bestkungfu weblog

Twitter unveiled a new redesign today. Very little of it is really noticeably different, until you look at the underlying code. Which, last I recall, used to be pretty good–they even used the fancy-pants XHTML 1.0 Strict doctype (though still using tables for layout, which the spec says it shouldn’t do).

But one thing about the latest version makes me wonder just what the hell they’re doing these days.

<center>.

The <center> element. In September 2008. From the “it” Web 2.0 company. Seriously.

I know this will make me sound like the annoying standardista, but how could anyone who still uses <center> still be doing web design professionally in, of all places, San Francisco? This is an element which has been deprecated for eleven years. Do we really have people who haven’t changed their coding practices since before 1997?

Sadly, yes. And the worse news is, they’re writing books. I just saw a book whose first edition was published in July 2008, which teaches users to use <center>, to do layout tables, to use CSS primarily just for font selections, and loads of other outdated guidance. This is material from the bad old days of web design, and it simply gets regurgitated over and over again. To quote the late, great George Carlin, “it’s all bullshit, and it’s bad for ya.”

I don’t know what it is going to take to finally cull the proverbial herd of these kinds of authors and designers. But each time I see this, it makes me wonder when we can expect some kind of professionalism out of the average content producer. Many of us have been talking about this stuff for years. It’s de rigueur at many web conferences, to the point that people now roll their eyes at it. And yet, it continues. I also don’t know whether Twitter is doing this in-house or if they hired an external designer. But certainly, somebody there dropped the ball.

And I know that one <center> is not a big thing. It’s just a symptom of a larger disease: that of lazy, ignorant and/or incurious designers. When someone sticks to one way to do something without ever updating their own skill set, their designs get more and more inflexible. Which makes redesigns more and more difficult, and more expensive, all with less to show for it. Which brings us to the boxy gridlock we experienced in the 90s. Which is why standardistas get so angry about this stuff. We know that customers deserve better than this. We know that when customers find out how their designer painted them into a corner, it casts a shadow over all of us in those customers’ eyes.

The question that remains from all this is, how can the professionals in this field separate themselves from the amateurs? Really. I want suggestions. What concrete steps can we take to ensure that the good designers and developers, the ones who are always learning, who have a full and balanced skill set, don’t get lumped in (or worse, beaten out by) the ones who are locked in 1995? Who’s got an idea?

I just had a horrible experience with eBay, which I think is summed up in this message I just sent to them.

I have a serious complaint with the way eBay sends automated messages. I was forwarded a message sent from eBay to the seller, which reads:

“I would like to have the item shipped to the address below:”
…followed by the shipping address in my eBay account.

However, I had never asked eBay to give that address as the shipping address, and in fact, the payment info I sent on PayPal had the correct address. As a result, the seller shipped the package, then went out of her way to return to the post office to change the shipping address from the _right_ one to the _wrong_ one–all because eBay says I told her to. And now the package will be delayed by a full week, and arrive at my home, where no one will be present to pick it up.

I hold eBay and its email notification system responsible for this.

eBay should never, under any circumstances, misrepresent its users by making statements beginning with the word “I”. You do not speak authoritatively on behalf of your users. I’m a designer and I understand the urge to sound human, but in this case, and I’m sure many others, you are doing more harm than good. I am extremely displeased that my package will be late, but even more upset that eBay sees fit to substitute its words for mine.

The same goes for any other e-commerce outfit out there. I know it sounds all down-home folksy to say things like “I would like to have the item shipped…” instead of “The buyer’s address is…”, but you don’t know what I want. You only know what your user tells you. And you should never communicate more than that.

I have a sister who’s 18. She’s studying nursing at Northern Arizona University, and I’m really proud of her. Occasionally, though, she sends me chain letters, and I just got one from her today. It consists of couplets contrasting our relative comfort against the struggle of our soldiers in the Middle East:

You walk down the beach, staring at all the pretty girls.
He patrols the streets, searching for insurgents and terrorists.

You’re angry because your class ran 5 minutes over.
He’s told he will be held over an extra 2 months.

You criticize your government, and say that war never solves anything.
He sees the innocent tortured and killed by their own people and remembers why he is fighting.

And so on. It ends:

If you support your troops, send this to 7 people.
If you don’t support your troops well, then don’t send this out.
You won’t die in 7 days, your love life won’t be affected, and you won’t have the worst day ever.
You don’t have to email this. It’s not like you know the men and women that are dying to preserve your rights.

And that was enough to set me off.

The classic subtext in the “support the troops” argument is that those who oppose the administration’s objectives in prosecuting the war are somehow “against” the troops. Which is like saying you hate your favorite sports team simply because you think the owner or general manager is a bum. Actually, it’s far worse than that: it is to suggest that you therefore hate each player to the extent that you don’t care if they die.

During the first Gulf War, I was proud to wear a yellow ribbon because I was proud of the individuals that make up the military, if not the proverbial owners and general managers. That’s still true today, individual crimes and misdemeanors notwithstanding. But the yellow ribbon is now driven by that quiet dual meaning, and I won’t wear one because it’s more important for me to be clear about my divided opinions of the management versus the rank and file.

What really got to me about this letter was that it reminded me of a story from my past, and since my sister was so young, I thought it best to relay it to her:

So, you probably don’t remember this, since you were 2 at the time. But during the first Gulf War, there was a billboard on the railroad between Santa Fe and Butler (in Flagstaff, Arizona) that had a “We Support The Troops” sign. One night, someone went up and papered over the words “the troops” with “Death and Destruction”. The next day, my friend David and I climbed up 20 feet onto the billboard to scrape it off. And I’d do it again.

So if you ever meet whoever started this chain letter, tell them I said if they think I don’t support the troops because I won’t forward their preachy, jingoist message, they can FUCK RIGHT OFF. For real.

Nothing personal. I still love you. It just pisses me off like nothing else when people confuse being against the war with being against soldiers. I care a lot about the soldiers, and I’m willing to do a hell of a lot more than start a chain letter if it would help make them safe, strong and free.

Love,
m

Question: What do you like least about eMusic.com?

Answer: At the moment, the fact that you use Zoomerang, whose survey interface is buggy on Firefox when it has no excuse to be.

I mean, come on. How can a survey engine be dumb enough to forget what users are entering, then not only fail to validate the submitted form on the client side, but have such terse errors that you might not even notice they’re there? I filled out two different companies’ surveys on that site in the last three days, and had the same problem each time. If you want me to spend my time providing feedback, the least you can do is not waste any more of it than is absolutely necessary. From now on, Zoomerang requests go straight to /dev/null.

I’ve had a problem with how my browser memorizes passwords for a while now, and I’m certainly not alone. Since the holy grail of identity management appears to be a long ways away, I think it’s time to address it.
When I enter a username and password, Firefox helpfully offers to remember it. This is good, and helpful, if you know your username and password. My problem is that I have hundreds of accounts scattered all over the place, and I can never be sure that the username and/or password I am entering is correct. If it’s not, and I tell Firefox to remember it, then I am guaranteed to be starting with the wrong credentials on subsequent visits. Only I won’t know it until I try signing in. That’s a less than stellar user experience.

The problem compounds itself on sites where the form sends you to another page in the site’s hierarchy. Then, you may store the correct username and password combination on that other page, and Firefox will remember them both. And as a result, you’ll go to log in on a site’s front page, then fail, but then be sent to that second page, which will let you in. I had to do that for years with Vonage, having forgotten that the original username and password I provided were useless.

It seems a better way to store new usernames and passwords would be to ask whether to store them after the transaction has been completed. So once you submit the form, and you know whether your credentials have been accepted, you can inform the browser to continue. If not, you can go back and try again. But in any case, you will not be saving bad credentials that will continue to come back and bite you each time you forget whether you used this password or that, or whether you’re bob or bobsmith or bobs or bobsmith@gmail.com or b0b_l0l_360 at any given site you have visited.

Am I alone in this, or does this seem like a useful feature request?

On January 17th, I ordered a case for my iPod. Not just any case, mind you, but the dock-compatible, magnetically-fastening Sena case, in dark blue. I was undeterred by the fact that it was on backorder, for this was the Ultimate iPod Protecting Device — and in the Blue Flavor signature color, no less.
On February 17th, according to US Postal Service records, the case was delivered to my apartment complex.

Where it was promptly stolen.

Sigh.

It’s not the lost money that bothers me. What has me really peeved about the situation is that someone stole an item that presumably is of near-zero value to them, out of a public space, from a box that wouldn’t exactly cry out “steal me” like, say, one with a big Apple logo on it. And here I am, fifty bucks poorer, with a growing need for a protective outer shell for my still-naked iPod, and having to endure another long backorder for another case, while some asshole has probably already tried selling mine to some pawn shop or fence, and most likely trashed it somewhere when they failed.

Apparently this is the first time someone has had their mail stolen from here in two years, and the manager told me he had kicked out a “transient” who had snuck into the building on Friday afternoon, so it’s probably someone on the outside. But my god, do people suck. I’m having all of my packages delivered to the office from now on, so that I can sign for them, and so that boxes like this will go into a locked mailbox. Of course, I must first add my work address to the list of authorized addresses on my cards, which I now have to do thanks to other people who suck, and who use stolen cards to have big-ticket items delivered to them. Thieving pricks.
Something tells me I need to run by Capitol Loans and see if they have any new iPod cases…

…as long as they spell your name right.

Which, of course, they didn’t.

In an column on Podshow receiving venture capital, Marketwatch’s Frank Barnako (I checked it, twice) refers to me as “Matt Kaye.” Now, I frequently get “Mike May” and “Matt Mays,” but Kaye? Hmm. Maybe I’m Doug’s kid.

Honestly. Is “Matt May” really that difficult? Does The Other Matt May have this problem? Should I just go by “M” from now on?

Thanks to Hylton Jolliffe (I checked it, twice) for the pointer.

I’ve had enough. Dave Winer has taken enough sideswipes at SXSW over the last week, and its “insider” nature, that I can’t let him get away with it any longer. If anyone is a podcasting insider, it’s Dave Winer.

I was a panelist on the podcasting session at SXSW, and although I don’t necessarily feel that I need to, I can explain why (your favorite podcaster’s name here) was not on the panel.

I was approached to be on the panel about three weeks before the conference. They knew I was going to be at SXSW because I was speaking on another topic, and they knew I was a podcaster because I put it in my bio. Others on the panel were exhibitors (such as Dannie Gregoire) and/or locals. So, to those asking why Eric Rice or Evan Williams were not on the podium, there’s your answer. It was a last-minute thing, and the organizers didn’t pore over the attendance list with a Certified Podcasting Expert. That’s all.

Now, let’s deal with this “insider” crap. The podcasting session was held on the show floor of the conference, which was free and open to the public. Dave should know this, since I told the podcasters list about it. At the time, though, he was more interested in getting into the conference for free because he was a podcaster. Which strikes me as something an insider would try to do.

Speaking of. Winer talking to Robert Scoble about “insiders” still has me tickled. Who better to talk about them? Winer is the ultimate insider. He’s been in nearly all of the hundreds of mainstream media articles about podcasting — and moans incessantly about it when he’s left out. He has the phone number of anyone (he thinks is) worth talking to in podcasting. When he issues a command from the Holy See of Scripting News, and finds that it has not been done his way, whoever is responsible will find their Winer Number reduced in due time. He has his favorites, and his favorite villains, and makes good use of both lists when it suits him. (In the interest of full disclosure, he once shouted me down at a Seattle blogger Meetup for daring to have a view on the role of music in podcasting that wasn’t both in line with his and composed of two or fewer sentences in length. He also got his digs in at me when I went to the Berkman blogger meetup, apparently for no better reason than that I work for the W3C. For someone who talks so much about openness and exchanging ideas, his ability to handle such an open exchange is laughable.)

I did record our session, and I plan to make it available as soon as the SXSW people, now possibly recovering from their final hangovers of SXSW Music, give me their blessing to distribute it. I know that time is of the essence here, but I want listeners to have a clear enumeration of the rights they have to the final MP3. More on that soon. But let’s bury this “insider” bullshit once and for all.

Around here, the A&E Network has a reality show in which we follow airport employees through their normal days. They call it Airline. I call it these are the idiots I have to travel with. On two recent episodes, we found drunk women arguing loudly, crowds of delayed passengers arguing loudly, and a single, shrill man arguing loudly. (The drunks and the single jerk both were sent away, and deservedly so.)

Now, here’s the kind of idiot I’d be caught arguing loudly with. A pilot writes in a Salon column about the latest xenophobic right-winger meme making the rounds: a soccer-mom-terrorized-in-her-own-mind tale called Terror in the Skies, Again?. In this, and its followup, we find Annie Jacobsen, a frightened husk of a person who suffered the ultimate injustice of spending a flight from Detroit to Los Angeles surrounded by ay-rabs. A dozen of them — more, even — talking to one another, talking to her, wearing clothes with Arabic letters. Jacobsen glosses over the fact that they were a musical group traveling to a performance: clearly, this is only a front for their terrorist ends. By the end of this descent into madness, Jacobsen has tied these people to a Syrian who was held at another airport weeks later for being in possession of “anti-American material.” (What could that be? Something written in French?) Jacobsen, and now a number of talk-show hosts and other nutjobs, now believe that she and her family saw the face of evil itself as it slid across their seats to go take a whiz.

These are the idiots I have to travel with.

Tens of thousands of passengers of Middle Eastern descent fly into, out of, and within the United States on a daily basis. These are Iraqis, Saudis, Pakistanis, whatever. Millions of them since 9/11; and more power to them, with all of the secondary screens and searches they all face. They’re not flying around plotting to kill you. In fact, most of the time, I bet they’d simply be happy if you stopped picturing them with a pocket full of box cutters while your trembling hand guides the third bloody mary to your lips.

I was on a plane just before Thanksgiving of 2001, two months after September 11th. Once we reached cruising altitude, we got the call from the captain. You know the call: [fsssssht] this is your captain… we’ll be flying over Farmington, Abilene, Mobile, and Pensacola before making our final stop in Orlando…. Only it wasn’t one of those calls. We were told that we live in a “different world” now, and if we see, you know, those people, we should by all means take matters into our own hands. It could even be the guy next to you. You were warned.

All I remember was shouting “Jesus Christ!” and something about how the pilot was just trying to frighten us. What happened on 9/11 won’t happen again. It can’t. Something different, maybe. But the element of surprise is gone. All that’s left is the fear, and the paranoia, and the speculation. Is this the Arab who’s going to bomb my plane?

No, he’s going to a concert in Palm Springs, but thanks for asking.

Northwest is not winning points with me, lately. The first leg of my flight to Copenhagen was two hours late, causing me to wait for four hours in Amsterdam — which is too long to kill idly, but just too short to dash into the city. But that was nothing compared to my trip home.

The agent at the desk refused to let me carry on my carry-on-sized bag, claiming it was too large. This is an error that costs me 20 minutes of baggage retrieval at Sea-Tac, which has a terrible two-carousel system which makes hundreds of people at a time waste their energy fighting each other to get to their bags after choosing the wrong carousel. Thanks. I appreciate it.

I have Silver Elite status on Northwest. Usually, this gets me some kind of benefit. In this case, though, it was a curse. I was seated in 10E, in the center of the foremost bulkhead row. This is usually fine: you strain a little to watch the movie, but otherwise, there’s no trouble sliding out to the lavatory, you get a decent amount of legroom, and nobody’s going to slam their seat back in your face pretending to sleep.

The problem is when you’re sharing that row with a newborn. Or, in my case, four infants and toddlers. No, I’m not exaggerating. A and B were a couple with a 2-year-old redhead girl. C and D were a couple on their second leg of a trip that started in India, with a 9-month-old girl in tow. G, H and J were another couple, their 2-year-old girl, and a newborn. F was empty, but for the five bags G had unloaded in the interest of child management.

By takeoff, two of them were screaming. That’s understandable: on takeoff and landing, an infant’s ears undergo a major change in pressure that they’re usually unable to relieve on their own. I let that part slide. But an hour into the flight, it’s clear that A and the toddler in J are going to be A Problem For Me, as they are taking turns screaming like banshees, with another two kids in the two rows behind us joining in the chorus. I am woken from a sound sleep before we even leave the tarmac.

That’s okay, I think to myself. Taking off my shoes is relaxing enough that I’ll fall right back to sleep. Turns out, not so much: when I put my feet on the floor, they suddenly feel wet. I look down and see a large dark spot in the carpeting, which looks as if someone has spilled an entire Coke on the floor. Now, I’m sure it wasn’t me, and C, D and G are too busy tending to their little bundles for cola beverages. So now I’m faced with a challenge: my feet are wet and sticky. If I put them back in my shoes, the lining will then become sticky. If I put them back on the floor, I’ll be squishy for hours. I spend the next two hours balancing my feet on the heels of my shoes until they’re suitably dry.

Halfway through the flight, A is showing off her special power: as she screams, her head turns freely in 360 degrees, independent of her body. The kid in D made noise maybe once the entire trip, but the parents in G and H are engaged in constant busywork, punctuated by loud screams from the toddler. The movie, Miracle, is playing above my head — apparently in 3D, unless it’s just horribly bad projector calibration. Moving out of my seat presents another dilemma: over the sleeping couple to my left, or the suitcase on the floor and the nursing mother they belong to on my right? The beverage cart arrives, and I think about asking for a shot, but am concerned that I would screw up my order and ask to be shot.

Fast-forward to the disembarkation. That puddle under my feet? It was the holding tank from the galley. I had been sitting in the waste beverages of everyone on the flight. Hooray. And after plunking down in front of the economy class carousel, the bag naturally arrives on the Business Class carousel, 20 minutes later.

Next time, they can skip the goddamn bulkhead seat. I’m traveling to Europe by steamship from now on.