For some years, I have harboured a quiet obsession for Evert Bloemsma. Given the Dutch name, you would naturally assume he is a type designer, and he is – or was, since he died in 2005. He designed some rich and original typefaces, including Cocon, which worked bizarrely well in an early online-captioning trial, and Balance, which sits in an aristocracy of two with Antique Olive as typefaces that are weighted more at the top than the bottom.

I’ve been thinking more about this in the wake of the Peter Saville podcast. After much rumination, I have finally come to understand his tone of voice in that recording. It is a voice like Richard E. Grant’s in The Player, one that is disillusioned and disabused of all dreams and aspirations. A man who, from the word go, achieved personal expression by illustrating other bands’ concert posters and album covers eventually gives in and admits that he and other designers were always in the thrall of clients all along.

Saville’s was one of the few pre-Web examples of true personal work in graphic design. But according to his revisionism masquerading as the voice of experience, setting aside for the moment that the actual voice is riven with fear, impatience, and bitterness, if you’re trying to communicate on your own then you aren’t a graphic designer anymore. You’re a writer or a philosopher or something else. And if you’re an especially pathetic sort, you will fritter away your time with kids’ stuff like “alphabets.” (And the sole practicing ginger homosexualist Web designer will back you up.)

Evert Bloemsma showed that you could write a whole song in a typeface. I don’t think people were even remotely close to understanding just how advanced his designs were when Bloemsma, a health buff, keeled over from a heart attack. I know this may end up mouldering on my pile of semi-completed, semi-abandoned projects, but I am looking for help in locating original materials about Bloemsma. The big problem is that a lot of them will be in Dutch; I am appealing especially to my many Dutch-speaking readers for help in this regard.

To start off with, does anyone know who is taking care of his estate? And why his Web site isn’t still up? That sort of ghostly remnant should carry on indefinitely after death, should it not?

From time to time when viewed in Lynx (which I use every day and is flatly the secret to finding things quickly), Google presents the following two buttons after the search textarea:

[16]I’m Feeling Lucky [17]Advanced Search

There is no actual Google Search button. It is impossible to use Google under this scenario, as I do not feel lucky or wish to use advanced search. I have to manually go to another site, like Google.IE.

And because Google has more money than God and believes it can do no wrong, there is no way to report this error to them. And as with accessibility, they simply would not care.

Doing good things with concrete here. (I don’t think the lower portion is granite.)

I’d been trying to find Celia Farber’s book Serious Adverse Events: An Uncensored History of AIDS ever since it came out. My interest in such a book does not mean anything objectively. This Ain’t didn’t have it, then they did, but only in the $60 library edition. Little Sister’s had four copies listed in their database, but four people scoured the store (a small and unprepossessing shop) and couldn’t find it. There was exactly one copy at the Broadway and Granville Chapters, which I snagged. In retrospect, I should have just Amazoned it.

I read it while waiting for and while riding on the plane home. This is a book with four versions and four ISBNs that uses that atrocious, spindly, overnarrow Adobe Garamond (no doubt because it came free with Photoshop), and with no ligatures – a serious impediment to reading, especially in the fi case. The real problem was the prevalence of typing and spelling errors on every second page, up to and including an inability to write “saliva” correctly ever (“salvia”). You make four versions of this? And your whole point is that the science behind HIV causing AIDS is inaccurate? At least accurately render your claims.

I distinctly recall standing at the dismal corner of Park and Pine in Montreal circa 1989 effectively waiting in a receiving line to talk to Celia Farber. She made sure to chat up everyone but me, going so far as to stand there silently if it was the only other option. She’s an unsympathetic character, but that doesn’t mean anything objectively, I suppose.

Here I am at the Broadway stop of Vancouver’s SkyTrain, photographing an aberrant sign that uses Meta instead of the unaccountable and perplexing Plantin (also seen at Heathrow Airport, the obvious inspiration).

Just as I lifted my camera, four cops walked by, one of whom stared right at me, as seen here. I took my shot and, with nerves of steel, double-checked it on the LCD. I pocketed my camera and waited for the train.

Try this in Toronto and you get to endure a talking-to by Grandpa Moscoe.

Sortie nocturne pour les gars, 2007.02.08:

Matt, Will, Pete (“Peter, Paul & Microsoft” [cf.])

One addressed and attended Web Directions North 2007, a successful international conference that, as a Canada-Australia coproduction, had nothing to do with Americans. (One recalls an interview with Australia’s ambassador to Canada, who chose his posting deliberately and viewed a statement of “I represent Canada, Australia, and New Zealand” as bearing considerable moral authority.) My old friends and supporters John Allsopp and Maxine Sherrin, who treated me to what I now understand to be the voyage of my life to Sydney in 2004 (Iceland is a close second), adopted Dave Shea and Derek Featherstone as business partners and branched out the Web Essentials Directions “experience” to Canada.

I flew WestJet uneventfully, refused to fret about my closing-keynote position but was very anxious for Wednesday at 1600 hours to roll around, and re-met all my old friends. I also met a wide range of new supporters, some of whom were visibly humbled to meet me. I have no capacity to react to that degree of respect.

We dug around on the stage at the Renaissance Harbourside Hotel (decorated in the “klassy” Dynasty model of brass, glossy stone, and carpets everywhere) and found a perfect modernist divan, in tufted white leather, sitting unused. We decided to drag it onstage and set-dress a bit to create a Fireside Chat with Joe Clark (later renamed a wireside chat). Everything onstage matched the furniture, even me, and some people couldn’t even see me due to the angles, and, even after doing a VU check, some people couldn’t hear me, but it went off like a charm.

My topic was accessibility in the design process, and I used as an example a redesign of the TTC Web site. Yes, I know I have maintained that we’re doing too much free work for this billion-dollar corporation, but the fact is I’ve been outvoted. And, after attending Transit Camp, I can’t very well be a little bit pregnant. I will be assembling my speaking notes shortly, and the recording will eventually be podcast. I am told that I brought down the house.

Now it is time to mention a regret, and I always have some. I planned for ages a little gag in which I would say that I promised myself this conference would be the first in recent memory at which I did not utter an expletive, and, I would add as I clicked to a slide reading FUCK YEAH, “I intend to hold to that.” But I blew it, and got so upset I muttered “For fuck sakes!” into the recording. Now you know why I swear: I’m a perfectionist who often lets himself down.

Something else planned for weeks was a Boys’ Night Out. As I have explained before, it is fine to work in this industry, but it does get a bit tiring to be the only X in the village, whatever the value of X might be. (Usually “gay.”) So, after decades of working for other people’s rights and equality generally (Cf. disability, homosexualism, AIDS, women in engineering, among others), the question I asked myself was: Why the hell do I have to go to all the straight people’s parties and why can’t I throw one myself?

So I would. The plan was to announce a BOYS’ NIGHT OUT (SORTIE NOCTURNE pour les GARS), of especial interest to our diverse LGBTTQQI2S* communities. “No girls, no trannies. Sorry, kids.” We were to meet in the hotel lobby at 2200 hours. But that night was the Microsoft-sponsored dinner, MCed by the IE7 product manager for developers, Pete LePage, who had confidentially informed me that he’d probably be coming along. Naturally I saved a seat for him at the dinner, where I became BFFs with this adorable little scamp. We didn’t leave the place till 2345. So much for that.

I planned to try again the next night and even set up a special Twitter so people could track our progress. I made an announcement just before the closing of the conference (another nice touch from the organizers, who do rather indulge me). I was pretty much stalked all afternoon at breaks by a woman who told me that I might want to consider the reactions of politically-aware feminists if I make an announcement like that sometime in the future; she had to ask around to figure out what I meant. Well, exactly! It was planned from the start to be an announcement that would make sense only if you were the kind of guy who would want to come along. Bafflement means you aren’t in the target market. Too subtle? Well, isn’t that a refreshing change? I also told her I was quite willing to take the risk of offending people. (And didn’t she notice I dedicated the entire presentation to a womynz? The world does not revolve around politically-aware feminists and their sensibilities.)

I took a disco-nap and later sat, as if desultorily, among discarded peanut shells at the Pumpjack (official orthography: PumpJack). But lo and behold, my adorable-scamp friend, his two colleagues from Microsoft, and a rather curious married man from another Canadian province all toddled in. While our delightful discourse is, by agreement, unbloggable, the photos aren’t. It was reminiscent of my night out with Jonno, the Brad, Josh, and a faghag we couldn’t get rid of in Austin in ’05. (Also reminiscent was the music – in both places, super hits played in apparent alphabetical order. It left me with an earworm for “Queen of Hearts.”) We closed the place, and the adorable scamp and I left the other three to their own devices while we retired individually.

Mission accomplished. Expect more of this sort of thing at future conferences, should there be any beyond @media 2007. Also be forewarned that the concept of a Boys’ Night Out in San Francisco will be like a kid in a candy store, so mark your calendars. And – sorry again, kids – no girls, no trannies.

Dave Shea opened Web Directions North at 0902 hours. (Liveblogging joins partway through.)

[After the Web got started in earnest, it seemed that commercial interests would take over.] Those of us left? Well, we were interested in the Web for its own sake. We actually spent time looking at those specifications that the W3C had introduced years earlier to the complete apathy of everyone else working at the time. We were interested in doing things right. This has all come about with a certain amount of inevitability, really; but in 2004, the idea of running a Web conference focussing on Web standards and accessibility – that wasn’t something that anyone expected. John and Maxine helped begin a conference in Sydney in 2004. I was thrilled to go down and deliver the keynote. Derek Featherstone delivered the keynote in 2005. Other conferences have sprung up and blossomed. Last year, there was some debate in Canada: Why don’t we have something happening here? Let me tell you, if you have the right people reading your blog posts, things happen. And here we are.

We’ve brought in speakers from five different countries. The sessions involve some never-before-seen issues.

Pete LePage and Angela Baxley Microsoft took the stage at 0908 to introduce Molly Holzschlag. If you lined her books up from here to the back of the room, you might actually make it: She’s got 30 books published, and she’s all about Web standards. (Asks Molly how long she’s been doing “Web stuff”: Since 1993.) Molly’s been out there advocating Web standards, teaching people about cool Web design/Web technique stuff, working with browser vendors like Microsoft and Firefox and Opera so we all do the same thing and don’t cause any headaches. I’m really excited she’s going to do a presentation today about breaking Web standards and crimes against Web standards.

Molly: Have you let people know what your job actually is?

Pete: I’m the product manager for Internet Explorer [for developers]. If you want to come with Nerf bats, we’ll take it for IE6. We’re not gonna take it for IE7, but if you want to Nerf-bat us for IE6…. (Angela works on Expression Studio.)

Molly Holzschlag walked onstage at 0910. “Crimes against Web standards: Web wrongs in the information age.”

Who’s been committing crimes against Web standards since 1993? 1997? 2000? more recently? (Decreasing numbers of hands.) How many people here have never built a table-based layout ever? (Seven.) A page with frames? (“Lot more.”) How many people know when they look at a DOCTYPE what they’re looking at? (Many.)

Today is intended to be light-hearted. I intend to look at my own code crimes, then at other crimes against Web standards, then look at each other’s crimes and let you judge just how criminal you are.

I began in 1993. That means when I was working with HTML or whatever the hell it was at that point – this SGML tag stuff – what was different about the Web? Man: “Pixels.” Can anybody tell me what that means? Other man: “Less of them?” No, it was text-based. There was no such thing as a graphical user interface for the Web in public hands. It was never intended to be that way, and we as people who are working in the Web are battling that.

Crimes: “In search of space.” This is Mick Garrison, my Web master; we committed a lot of crimes together. (Shows <ul><li><p><li><p>.) But this validates. The validator does not know it is presentational.

(Shows hyperlinks as navigation.) What would we do today to make this a little more sensible? Place it in an list. OK, very good. Would we use those ps? No; we’d put those in list items. (Ends in <p><p>, which would collapse into a single p.)

(Shows example with a dozen or more brs.) What’s it for? To make the user scroll? Clearing the image? Vertical alignment? All of you were correct. If I were to tell you this is one table cell next to another table cell, not nested tables, can you describe what would result? Lining up text with image. But what are all those breaks for? One table, two cells (with one column having two sidebar photos, the other a column of text with one photo). You can see how easy that would be to do in CSS. And for a site that was designed in 1995–1996, not too shabby. But there really was no other way. What would you have done if this were 1997? Spacer GIFs. But it still looks great, and, ironically enough, because of its lightweight table, it is actually accessible and readable – and valid.

(Runs video from Eric Meyer trying to sound like a mafioso, which worked as well as fellow ginger David Caruso’s efforts to sound like a cop. But I digress.)

“In search of WYSIWYG.” (Shows snippet of code from GoLive.) A cool table? usegridx? Anybody know what it’s there for? Man: “GoLive.” Did you say that? “I was the product manager. And you know what? My tables were cool.” Contributing to our bad behaviour – you terrible criminal, you! That was all used for the layout grid. And there were ways to clean this up, to be fair.

(Shows other snippet.) It’s not a broken DOCTYPE It’s HTML 2 from the IETF. See? We have a history. This is FrontPage 1.1 with font.

(Shows third snippet, with leftmargin, topmargin.) Dreamweaver.

(Shows video from Neil C. Ford. “The client wanted it quick and I was up against a deadline. Nested tables? They’re not really that bad, are they? Those plus a few spaces kind of made it easy. Of course, converting all the text to graphics made it even easier. It works. I got paid. Maintenance might be a problem. So we won’t worry about it. Apparently there’s some problem with accessibility or something. I could get to the site fine, so it looks perfectly accessible to me. I can’t see what the fuss is about. People are making me out to be some kind of villain. I’m the villain? Nah, can’t be. I’m not the person who told the guys using Outlook to use Word, now, am I?”)

“Framed.” “To view our framed version, download Netscape 2.” (Shows page with static navbar and scrolling body copy.) Shows old site from MSN, which was IE-only at the time. Shows snippet to hide the frame. “So it would break in Netscape?” I ask. No, so it wouldn’t break in Netscape. (Shows purple-and-white-on black frames site for the Disabilities Forum.) Does anybody have a desire to still work with frames? Andy Clarke: “I miss them so much!” Imagine what a designer like Andy could do with frames. Andy: “Imagine what I did with frames!”

(Shows Lynx.) Many, many purists will tell you that this is the biggest crime against Web standards. What is it? (Shows Mosaic logo.) You may remember the beautiful background colour we were forced to look at – grey. What is with the re-emergence of grey? (Shows another Meyer video. “I think the therapy’s going well. I realize the error of my ways.” Pretends to be doing Web tech support. “You… want to prevent users from changing the text size?”)

(Shows Tim Berners-Lee quote: “Anyone who slaps a ‘this page is best viewed with Browser X’ label on a Web page appears to be yearning for the bad old days.”) (Shows IE logo stomping a Doc Marten on a Netscape logo.) (Shows iCab, Camino, Safari, Opera, Firefox logos, does show of hands.) Who’s using [each] as their primary browser? (I put up my hand for Opera, as do one or two others.)

But then came five lonely years. (Runs recording from Bill Gates.) Slide: Box-model hack, DOCTYPE switch. Gates saying we’ve done the mea culpa, and yes, we should have kept the browser innovation at a continuous curve.

(Shows * html.) Anybody explain why this is so wrong? Man: “HTML has no parent.” When it came to do IE7, this fix had to be fixed; this is a bug.

(Shows a faux magazine cover: Dean Edwards.) Dean took just about every IE6 bug or faulty or problematic issue and, using IE’s own JScript, created a library that repaired everything in IE6. That’s a little message, I think, at the very least that it could be done.

(Shows Web Standards Project logo.) We sat down with representatives from Microsoft and began to talk about the pain and the suffering and the woe we had felt from Microsoft. And out of that has grown many, many positive things, including IE7. (Asks for show of hands of browser vendors in the audience.)

I’d like to do something terrible for a journalist and take people’s quotes out of context. He said “mea culpa.” But now we have progress, and I want everyone to give a round of applause to everyone who worked so very hard to get it that way. A lot of people feel that the4y should not have to be playing the part of cop when it comes to what browser developers are doing. But if we want it, we have to fight for it. Ands that’s how it’s been all along. So until that paradigm shifts….

Some lessons:

1. Presentational hacks appeared first.
2. Table layouts were likely the fault of WYSIWYG software.
3. Just because it’s in a spec doesn’t mean it’s good. [(Asks how many W3C people are here. Four.) Frames are problematic.]
4. Waiting years for browser upgrades sucks. Let’s make sure that never happens again.
5. Forgiveness is a virtue that shall be rewarded.

(Ends 0943.)

Asks for people from the 1993 days to confess markup sins. Scott Fedgett is called to stand up. Scott: I wrote an article on table-based layout well before there were WYSIWYG layouts. What are you doing today to make up for your crimes? I only use CSS and valid markup; I am preaching the gospel. So what made this change for you? Ostracism from my peers? And the company you work for? I’m fighting the good fight from within (at Adobe Dreamweaver). We’re working hard to absolve ourselves from some of the guilt that Molly has forced on us. Molly: And Dreamweaver has come a long way.

David Storey, Opera: Actually, I’m trying to fix everybody else’s crimes at the moment. (When a site doesn’t work in Opera, he goes around trying to fix it.) Is it just opening the Web for Opera? When we give suggestions for fixes, we make sure it works in all browsers.

Markus: I confess! When I did my Ph.D. work, they loved table-based layouts. When I joined Microsoft in 1996, the same. Two years ago we started work on IE7. It is one of the highlights of my life that it’s all coming together here.

Dave Orchard, W3C. Molly: What do you think the W3C might have to do with Web crimes? We haven’t done a good enough job with advocacy. Web Standards Project has been better, I think, than what the W3C has been able to accomplish on those. Work on HTML and XHTML and tag-soup integration and all that other stuff – that unquoted-attributes world of HTML mixing in with microformats…. I’m hoping we can try to bring those worlds together a little bit, but that’s really hard because of the legacy stuff. Molly: And the bureaucracy of the W3C. What about the design of the site? What’s up with that?

John Allsopp: In fairness, the term wasn’t even invented (when I started in 1994). I used images for text, a table to get a list of things separated out the way I wanted, the “font tag.” It’s a great irony I started writing CSS software and the CSS Samurai. You cannot do nonstandard stuff – by design.

(Scribe terminated at 0951. There may be no other liveblogged sessions due to difficulty of typing.)