Wednesday, January 30, 2008

The Future of Text









I'll keep it short this week because I want you to see this.


I stumbled upon this video on YouTube, somehow, and kept it because I love both the message and how it's delivered, in only four and a half minutes.


HTML underwent, or more properly is still undergoing, a sea-change in how Web pages are built starting about five years ago. Developers were fed up with all of the various browser hacks. Accessibility advocates were fed up that so much material was unavailable to differently-abled Web surfers and eCommerce types were upset that so many calories had to be devoted to Search Engine Optimization—gaming the system so your pages rank higher than mine.


Up until then, most books were filled with "tips" like You can use uppercased letters, lowercased letters, or both when making your tags. Most showed how to use various presentational tags, often even including proprietary presentational tags that were never a part of true HTML. It was rare that anyone explained how to double-quote attributes. And then, of course, there were all of the chapters on using tables for layout.


It wasn't that we didn't care, or that we were all jerks. It was that we didn't have any better tools at the time.


Today we have the tools, and we should use them whenever we can. They make our pages easier to render, easier to understand, easier to maintain and easier for search engines to catalog. Separate your content from your presentation and you can do all kinds of things. Continue to blend them and you are going to be severely limited in the not-too-distant future. Content is the message. It's the reason you need a Web page. It's the material that needs to be shared, distributed, archived. Presentation is how the message is delivered. What fonts, colors, sizes? Lots of room on the left side? Box around it all? Read aloud in a man's voice or a woman's? How should it look when printed on a page, should it even appear at all? All of this is presentation.


The first UNL.EDU Web pages were built before HTML v3.2 became the standard. HTML v3 was adopted, quickly morphed into v3.2 and then came HTML 4 and HTML v4.01. The current design uses XHTML v1. XHTML is HTML recast in the XML language, and XML is all about structure. It may be a while before our Web pages are entirely based in XML. But it should be pretty clear that that's the future. You might want to spend some time thinking about that.

Wednesday, January 23, 2008

It's All About You.

Are you an icon clicker, or a menu selector? Or are you one of those who learn keyboard shortcut combinations to help make you more productive?


Does it make more sense to you to have all of your files and folders on the left side of the workspace, or the right? Do you like to save your pages every several minutes and always know what your web site looks like with each incremental update, or can you work all morning on a new design, save your changes, and then upload the changes all at once? Do you work almost exclusively in either Code View or Design View?


One of the things that makes Dreamweaver so popular is that so much of its interface is really left up to you. You can set up Dreamweaver so it opens with the last pages you worked on already opened for you, or so it opens up with no page ready. You can have a splash screen full of recent work or nothing at all. There are hundreds of settings for dozens of parameters available to you through the Preferences. Don’t be afraid to go there and change things—that’s what it’s for.


I know that a lot of people seem to become overwhelmed when presented with dozens or hundreds of choices. "I just got this program. How am I supposed to know how I'm going to want to work in it?" It's hard to argue with that. But if you break it all down into manageable chunks, it's too much.


Twenty years ago, I was very involved with online communities on the old GEnie network, the General Electric Network for Information Exchange. We were an online subscription network, like CompuServe or America Online or Prodigy, with various forums devoted to various interests. One of mine was writing, and I hung out in the Writers' RoundTable until they finally hired me to help out. I learned there that nobody can actually write a novel.


Think about it. Nobody ever sits down and writes a novel. They put a word or two together, building a sentence. Then they read that sentence a time or two and build another one ahead or behind it. After a few of these, they've built a paragraph, and then a page, and then a chapter. Eventually, a book results. It's the same with a house or any big project.


Most people need some experience in order to really learn something. You wouldn't want to fly to Hawaii behind a captain who had only read several How-To-Fly books. You wouldn't want a loved one to schedule surgery with a new doctor who had only read about surgery. And I think it's that way with Dreamweaver, too. You can read about paragraph tags and how to insert photos and such for days, but until you actually build a web page a lot of it is just going to be theory to you. So, pull down your Preferences options and tick through a few. If you're on a PC, Preferences live at the bottom of your Edit menu. If you are using a Mac, it's under your Dreamweaver menu.


At the top of the Category pane, which has twenty individual options, is the General category. When it's selected, you have another eighteen or twenty options, and that's again just for the General category. But look them over. The first four are about starting up Dreamweaver. Do you want Dreamweaver to open pages in tabs? And if so, do you want them to always be visible? I have loved tabbed browsing since the last generation of Web browsers came out. And having two or more pages open in tabs in Dreamweaver is just as nice, for the same reasons. I have both options checked. That doesn't mean you have to have both options checked, it's just how I work.


Should Dreamweaver show you the welcome screen when you start up? From about Dreamweaver MX2000 through Dreamweaver 8, I had mine turned off, but now I like it. It presents a fast and easy way to get to pages you have recently worked on, a selection of New pages you can create and samples you can use to build on. There is also a link to the Dreamweaver Exchange site and a Getting Started tutorial, a New Features tour and some resources you may find useful. You can turn off the welcome screen from the welcome screen, or from the Preferences. I'm starting to love the way there are so often several ways to do the same thing, in Dreamweaver.


After you have used Dreamweaver for a week or so, take a moment or two and go through the Preferences panel. If you have one or another area where you feel that using Dreamweaver is awkward, check the Preferences to see if there might not be some way to change that behavior to something more to your liking, and/or look for alternative ways of accomplishing the same task. I'll bet they're in there, somewhere.

Wednesday, January 16, 2008

Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes!

All of the political news has got me thinking about Changes.


This year, I hope to be able to build one Web site without redesigning it somewhere in the middle. I think that might be fun.


It hasn't happened yet, and I have been at this for more than a dozen years.


Somewhere along the line I always end up with one of those forehead-slapping "Oh, yeah!" moments, followed by the inevitable tearing-up of a dozen or more lines of markup.


It doesn't seem to matter how carefully I plan, or whether I just jump in and decide to wing it. It doesn't seem to matter if I am working on a site alone, or as part of a committee. At some point it becomes clear that some fraction of the work completed needs to be re-done. I have learned to try to anticipate some of these events, and so my "Oh, yeah!" moments are becoming fewer and fewer, but I still have at least one in every project.


Maybe this is unavoidable, and maybe it's even a Good Thing.


In the olden days of printed materials, everything was set in place and it was expensive to change any of it. But online, it's not like we are burdened with having to re-heat the lead to change a line of type the way Mark Twain did it. If we get a better photo of a different size we can include it in a Web page immediately. We can add or delete text to make it fit into a limited space, adjust the text size or we can leave things as they are and let the browser take care of flowing the text around a bigger or smaller image. And making changes like these does not obsolete a dozen or a hundred copies of the previous work.


Nice, huh? When I was first hired by the University of Nebraska back in 1985 (* Cough! *) I brought home at the end of my first day an entire shopping bag full of paper. Employment contract, job description, parking lot map, faculty/staff calendar, many, many insurance pages and even a directory of every employee and department and college. Here's where the health center is, there is where the credit union is, and so on. There were even pages with coupons for local restaurants, if I remember correctly. Congratulations on your new job, come and have a sandwich on us.


And I was told that there was probably some error in nearly every document of the dozen pounds I packed home with me from Nebraska Hall that evening. Someone got married between the time the directory information was solicited and the time it was printed. Someone else got promoted and moved to another office with another phone number. Parking facilities were demolished to make room for more office and classroom space (sound familiar?) and so on. But this was the packet that every new-hire took home for a period of about a year, when a brand-new and yet still instantly-obsolete document was generated and distributed to everyone.


Today, you get a couple of pages, and a couple of pamphlets. That was it! Everything else has moved online. If you want to know the University's policy on smoking, or snow days, you can check online and get the latest information and print it only if you need a paper copy. And if a coworker gets married and changes her name, that information goes up right away, too. Better information faster, and cheaper. How cool is that, right?


Plans change. People change. Technology changes and with it the various procedures we go through to accomplish various daily tasks. It's good that changing a paragraph today means just that, changing only a paragraph. You don't have to tear down a whole page and re-do everything on it, or every page from that point onward.


So we make a lot of changes because they are both necessary and easy to do. I can live with that, I guess. But I'd still like to dive into a new Web site and work straight through to the finish just one time, without having to back-track and change something that was already done.

Wednesday, January 9, 2008

Does it feel to you like we are all still starting the New Year?

A lot of people took a few days off after New Year's, finishing out that week. So there are a few folks I have not seen since last year. But now that we are all back, there still seems to be a lot of catching-up going on.

Before things get too far into a comfortable and familiar routine, let's take a moment and think about your Web sites and pages. Are there any edits you need to make to bring them into 2008?

The first place to look is probably at your footer.html page footers. You will need to update the copyright year, from 2007 to 2008. Of course the nice thing about the Templates is that you update this one file, one time, and that change is reflected in every Web page you build that references that included footer.html file (Of course, you don't have to tell your boss that. I like to tell mine "I think I got them all. If you find any old ones please let me know" and then let him spend an hour or so checking!). Your footer.html file lives within your sharedcode folder, remember. Why not make a point of editing that before you leave for the day, today?

Double-check your room assignments, office hours, schedules and calendars. And don't forget your Templates. If you have any boilerplate text saved as a Snippet or a Library item, this would be a good time to update that, too.

Did anyone join or leave your organization, within the last year? It can be frustrating when your Web users expect Dr. Taylor to be in charge of things, having read your site, only to discover that Dr. Taylor now lives and works in Colorado, somewhere, and someone new is doing Dr. Taylor's job. If someone is now occupying a formerly-vacant chair, you should make sure their contact information is available and up to date, too.

How about new names? Anyone get married and take a new sweetie's name? Sure, she's always been good ol' Carol to everyone around the office, but make sure her information is up to date, too, for people who didn't hear about the wedding and may be trying to look her up, online.

Finally, did anyone get promoted within your area? Did someone used to sit in this cubie and answer this telephone, and now has an office with a different phone number?

Again, make sure you make the changes. In the Olden Days, the 1990s, we used to see pages with "This Page Last Updated: 99/99/99" but that kind of thing has rightfully diminished in recent years. There is a user expectation that information found on the Web is current. If it wasn't, it would have been changed. And frequently, the only thing you need to change on a page in order to make it current is the "This Page Last Updated: 99/99/99" so what's the point of that?

Remember, Dreamweaver can update pages in your site that you have not even opened. That can save you some time, while you are ensuring that all of your information is as good as it can be.

From the Dreamweaver Find/Replace dialog box, you can change every instance of "472-0067" to "472-1968" by selecting Opened Documents, from the Find In selection, if you know what pages you will be changing and have them open, or Entire Current Local Site, if you do not know for sure where the phone number might appear. You will be searching in Text. Enter the old phone number in the upper box, the Find: box, and enter the new phone number in the lower box, the Replace: box. Click on Replace All and Dreamweaver will cruise through every file on your site, looking for the old telephone number, and changing it to the new one.

It can be kind of scary, the first couple of times, making changes to pages you haven't opened. But Dreamweaver reports on what pages the changes were made within so you can go back and un-do anything that shouldn't have been updated.

It's a new year. Our Web pages should reflect that. Good luck in the year ahead.

Wednesday, January 2, 2008

Happy New Year!

I wish I had learned more, in 2007. I had the best of intentions when the year began, and I have learned quite a lot. But there is always more to know, and more importantly, more to use, to actually put into practice. I feel confident I know the basics pretty well, by now. That <p> tag hasn't changed in more than a dozen years and I have every confidence that if you need a paragraph, I'm your boy. But there is much that changes every few years, or even every few months. And it's going to be like this for our lifetimes, I fear. We are still in the caveman-and-fire stage of Web development. They tell first-year medical students that much of what they are about to learn, much of what they have to learn, will be obsolete by the time they graduate and that must be true for us, too.

There is a core of Web knowledge that does not change. Or, more properly, there is a core of knowledge that hasn't changed yet. But most of what is left seems to have a shelf life of about three years, maybe four. When you first embark upon this journey, it can be like drinking from a fire hose, there is so much to learn. But you quickly come to understand that some fraction of the whole doesn't change at all. And some fraction changes only rarely, and only slightly. Some part changes regularly, but predictably, and then you get into the part that is different in random meaningful ways every few years.

We have only been doing this since the middle 1990s, but we have already seen a few false-starts, a few transient technologies. You might stumble upon a Web page built with Frames. Frames were inflicted upon us at the beginning of the dot-com boom, and for a while we feared that this might one day be how all web pages were built. But Frames quickly showed themselves to be the second-best way to do just about everything, and have fallen from favor. But they were kind of slick if you could get them to work correctly in at least one of the popular browsers of the day. Today, we have other technology to let us do Frame-y things without the Frame-y drawbacks, so Frames are on their way to joining the lexicon of Web Latin.

This is the way of technology. There was a time in this country when you could not sell a modem if it did not say "Hayes Compatible" somewhere on the box. Even long after Hayes went out of business, the surviving modem companies still put that on the box somewhere, so people could be confident in their purchases. Today, of course, it's hard to sell any modem, in a world of cheap broadband connections. So everything has a shelf life, it seems.

One advantage we have over so many other areas of technology is that HTML evolves very slowly, now. For years, we were told that HTML 4.01 was in fact going to be the last version of HTML. Any further development would be on XML and XHTML, the conventional wisdom went. Now there are once again rumblings of an HTML 5, but we are probably in no danger of its adoption before we pay off our next new car. So while there are new versions of the Microsoft Office suite every few years, and new versions of Windows, we can concentrate on HTML and how best to use it.

I don’t know if there is any rule of thumb for keeping up with everything. I would hate to spend much of my time learning things that are definitely going to become obsolete. We know that the guys who wrote Dreamweaver CS3 all still have jobs. There will be a Dreamweaver CS4 one day, or Dreamweaver 10, or Dreamweaver MX2012 or whatever they call it, then. Most of the program won't change, much. But there will be changes, you can be sure. Some may even be improvements. And then that part of the equation will be locked-down for three or four years and we can focus on learning other things.

In the year ahead, I need to learn a lot more about PHP and MySQL. I would benefit a lot from extending the limits of my Dreamweaver knowledge. I thought I'd dodged a bullet by not "wasting" my time learning JavaScript years ago, but new ways of using JavaScript have given it a new lease on life and we may soon be featuring AJAX, Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, on many of our pages.

One way or another, I have resolved to spend at least a few minutes every day face-down in a book or two in the year ahead. This time next year, I hope to be much more comfortable with both PHP and MySQL. And maybe it wouldn't hurt to review the CS3 release of Dreamweaver and a little HTML, too.

I wish I had learned more, in 2007. I resolve to redouble my efforts in 2008. If I learn only one new thing a week, then this time next year I’ll know another fifty things. That’s not asking too much, is it?