Molly at Opera

Here's a bit of good news I came across last week. Molly Holzschlag has joined the Opera team.

Molly and I go way back. She worked for me briefly on the old GEnie network, the General Electric Network for Information Exchange. She ran the disABILITIES forum, and this is was the spark of my passion for equal access and for Molly herself. When Microsoft got into the game, we each had forums over there, as well. The next time anyone heard from Molly, she had written a book about some new language everyone was talking about, HTML. Molly, overnight, literally became the girl who wrote the book on HTML. Speaking engagements followed, magazine gigs, and of course, ever more books.

Before long, Molly had staked out an entire bookshelf. She had written books on HTML, on Web design, on the use of color, on how to work with various Web-related software, and more. Lots more. Over the last decade, she has ceased to be merely molly holzschlag, and has become Molly Holzschlag, in the Web world.

In recent years, Molly has put some muscle behind the move toward standards-based Web pages, even while pointing out that in many cases, no real standards exist. And I credit her with a great deal of the work that went into making Micrsoft's Internet Explorer a much better browser, finally. And now, she works at Opera.

You may not have heard of Opera, but I suspect you will, soon. It's been around for a long time, now. Opera was spun out of a telecom research project in 1995. They released their first browser in 1996 and started really gaining a reputation as the twentieth century came to its close. They built a reputation for a lightweight, very fast Web browser that had amazing fidelity to the published standards. This was back when nobody gave a damn about standards. If anything held Opera back it was that during this time they were charging for their software.

Oh, a free browser was available, but it featured advertising that could not be turned off, unless you paid for the software. This had the effect of causing downloads for new ads while you were browsing for new pages, slowing things down—and did I mention nobody cared that Opera was one of very browsers that actually did what it was supposed to do? Opera is now free, again.

Over the years, they have really forced the hand of other browser developers. I have no doubt that Firefox is a better browser today because Opera was on the scene. Even Microsoft was finally embarrassed that this little company, and it is a little company, could create a Web browser that played by the rules while they could not get Internet Explorer to get out of its own way. Opera is avialable on Macintosh and Windows PCs, on Linux computers, on the popular game playing machinery and a host of Smart Phone hardware.

Molly has worked with the WorldWide Web Consortium, with the Web Standards Project, with a host of publishers, and with me. She may leave Opera one day—there seems to be little permanence anywhere in this industry. But I suspect she will leave Opera a much better company, and browser, than we see today. It might not turn out that way, but that's the way to bet.

Just please, if that day ever comes, no jokes about the Fat Lady singing, huh?

Budgets

So we are all, once again, worrying about budgets.

A few years ago, we went through all of this. We lost a few programs and a few friends, and then everything got better. Talk to enough old-timers and you will probably hear plenty of these stories, from every several years.

I wish I had the answer, but I'm not sure I completely understand the question, myself. It may be that we will skate through this with just a few stern warnings to turn out lights, or have to keep our computers for an additional year or two before we can upgrade them. It may be that entire programs will again be flushed, and some good people along with them.

In the How To Cope With Stress books, they tell you not to spend a lot of calories on things you have no control over. But it's difficult, when the lead story on the news every night is another piece about some unimaginable multiple of hundreds of people have suddenly found themselves without work. It's on the front page of every paper. It comes to us in e-mails and Web links and now here I am bringing it up, too.

There are a lot of ways this could shake out. All of the real decision-making happens several pay grades above my position. I have no control. That's not to say that I don't have any influence though. There is plenty that you or I can do to make sure we're the last name on the list to be crossed-out.

I'm not talking (only) about coming in a few minutes early, and leaving a few minutes late, and all of that nose-to-the-grindstone stuff, here. Our focus has always been on learning to build good Web pages better and faster and so that's the hook, here. If you are concerned with your future, consider doubling-up on your efforts to learn Dreamweaver, to learn HTML and CSS, or to learn some additional technologies like the content management in Adobe Contribute, or server administration or programming in JavaScript, PHP and My SQL.

Learn as much as you can about any of these—or all of these—and you will be just that much more valuable to your boss. Taken to an extreme, if you are doing the work of four or five WebFolks, then it would take four or five people to replace you, right? That makes keeping you the biggest bargain in your offices. They'll get rid of the coffee maker before they let you go.

Or, not. Maybe there just isn't the money to keep you, no matter how much your output improves. If that's the case, then you enter the population of workforce candidates with a new skillset that puts you ahead of some huge percentage of people competing for the next job. Larry, Curly and Moe all know HTML and Dreamweaver. But you know HTML, Cascading Stylesheets and the Templates. That pretty much makes it your offer to accept or decline.

We're doing all of the normal Fiscal Responsibility things at our house, like turning off lights, casting an eagle-eye on the cable-TV bill and trying not to spend so many (wonderful!) evenings in restaurants, banking savings in anticipation of maybe being able to only make minimum payments for a while. There are any number of books, magazines and Web sites with great tips on how to handle your money, when it's still coming in.

But if you're like me, and worried about the axe that may or may not be falling, this may be a great time to start learning, relearning or even just applying the things you already know, but haven't gotten around to using, yet. It's got to be much easier to learn 500 things over six months, than over six weeks.

Good luck in the weeks and months ahead. And if things don't turn out our way, maybe we can carpool to an interview?

I'm Taking the Afternoon Off

Yeah, I had a bunch of things I wanted to talk about this week, but you know what? The weather is nice and I have a bag of vacation time banked and the Web will surely be here in another week.

So I'm going home to put my feet up, maybe play a little guitar and catch up on some TV and reading.

How Do You Keep Up?

The other side of How Do You Learn All Of This? is probably How Do You Keep Up?

On balance, I would say that this might even be more important than learning things in the first place. We are in a rapidly-changing field here, kids. Even though HTML itself has not changed since December of 1999, how we use it, and how we use Cascading Stylesheets and JavaScript and a host of other technologies has changed quite a bit.

The problem with books, and you don't know anyone who loves books more than I do, is that they don't change. Whatever was printed on that particular day is the information you have. So when styles, best practices or even standards change, how do you know? How do you keep up?

Books are static. The Web is dynamic. For news and updates and all manner of help, get thee to the Web. Here are a few of my favorite Web sites:

I rarely visit the WorldWide Web Consortium, the W3C, except to validate pages. They are a big academic exercise and can spend days and days navel-gazing and deciding where a comma goes in a sentence. If have a lived a faithless life, I will find myself in the W3C conference room as my Reward. But there is a lot of good information, here. In fact, this is the source material for probably every book on Web Design you find on the shelf. But source material isn't always pretty.

Here's the W3C on ID and Class attributes: http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/global.html#h-7.5.2

Not thrilling, huh? Almost any book on HTML does a better job of teaching you HTML. But that's not really what the W3C site is for. It's more of a reference, the final arbiter of How The Web Works.

I spend much more time with A List Apart (http://www.AListApart.com). ALA, the kewl-kids say, tackles much more of the leading-edge stuff. Several years ago, they spearheaded a campaign to do away with browser-specific markup and whip browser developers into shape building software that adhered to the standards (as published at the W3C). If you have ever wanted to Zebra-stripe a table and wondered how, or even wondered if it was worth it when it comes to usability, ALA probably has an article or two covering it. Need to style your <form> inputs, buttons and text boxes? I check ALA, first.

Molly Holzschlag is one of my Web Heroes. She is the one who (patiently) taught me HTML, back in the days of the 56kbps modem and the Steam-Powered Computer. Her site isn't only about Web standards, but also about whatever happens to be taking up space in her life at the moment. http://www.Molly.com is on my daily Web hike.

Eric Meyer is another of my Web Heroes. Eric literally wrote the book on CSS, again translating all of the arcana of the W3C site into a how-to guide that was there first with the most readable information and how-to help. I visit http://www.MeyerWeb.com once a week or so, on average.

There are probably several good mailing lists out there. People post questions and others post answers and, at the end of the day, a digest of all of these transactions is compiled and e-mailed straight into your mailbox. I enjoyed seven or eight years of the WebDesign-L mailing list (http://www.WebDesign-L.com/) but finally ran out of time and got tired of the repetition. You can imagine that over the course of a decade or so, you will see questions like "How do I make my ordered lists start with Roman Numerals instead of Arabic Numbers?" comes up quite often.

Next up: An amazing phenomenon I have noticed in the Web World.

I am a big fan of Paul Boag, and his BoagWorld podcast ( http://www.BoagWorld.com/ ) from England. Some of the language is a little tricky (if something is awful, it's pants!) but the accents are charming, the humor is refreshing and the information is spot-on. I subscribe to the podcast and listen via iTunes.

There are at least two really good magazines on Web work, both from the UK. The first, Web Designer, comes with detailed tutorials color-coded and with links to available help-files. Turn to the green pages and there is some whiz-bang new trick you can perform in Dreamweaver, in about an hour. They do a great job of keeping up with the trends and the news, as well. It's pricey here in the Big PX, but it is well worth the time and money for the news and information. http://www.WebDesignerMag.co.uk/

The other magazine is a little trickier. It's available everywhere in the world as .Net, which of course was the name of a whole suite of technologies Microsoft developed years ago only peripherally involved with Web design. Here in the States, the magazine was known as Practical Web Design for years, but it merged with .Net a few years ago and is now available here as both the .Net Magazine and Practical Web Design, depending upon your news vendor's distributor or something. It's all very confusing. If you Google "Practical Web Design Magazine" the first hit that comes up is a link to .Net but the magazine is available here with both titles, so be careful. Again, this one's expensive but worth it if you can afford it (see if your boss will buy you a subscription!). http://www.NetMag.co.uk/

The last source I lean on is our own Web Developers' Network. Whenever you have a question, check WebDevNet first, to see if someone else hasn't already encountered and maybe even solved your problem. http://wdn.unl.edu/

How do you keep up? That's how I do it.