AlastairC » Real life

Open Rights Group Conference

AlastairC — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 17:02:26 +0000

I just had an interesting day at the Open Rights Group Conference (#ORGcon). As someone that doesn’t identify with any political party, it’s the only (mildly) activistic group I’m involved in. That’s probably due to the close connection with the tools I use everyday at work, like the Internet.

A few things I learned from today…

From Cory Doctrow:

Politicians struggle to regulate computers/networks in effective ways because computers are fundamentally flexible tools, you can’t restrict how they work without preventing them from working. (E.g. It’s like trying to regulate how a car works by changing the wheel.)
Efforts to restrict the functions of computers always end up in software like root-kits. (E.g. the Sony rootkit they installed when people played CDs, or Nintendo’s methods of restricting content on their DS3.) I recommend checking out ‘What’s Inside the Box?‘, which questions who should be in control of the software running on computers you get into (e.g. cars), and those put into you (e.g. hearing aids).
Efforts to restrict content end up in censorship. Part of his theme on “Censorship is inseparable from surveillance“, pre-internet preventing someone from buying a book could be handled at the publisher end of the equation. Now everyone can be a publisher, attempts to control copying mean checking every book you read.
Software used for restricting internet access in schools is generally:
- Ineffective, as kids routinely route around it.
- Anti-education, as often teachers find resources they were going to use blocked.
- Opaque, you cannot tell how it works. There is no central standard, so the black/white lists are either maintained by local sys-admins, or the company providing the software.
- Provided by the same organisations supplying the countries we tend to think of as undemocratic.
Copyright / copying is really only ‘level one’ of a war on general computing, as other industries will find these universal tools that run software hinder their business model. For example, 3D printers making small goods at the press of a button.

Should Digital Archives be open?

The presentations from Nick Poole and Ben White kicked off a couple of ideas, the issues seemed to focus around the institutions having missions centred around physical access, and not having the resources to digitise or share their resources effectively.

Reducing costs: I wonder what would happen if Libraries and Museums took a Seti/BitTorrent approach to distributing their digital resources? I.e. Allow interested people to install a programme that stores a tiny little bit of the site or resources. When requests are made through the central website, it proxies through to one or more people who are looking after the content. For larger resources it would make sense to use a protocol like BitTorrent so that it distributes the load over several computers/connections.

I could see people running that at home, and plenty of Universities would probably be happy to do that.

Making money: It seems the battle ground between institutions and the public is over the headline resources, the stuff people (in general) actually want to see. A win-win method might be to reverse what Pinboard did, which was to charge a little more for every subscriber to the service.

Institutions could charge a small fee for each item, but that fee decreases every time someone pays for it, becoming free after a certain amount of money has been raised.

That would take advantage of the long-tail of (mostly) Academics who would want to delve into niche areas, but the popular stuff would be free for all.

Defeating Acta

A great French duo treated us to a serious and funny couple of presentations, and although I didn’t follow it all, the politics involved are both intriguing and disturbing. At the very least Acta should be booted out because it’s trying to make legislation without going through the parliamentary process.

Realising the fight we’re in

Professor Lawrence Lessig is a very compelling speaker, and even though I’d seen some aspects of it before it was a great performance. It was one of those presentations where you won’t get much from just looking at the slides, so keep an eye out for the video on the ORG website soon.

The general argument was that copyright issues are important, but actually the core issue is the (over) influence of large business interests in the political system. A lot of the examples are from the US, but given that the same types of law are passed in the UK, there is something going on here as well.

Some of the points made me wonder about what type of organisations are best suited to different things. For example, the US has terrible broadband, and in many states they legally prevent citizen groups from providing their own. The for-profit science journals cost 9 times as much as not-for-profit organisations. In the UK we have better competition in mobile providers and much better deals than the US.

It seems that when dealing with a resource that cannot be competed with (e.g. cable broadband or the source material of journals) for-profit organisations seem to have the wrong incentives.

Where the aim is to provide a resource in a non-competitive situation, for-profit organisations are not effective.

Prison’s in the US are another recent example, where lobbyists for private prison companies are literally drafting laws that will put more people in prison, and they often get passed.

The undercover economist uses health insurance as an example of why a non-mandatory insurance will simply never work well for health care.

Back to Lessig’s presentation, and his core theme was that we need to attack the roots of the problem, which is how money affects politics. Although he didn’t mention it directly, I had already come across Rootstrikers, which outlines the plan.

Bristol Council CMS discussion

AlastairC — Sun, 12 Sep 2010 13:31:21 +0000

I attended the Roundtable Discussion about Bristol City Council’s Future Web Platform, an interesting insight into how local authorities think about their web presence. Something about the presentations & process jarred with me, and it took a little while to work out what the problem was: the assumptions.

I’d glanced through the requirements, which were relatively good for a Council, but obviously include everything and the kitchen sink. The presentation gave a brief outline, these are some key slides for the requirements:

Apologies for the picture quality, check out the full presentations on Bristol City Council’s blog. (Some of it is available on Connecting Bristol in video.)

I think these requirements will lead the Council down just the same path they are trying to escape. Particularly:

Using Java or Microsoft (internally support technologies)
Having a 5 Year roadmap
Over-arching requirements that affect all other functionality; such as being multi-lingual, personalised, and accessible. Assuming that each of the specific functionalities (e.g. forum) has to meet those over-arching requirements (which is implied), they create an enormous overhead. Not that they are unachievable, but the chances of a traditional CMS being able to meet them across all the specific functionalities are non-existant.

Although not in the slides, there are two implicit requirements:

BCC do not want to be trapped using a niche product with limited suppliers.
The ‘solution’ would be a single product

Unfortunately there isn’t a solution that will meet those requirements.

Java

NB: There was no-mention of Microsoft ‘solutions’ at the meeting, so I’m assuming BCC don’t believe one would be open or cheap enough.

I would ditch this requirement for several reasons:

It assumes people unfamiliar with the website’s development will edit it.: Even if a Java CMS were used, why would Council staff mess with the CMS? Perhaps if the internal staff are involved in the development work it would be ok. But then, why use an external supplier at all? Assuming that the Council physically host it then they can and should administer the system, but it doesn’t need to be in Java for that. I would separate the development from the (hosting) administration, and have a contract with the developers for support for the application(s).; Another option would be to hand-off the hosting to the company developing the website (or their hosting partner).
Java isn’t used by people creating modern websites.: I have nothing against Java, and it is eminently suitable for many purposes. Unfortunately quick development of a modern website is not one of them. I recently looked around for a Java framework that produced good, clean, accessible HTML. There are some promising developments (e.g. Grails), but as a general rule Java developers/development doesn’t tend to care about the front-end. For example, a client was considering the Java Icefaces framework, who’s knowledge of accessibility is years behind current thinking.
How future proof is Java?: Another count against Java (especially in a 5 year time frame) is whether it will be open. Since Oracle bought Sun, and especially since they sued Google over Java, Java’s future direction is in doubt. Not that I think BCC would have a legal issue, but Java could be a legacy technology in 5 years.
Java is inherently a heavy technology.: We used to use Java for our CMS, and using the JVM plus database and webserver is a lot for a server. Compared to a LAMP stack (or our preferred Linux/Nginx/Postgres/Python) you won’t get a lot of bang for your buck. A modern website tends to integrate multiple streams (e.g. RSS), databases of things, and related components, and if you look at the big players (Yahoo, Facebook etc.) they aren’t using Java as their primary technology. Neither are the products catering to small players (e.g. WordPress & Drupal)

5 year roadmap

This requirement is inherently going to discriminate against open source solutions. The nature of open source development is distributed and reactive, there isn’t a “guy in marketing” who will draw up a customer friendly roadmap.

You need to either to find a partner company with a good track record who looks like they will be around in 5 years, or go into the initial development assuming that you’ll have to be able to move off the solution with a 1 year turn-around.

I also don’t think that proprietary solutions are realistically better here, it’s just as likely they’ll get bought out or go under. The difference between an open source CMS dying out (like APLAWS) and a proprietary one going under is negligible, you’d have to migrate in both cases.

Overarching Requirements

These are useful and necessary requirements (e.g. accessibility), I’m not suggesting they are ditched, just that combined with the desired functionality, the Council should not be looking at one product.

Start at a lower level

Council (in fact most) procurement starts with the assumption that you can draw up a list of requirements, and assess a series of products and see how well they match. CMS products (commercial and open source) are built to meet these tick-lists.

The thing is, the more boxes a product can tick, the less likely it is going to do it well. You know that joke about consultants? They can be quick, good, cheap: pick any two.

There is a similar ‘law’ of content management systems, pick two out of:

Quick to implement
Flexible functionality
Have an easy to use interface

Take WordPress as a well known example, it’s got a reasonably good interface, and it can be very quick to implement. However, it isn’t going to be flexible enough for the Council’s requirements (e.g. changing the workflow).

Drupal can be quick to implement (for sites which have the same assumptions that Drupal makes), it is quite flexible, but it’s a pig to use for non-technical authors. (You can modify the interface, but then it’s not quick to implement.)

Having done some Reddot development, that is fairly quick to implement a site, and the interface for authors is ok, but extending it can be a nightmare.

New assumptions

So what to do? The most important change in assumptions are:

The website will be highly customised and that a traditional CMS is not going to meet the council’s requirements.
Start with only the core requirements to provide the most important services, and a roadmap.

I’ve done a lot of user-research with local authorities, and if you don’t get the basics right (easy access to core services) all the fancy ‘Web 2.0′ style functionality is wasted.

My recommendation for technical direction would be to use a framework based approach. Use a lower-level framework like Django, Ruby on Rails or MS MVC. These were created as toolsets for creating modern web sites / applications. Some companies have CMS type products that provide an easy-to-use interface that sit on top, just be careful they retain the flexibility of the underlying framework. The key is that you start with a core website and build exactly what you need.

Another approach would be to assume the use of several technologies. For example, use Drupal as the main tool for the website, but assume that there will be an extended development time for customisation, and other products will be used, skinned and customised.

I prefer the framework approach, as you spend less time working around the assumptions of the CMS, but it depends on the situation. Let’s hope the Council can get past the standard thinking.

My biases

I think everyone at the meeting has some inherent bias or agenda, I’ll make mine explicit:
I work for a company (Nomensa) that does work with local authorities (and others) in the area of user-research, web design and content management. The usual disclaimer that these are my words applies.

So in experience terms, I’ve run or seen lots of usability testing, Information Architecture sessions, and focus groups of citizens/customers for local authorities. I’ve also been involved with many CMS-migration / redesign projects at local authorities (and other markets).

I’ve also spearheaded development of our (DJango based) Content Management System Defacto (website updating soon), which was born out of frustration with inflexible and inaccessible CMS products.

However, what I’ve written above is my honest assessment, we haven’t bid for the website and I don’t have any commercial interest at this time, just a Bristonian’s interest!

Music industry change

AlastairC — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 13:28:43 +0000

A layman’s perspective

Ok, I don’t know much about the music industry, but there is such as huge disparity between what the record labels say and just about everyone else, it’s difficult not to comment. I think that’s probably because their business is over. I’m not even someone who participates in online music sites, these comments come from watching Internet businesses.

Historically, the major record labels have been the gatekeepers. People would listen to a few bands on a few radio stations, and the choice of music was finite. New bands come and go, but pretty much at the whim of the labels. Popular bands (Beatles, U2 etc.) would make the record labels huge amounts of money, and many other (no so popular) bands would benefit from record label support.

The record labels controlled the distribution (records, CDs etc) and generally kept rights to things, so they maintain control.

If you think about the general spending on different bands, it’s been something like this (please excuse my poor drawing skills):

Now, I don’t know the actual figures, but both of these must be logarithmic scales, as a few top ‘artists’ make mega bucks (Black Swan style), and there are many who do it for the love of music and gigging.

Changes

The main changes since the CD heyday have been:

The digital format and MP3 players have changed how people listen to music, and how it’s collected & stored;
The internet has made the distribution channel almost free;
The web has made the long tail of interests supportable, allowing geographically disparate people of niche interests to communicate easily.

What hasn’t change is the record labels, especially in the US, where the RIAA prosecutes consumers: the music industry spent an estimated $1M to prosecute just one of the millions of individuals who use file-sharing software. The futility of this approach is obvious.

The future for record labels seems bleak, and I’m not convinced that even with radical change they would survive.

The future of music distribution

Looking ahead a few years, the role of the record label could be replaced by a marketing function with minimal infrastructure. Internet distribution, on-demand printing of t-shirts, books and even CDs means that scaling from 5 bands to 5,000 bands would be (relatively) easy.

Imagine a site similar to MySpace, but purely aimed at being a music community. A site where bands can sign up for free, create some pages, upload some tracks, upload some designs for t-shirts, and put in their gig dates. The site provides blogging for the musicians, for the end-users it provides forums, sharing of ratings and new music recommendations for end-users. (last.fm does this well.)

The band can select a few give-away tracks, and the others have pre-view clips with purchase buttons next to them. The purchase has to be super-easy, going straight into your music collection.

The people running the site keep an eye on the incoming bands, making sure the right people know about new bands, and taking a cut of all the outgoings. They concentrate on giving the bands a good platform, and the users a great way of finding the music and musical events they are interested in. At this point, the share of money going into music could be much more evenly distributed:

I wonder who will be the first to create this type of site? It could be the current labels, there are moves in that direction. It seems unlikely though, they are too entrenched in scarcity thinking.

The massive stumbling block for anyone else is all the artists who are currently signed up. I suspect that the copyright issues would prevent any currently signed band from moving to a completely online model. Sites like Last.fm and services like Spotify have made the listening and finding aspects much, much better. However, they still have to play by the label’s rules, and probably aren’t able to create the sort of music services I’m thinking of.

Another consideration is that ‘music’ is probably too wide for a reasonable online community, it might be that there are site(s) per genre, even if they are simply white-label style differences.

.net standards champion

AlastairC — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 15:31:59 +0000

I was pleased (and rather surprised) to be nominated for “standards champion” in the .net awards. The thing is, the competition is, um, quite fierce! I’m up against the W3C, Mozilla, and some of the best known names in the business (like Zeldman). So I’m not picking out a suit for the ceremony, but bear with me a moment, there’s a couple of things to consider.

First of all, the award is for:

a site, individual or organisation promoting accessible design in 2008.

Accessible design, hmm. Well, the organisations don’t really promote accessible design really, so as nice as it is to be considered with the W3C and Mozilla, they wouldn’t get my vote.

Also, if the award were for standards champion of all time, or a lifetime award, then it would be very stiff competition between Zeldman, Shea, Molly, Meyer & Cederhome (in reverse alphabetical order). But I’m not sure any of them have been promoting accessible design this year?

.net is also a UK based magazine, and I’m hoping a little patriotism might bias people towards the UK based entries

So that leaves:

Me
Christian Heilmann
Julie Howell

Julie Howell is very well known in the accessibility world, campaigning for over a decade whilst at the RNIB, technically authoring the PAS 78 standard and is still right in the thick of things on an upcoming British Accessibility standard. I would assume that, like me, a lot of Julie’s work is for clients, helping them create accessible sites.

Christian Heilmann, “International Developer Evangelist” at Yahoo!, is the creator of accessible versions of Flickr, Easy-Youtube, a method of captioning youtube videos, and even injecting lang attributes into twitter via google!

Perhaps most importantly of all, he has organised the scripting enabled conference, a day of understanding the issues, followed by a day of trying to fix them! (I will be there.)

I’m one of the founders of Nomensa, we’ve been creating accessible sites since 2001. I post here quite a bit, on quite a wide spread of accessibility topics, and in .net magazine. Not incredibly inspiring stuff, but there is one thing that I haven’t mentioned yet. Recently we created the web accessibility and development guidelines (based on WCAG 2) for a well known multi-national, who will be enforcing this with their development agencies for around 500 websites. That should see quite a sea change at that level, as it will be part of the contract for all their new sites to test against and commit to meeting WCAG 2.

Getting that sort of initiative going took not only buy-in at quite a high level in the organisation, but a lot of work to educate the people involved, and willingness to fit accessibility into their current processes and troubleshooting to get past initial problems.

In terms of putting practical tools for accessibility into the hands of developers, Christian wins hands down. However, please do make your own choice at the .net awards.

Dr Horrible’s sing along blog

AlastairC — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 22:14:07 +0000

In a break from our irregular schedule, I feel compelled to point out that Joss Whedon is doing a sort of Radiohead. For a few days only, there is a three part “supervillain musical” free online, the idea was to:

make it on the fly, on the cheap – but to make it. To turn out a really thrilling, professionalish piece of entertainment specifically for the internet. To show how much could be done with very little… And to make a lot of silly jokes.

If that idea floats you’re boat (or you liked Buffy/Angel/Firefly/Serenity/Toy Story), have a look. It doesn’t seem to be available from the UK iTunes, so this might be you’re only (legal) chance, it disappears on Sunday.

Nathan Fillion plays the smug good-guy, our hero is the villain.

Anything that ends on the word “balls” is good for me.

PS. If you must think about something accessibility wise, what do you think of the WordPress 2.6 image/caption code? From the interface, the ‘title’ I entered started “Capture…”, the ‘alt’ started “Nathan…”.

Why I don’t buy DRM (music) products

AlastairC — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 17:13:19 +0000

Because it can be turned off:

Microsoft last week told former MSN Music customers that it would no longer support the DRM licenses for tracks bought through the failed music sales portal. The news meant customers would lose the ability to play the music they own once their existing computers ceased to function.

iTunes Plus, Play, Amazon (when it gets to the UK), fine. But with DRMed content, even from a popular service like iTunes, you never know what’s around the corner. The default state of the file is unreadable without their permission.

Mark Pilgrim walks you through the day the music died.

Yahoo have also pulled the plug.

Email IA for the overloaded

AlastairC — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 22:24:17 +0000

For those who get a large volume of email, you probably know the pain of trying to balance reading, sorting, and acting on that email. After several years of battle, I’ve settled on a particular filtering method that will probably work for anyone that receives email from several internal teams, and many project lists. Do you need to use Information Architecture (IA) on your email?

I get over 100 email a day that I should read (i.e. not spam, which I get much more of). This is simply too much to read and do work. So how do you cope? I used to get interrupted all the time, checking lots of email. When I got annoyed with that, I’d miss email that I was supposed to respond to.

So I fell into a system that let me differentiate the ones that I should read soon, and those that were ‘FYI‘. Using this system can also help to enforce a little email best practice in other people as well.

Some people will probably think “well, that’s obvious”, but I know many people struggle with this, so perhaps a quick ‘how-to’ will help someone.

Folder structure

How you categorise things will depend on your email, but I split things into email about projects (folder per client) and internal email (non-project specific work email, folder per team). You might consider a folder per person, but if there are more than about 10 I would suggest grouping them by business function / team.

I’ve assumed the use of outlook, but most email clients should be able to do something similar. I’m also assuming each project has a group email list that you can use to filter those email.

That leads to a folder structure similar to this:

Not to me
Clients
- client 1
- client 2
Teams
- team 1
- team 2
Other folders

The ‘not to me’ folder I’ll explain below, and other folders could be any that don’t get that much email.

Rules

There are several layer of rules, most should ‘stop processing more rules’ once it has run:

Spam (move anything with “[SPAM” or equivalent into the junk folder).
From me (anything sent by me is marked as read. This applies before the other filters, so don’t set ‘stop processing more rules’.).
Client/Project emails (anything sent to list for “Client x” is moved into the Client x folder, except if my name is in the To or CC box, or it’s marked as high importance. Set ‘Stop processing more rules’).
Team emails, (anything sent to “team x” is moved into that folder, unless my name is in the To or CC. Set ‘Stop processing more rules’).
Internal people emails (anything sent by person in “team x” is moved into their team’s folder, unless my name is in the To or CC. Set ‘Stop processing more rules’).
Not to me (anything where my name is not in the To or CC, except if it’s high importance).

This has the effect of filtering anything that isn’t sent directly to me (also preventing the pop-up by the system tray in Outlook). Therefore anything that is sent to me, is worthy of looking at soon. Everything else can be left until I go through project or team emails.

Projects are dealt with before internal email simply because it’s more important to deal with. If you think about the filters, if colleague X sends you an email, it will go to a project list if it’s about that, their team folder if it’s not sent to you, or your inbox if it is.

This has also been quite helpful for getting others to think about how they address emails, as they quickly work out I will reply promptly if it’s sent to me rather than (or as well as) a list.

The ‘not to me’ folder gets any email that isn’t sent to a project list, from a team mate, and isn’t addressed to you directly. That catches a lot of miscellaneous email like discussion lists you haven’t dealt with, or spam that’s BCCed to you.

Favourite folders

Whilst emails are pre-sorted into the appropriate folders, it also really helps to read across many folders, like cross-section indexes on a website. I tend to have these ‘favourite’ folders:

Inbox
Today (a search folder that aggregates everything sent today)
Unread email
Sent items
For follow up
Junk email (so it’s always in view, and I can drag things into it easily).

These enable me to go through all the recent or unread email quickly if I’m using a block of time to deal with email. I’m sure there are many other ways and tricks, but this feels right for now.

My phone thinks I’m a geek

AlastairC — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 10:51:01 +0000

Predictive text is great, but a double edged sword. I’ve taught it a few too many acronyms, and now they are the default. These defaults for common words are really annoying:

I type	My phone shows
see	pdf
to	vm
the	uie
for	dns

So, "Go to the office and see john" becomes:

Are there any others who’ve been unstuck by this, or am I the only one?

Also, is there a way to change the dictionary? I’ve seen reports of it being in: c:\system\data\predic\10xxxxx.dat, but I don’t have that folder, at least browsing via bluetooth.

If I’m never heard from again…

AlastairC — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 05:00:32 +0000

I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but I try not to ‘test’ the system if I can help it. But when a friend drops you in it (possibly), you don’t have much choice. If I’m not heard of again, this is why.

The background is that I’m visiting a friend (nickname Sooty) in Australia, this is an IM conversation in advance of that:

Sooty: g’day mate you busy?
alastc: Fairly, what’s up?
Sooty: nothing just did you know you land the same morning as the american president!!!! Thats gonna make you customs trip fantstic…
alastc: oh crap.
alastc: same airport?
Sooty: yer and i might tip off the customs people about keith!! you know how he loves the police and all that!!!
alastc: Yes, I seem to remember he had great treatment / customer service from them as a suspect
Sooty:
alastc: Do you know what time airforce 1 lands?
Sooty: nope i doubt many people do….. now we had beter not mention that and missiles otherwise the people reading this will flag it and you two can’t complete your mission while you are here!!!
alastc: Oh thanks. Well, I guess now we find out if there is a big brother for MSN…

I’ve had a product demo from the same people that work for the American military, and it seemed like pretty good technology for matching words and concepts, so I could be in trouble!

PS. This post was timed to publish at the time I land in Australia, staying only for three weeks.

@media 2007

AlastairC — Sun, 10 Jun 2007 19:07:34 +0000

I’m just back from @media, and thought I’d post up brief notes (such as they are) for my own reference and anyone else’s gain. Obviously, I will only comment on the presentations I saw, and it’s all from my own particular perspective.

Jesse James Garrett – Beyond AJAX

I didn’t take notes here, but it was an interesting story type of presentation, where the meat was “Here is why you should do user-centred-design”, without actually mentioning UCD by name. Perhaps that’s a little cynical, what he actually said was: design from the outside in (i.e. interface first, then functionality, then technology choice), with lots of online and offline examples.

Someone else’s notes on JJG’s presentation.

Molly Holzschlag – The Broken World: Solving the Browser Problem Once and For All

Again, no notes, but the thrust of the presentation was that there are real, human reasons why browsers are they way they are, as well as being hideously complex things to create. I’d love to have a close look at the ‘class diagram’ she took a snap of on a wall at Microsoft, it looked like a massive 3d cube of wires.

Someone else took notes on Molly’s presentation.

Nate Koechley – High Performance Web Pages

I’d been following the performance research by Yahoo for a while, but still wanted to see if there was anything new, and there was.

Starting with a premise that recent interfaces have to some extent reduced the performance impact of the using modern method and separated CSS and JavaScript, he noted that there are two types of performance when sending a page:

Back-end: 5% of time
Front-end: 95%

Most things to improve performance are on the front end.

Cache

I’ll skip the jokes as they won’t work written down, but they went down well

The difference between the first page load and a cached page load are quite dramatic due to assets being cached. The difference (I think for the Yahoo homepage) are:

168K 2.4 sec, to 28k and 0.9 sec.

They did some experiments by setting expiration in the past for an image compared to one that should be cached, the graph of the experiment goes from no-one having it cached, to 40-60%, but no further.

20% have a empty completely cache (presumably new visitors), and yet the images for 40-60% were not cached? Perhaps that was due to the homepage effect in IE they found, where IE doesn’t cache the browser’s homepage.

Cookies

Broad scope cookies also get sent to sub-domains, e.g. .yahoo.com gets sent to finance.yahoo.com, so it’s worth keeping those high level cookies to a minimum.

Parallel downloads

Browsers download several items (generally 2) in parallel, and you might expect that if they downloaded more items in parallel they would be quicker. However, the data didn’t back it up. Doing 2 in parallel is quicker than one, but no further benefit was found for 3 or more.

The main causes are likely to be things like CPU thrashing, DNS lookup times vary by geography, and DNS hostnames may not be cached.

Also, if you divide assets it over different severs, the time goes up dramatically.

12 Rules

The best aspect of the presentation was Nate’s consolidation of the research into 12 rules:

Make fewer HTTP requests. It’s the single best thing you can do.
Combine scripts and CSS files, so you have one of each.

Use things like CSS sprites (combining images then referencing by co-ordinates), the combined size is smaller, and less requests are made.
Use a CDN (Content distribution network)
For example, Akamai, which is geographically closer to the users, and tend to be cached more (DNS). Start with static stuff, images, css and JavaScript.
Add an expires header
It’s not just for images, if there is no expires header, files won’t be cached.
Gzip all your components
You can really affect download times. 90%+ of browsers support it, and it’s negotiated with the server to check first. The usual methods are usually mod_gzip or deflate, mod_gzip seemed to perform better in their testing.

It’s good for any text based content. Most large sites do HTML, not all do it for JS & CSS. It is not suitable for images or binary/compressed files (e.g. PDF)

For the text based formats it always save over half of the file size.

Use central servers for libraries, e.g. yahoo’s YUi.
Put CSS at the top of you’re docs
- Style sheets block rendering in IE
- Use link, not import. It seems to defer @import. Although it was the fastest loading time, it had the slowest perceived time. Sorry this one is a bit cryptic, there was a good diagram of it which hopefully will go on the blog soon.
Put scripts at bottom
Scripts block the rendering of everything below them in the page.

Scripts block parallel downloads… (I missed something here, not sure on the reasoning.)

NB: ‘defer’ is not considered a solution, it’s doesn’t work well enough
Avoid CSS expressions
Most execute many times, e.g. mouse move, hey press, resize, scroll etc. [I'm still inclined to use one for page max/min width.]
Use separate files for CSS & JS
Whilst this seems obvious, there are actually occasions that you might consider not doing that. Variables include:
- page views per session.
- empty vs full cache.
- Component re-use.
NB: Home pages (as in browser ones) are an exception, and CSS/JS can be inline for greater performance.

Post-onload download (not sure if that’s correct) is a method of pre-loading files which you know are going to be used. Such as sequential things like shopping baskets.
Reduce DNS lookups
These can block parallel downloading, use a max of 2-4 hosts, use ‘keep-alive’, so it downloads multiple files in one go without new connections & lookups.
Minify
Be careful with obfuscation, as the re-writing can introduce bugs.
Avoid re-directs
Turn off ETags

Web 2.0 apps

Client side CPU performance is more of an issue.
Nate showed some tests from a Yahoo mail case study. Using AJAX type methods increased initial time (from 6 to 12 secs), but massively reduced the read mail time (to under 2 secs)

The basic idea is to make sure you test time by task, not by page load.

Live analysis – Tools

IBM page detailer.
Fasterfox, measures time and allows you to tweak. (Do you need this when you have Firebug?)
LiveHTTPheaders (FF ext)
Firebug (obviously)

Nate also mentioned they will be releasing YSlow, a performance lint tool. From the screen shot, it looks like it integrates with Firebug.

Questions

Someone commented that Apache generates etags based on certain things, if you re-configure without imode, you can re-configure apache.

Question on DNS lookups, could you use IPs to speed things up?
Sounds like it would work, but you’d loose the DNS flexibility. Perhaps script it so that first time it looks up, then works out the IP for further requests?

Question asked about whether there are problems with gzipping content?
A very small percentage of edge case on IE where compression can sort of backfire, but it’s no a huge problem.

Someone found that minified JS isn’t needed if it’s gzipped.
Yahoo’s research is different, they found gzip reduced by another half on top of minimisation.

Someone uses SVG and VML to render complex images.
Yahoo have done some work on that, but not found something they are comfortable with yet.

Richard Ishida – Designing for International Users: Practical Tips

Everything I’ve read about Internationalisation seems to lead back to Richard Ishida of the W3C. I didn’t take notes, but he has published his presentaion.

Richard is an entertaining speaker, and even if you get the basics from the slides, he is well worth seeing in action.

Tantek Çelik, Microformats, Building Blocks, and You

As always, Tantek’s presentation is online, I just tried to keep up with the pace. Even if you’re completely upto date on Microformats, you’ll learn something at Tantek’s presentations, and I’ve moved Microformats up my list of things to do to this site.

Joe Clark – When Web Accessibility Is Not Your Problem

Again, Joe is good with putting his notes online, so I just sat back a listened, somewhat nervously it has to be said.

The reason for my nerves was the knowledge that he was going to launch the WCAG Samurai errata, and mention my review. Not that there is a problem with either, but the mystery surrounding it just made me nervous.

The main content of Joe’s presentation is a call to disregard some of the old WCAG 1 issues that are not (or in some cases should not) be relevant anymore. I hadn’t intended to write an article with similar content recently, but there wasn’t much overlap in any case. Joe had better examples to bolster the argument, I had looked at what people should have in their browsers/user-agents.

Jon Hicks - How to be a Creative Sponge

I have no talent for design, nor a particular desire to do design, but it was very interesting seeing the type of methods Jon uses, and it does parallel the more technical in some respects. For example, Jon was espousing the collection of lots of materials for inspiration, primarily non-web materials such as leaflets and t-shirts. I quite often snaffle away little bits of code for later examination.

Jon’s slides are online, linked in the heading above.

Hannah Donovan and Simon Willison – For Example…

Two quicker presentations here, from people involved with last.fm and lawrence.com respectively, both of which are sites worth investigating if you haven’t already.

Last.fm

Hannah was the first designer at last.fm, four years after the company had started, which caused some problems when they wanted to ‘skin’ something, and in web terms Hannah suggests that “Form ever follows function” (Design for the real world by Victor Papanek).

The whole talk was presented with a refreshing honesty, you really got the impression that you were getting the real, gritty story, rather than one through rose tinted glasses.

A point that confused me slightly was you should expose the functionality to users more and add steps into the process. I think in the specific case she was talking about (making apparent where recommendations come from) she is probably right, but I’m not sure it’s generalisable. It kind of goes against the keynote which showed fairly conclusively that users don’t care how things work in general.

Another useful point was they when using the ‘scrum’ methodology, the 5 minutes of forced interaction between different teams each day was very useful.

Doing local right – Lawrence.com

Simon’s talk was very MTV – quick and packs a lot in. Although someone asked him to do it again at normal speed, I liked the pace.

Simon started with two seemingly unconnected observations:

Local search sucks.
Compared to local knowledge, you can never tell if a search result is comprehensive, accurate, or even if the individual results still exist in the real world.
The decline of traditional news
This point hits home with me, as I’ve been on the receiving end of press-releases which don’t even include a link to the original article, and you just know that three other sites have published the same one. Searches on Google news tend to bring back many versions of the same thing. It’s very anti-web.

In many ways Lawrence.com tackles these well, it is a local entertainments portal, with events, movies, blogs of citizens, “best bets”, and all are subscribable.

The best thing is the number features, but the integration between them. For example, if an event is classified as an outdoor event, it links through to the forecast.

Lots of data is stored as well, such as the 51 restaurants kitchen hours and open hours.

It’s a good case study for a site with richly tagged and interlinked data.

Simon also showed some examples from the sister site LJworld.com, showing more of the same interconnected features.

So the question is: How do you do it?

Have a small passionate team
5 people sitting within 5 m with a large whiteboard
The gap between thinking of features and implementing them is measured in hours.
Have someone else to think about money, just like the barrier between advertisements and journalism.
Get free interns to do a lot of the legwork (e.g. phoning up all the bars every month to get the latest drinks deals.
Treat your data with respect, make sure it is properly set up, as you never know how you’ll slice it up in future.

The plug: use Django, which was developed when at the newspaper.

It is optimised for constructing complex data models and creating the interfaces, for data rich sites. People can be inputing data whilst you are creating the front-end web site.

The questions asked (since he had buzzed through so quickly) were:

Q: Could you re-do it at normal speed?
No.

Q: Are they profitable?
The aim was to break even, the were investing heavily early on, but believes they are at least breaking even.

Q: Doable in the UK?
Yes, but no one has yet.

Q: How much did it cost?
No idea, but: The team has increased, and they now sell that CMS to other papers. Ellington is a product on top of Django.

Q: Do you have to start from scratch with Django?
It does tend to assume green-field development, but there is a tool for inspecting via SQL and translating.

Simon wrote up the presentation with links.

Shawn Lawton Henry – Advancing Web Accessibility

Having followed the WCAG & W3C process for a while now this wasn’t particularly new to me, but a couple of tit-bits emerged:

WCAG 2.0 is unlikely to be fully ratified this year, but shouldn’t be too much later.
ARIA is in second working draft, and may be out this year.
Some best practice guidelines for ARIA are coming out soon.
She has released a book.

Perhaps the most pertinent quote was actually from Joe Clark during the hot-topics panel: They seem to have taken all the comments seriously, even mine!

Dan Webb – The Mysteries Of JavaScript-Fu

Frustratingly this was up against Andy Clark’s presentation, and I was torn, but given my lack of design orientation, I plumped for JavaScript-fu. It was a very useful talk for getting a quick understanding of various JavaScript topics, with an entertaining martial arts (films) theme. Not just the what, but the why you would use something. I finally got how you would use event delegation.

Dan’s slides are up, so I’ll point out what appealed to me:

DOM methods are like Ninjas, innerHTML is a sumo
A faster loop method (for node type stuff)
Get Javascript to build things (e.g. opening menus) when needed, rather than building everything at the start.
Selenium sounds very useful for browser based testing.
The Pro JavaScript techniques by John Resig includes a lot of stuff from jQuery.
Dan’s likely to do a ‘how to spot a bad JavaScript resource’ article soon.

Hot-topics panel

Starring Richard Ishida, Dan Cederholm, Joe Clark and Drew McLellon, ~~compared~~ chaired by Jeremy Keith.

It started off with a few questions on the W3C, which thanks to Richard Ishida’s presence became basically ‘get involved’.

I guess the big news is that Joe Clark is retiring from active duty as a web accessibility advocate. Rather than read my mis-remembered version, I suggest you read Joe’s Trying not to pretend post.

I don’t particularly think that accessibility is ‘handled’ yet, although good progress is certainly being made. However, I’m in the privileged position of being able to continue working in the field thanks to being part of a great team, so I’ll not argue about it!

Other coverage

Other coverage sources:

Blog mentions from Technorati
Photos from Flickr, particularly Patrick’s stream, and this one.