People-Centric Web

Last year, I co-founded a company by the name of Foleeo (which will likely change names because of Palm’s Foleo) that is working on a solution to the ever-increasing rift between record labels, movie studios, and people like you and me who want to get music, movies, and TV shows under far more reasonable terms. But like Google with search, that’s simply where we’re starting. We’re also working on what I (very esoterically) refer to the “citizen-centric social anti-network”. Many of the ideas behind this venture were recently described my Chris Messina in a much more eloquent manner:

Now, the big thing that’s changed (or is changing) is the emphasis on the individual and her role across the system. Look at MyBlogLog. Look at Automattic’s purchase of Gravatar. Look at the sharp rise in OpenID adoption over the past two years. The future is in non-siloed living man! The future is in portable, independent identities valid, like Visa, everywhere that you want to be. It’s not just about social network fatigue and getting fed up with filling out profiles at every social network you join and re-adding all your friends. Yeah, those things are annoying but more importantly, the fact that you have to do it every time just to get basic value from each system means that each has been designed to benefit itself, rather than the individuals coming and going. The whole damn thing needs to be inverted, and like recently rejoined ant segments dumped from many an ant farm, the fractured, divided, shattered into a billion fragments-people of the web must rejoin themselves and become whole in the eyes of the services that, what else?, serve them!

Normally I have no particular opinion of the term “Web 2.0″, although now as I think about it, it’s a bit of a misnomer. Web 2.0 began with XHTML and RSS. Later, Web 2.0 grew to include XML Web Services, Blogging, and Trackbacks (i.e. a cross-network, or an actual “web”). In 2005, we saw the big AJAX push which was like fuel on the fire, and these days we have a buttload of social networks. The next step is a move to more “open” services, or at least more services that play well with others (see “OpenSocial“).

This is the thing that I am most passionate about on the web. Connecting people together in people-centric, people-friendly ways. Adapting technology to fit people instead of the other way around. With SimplePie, we started of by taking something complex (RSS parsing), and making it simpler, easier, more flexible, and more robust. By enabling people to easily integrate other people’s content (or even their own), we’ve made it that much easier to integrate various parts of the web. At Foleeo, we’re wanting to take that several levels further.

I like the quote by John Maeda from the book “The Laws of Simplicity”:

Simplicity is subtracting the obvious and adding the meaningful.

If you’ve never read the book, I highly recommend it. It’s fairly short, and you could probably knock it out in a few hours, but it adds a tremendous perspective on how to simplify (good) while adding more value (better). And for me, the aforementioned quote is the driving force behind everything I build. I ask myself “how can we make this simpler, easier, yet more valuable for human beings?” (It suddenly occurred to me that I should start looking into books by Jef Raskin). Here’s another favorite quote by Antoine de Saint-Exuper:

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

Between my work with SimplePie and Foleeo, I’m wanting to influence my little corner of the web to become something incredibly cool and/or useful that makes people marvel at how easy and intuitive it is. That takes a tremendous amount of work, but by focusing on people instead of technology, and by surrounding myself with some of the smartest, most talented people in the industry I plan to accomplish that goal.

Standards, Invalidation, and Missing the Point

First, read Darice’s post, then come back and finish this post.

I agree and disagree — both concurrently.

On one hand, I see people going overboard about making sure that absolutely everything is flawless code, or else they freak out. On the other hand, I see people who intentionally invalidate their code to try to make a point. Both groups are wrong.

Standards-compliance is a journey, not necessarily a destination. It’s a matter of doing the best you can with the tools and options before you. Had we (Netscape and Microsoft) done things correctly from the get-go, this wouldn’t even be an issue. All websites would be valid, semantic, XHTML 1.0 Strict web documents fed to browsers as application/xml+xhtml. With the current state of the web, this just isn’t possible. At the same time, this doesn’t excuse us from writing the best quality code we possibly can.

You start with the best code in the best browser, and work your way down. Occassionally, you’ll have a loose ampersand, or a tag that has no purely semantic value. If this were an XML world, those things would be unacceptable. But we’re not living in an XML world — we’re living in a much looser HTML world. Web browsers, as good as they’ve become in recent years, are still far from perfect. IE6 still holds the majority of the market share. This isn’t because it’s a better browser, it’s just human nature to take the path of least resistance. This is the kind of world we’re looking at for the next several years. Granted all of this depends on whether Microsoft fixes IE in time for Longhorn or not, otherwise we all simply have to accept the imperfect world that we live in.

Andy said something last January that really made sense. It shouldn’t be about freaking out over a loose ampersand or feeding your sites in a mimetype that IE doesn’t support. At the same time, I’ve seen standards advocates intentionally invalidate their markup to make a point opposite of the first group.

Keith made another interesting point, that standards shouldn’t be something you think about. Standards should just be your de facto method of designing — that’s it!

So far, I’ve agreed with Darice 100%… except for this part:

“Everyone should use the method that fits their design best. The discussion should not be about what method is best but what different method fits which situation best.”

… to which I agree, except when it comes to tables. There are enough standards-aware browsers, and good XHTML+CSS methods to replace any table-based layout… even the complex ones. It might take a bit more work, but that’s how you produce a quality website. Granted, I’m also talking from the side of the gorge that doesn’t use tables anymore anyways.

For those who are still on the table side of the web design gorge, jumping straight into XHTML+CSS design is a pretty tall order. I worked for 3 months solid on a redesign for my website that debuted back in March 2003, and it still used one table to hold everything together (I didn’t understand the CSS box model yet). If we, as standards-compliant designers, come across people wanting to make the jump, we need to help and encourage them to use better methods.

People have asked me why I’ve helped completely random people to build better and better standards-compliant websites, seemingly with no benefit of my own. The reason is because helping one designer build a better website makes the web, as a whole, a better place for everyone. The more people with valid, usable, accessible websites, the fewer bad websites we all have to deal with.

Anyways, these are my thoughts on the issue. I want to thank Darice for inspiring this.

Letting Go of Legacy Code

Taking my own advice, I’ve updated my “crappy browser” messages to include Internet Explorer 5.5. IE 5.5 is now 5 years old (1999), and it’s time to encourage more and more people to move up.

Since IE6 supports the correct CSS box model (in “almost standards” mode), I’m not going to bother with the CSS box model hack in the new design. This is 2004 people… get with the program. If users insist on hanging on to outdated technology, then they need to understand that at some point they’re going to be left behind.

Microsoft has left behind Windows 95/98/Me, Apple has let go of anything prior to Mac OS X 10.1.5 (pretty much), and I’ve let go of IE prior to 6.0. At some point, you just need to bite the bullet and let the legacy code go. That’s where I’m at.

If you’re a die-hard Internet Explorer 5.0 user, sorry. If your company still hasn’t upgraded their systems with IE6, either find a new one that’s on-the-ball, or create a fuss to get IE6 installed (if not a better browser like Firefox).