A few articles worth reading: Kathy Sierra fears the ease-of-use police. Though they mean well, they often destroy the usefulness of websites and software by dumbing down the product:

Is our heart in the right place but our execution flawed when we neuter a product in the name of newbie-friendliness? In the push to make programs “so simple even your [mom/kid/dog] could use it”, there are a lot of dumb products out there. Or rather, dumbed-down products. It’s like we’re throwing the power baby out with the poor UI bathwater. But if we want passionate users, ease-of-use should NOT be the Big Design Goal. Good usability is the enabler for what we (users) really want–more superpowers.

The image she uses to illustrate her point is perfect:

PPK, who writes Quirksmode, (which is indispensable to Javascript coders) say interesting things in his panel proposal for SxSW:

The web developers’ strong points are good knowledge of accessibility, HTML and CSS, as well as immersion in the ideas of the CSS revolution. Their weak points are sloppy spaghetti-coding and a general lack of knowledge about application design.

The application developers’ strong points are strict coding practices and lots of knowledge about application design. Their weak points are a total disinterest in accessibility and sloppy HTML coding practices.

As is obvious from the preceding, both groups can learn a lot from the other. Unfortunately I don’t really see any knowledge sharing being practiced on a large scale.

Roger Johansson argues that web standards still matter:

If you really think that the majority of people in the Web business have fully embraced Web standards, accessibility, and usability, and strive to follow best practices in general in their work, I’d like to know what planet you’re living on. On Planet Earth, standards-aware Web designers and developers are still a tiny minority of the people working in the Web business. Tiny. We may be vocal, and we may be the ones writing articles and books, but we are seriously outnumbered. I encourage anyone who thinks we do not need yet another article or book on Web standards, CSS, accessibility, graceful degradation, progressive enhancement, or anything else related to best practices, to take a quick look around you.

I’d add, the best thing about the web is that anyone can be a publisher and the worst thing about the web is that anyone can be a publisher. Given the open nature of the web, it’s likely that the majority of all content, now and always, will be created by amatuers. Unless we want to see the web dissolve into a balkanized heap of incompatible technologies, educating the public about standards needs to be an ongoing project by all concerned with the health of the web.

In other news…

It is difficult not to be impressed of the amount of innovation currently being done by the Ruby community and, especially, the community around Rails. David Heinemeier Hansson (the inventor of Rails) writes about the just completed RailsConf Europe. Many impressive new projects were showcased at this conference:

HAML gave us a great take on how views can also be done. It looks a little cryptic at first, but don’t let that shake you off. Once you internalize the meaning of %, #, and . it should be all good (and you already know most just from CSS). I’m not sure it’s my flavor, but I love the willingness to think different…

Honorable mention also goes out to Unobtrusive Javascript for Rails (UJS). By far the most professionally produced plugin I’ve seen yet. The guys behind it has strong opinions and plenty of passion. It’s thrilling to see them being able to express it all with Rails without necessarily needing any kind of official support or blessing. This is one to watch for sure.

JRuby also impressed me. It’s hard not to be in slight awe of seeing Rails run at a fast clip on top of Java and making snappy calls to EJBs. It’s one of those things were I count my lucky stars that I won’t ever need, but it’s incredibly cool for those who happen to be saddled with a significant Java investment. Props to Charles Nutter and crew for making such rapid progress and to Sun for seeing the potential.

From my own backyard, Jamis Buck knocked my socks off with Capistrano Shell. What I wouldn’t have given to have had that feature available during the initial setup of the new 37signals cluster.

Joshua Porter talks about sites that look ugly but please their customers. He argues that design is how something works, not how it looks:

The MySpace Problem is when hugely successful web sites succeed while looking ugly. They work, but they don’t look very good. They look as if they were created by an engineer, not a trained visual designer. The mere existence of sites like MySpace goes against some of our more refined visual sensibilities. The most difficult part of the MySpace problem is that, despite what designers might think about it, and how they might have made it look, MySpace is actually a well-designed website. Who could argue with this? MySpace has grown faster than any site in the history of the Web, and in two short years garners nearly as much traffic as Yahoo! If that growth and popularity isn’t a metric of good design, then what is?

Jason Santa Maria argues strongly that sites that satisfy large numbers of people should be considered well-designed, even if the look ugly to a trained eye:

What if you had an ATM card that didn’t work in any ATM machines, but was the most beautifully designed ATM card ever? It would fail at its message and function. It’s possible to fail at your design’s intended purpose, in any medium.

Craigslist is often cited as a prime example for the ugly/undesigned site success story. Guess what, that’s because you can’t see past the visuals. Does that mean it fails or is poorly designed? Well, no, just one piece of the puzzle is missing. Fortunately for Craiglist, the other pieces are so strong that they are able to overcome it. Craigslist succeeds despite its graphic design. This is hardly a revelation. How many poorly designed sites litter the internet? How many sites fail due to their lack of design? Craigslist is an anomaly, but hardly par for the course.

Shelley Powers takes issue with Frontforge regarding their guidelines for using AJAX. They’ve ten rules which, says Powers, all sound good until you understand what the rule is really saying:

If I create a slidehow using Ajax, according to this list I must make sure that each slide is reflected in the history and accessible via the browser back button, as well as being bookmarkable. However, one of the advantages of slideshows is that I can go through a set of photos and then hit the back button once to leave the page and return to where I started. There is no contract with the users that history or back button or any such is ‘required’ in order for a web application to be successful. That’s all made up. What is required is that one understands how people might use the application and then respond accordingly. So, for the slideshow, rather than try to force behavior into the browser for it to manage an arbitrarily constructed ‘history’, what one needs to do is understand what the users might want.

By the way, Shelley Powers’s new book on Javascript is due out next week.

Rodger Cadenhead takes issue with the gender bias of the organizers of the upcoming Java conference, the Spring Experience (Dec. 7-10 in Hollywood, Fl). They’ve 38 speakers listed, all men. Cadenhead points out that, with just a few minutes of searching online, he was able to come up with a list of ten women who are more than qualified to speak at such a conference:

* Portia Tung is a committer on the Spring Framework project team and an instructor at Core Spring bootcamps.

* Dr. Helen Hawkins is a committer on the AspectJ Development Tools project and a member of IBM’s aspect-oriented software development team.

* Julie Waterhouse, another committer on AspectJ Development Tools, spoke at the Aspect-Oriented Software Development conference last year.

* Deborah Hartmann is the agile community editor for the enterprise IT portal InfoQ and a speaker at Agile2006.

* Dr. Rebecca Parsons, a speaker at several NoFluffJustStuff events, is a ThoughtWorks executive and comp-sci professor specializing in enterprise architecture.

* Kathy Sierra is the author of Head First EJB and Head First Java and a former master trainer at Sun.

* Fabiane Bizinella Nardon, a health care company’s CTO and a member of Java Champions, gives frequent speeches on enterprise Java development.

* C++ and Java instructor Angelika Langer is the “Effective Java” columnist for Java Spektrum and a speaker at numerous Java-related conferences.

* Wendy Smoak is a committer on the Apache Struts, Shale and MyFaces projects and a member of the Apache Software Foundation.

* Heather VanCura, a speaker at Europe’s JavaPolis conference in 2005, is the marketing manager of the Java Community Process

Matt of 37 Signals suggests that companies that try to fake confidence, using tools such as specs and processes, set themselves up for a world of pain (Jason makes a similar point when he says “avoid appeasement documents”):

Some companies try to manufacture confidence. They use specs, documents, and process as things to lean on. These crutches give them a false confidence that nothing will go terribly wrong. The problem is when you build confidence with documents and all that, you are nailing yourself down to assumptions that are probably wrong (assumptions always seem to fall by the wayside once things get real). Yeah, you may feel better that you have a recipe written down. But if it’s a recipe for failure, what’s the point?

Still, some people don’t get it when we argue “don’t worry about all these specs and documents� and instead “dive in and build stuff.� Maybe they’re confused because there’s something implied, but not usually overtly stated, in these ideas: confidence. You have to start with confidence in your own people. We believe in the ability of our team members. We believe they are smart. We believe they can get it done without handholding. We believe they will design effective UIs, write efficient code, author clear copy, and communicate well with each other.

Back In Skinny Jeans is a blog that focuses on fashion and celebrity, yet the author decided to explain RSS to her readers and, judging from the reaction, here is one article that managed to explain RSS in terms anyone could understand:

Suppose you have 50 sites and blogs that you like to visit regularly. Going to visit each website and blog everyday could take you hours. With RSS, you can “subscribe� to a website or blog, and get “fed� all the new headlines from all of these 50 sites and blogs in one list, and see what’s going on in minutes instead of hours. What a time saver! That one place where your RSS list is created is called an RSS Reader, and it gathers all the headlines from all the websites and blogs you have subscribed to. In a moment, I will describe how to get an RSS Reader.

Cameron Moll suggests it is time to stop developing for 800 by 600 screens and time to start developing for 1024 by n:

Let’s face it: The jump from developing for 800×600 to 1024×n is inevitable; not only inevitable, but just around the corner, too. Many of you are considering the jump. Some of you have already leaped. I suspect that some time in 2007 most of us will knock out comps optimized for 1024px resolution rather than 800px if we’re not doing so already. But perhaps just as important as when it will happen is how: What’s the proper width for a layout optimized for 1024?

Miss Rogue would like to know why companies want to release a buggy product that will leave a bad impression:

No amount of money, pressure, cleverness, ‘viralness’, advertising, MySpace pandering, p.r., community building, or ’story’ telling, etc. can save a crappy product… I have gone into many clients and employers to find them ‘chomping at the bit’ to grow the buzz and get adoption while their products are buggy, slow, crashy, broken, etc. Why would you want to spread something that is going to leave a bad impression? All of a sudden, word of mouth becomes extremely damaging. Why not gather a group of focused and understanding early adopters who are willing to work with you to improve what you are building, THEN when it is kickass, unleash it and put a bit of pressure on.

Leon Spencer launches a humorous attack on Tim Bray in which, among other things, makes clear how clean a language Ruby can be for templates:

From here, he rapidly descends into whining like a Java programmer. He writes “To some degree, all are heavily informed by the special case of generating HTML; and maybe they’re OK for that. But if you want to go further and generate XML, they’re all pointing in the same, wrong, direction.� The only person who is in the wrong direction, though, is him. He goes on to yell the following (paraphrased to protect my beloved readers from his awful whining):

YOU CANT USE A METHOD TO MAKE A TAG BECAUSE TAGS CAN HAVE DOTS AND HYPHENS AND UMLAUTS AND KAWAII SMILEY FACES LISTEN TO ME I KNOW EVERYTHING BECAUSE I PERSONALLY AM THE DOT IN DOT COM

Yes, it literally is that bad. I mean, what kind of a communist uses umlauts and accents in XML? A commuterrorist that’s who. Besides which, as he admits: “Yes, Ruby does allow you to have methods with funky names, but you have to do extra work to use them.� In other words: he’s going to do extra work so he doesn’t have to do extra work, the kind of extra work that someone else already did for him, so that he can be a little commuterrorist with his fancy doppelesses and god help us all, graves, in his goddamn XML.

Are teens being driven to use MySpace by mall owners who don’t like them loitering? Danah Boyd suggests that the more teenagers are confined from public spaces, the more they need MySpace:

Adults often worry about the amount of time that youth spend online, arguing that the digital does not replace the physical. Most teens would agree.

It is not the technology that encourages youth to spend time online – it’s the lack of mobility and access to youth space where they can hang out uninterrupted…

Adult public spaces are typically controlled spaces for teens. Their public space is where peers gather en masse; this is where presentation of self really matters. It may be viewable to adults, but it is really peers that matter.

Teens have increasingly less access to public space. Classic 1950s hang out locations like the roller rink and burger joint are disappearing while malls and 7/11s are banning teens unaccompanied by parents. Hanging out around the neighborhood or in the woods has been deemed unsafe for fear of predators, drug dealers and abductors. Teens who go home after school while their parents are still working are expected to stay home and teens are mostly allowed to only gather at friends’ homes when their parents are present.

Additionally, structured activities in controlled spaces are on the rise. After school activities, sports, and jobs are typical across all socio-economic classes and many teens are in controlled spaces from dawn till dusk. They are running ragged without any time to simply chill amongst friends.

By going virtual, digital technologies allow youth to (re)create private and public youth space while physically in controlled spaces. IM serves as a private space while MySpace provide a public component. Online, youth can build the environments that support youth socialization.