s interrupts workflow, longer wait is nasty) and the fact that Ajax is constrained by browsers' single thread model, which causes UI lag if compute-intensive/slow tasks are running (and Ajax encourages background tasks...) Google Gears adds "worker pool" threads to solve this and Caja for security.

Ajax on the desktop? Adobe AIR, Joyent Slingshot (for Rails), Mozilla Prism.

They finished by describing an encouraging trend, quoting Apple's British chief designer that the days of "functional", just-working app's is over, JS/web app's have matured so that users expect "sexy" design, quoting Donald Norman (author of Emotional Design): Attractive things work better.

Busy, busy, busy...

<Lame!>The usual excuses about being too busy etc</Lame!> here's a quickie for what I've been doing recently:

• Spent the summer supervising a visiting French student, helping him to learn PHP and MySQL programming (I over-estimated what he knew before he arrived, so the project he was to work on proved very challenging ... still, it's 75% complete & working)
• Been to an excellent conference in Southampton from the HEA ICS subject centre
• Joined a project at work to use technology in the classroom for rapid feedback -- used "ppvote" technology once (writing questions is hard!)
• Done some "cat-herding" work with also-too-busy colleagues with widely-varying opinions on the age-old question: Why do some students find introductory programming modules so hard? Arriving at some consensus actions is hard!
• Written two brief articles for our University newsletters: one on computer-assisted assessment and how to tell if it's working, the other on a speech recognition project that I and two colleagues have a PhD student working on (dictating Maths!)
• Did some L&T/feedback work with some guys from an Indian University with which we have a collaborative agreement
• Presented L&T technologies to some visitors from Chile
• Started to teach JavaScript again -- this year the group assignment is to do Minesweeper in JavaScript -- fun!

Moving home...

Apologies: I'm moving physical house tomorrow which also entails a move of vitual home space so housekeeping-wise I'll finally have to get a proper web host ... this may take some time! Until then, au revoir...

Update 20/Aug/2007: House-move has happened and I'll be sticking with Blogspot for a while...

POSH (pointlessly oversimplifying semantic HTML)

I'm afraid I totally agree with this post: We don't need an acronym to "sell" semantic HTML (i.e. using HTML tags to represent the information they were designed for and/or that current best practice says they should be used for) ... but I have no aspirations to be a web-rock-star, so no worries!

When teaching feels worthwhile

It's stories like this that make this job worthwhile...

More MySQL tips

Nice list of yet more MySQL tips here courtesy of Fabulous Entertainment (entertaining indeed!) who cites a talk on Google Video by Jay Pipes which I must look at...

Scrolling and the page fold: data!

Nice data illustrating users' scrolling behaviour from ClickTale on their blog. It helps to dispel the myth that users don't scroll (but Nielsen himself reported this in his 1997 Changes in Web Usability Since 1994). I love the histograms -- it's great to see data (plus they look like meteorological Talagrand diagrams, aka rank histograms, which I used to work on!) Interesting... plus the software uses JavaScript (it's client-side after all).

Firefox grunges RSS feed display

Just trying to adapt an RSS feed with an XSLT stylesheet: Works fine in IE6 :-) but lo! Firefox ignores the XSLT and renders the feed itself :-(

Seems I'm not the only one (but at least a year behind the rest!): Bugzilla #338621 includes the following suggestion (and a lot of discussion!)

The emerging workaround for this problem (which isn't new to us, since we're using the same heuristic that IE7 betas have been using for months) is to put in a comment ranting about the evils of sniffing web content and overriding the desires of web developers which is long enough to move "<rss" or "<feed" out of the first 512 bytes, since that's all we sniff.

There's no way we can tell the difference between XSLT intended to style a feed into something that's not a feed, like yours, and XSLT intended to just keep people with earlier browsers from having to look at raw XML, so I think this is WONTFIX. With more than 99% of the feeds with stylesheets just trying to do what we're doing, but without the knowledge of what aggregators the user actually uses and without the chrome privileges to subscribe them, not using our transformation on feeds that have a stylesheet would just make for a worse and less consistent experience for our users.

BTW, pasting that text into a comment in the XSLT after the XML prolog works ;-)

I'm going to @mediaAjax

There are times when I love working in the University sector: we benefit from flexible attitudes to working and CPD (sometimes! Depends on management, budgets etc.)

Today I got my ticket for @media Ajax November 19th — 20th, 2007 at The Church House Conference Centre, in Westminster, London SW1P 3NZ, UK.]: The @media Ajax conference brings together some of the leading figures in the field to explain how to best exploit this "magic", from concept and design through to the underlying code. — sounds great! … now just gotta get my classes covered on those days!