Simon Willison's Weblog: jonathan-delacour

Conversations with Joe Clark

2002-12-19T15:29:24+00:00

Jonathan Delacour is three days in to his Conversation with Joe Clark series (see also parts one and two and the introductory book review). I thoroughly recommend reading the whole series, but here are a few points that stood out for me:

In the meantime, firing all the boy-racer HTML programmers who think they're tough shit would be a good place to start. They're jumped-up script kiddies; it was quite telling that my submission of well-written, copy-edited text in a valid HTML document was an absolute first for Slashdot. This is a clientele that does not know what the Shift key does or how to debug two nested ordered lists. (The latter is an actual example from a site I worked on. The concept of closing a paired tag had never occurred to them, so they could not find the error in the sequence <ol><li><ol><li></ol>.)

And of course we'll also have to fire the boy racers' clueless Dockers-wearing manager dweebs, who consider themselves old-timers because they got online in 1998 (!) and whose entire experience of the Internet is the commercial Web as rendered through Internet Explorer for Windows. These people cannot even *spell* "W3C" and still think banner ads have not been given a fair shake.

If we could rid the Web-development ecosystem of life-sapping parasites like these - essentially, everyone who is immature and/or has *bad taste* - then we stand a good chance of making valid, standards-compliant Web development the norm rather than the exception

To avoid the risk of misrepresenting Joe's responses by quoting the above, I should mention that the rest of the series is far less inflammatory.

This note about accessible forms also caught my eye:

People use tables for forms so that online forms look like printed forms - that is, they use as much of the "paper" as possible, because "paper" is expensive. But online we have unlimited screen real estate, at least in the vertical dimension. HTML forms, at root, yearn to be vertical, not horizontal. Do not flout their natural desires. Do not attempt to overlay the design of printed forms onto online forms.

Finally, yet another reason not to spend hundreds of thousands of pounds on an "enterprise" CMS:

The larger CMSs are a kind of protection racket: You buy our system for six figures, and then you keep paying us every year to maintain your license, and also you'll have to hire a person trained in our ways to keep your system up and running. Fail to do any of that and your entire site crashes. It's extortion, really, and high-end CMSs are dogs in so many ways - they can't produce valid code, their URLs are appalling, and they are difficult to use. In essence, big CMSs are mainframe systems, with the same need for constant nursing and non-stop tending by codependent system administrators as those old mainframes.

The comments attached to the various stories are also well worth reading. I particularly liked Mark Pilgrim's argument as to why Joe's controversial views on fixed font sizes should be taken with a healthy pinch of salt:

Simply put, I believe that there is a large class of people who would not in any way refer to themselves as "visually impaired" or "disabled" in any way, who nonetheless can not read 9px type on their computer monitor. Reading on-screen is hard enough as it is, and tiny type in stupid fonts only makes a bad situation worse. These affected people are not running screen magnification software as Joe suggests; they are not running any accessibility-related software at all, because they do not view themselves as disabled. At most, they may be running in a display theme with slightly larger fonts, which means that everything on their computer that they read on a regular basis (menus, buttons, toolbars) is readable -- everything except web pages that use absolute font sizes.

My Father certainly falls in to this category of users, and was very impressed when I showed him Mozilla's text resizing ability (he had not realised text resizing was possible in IE either). I find it extremely annoying that modern browsers consistently hide their basic text resizing options - IE 3 got it right by including an increase/decrease text size button in the main toolbar by default but browsers since then have all conspired to hide the option in a menu where it is far less likely to be found by casual browser users.

Tags: accessibility, joe-clark, jonathan-delacour

Joe Clark interviews

2002-12-12T12:32:34+00:00

On Monday, Slashdot posted an excellent in depth interview with Joe Clark, author of Building Accessible Websites. In a fantastic display of cluelessness they pasted the XHTML document which Joe sent them straight in to the Slashdot template, <html> tags and all. The good news is that there's more Joe Clark related goodness to come, courtesy of Jonathan Delacour:

... since next week all my posts will be devoted to Joe Clark's Building Accessible Websites: first a book review, then an extended conversation with Joe about accessibility matters.

Tags: accessibility, joe-clark, slashdot, jonathan-delacour

Pocket Stuff

2002-09-10T15:20:37+00:00

Jonathan Delacour:

Big Kev is an Australian icon who has taken the cleaning products business by storm—partly because of the quality of his merchandise but mainly because he appears in his own TV commercials wearing one of a large collection of spectacularly vulgar satin shirts and signing off with the slogan: I'm Excited! Thanks to Big Kev, Australia leads the world in stain removal technology.

Jonathan's right, "pocket stuff" is a perfectly valid excuse (at least until society stops discriminating against guys with handbags).

Tags: jonathan-delacour

University of Blogaria

2002-06-16T13:22:48+00:00

Apparently the University of Blogaria was founded on the principle that the ideal university would have no students to contaminate the educational process (Jonathan Delacour). The only way in is to earn a position on the faculty, which no doubt requires slightly more than four days of blogging. Thank goodness their courses (or at least the benefits of their wisdom) are freely available to all.

Tags: blogging, jonathan-delacour

The nature of blogging

2002-06-15T20:42:33+00:00

Meg Hourihan's explanation of blogging (which I linked to and praised earlier) is stirring up something of a storm. Meg's suggestion that the key to blogging is the format has been ripped to pieces by the likes of BurningBird, Jonathan Delacour and Stavros. Jonathan uses photography as an analogy - some photographers are excellent technically and concentrate on taking the perfect photograph while losing sight of the art of the medium. I hope I'm not overquoting, but Jonathan clinched his argument for me with the following:

Which is not to say there's no place for an explanation of the mechanics of weblogging: tools, posts, links, time-stamps, permalinks... But wouldn't it be better to leave those prosaic details for later? And to start by mapping out an imaginative vision of the medium's potential?

To focus attention on the magic and mystery of blogging. To acknowledge (paraphrasing Burningbird) that the key to weblogging is people, not a format. To admit that -five years on- we're only just starting to realize what might be possible. To stress the communal nature of the activity. To celebrate the amplification of meaning that occurs when smart, creative people collaborate. To invite newcomers to join a grand adventure, a networked version of Hesse's Journey to the East.

As a new blogger I am still trying to come to terms with the format and how it works. I think this is why I was initialy so impressed with what Meg had to say - she described blogging in technical terms that made sense to the logical part of my mind. My opinion has been reversed thanks to the interlinked nature of the blogging community, which lead me to opposing viewpoints and helped dramatically improve my understanding of what it is to blog.

I notice Jonathan, BurningBird and Stavros are all on the faculty of AKMA's University of Blogaria. I wonder if they are accepting undergraduates.

Tags: blogging, jonathan-delacour