The French Revolution was an uprising in extremis (in contrast to The Glorious Revolution). We all know about the storming of the Bastille but the revolutionaries didn’t stop at regime change. They also introduced their own calendar. While I personally might find decimal time to be a splendid idea, it was doomed to failure. It required the existing system to change too much too quickly.

I was reminded of this over the past week as I watched a fever of clock-smashing fervour sweep the world of web standards.

It all began with Håkon’s open letter to the Web community wherein he justifies Opera’s antitrust complaint with the EU. This justification revolves around conflating Internet Explorer’s market dominance with its relative lack of standards support. But for the purposes of an antitrust complaint, these aspects are entirely unrelated. If Microsoft is abusing its market dominance to push its own web browser, that’s one issue. If that web browser happens to be sorely lacking in standards support, that’s a separate issue. Eric has already called them on this—if the issue were really one of standards-compliance, the time for action was when IE6 was languishing in the doldrums, not after the release of IE7 which shows Microsoft is at least back on track:

What I’m advocating is that rather than attacking the laggard right when he’s showing promise of catching up and being part of the team again, it might be better to help him along, maybe even say a few words of encouragement. Unless, that is, this attack springs out of some sort of perceived threat—in which case, just say so, and don’t use web standards as a fig leaf.

If I were cynical, I might suggest that Opera’s mashup of issues is a ploy to manipulate the emotions of web developers who care about standards. But I don’t think that’s the case. Håkon is passionate about web standards—one of the most passionate advocates I’ve met—and I believe that his intentions are honourable. I think he honestly believes that Opera’s actions are in the best interests of the Web. It’s just a shame that, in making his case, he has muddied two separate but important issues.

Spurred on by Håkon’s call to arms, Malarkey predicts a riot and proceeds to lob a brick through the window of the W3C. He outlines his plan for the CSS Working Group equivalent of a decimal clock as one in which browser manufacturers—the people who actually implement the specs—aren’t invited. He cites the situation between Opera and Microsoft:

What I am concerned about is how Opera’s action will further destabilize the W3C’s CSS Working Group of which both Opera and Microsoft post representatives. I am concerned that this action will irrevocably damage the promise and progress of CSS3.

But, as Zeldman points out, this connection is tenuous at best:

Apple and Microsoft and Netscape and Sun and Opera have been suing each other since the W3C started. What lawyers do has never stopped developers from Apple and Microsoft and Netscape and Sun and Opera from working together to craft W3C and ECMA specs.

The next bit of clock-smashing comes from Alex who cries from the barricades that The W3C cannot save us!

Alex solves the kinds of problems that us mere mortals haven’t even recognised as being there. He’s constantly thinking a few years ahead of the rest of us. No surprise then that his frustrations are magnified by his time-travelling perspective. His takeaway soundbite quote is this:

In order for the future to be better by a large amount, it must be different by a large amount.

He is absolutely right. But here’s the thing… I don’t want the future to change by a large amount. The present isn’t that bad. HTML is good enough. CSS is not bad. JavaScript is okay. Yes, I’d like to see improvements. Yes, I’d like to see innovation. But not at the expense of interoperability. I’m certainly not in a hurry to return to the bad old days of the browser wars, which is the very thing that Alex thinks is required to drive innovation.

I suspect that the frustrations felt by Jeff and others are on a different scale to what Alex is talking about. We don’t want the decimal clock of some brave new browser war; we’re just looking for the Gregorian reform of CSS3 with its multiple background images, embeddable fonts and other shiny goodness.

Alex sets up a false dichotomy by suggesting that change must either come from a standards body (something he believes is impossible) or it must come from browser vendors. The truth is that both are possible, as evinced by namespaced CSS rules or, on a more extreme scale, the success of the proprietary XMLHttpRequest object.

While acknowledging the truth in Alex’s frustrations, Stuart sums up the problem with his proposed solution:

Let us not forget that the problem with the browser wars wasn’t that it fragmented the world in lots of different directions. The problem with the browser wars was that it fragmented the world in lots of different directions that weren’t possible to eventually implement everywhere.

I fear that a new wave of browser wars would lead to an ascendancy of Robespierres and, inevetiably, Napoleons.

Lest you think I’m being a W3C apologist here, let me make it clear that I am as frustrated as any other web developer at the glacial pace of the CSS Working Group and the lack of progress with CSS3. I just don’t think we need to dump the baby out with the bathwater. I think we can avoid any water disposal related infanticide by just changing what needs to be changed.

I think we can all agree that we’d like to see more transparency and movement from the Working Group. I don’t think we can avoid the process being a “battlefield”, an idea that many find distasteful but which is inherint to any heterogeneous body. It would be a wonderful world indeed in which Parliament, Congress and the United Nations never had to deal with heated disagreement. Disagreement isn’t a reason for abolishing these bodies; it’s the reason they exist in the first place.

It looks like all the recent sound and fury is starting to have an effect. David Baron is taking a stand from within:

I’ve informed the CSS working group that I am no longer participating in member-only mailing lists or meetings. I believe the member-confidential nature of the group hurts the future development of CSS.

Change is needed. It looks like change is coming. It may even be a regime change. But let’s not start drawing up new calendar systems just yet. The clock of CSS is running slow. We need to wind it up. That doesn’t mean we need to smash it.

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Tagged with css w3c standards

Openjobs is a very cool project where I had the opportunity to work in partnership with my brother. It’s basically a job board target for the Brazilian Market, inspired by Krop, 37signals GigBoard and Authentic Jobs.

One of the coolest things about this project was the freedom I had to create the design and the CSS.

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Alex Trochut.
Hot.

Holy crap, the entire Discovery Channel cycling team's bikes and helmets (they disbanded the team)

It’s an instant favorite, and therefore a “must post”. It’s one of those logos where the idea comes quickly, in the first few of hours after starting working on the project.

ClubCollective is a night club chain in Netherlands, Spain, France and soon in a several more places in Europe. It’s designed by the talented people at Bunch, a design agency based in London, Zagreb and Singapore.

What they came up within a couple of hours working on the logo is pretty cool

Credits

Bunch

Design Bookmarklet. A suite of web-design and development assistive tools which can be utilised on any web-page.

After my first texture release, some of you mentioned you might find some ‘paper’ textures useful, so I guess you could say that this is a requested freebie. Not much else to say other than keep the requests coming. Download the High Res images from Flickr by clicking on the pics. The full size images are 2005 X 3000 px :)

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Every year Rich creates a mix his favourite songs from the last 12 months and hands it out to his mates. Rich has excellent music taste, so the CD is always greatly anticipated. This year Rich had the idea of creating an office mix as well. Each of us would nominate our two favourite tracks and we’d end up with a CD that reflected the year’s soundtrack at Clearleft.

I found it very difficult to pick just two tracks, so it got me thinking about the soundtrack to my year. I don’t know about you, but I tend to associate specific events in my life with specific songs. For instance, “Playing With Knives” by Bizzare Inc reminds me of walking back from the PSV club in Manchester during my university years, while “Wonderwall” reminds me of sitting in a hammock in Thailand with an old girlfriend. So I decided to compile my soundtrack based on the songs I listened to each months and the events surrounding them. It’s a little contrived at times, but you get the picture.

January - “Alala” by CSS

A punkey blast of riot girl power, this track kept me bouncing well into the New Year.

February - “Ice Cream” by New Young Pony Club

Introduced to me by my then girlfriend, NYPC were a natural progression from CSS and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Sexy, sassy and fun, just like her.

March - “Binary Love” by The Rakes

The Rakes provided the backdrop for my post SXSW road trip down the coats from San Francisco to Big Sur. Good times.

April - “Young Folks” by Peter, Bjorn and John

Another introduction by my then girlfriend, this song is beautifully upbeat and is almost impossible not to hum along to.

May - “Hoppípolla” by Sigur Ros

This gently haunting song is the perfect soundtrack to a relaxing night in.

June - “Rock & Roll Queen” by The Subways

Rather sadly I came across this song via a TV advert featuring Kate Moss. Despite that, Rock & Roll Queen is a class act, unlike our Kate.

July - “Season Song” by Blue States

Watching 28 days later reminded me how much I love this track. Perfect music for drifting off to sleep.

August - “The Crane Wife 3” by The Decemberists

The Clearleft office was pumping with the sound of the Decemberists in the run up to dConstruct this year, thanks in no small part to Mr Keith.

September - “It’s Not Over Yet” by the Klaxons

The album is a bit hit or miss, but this floor stomper really kicks butt. Golden Skans is also pretty cool.

October - “It’s a Hit” by We Are Scientists

Spent the autumn rocking out to “We Are Scientists”. It was really tough picking out a single track as they’re all so good.

November - ” Doing It Right” by the Go Team

This high energy track with it’s catchy cheerleader chants is enough to get anybody bouncing rounds the house. And they’re from Brighton to!

December - “When Anger Shows” by Editors

There’s something about the time of year than makes wandering round town listening to the Editors melancholic power ballads feel appropriate.

So that’s my rundown for the year. How about you?

I feel like I'd better pop my head up and break the Web Directions-induced radio silence for the sake of getting at least one more post on here before the end of the year. So this will be a bit of a round-up of what's been on my radar in the past month, in amongst all the craziness.

Web Directions North

The most frequent question in casual conversation these days: how are registrations? This year it's going really well. I daresay WDN08 is going to quite a bit bigger than 2007. There's still a lot — an awful lot — to do before the end of January, but the four of us putting it on are starting to feel the pressure lifting a little which is a nice pre-holiday treat. If you missed it, Digital Web is running their snowboard contest once again, and you have a few more days to get entries in for a shot at free tickets to the conference.

24 Ways

Drew and crew are back for another year of holiday cheer. If you missed it, over the weekend my annual contribution was published: Get in Shape, where I spend some time looking at the role of consistency, balance, and completion in design. Given last year's colour analysis, you could be forgiven for plotting the next few years' worth according to fundamental design elements like, ohhhh, say line or texture.

Suits

You've likely heard by now that Opera has decided to engage in legal proceedings against Microsoft. The main points seem to resolve to 1) Microsoft is limiting choice, and 2) they're refusing to implement web standards.

I'll reserve judgment on point #2 until I see what's in store for IE8 as the steps forward made by IE7 give me some hope for what lies ahead. (It struck me IE7 was a quick fix to kill the biggest headaches, so I wonder what they've done with the year or so they've had since shipping.)

As for point #1, haven't we seen this movie? Keep in mind that Opera is a commercial company. I think their proposed remedy of including pre-installed browsers in Windows is somewhat telling.

Eric Meyer thinks this is a case of very Bad Timing and though I'm not quite as concerned about potential bad reactions, I find myself agreeing.

Stuff and CSS

And in the other corner, Andy Clarke kicked off a dialogue about disbanding the current CSS working group as a consequence of the Opera lawsuit, making the perceived connection more clear in a follow-up post.

Reactions have been swift and passionate both on-site and elsewhere. For my part, I questioned the financing of such a proposal, but that's far from my only concern. I think Maciej Stachowiak (Apple, WebKit) sums it up best: those of us in the trenches don't get feature requests from the general web design & development community, but the browser folks do. Far be it for me to claim what I want is the same as what everyone else wants; the community is too diverse. Removing the people who likely have the most insight and do much of the work seems like a less than ideal course of action.

It's a good discussion to have; there have to be better solutions.

Update: an insightful late-entry essay to add to the heap, The future of web standards.

Zen Mini-update

Back in October I decided to change the submissions process of the css Zen Garden to either yes, you're in, or no, thanks for trying. The new way didn't sit well with me, I'd forgotten that I often don't/can't include great work for some reason or another. Rejecting them outright was a problem.

So, another quick change to the publishing process, and we're back to the old way. All designs are published, but the ones that don't make the cut are put on the Other Designs list (accessible from "All Designs" in the top paragraph of text). While I was at it I decided to use the metadata for the newer ones that have it, so there's now a country and date listed for each of these.

A big link list may not be as elegant as the previous categorized designs, but it's sustainable — I still make a yes or no decision, but at least these the ones that don't make it have a place to go.

Presents. Did I mention there were presents?

And to end on a positive tone, I'd like to share a few sites I've been enjoying lately.

I Love Typography popped up a few months ago as a well-designed new type blog. It was an automatic add, but it's managed to keep me engaged with great material like font creation case studies. Then little while later I noticed Nice Web Type, which hasn't been updated much yet, but hits all the right buttons in terms of subject matter. One to watch anyway.

Two personal blogs that stood out this year are Ongoing and rc3. Both are written by programmers, both frequently dive into coding minutae I can't hope to follow, but both also cover much broader subject matter more frequently in literate and well-considered fashion.

And a brand new find (as a result of a link to Web Directions, if I remember correctly) is FAIRspot. Part blog, part gallery, part directory, it's kind of like CSS Beauty without the CSS part. Lots of great stuff coming through their RSS feed.

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That's likely it from me in 2007. It's been a fairly light year for writing on this site, but that's just cause I've been busy elsewhere. Good problem to have.

Whale Watch week is coming up, and here's where to spot whales just off the coast of Oregon.