Simplicity Rules

Brian’s tale of the Web 2.0 conference reminds me of my trip to SXSW 2000, at the height of Web 1.0:

The thing that struck me the hardest about the first two days of Web2.0: the greed. The smell of money. The possibility of money. The imminence
of money. Gobs of it. Truckloads. More than you could ever count. Huge,
massive sums of money. The place was drenched in the presence of and
desire for money. All of it. Now. Sooner than now. Gimme.

Still in college, I remember feeling like if I had expressed interest, I could get a job along with that free shirt, just for knowing HTML.

I still bristle a bit about the term “Web 2.0.” The fact that they had a conference all about it last week is kind of strange, considering how nobody seems to agree on what exactly it is. That said, Kareem Mayan’s eighteen quotes from the Web 2.0 Conference provide lots of great nuggets about building a website in 2005.

A couple of my faves:

“eBay has 150M customers, in the nicest terms, that’s 150M people who have learned to trust strangers.” – eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, on how business can be an engine of positive social change

“[In 5-10 years, the value in media] will be in the companies who can grow audiences, not in those who control content.” – Vinod Khosla, former General Partner at Kleiner Perkins

Read them all

When it comes to the web, I was a curmudgeon in my early twenties. Among many firm beliefs, I was against requiring JavaScript. To do so seemed like a bad idea since its browser support was unpredictable and many people disabled it due to popups ¹. Most web folks agreed with me at the time, but a new, bigger crowd has gathered, creating a second approach to JavaScript.

The two approaches:

1. Never require JavaScript, because your site might break.
2. Only support select browsers with settings just so. Use otherwise at your own risk.

Both of these approaches are pretty single-minded. Google Maps sort of lent credence to the second approach, much like ESPN’s 2003 redesign fueled the modern CSS layout explosion.

However, I have been searching for a middle ground in my work with BestPlaces. For one, some of our partners fall into the group that does not want to require JavaScript. Secondly, providing technical support can be a nightmare:

• Users don’t know what JavaScript is.
• Users don’t know how to enable JavaScript (and there is an additional pain for the supporter in navigating the preferences of every browser type).
• Users don’t know that they disabled JavaScript (maybe nephew did it two years ago to stop popups).
• Most importantly, nobody likes being told that they are unsupportable and it looks unprofessional to pass the buck.

Since it was such a long-believed creed that JavaScript should not be required, we are pretty good at designing sites this way. It seems like even the most JavaScript-heavy apps, like Google Maps, could be designed first without JavaScript and then adding the bits that make it so much easier to use.

Ryan Campbell agrees that we can degrade gently and he even shows how to do it. I’m all for giving up my curmudgeonly past, but I don’t want to forget the lessons that got us here. Let’s be responsible, let’s stop the buck. JavaScript recommended, not JavaScript required.

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1 – Flash tangent: With Flash popups on the rise, look out for increased use of Flash blockers unless someone (browsers? Macromedia?) creates a means of blocking Flash popups.

Every now and again there comes along a piece of software that I completely love. The common user experience is about combatting programmed logic in order to make an application do what you want. Begin a logical person, I’m pretty good at putting up with this. But for me to love software, it has to feel natural. And natural is how it feels with Firefox and me.

There are many things I dig, starting with the tabbed browser window, which I will never give up. But the feature that has me all a’flutter is Quick Searching, also called Smart Keywords.

Defining a word, searching the web, and looking up the stats on my favorite baseball player–or actor–has never been easier. Simplify your online life today and get Firefox.

A few weeks ago, I mentioned two arguments against preferences. Today I ran into a great tip to alleviate accidental shortcut activation under Mac OS X.

The problem occurs in Apple’s browser, Safari. There is a shortcut, Cmd-K, that toggles pop-up blocking. I have found myself disabling pop-ups without even knowing it. OS X (Tiger, at least) has a feature to alter the shortcut to any menu-listed command in any application. It’s not often I will use this tucked away feature, but I’m happy to have it.

I chose a combination I’ll probably never use. The reason I did this is I think this sort of option should never have been a toggle. Whenever I’m activating or deactivating popups, I should know the current state. There is no visual way, outside of the menu, to see whether popups are being blocked, so it’s best to force myself to see the current setting before I go a’togglin’.