Liveblogging a panel at South by Southwest 2005 (SXSW2005; SXSWI) with Andrei Herasimchuk, Cameron Moll, Keith Robinson, Ryan Sims, Paul Nixon; 2005.03.14 17:30

I walked in late on this one after getting another really choice remark from someone vaguely related to Knowbility at the AIR Awards (“It’s a private party”). The screaming good humour and team comedy from this session’s presenters was unmatched at the conference.

They’re live-redesigning the entire identity for a known bloggeur, Dirk Knemeyer. Hey, they have their own site!

Cameron Moll notes that I just walked into the room a few minutes earlier and that maybe I should close my eyes. “We could have him removed from the room,” somebody else says.

Steps he uses to select type:

1. Start with familiar faces that he know works.
2. Add faces that address a need, in this case heart/mind::professional/personal.
3. Try two sizes.
4. Lower case vs. upper case.

Anybody know who designed Avenir? “Frutiger,” I yell. “Can we have Joe Clark removed from the room?” “Security!” Does anyone know what year Avenir was designed? “Fucked if I know.” “1928!” yells a woman, incorrectly.

He called up John Parker of Veer for suggestions. Asked for something between a sansserif and a serif (I immediately flashed on the horror of Rotis Semiserif). The suggestion was Dynasty Light.

Other dude comes up to talk about colour for eight minutes. “It’s something I think a lot of designers just sort of look over… They just sort of like a few colours” and that’s it. How are heart and mind connected and separated? “Some colour options that I came up with were really groundbreaking – red, green, and blue.”

Andrei Herasimchuk talks about cropping and colour correction of photos.

And the final site actually validates. “Where’s the Flash version?”

Question: How much would this have cost? “Oh, yeah, we forgot, Dirk – we were going to charge you.” “We did it for the love, man.” Dirk doesn’t want to pay for it, though.

Give these guys their own show

They’re gobsmackingly competent and humorous and they can boast Broadway-calibre charisma and chemistry.

Liveblogging a panel at South by Southwest 2005 (SXSW2005; SXSWI) with Jane Wells, Chris Wetherell, Dunstan Orchard, Eris Free, Kevin Conboy, Jaxon Repp, Vera Fleischer; 2005.03.14 15:37

Jane Wells moderates. Flash and HTML developer teams have created prototypes of four different applications.

Interactive tour for Steamboat Springs

I can’t see people’s names and am not going to guess about speakers. The proponent admits that even he was not in favour of many of the features their Flash developers added. Dunstan notes that there are no text equivalents at all for people with no Flash installed, and that the Lynx view is simply [EMBED].

“There wasn’t even really much point at trying to replicate” the zoomable maps. “It’s such depth of information that it’s quite incredible. Not only would it be very hard to copy that information out, but this sort of functionality – rolling over tiny little trails and so on – we had to admit that we couldn’t duplicate this functionality with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. That said, this is a case where the tool drove the way the site was developed…. Yes, I can’t duplicate it, but I wouldn’t want to, to a certain extent.”

What would you have done differently? JavaScript-generated menus and suchlike have no meaning at all when CSS is reverted to the browser’s default (often mistakenly dubbed “when CSS turned off”). His improved version checks if JS is not running and, if so, fails to include certain content.

Man on Flash team: “I think that’s a win for us.”

We applaud and are registered on a sound meter. Sounds like a stacked deck in favour of HTML to me, though the Flash is better. “Oddly, an exact tie.” No, 24 for Flash and 31 for HTML.

Gmail

Chris from Google: HTML elements are generated by JavaScript. “The browser is somewhat of an impoverished user-interface environment.” “There are a lot of iframes on this page.” Keystrokes “are from Unix applications, so that makes a lot of sense to new users, which is nice.”

Kevin: Redesigning E-mail is kind of a hard thing to do. Gmail did a pretty good job. “Doing it in a strict traditional Flash environment, I was going to have to do some scaling and some crazy experimental-type things, and when it came right down to it, I didn’t want to do that.” He uses Flex to dynamically serve a Flash file to your computer. “The Flash player, luckily for me, is not” an impoverished user-interface environment. “I didn’t go that far, but what Flex gives you right off the bat is a pretty solid suite of tools.”

He asks how many people use keyboard commands to move through Gmail – fewer than 10 hands. “I never get it to work in Safari,” he says to laughter.

Text is antialiased even on Windows. He’s even got a browse-by-picture feature for his contacts and can drag and drop pictures to add contacts. You can also file all your attachments in one place.

Chris quite likes it, with a caveat about how to “star” a contact, whatever that means.

The plain-HTML version “exists, but it isn’t really cool. Please blame Berners-Lee for that, not me,” Chris says.

Applause meter: 38 all. “Kevin may have rigged the applause-o-meter.”

JetBlue

“We thought the current JetBlue site was pretty horrible and clunky,” so they decided to give both teams free reign.

Jaxon (I think): He never knows what the big picture is. But with TurboTax, you put your income in and your tax due rises, then you add the tax you’ve already paid and it goes down, then you add your freelance income “and it goes way up” until you “lie about your expenses” enough to reduce it. Exposé on a Mac is “really, really like what I just built.” His version lets you compare two travelers and change settings and costs in real time.

Eris handles HTML version. She’s using XForms, which only works in IE for her. It beats using HTML plus “a language on top of it.” “It doesn’t really work in the real world right now, but in a year or two when XHTML2 comes out and CSS3 is supported—”

Help, hint, and alert are all available to assist the user. She mentioned accessibility, but it was really about help in that case. The first menu has every departure choice available, but the second menu varies depending on which departure choice you made.

Dunstan: Eris knew nothing about XForms until about a week ago.

Applause meter: 39 Flash, 22 HTML.

Jaxon: So you have to reset [the meter] every time? Is that a Flash-caching problem?

Flickr

Teams pretended that Ludicorp weren’t intelligent and instead were dogmatic and were all-Flash or no-Flash.

Vera for the Flash team: She initially thought Flickr was a great use of Flash, particularly with the notes feature. So what else could I add? Speech bubbles! “If you type more it resizes, just like a good bubble.”

She’d prefer to see more than just two photos in an album, so she created an autoscroller.

Dunstan: We were working on this last night… and Chris said ‘Look at their version of the site.’ …[I] realized we were on their version of the site.” They’d already worked some of his improvements into the site! (With his permission.) “I came up with the name Flick originally,” Dunstan jokingly adds.

His goal was mostly to replace Flash with JavaScript. Current site uses tables for layout. Their code appears in nearly the same order as it appears in the final site. His new version places navigation at the bottom in browser’s-own-style view (errantly called “unstyled” view). A “bog-standards CSS makeover, which was quite interesting to do.”

His version copes well with resizing even though it uses absolute positioning and margins set in em.

Visiting Flickr without Flash means you don’t see any of the notes. They hide a notes section in JavaScript. And you can move notes around in JS, too.

Dunstan: Layout works in nearly everything but Netscape 4. “Does it work in iCab?” “Yes, it works particularly in that.” “Does it work in Lynx?” “Yeah. Yeah, sure.” “What do you mean ‘work’?” “Well, you use that to kind of disparage the site.” “Well, you get to see the layout,” Dunstan says.

Applause meter: 19 Flash, 61 HTML.

Totals: 120 Flash, 152 HTML.

“I question the calibration, but I’ll go along with it.”

OK, how about Gmail accessibility?

I asked when Gmail would meet WCAG 1.0 and any part of ATAG.

“You are aware we have an HTML version?”

“Please answer the question.”

“Well, the HTML version was the first step. There will be more. We are in beta.”

Liveblogging a panel at South by Southwest 2005 (SXSW2005; SXSWI); 2005.03.14 14:04

Above all, the most important news

I took the elevator up with Ana Marie Cox and you didn’t.

Evan Smith, editor, Texas Monthly, hosts. She pronounces it “Ahna.” Age 32; married to an editor of some kind; a Texan.

“Even then I had an ear for the slightly-off catchphrase: ‘Loving Beer and Loving Horses.’ ”

Who picked the word “Wonkette”? Originally they were going to go for Guckert.com. “Immediately I dismissed it; it was too gender-specific…. Being the blogosphere we just don’t think past the immediate future…. Gay men have done well on Wonkette, so maybe that’s how we’ll solve the gender problem.” Denton (her unnamed “boss”) did, however, love it.

Without the mainstream media, “bloggers would have no facts [to blog] except for what they could Google,” which isn’t everything. Do bloggers actually give a damn if the New York Times reports what they say on their Web site? “I think they do,” but there are rather a lot of them. Some bloggers use the medium “as a résumé-builder.” Many are “just as sort of sealed off from the little people beneath them.”

Aren’t more people now getting their news from people who “say stuff than journalists who check facts”? “It’s a really cheap way to create narrative drama. You can blame bloggers for this, but I think cable news is just as bad – not just Fox, but I think Fox is trailblazing in that direction.” Journalism used to be about creating drama through narrative and storytelling; “that’s expensive… and it’s easier to create drama just through yelling.”

There’s no cost to entry. “And thank God. There’s not much to say about it except: Welcome, everyone…. People have to become more critical in their consumption of media.” Why should people get their news from the mainstream media? “Blogs… are upfront about where they’re coming from and their opinions. There’s a kind of rigidly-enforced sourcing in a way,” in that you have to link to the sources you’re citing, “and I think those kinds of things are missed by mainstream media.”

Are bloggers any more accurate, per capita per post, than the mainstream media? “Well, what are they posting about?… There are very few blogs out there claiming to do original reporting, so there’s not much for them to get wrong.” For a story about chiefs of staff, she Google Image–searched every chief of staff she could and speculated which ones would have to pay for sex.

She now commutes between D.C. and New York, which does indeed take a toll on one’s marriage. “I have a wonderful Apple 12″ PowerBook that I pretty much take with me everywhere…. Alarm goes off at 7:00, and I literally can usually just roll over and pick up my laptop” and look at the morning papers. Her contract specifies 12 posts a day. (“Twelve!” Dunstan Orchard exclaims under his breath beside me.) “That’s how Gawker makes money.”

“I probably don’t do enough stuff that would get me into trouble.”

“I do kind of have a general policy of not outing people, especially gay conservatives, because I figure gay Republicans have it bad enough.” Why worsen their “private hell”?

“I did get her fired, but I also got her a $300,000 book deal, which is more than I got.”

Are bloggers journalists? Journalism encompasses many fields. “If we’re going to include Maureen Dowd as a journalist, then why not bloggers?” (Or any “opinion journalist,” a concept she doesn’t understand.) “You’re a journalist and you have a blog or you don’t have a blog,” as Josh Marshall did and does.

CNN immediately described Jeff Gannon as a blogger “because he got stuff wrong.” CNN equated the two, apparently. “You can have a blog. it doesn’t cancel out being a journalist.”

“Most people aren’t that interesting on the first draft, aren’t that funny on the first draft. You really have to work it over a bit…. The ones that are good are the ones that care about the writing they’re doing,” and readers think that too.

Her book Dog Days will be about August in D.C., and will take place in a world that actually has blogs.

Question: Does your site help or hurt democracy? “Oh, gosh. Well, democracy or America? I think it’s good for America, bad for democracy – I think it’s good for me, bad for America, bad for— No…. I’m something of a cyberlibertarian… more information is better…. I’d rather [too much information] existed and have people filter it rather than the government.”

“That’s my take on Jeff Gannon: I think there should be more assfucking in the White House, not less.”

Question: Is a definition of journalism like Dan Gillmor’s – someone who finds out stuff and tells it is a journalist – valid to you? Yes, essentially. “The definition of ‘journalist’ is always in flux’ because the media are always in flux. Journalism is a non-credentialed profession.

Gannon: It’s a pretend briefing anyway, so why not have pretend reporters?

Question: What advice would you give to TMFTML or a young blogger? “Wow, the responsibility. I can’t advise following in my own shoes; there have been far too many missteps…. But remain true to your feelings and your beliefs, and talk about assfucking a lot.”

Speaking notes, which I did not actually deliver because we went off on extended Q&A discursions, are online.

Liveblogging a panel at South by Southwest 2005 (SXSW2005; SXSWI) with Christopher Schmitt, Molly Holzschlag, Douglas Bowman, Dan Cederholm, Dave Shea; 2005.03.13 11:31

Molly polls audience for expert, intermediate, and “new adventure” levels. (I’m intermediate.) “Before we get to CSS, there is a real fundamental need to discuss the document… and why markup is so fundamentally important to CSS. I’m calling it the starting place.”

CSS does nothing unless you attach it to some kind of ([X]HTML) document. Mastering the markup “gives you a tremendous amount of more control…. People interested in Web standards [feel] document and data standards are equally significant to Web design as the design itself.”

Structure is not semantics. Structure is “the required syntax that has to be there,” like proper DOCTYPE declaration, the root element html, a namespace, head and body elements (though some of those can be deleted validly in some version of HTML, I’d note). Semantics is actually the “meaning” of the markup, and while XML might be richer, we have to live with what we’ve got in HTML.

“What I am saying is for people to think in data structures, not design.” That may be unpopular with designers, but “we have to understand that we are really working with data first and foremost. At least that’s the way that I see it.”

Dan, barely audible as usual, introduces “Beautiful and Bulletproof in 10 Minutes.” When design, text, and images “come together well,” he likes to use the word “bulletproof” to describe the result. A bulletproof site is designed for worst-case scenarios.

His ten-second usability test involves turning off CSS (another myth; you’re just looking at the browser’s internal CSS). You can then tell if the structure is correct, allegedly.

Images became surprisingly important in his site. When images are turned off, a background behind text disappeared, leaving dark-grey-on-grey text. So always specify a background colour just in case.

Dave, whose slides are really great to look at (a rarity): Nearly everybody uses a text editor, according to his audience poll. WYSIWYG editors: Three hands. “When you consider the typical Mac-loving, latte-sipping graphic designer, conforming to convention isn’t the first thing that comes to mind.”

Graphic designers think visually; all the design software in use requires the mouse and is entirely visual. CSS, on the other hand, is a “coding” or “styling” language, “and it’s not something that graphic designers are naturally accustomed to use.” CSS is in some ways like a page-layout program, in that you define styles for different elements in a central spot. Yet CSS is merely code.

[Dave’s presentation style has improved considerably. He claimed to be nervous in Australia, but he was just fine onstage, with excellent delivery (naturally rather stern and firm, but that’s his style). Today he displayed considerable fluency and good organization.]

“Study typography. I say it again because it’s that important. Type is essential.”

Bowman had his usual phenomenally beautiful slides. He starts off with the topic he overran his time with last year – double rollovers, or remote rollovers as he now calls them.

Doug recounts the E-mail he received after the Wired redesign, that ended with “By the way, I’m blind.” “That hit me like a ton of bricks. I went back and reread that 20 times because I loved that so much.” He no longer designs for “people like us, who can see.” Beauty in design is not just for those, but individuals with no eyes.

Molly notes, in response to a question, that very few courses teach standards.

Doug thinks a :parent selector would be “something very, very simple that we could make use of immediately.” Dave thinks embedded type is useful, but that’s more of a licensing issue. Dan thinks assigning multiple background images to elements is needed. Molly is “pretty pleased where CSS is now,” but wants better browsers. (Scattered applause.)

…for South by Southwest. I’ll discuss why design matters and pass judgement on your Web site’s accessibility.

Approved persons may meet me. Many others may sit next to me in the soulless convention-centre auditoria.

If you care about correct writing and presentation (which is not the same as avoiding slang), then of course you have to deal with people who tell you what you’re doing is unimportant. These people invariably could never have copy-edited themselves in the first place. Essentially, the ignorant attempt to upbraid the educated. Stick to your guns, because you, more often than not, are simply right.

Stick to your guns, moreover, because you don’t want to end up like Miss Gould of the New Yorker.

Six decades ago, not long after being hired by Harold Ross as a copy editor at The New Yorker, a shy young woman, an Oberlin graduate, set to work on a manuscript by James Thurber and soon came across the word “raunchy.” She had never heard of the word and thought it was a mistake. “Raunchy” became “paunchy.” Thurber’s displeasure was such that the young woman barely escaped firing. Later, according to his biographer Harrison Kinney, Thurber wrote that “facetiously” was the only word in English that had all six vowels in order. What about “abstemiously”? the copy editor replied. Thurber, who was not easily impressed, was finally compelled to ask, “Who is Eleanor Gould?” […]

Miss Gould used to tell her friends at the magazine that she wanted to work until she was a hundred. A stroke, which she suffered at her desk, in 1999, forced her to retire. The title of Grammarian was retired with her. In subsequent years, friends at the magazine would visit or send gifts: books, flowers, a basket of cheeses and fruit. But after a while she found such attentions hard to bear. She missed the work that she could no longer do. To one correspondent she sent a beautiful letter, frank and kind, needlessly grateful, which ended with the sentence “Please forget about me.” Of course, we never could and we never will.

How poignant and tragic that someone who spent decades improving the entire project of writing to remember would hope to be forgotten.

Let me get some photos online while I’m procrastinating the writing of my exegesis of my days of wine and W3C.

[continue with: Esteemed colleagues met in Boston →]

What were the best and worst features of my attendance at the W3C Technical Plenary?

Worst

Sessions existed in a quantum state between barely tolerable and a crashing bore

Best

I was at all times viewed as a full and equal participant, even at a very large session with two other working groups. (I asked the first question!)

Notes and photos forthcoming (Cf. Technorati; Flickr).

I’ll mention up front, though, that, outside Harvard Square metro, Kerstin Goldsmith hollered the following at my retreating back, just as they do in the movies, or perhaps in Peanuts television specials: “You’re getting a hug, Joe Clark – whether you want one or not.”

I note with relief that Kerstin, whose name is pronounced “Chastain,” never made good on her ominous threat.