Eclectic Brain Salad

Chris Mills' thoughts on the web, music, life, and more

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My W3C fellowship

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So, in another interesting turn of events, I am still employed by Opera, but I have recently started a stint working as a W3C fellow. What's this, I hear you ask? Well, the W3C is a very interesting organization with its fingers in a lot of pies. They work on a lot of interesting projects, and do a lot of good, shepherding web standards to a usable state, keeping the web open, and generally securing its future. But one thing the W3C don't have a lot of is money and resources. When they find a new interesting project to work on, they often need help to push things forward.

To this, end, W3C member companies such as Opera can give the W3C some of their employee's time so that they can lend a hand on a special project. And this is me, for the next year or more, spending 50%-70% of my time working for the W3C on developer relations and creating documentation/education resources for a fantastic new resource that will be unleashed upon the world around the end of the year. It's gonna be hot, so please watch this space!

Anyway, I'm enjoying my new position, working alongside the fabulous Mr Doug Schepers, and some of their new hires, such as the super talented Lea Verou!

Reminder: buy my book.

Practical CSS3: my book is finally published!

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It was about eight or nine months ago that I first started talking to some folks from the Peachpit/New Riders publishers about writing my own book. I have always fancied doing so, especially considering that during my many years working for various technical publishing houses, I have edited around 150 books, or thereabouts. I really do lose count.

I have developed quite a lot of knowledge about CSS, and spend a lot of my working life these days experimenting with cutting edge CSS3 modules, so I was glad we agreed on a CSS3 book. After months of tireless writing, coding and researching work, ignoring the kids and getting huge bags under my eyes, and some months of waiting after that, Practical CSS3: Develop and Design" finally arrived, and I'm really rather pleased with it!

The main challenge was covering as much of the most exciting range of new CSS features as possible, while at the same time keeping things cross browser compatible and accessible — in my mind, a cutting edge feature is completely useless in the real world if it only works in one browser or rendering engine. I think I did a pretty good job, even down to providing alternative styling that is at least usable at a basic level in old browsers like IE6-8. I tried to balance fun and practical, and added as much of my musical stylings and unique "wit" to the project as I could. Please, check it out!

All of the code samples, online bonus material and other stuff to do with the book should be available on the official Peachpit book page. It isn't right now, but I reckon it should be in a few days.

Buy the book

Please buy my book through one of the below links if at all possible, as I'll get slightly more royalties. I am a poor, starving open web evangelist, and have barely enough money for sex, drugs and rock 'n roll as it is!

The print version:

the eBook:

The chapters

  1. INTRODUCTION TO CSS3 AND MODERN WEB DESIGN
  2. BUILDING A SOLID CROSS-BROWSER TEMPLATE WITH HTML5 AND JAVASCRIPT
  3. SPICING UP YOUR FONTS
  4. ENHANCING BOXES WITH CSS3 BLING
  5. ANIMATED EFFECTS USING CSS3
  6. USING CSS3 TO IMPLEMENT ICONS
  7. CSS3 LAYOUT CHOPS
  8. RESPONSIVE AND ADAPTIVE DESIGN
  9. STYLING HTML5 MEDIA AND FORMS (ONLINE BONUS CHAPTER)

Constructive feedback, not destruction and damnation

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I am not the sort of guy who usually gets involved with Twitter disagreements and suchlike. they are mostly petty and unimportant, and tend to blow over very quickly - storms in teacups, as it were.

But seeing Arran Ross-Paterson's No Show Twitter list, which basically publicly calls out people for being shit conference speakers, make me feel a bit angry and upset (minor problems - I'm a big boy and can look after myself), but more importantly, worried about our industry.

Arran, this upset me a bit because it really upset some of my friends, therefore I felt compelled to join in the discussion and try to guide things towards a more agreeable place.

I'm not about to wave my arms and call you names as it wouldn't be, well, constructive. And I applaud you for your efforts in trying to evolve our industry by organising events, doing good work and trying to raise the bar on (event) quality. Humanity is often guilty of tolerating or even applauding mediocrity (in all walks of life, not just the web industry), often making appraisals based on hearsay and marketing hype rather than first hand experience of real talent, quality or innovation.

BUT ... I feel that there are better, more constructive ways to tackle your event speaker "feedback" than just publicly ridiculing people:

  • It doesn't really come across as feedback or a useful list, just abuse. And to be honest, it reflects badly on you.
  • It is not a useful tool for conference organisers wishing to avoid bad speakers. They are probably not going to take your recommendations at face value without any kind of constructive criticism or evidence to back up your claims.
  • We all have bad conference talks, for various reasons, but often someone can be having a bad day, with a particularly tough crowd. One bad talk doesn't make a bad speaker.
  • Very few people are beyond help: everyone can get better, be they n00bs or veterans. But they are less likely to improve if they get bashed down like this, without constructive criticism.
  • No one is going to be a great speaker from the word go. This requires a lot of practice and determination. Some of the folks on the list are very new to the scene, so to bash them down at this early stage in their career is particularly counter-productive.

But the most important point, which is what's causing me the aforementioned worry is this: for our industry to evolve, and especially our conference/teaching efforts, we need awesome new technologies, and we need veterans to inspire people. But we also need new blood to get up and start talking: the whole scene gets stale without new ideas and points of view. And we need better web education to spread best practices and drive out old bad habits (tables for layout, etc.) that still persist. This better web education will largely be the result of the new blood going out there and speaking at conferences/meet ups, and writing articles, to help others learn.

The new blood are not going to be great speakers to start with (as I already said above). They may not have a good presenting style, or be so nervous they forget stuff, or make a couple of mistakes. But they will still largely have value with their new opinions and ideas, they will get better in time, and most importantly they will have passion, a hunger to change and improve things, and the balls to get up and do this in the first place!

I know how nerve racking it can be to do public speaking, and I know you do too. For a young newcomer, this can take a huge amount of effort.

If you bash down newcomers at this early stage in the way you have done, they are less likely to improve, and more likely to just not bother talking again. They will contribute to the future direction of the Web we hold so dear, so we need to help them improve before we start throwing bombs in public. I hope the Web community of the future will continue to be built more on sharing and encouragement than negatives.

Some suggestions and advice/insights:

  1. Change the message of the list to something less damning and more positive, like "Speaker improvement suggestions".
  2. Add some constructive criticism to say how you think they need to improve.
  3. Better still, take the list down, and start by sending speakers constructive criticism to help them improve, privately.
  4. If they consistently ignore your advice, and keep appearing at conferences doing a terrible job, then perhaps consider naming and shaming. But most people who sink this low tend to get weeded out naturally anyhow. I've seen most of the speakers on your list speak more than once, and think most of them don't deserve to be on this list. I think some of them are great speakers, and even the inexperienced ones are definitely improving, and adding value to the community.
  5. There are some old guard speakers who have been around forever, and are a bit dated. But often their role is to provide a bit of overall context, or inspire the young 'uns, rather than to tech new ideas and tools. I think this still has its place, although conferences that just feature these speakers are a bit dull. Hence the need for new blood as well.

Hope this helps someone, in some way. I think we should all try to think about being more constructive going forwards. Myself included. I'm making it a new year's resolution ;-)

I was impressed with Matt Bee's rather constructive blog post - Stop complaining and make a list.

I've been tagged: here are my 7 things!

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I just got tagged by Mihai Sucan, awesome Romanian developer and all round decent guy that has written some great articles in the past for my tutorial site, dev.opera.com. I didn't know about this 7 things shizzle before now, but it seemed like fun, and a nice way to learn more about interesting people.

The rules

  • Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post.
  • Share seven facts about yourself in the post.
  • Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
  • Let them know they’ve been tagged.

Seven fascinating factoids about me

  1. I was born in the Isle of Man. Which is why I'm a three legged deviant with no tail.
  2. I first went on the Internet in 1996, whilst doing a Biochemistry degree. Glad my degree was eventually useful in some way! Around that time, the computer lab was full of people downloading porn in minimised windows, using Netscape 3.
  3. I love video games and heavy metal to an unhealthy degree.
  4. I started playing the drums when I was 12, and my first band was a Carcass-inspired gore grind band called "Symbolic Immortalation".
  5. I have been in 19 bands since I was 12. I am now 33.
  6. My current band, Conquest of Steel, has been going for 14 years, as of this year.
  7. I have a really bizarre word blindness/confusion over certain words. For example, when I want to say "Cinema" I automatically say "Supermarket", and vice versa.

My seven funky people

Now it is my turn to tag fine some interesting, strange, and hopefully interesting people: @hereinthehive (Dan Donald), @jake74 (Jake Smith), @brucel (Bruce Lawson), @patrick_h_lauke (Pat Lauke), @iheni (Henny Swan), @robertnyman (Robert Nyman), @rem (Remy Sharp).

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Arrival of a second Mini Mills

Freida Daisy Mills, born May 3rd 2011

I've been very shy of the interwebs just lately. Not really looked at them much for the last two weeks. Why? Well, I've been busy with the little people. Nope, don't go reaching for the phone to call the asylum - I'm referring to my lovely kids.

My third little bundle of innocence and happiness, Freida Daisy Mills, arrived at 1.32pm on May 3rd 2011. 10 days late, I may add. We were waiting with baited breath for her to dain to show up, but were starting to think that she was way too comfy in the womb, and was gonna leave it until high school time before coming out.

She did however give us the signal in good time. My son Gabriel and I worked tirelessly into the night to blow up the home birthing pool (we did it the same way again, as it had worked so well for Elva's birth) and fill it with water to the correct temperature. And once we were done, Kirsty was only sat in it for 20 minutes before Freida came out!

Needless to say, she is absolutely beautiful, and the whole family are totally overjoyed with our new addition. See below for pics!

Other exciting things that happened on May 3rd through history:

  • 1616: William Shakespeare dies
  • 1791: Halley records total solar eclipse (the last one visible from London for an estimated 900 years)
  • 1903: Bing Crosby born
  • 1959: Ben Elton born
  • 1978: First ever spam e-mail sent

Freida with her mum:

Freida being an archetypal sleeping babe...

...and then being a lot less chilled, after being woken up when hungry!

Freida with her proud big brother...

...and looking far too cute with her sister!

Proud dad

Arty black and white shot of the two girls, with Freida aged 6 weeks or so.

Freida at 7 weeks, kitted out to go to her first heavy metal gig.

Freida at 9 weeks, ready for bed.

Freida at 10 weeks, wearing her halo.

Chilled little babe, in her dad's arms.

Geeking out up North!

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North UK that is, or ooop North, as us locals say it. This week saw two cool web standards events going down in Lancashire, and in this post I'm gonna provide a report on both of them. Good times indeed!

Standards.Next Manchester #1: HTML5, September 29th 2010

I decided to get some standards<next events running up in Manchester, as there still aren't really that many web geek events happening up here, and loads of info starved web geeks!

Bruce and Patrick came down to deliver the talks, one on semantics and HTML5 background, and one one dynamic multimedia features such as <canvas> and <video>. Bruce and Patrick both did very well, and people seemed pretty impressed with how the evening went. We are repeating the event in November, as all of the 80 tickets were signed up for in about 4 days, with 65 actually turning up on the night. I was flattered that we even had some folk from Sheffield and Preston turning up.

Related slides:

You can also find some pictures of the event online courtesy of Hwa Young Jung from Madlab!

University tour, UCLAN, Preston, UK: Mobile web development, pleasure or pain? September 30th 2010

A couple of months ago I was contacted by Mark Porter, one of the teachers in the UCLAN. His department combines journalism, web design, and other creative disciplines, so he wanted me to deliver a talk about the mobile web that would be of interest to techies as well as content producers. I went through content about Opera's history, history of mobile devices, the boom in mobile web browsing and why that happened, mobile limitations, web design techniques for mobile optimization, and writing content for mobile.

The turnout was pretty good, with about 70 students and staff attending. They appeared to find the talk useful, and I also got some interest in Opera internships and campus crew.

Download my mobile web slides (ZIP file, 1.5mb).

Review: Introducing HTML5, by Bruce Lawson and Remy Sharp

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Disclaimer: Bruce Lawson is a long time friend and work colleague, and Remy Sharp is also a good friend, so you might expect this review to be slightly biased. In any case, I will try to remain as impartial as possible, and look at the warts as well as the hotpants.

The setting

The last two weeks have been pure relaxation for my family and I, as we have been on holiday in the sun kissed Greek Island of Kefalonia, driving around the mountains, eating great food, drinking great wine and playing on the beach. And what better way to supplement this Nirvana than flicking through the pages of the latest HTML5 book offering from Messrs. Lawson and Sharp, the HTML5 hobbits we all know and love?

The good

Joking aside, this really is a very good book. Bruce and Remy have done a great job of wading through the absurdly-but-justifiably detailed HTML5 spec (including many months of reading the mailing lists), and distilling it down into a thoroughly readable, enjoyable little manual that weighs in at just over 200 pages. The writing style is humorous (but not painfully so), practical and pragmatic, and provides a really good snapshot of HTML5 in 2010, including exactly what you can do cross-browser right now, and how to plug the gaps in the browsers that won't play ball (poor old IE - makes you feel like kicking a puppy).

I really like the way they don't try to claim HTML5 is perfect, either the spec itself or the browser support. Remy really lays into the mess of drag and drop, for example, and Bruce explains that, while most of the new semantic elements make perfect sense (some take a while longer to grok than others), some of the browser implementations leave a lot to be desired, for example the lack of easy customization of form validation errors. They do however reassure you that it'll all be ok, and fill in the gaps where needed, so you can go through it with a feeling of excitement, not anxiety.

The bad?

If I had to pull them up on one thing, I'd say that some of the examples could have been a bit more in depth. When they demonstrate how things like web workers and sockets work, the examples given are the absolute bare minimum, and I would've liked a bit more to get my teeth into. However, you can't blame them for this approach - some of the API implementations are incomplete, or buggy, and the aim from their point of view is to get you up to speed with the new features as quickly as possible, with no cruft to get in your way. If you have some previous JavaScript experience, you'll have no problem picking this stuff up and plugging it into your own kick ass web apps.

Conclusion

This book is really well written, and provides existing web developers and designers with a great intro to all the major parts of the HTML5 spec, and how to get them working now. In 2010. Not 2022.

Find out more details and order the book from http://introducinghtml5.com.

SXSWi 2010 - March 12-16 2010

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Another year over of the big SXSWi! It was a crazy year as usual, and the vibe felt a bit different this time, I think mainly because there were SO MANY people there this year. However, it was still a wonderful creative/passionate melting pot, and it was also very successful for Opera.

I'm not gonna make this a blow by blow account like I usually do (my longest SXSWi report was 27 pages or something crazy), but I will focus on the parts that struck a real chord with me this year.

Panels

I only got to couple of panels besides the workshop series I contributed to (Knowbility's accessibility day series), as I was so busy on the Opera booth, giving product demonstrations and answering questions about HTML5, CSS3, etc., but I still got a lot out of the conference. I was at the following talks:

  • Accessibility: What It Is For and Where It is Going: In the first part of our accessibility workshop series, Sharron Rush and Richard Schwerdtfeger talked about the state of accessibility today, and Richard went through some of the tools IBM are working on that help facilitate accessibility for modern web applications.
  • Accessible JavaScript: Patrick Fox and Becky Gibson then went through accessible JavaScript in detail, discussing the foundations of accessible JavaScript (ie, content being accessible without JS where possible, which the SXSWi site fails on, as Patrick pointed out), and then going into detail on WAI-ARIA and how it facilitates accessible JavaScript applications (Becky did a great job of this, taking the audience through the basics and then showing some great Dojo examples)
  • Cross-device accessibility: is it for real?: My main presentation took some of the WAI-ARIA examples from the previous session and showed how well they worked across the spectrum of available mobile browsers and other alternative browsers. The conclusion reached was that, well, they pretty much just didn't! I then talked about the other problems with getting web apps working on mobile devices, and showed some solutions using best practices (eg using fluid layouts and making things keyboard accessible), and nascent technologies (eg CSS3 media queries and HTML5 video)
  • Web Education Rocks: The education panel - delivered by Leslie Jensen-Inman, Jeff Brown and Glenda Sims - was really fun. they went through some of the stuff we have been doing to improve web education recently (eg the new courses published on WaSP InterAct), and gave tips for making your classes more effective and fun. This last part took the form of a game of Jeopardy! The audience wasn't huge, but we did get to meet a bunch of new educators we hadn't bumped into before, and get some great new ideas. I announced myself as a useless hippy form England, when I got up to say a few words.
  • Is Canvas going to kill Flash?: This session was very interesting - Greg Veen from Typekit moderated, then they had Ben Galbraith speaking up for Canvas, a Flex guy speaking up for Flash, and a couple of developers that had worked with both providing some arguments for and against. In short, I think was fair to say that Canvas won, but then again this is largely a web standards crowd. The Flex guy also suffered in places by having a lack of knowledge to back up some arguments. Plus there were some interesting inaccuracies stated about Opera, for example about using the WebKit engine (eh???), and WbKit being the world's most popular mobile browser (I don't think so!)

In addition to all that, I also did a web educator's breakfast talk at the Hilton at 8am on the Saturday, getting up to give a 15 minute talk on the state of web education. This was an event organized by my publisher - New Riders - to promote our new book (InterAct with web standards), and it was well-attended, given that it was so early in the day ;-)

Opera success

As I mentioned before, this year was a huge success for Opera. The US is finally waking up to us ;-)

  • The UI looks great, and people love it.
  • The Dragonfly developer tools seem to work well, although they could definitely use a little UX love. People seemed impressed by the capabilities, especially the mobile debugging, the colour picker, the CSS editing, etc.
  • The standards support has really caught up nicely. Great that we are on top of this again. Nobody had a thing to say about stuff that we don't support yet. No more bitching about rounded corners, and lots of love about HTML5 video, transitions, etc.
  • The performance is really impressing people. On a few occasions I had folks come up and say "You claim to be fast, but let's try my site to see how you do" and then their jaw would drop at the rendering speed. The general pattern seemed to be that we were faster than Firefox, and about as fast as Chrome, but Chrome doesn't have developer tools available.
  • The Mini on iPhone story is pulling in a lot of people. Huge buzz generator. I think this will be fantastic for us, whether we get accepted on the app store or not!
  • I talked to loads of people this year who said that Firefox is getting too damn slow, so they are desperate to find an alternative browser. They all said they'd try Opera.
  • We had non-Opera people going around evangelising Opera! I was so thrilled to see this happen. John Foliot was the major one, but we had students from TSTC and other places doing it as well. Hell, I even had random conversations with music peeps that revealed that they use Opera and recommend it to their friends.

Other grooviness

  • It was again really cool to hang with all the educators and have a great time discussing new things to do in the future, in terms of continuing to publish more educational material as part of the WaSP InterAct curriculum framework, new outreach strategies, etc.
  • I loved seeing far-flung friends that I rarely get the chance to hang with, and making new ones
  • I really enjoyed hanging out with the accessibility posse — Sharron, Rich, Patrick, Becky, John Foliot, et al.
  • It was fun introducing Bruce "naughty pixie" Lawson to the crazy delights of SXSWi ;-)
  • I loved attending parties that were so crowded that I couldn't get a beer or walk across the bar. no, wait ;-)

HTML5 slides, speak the web

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I will be presenting an HTML5 talk on the 11th of February at Speak the web (the Leeds leg of the tour), a series of web talk evenings organized by Rich Clark and Dan Donald. I'm looking forward to it lots, and to provide you with a sneak preview I am making my slides available before time!

Click the link below to download them. I have created them with CSS, JavaScript and HTML, using the Opera Show format. You can view them in any browser by opening the HTML index page, but you will need the Opera browser to view them as an actual slideshow (use View > Full Screen).

Download Speak the Web slides (ZIP, 6.7mb)


Note that I have removed most of the actual video files from the download zip, to keep the file size down. There are a couple left in there that you could copy across to the other examples, and of course you can feel free to use your own!

Mobile web slides, Digital Sparks, 28th January 2009

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My first speaking gig of 2010, I have been invited to speak at the Digital Sparks event Transmission #3 — Device & Conquer: Tales from the front-line of mobile innovation on Thursday 28th March, along with JavaScript guru PPK and iPhone developer Matt Pollitt. It looks to be a nicely-balanced event, with me speaking about the state of mobile (web) development in general, Matt looking at iPhone development, and PPK looking at the technical details of mobile web dev in more detail.

To allow you to pick my slides up, I am making them available on this blog post - click the link below to download them. I have created them with CSS, JavaScript and HTML, using the Opera Show format. You can view them in any browser by opening the HTML index page, but you will need the Opera browser to view them as an actual slideshow (use View > Full Screen).

Download my digital sparks slides {ZIP file, 1.5mb)

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