Remember when I was going to learn JavaScript? John Lennon told his son Sean, "Life is what happens when you're busy making other plans". Stuff just got in the way. New releases of software, new ways of doing old things. The general ebb and flow of life. So that needs to go back on the spindle, for next year. I've made it all these years without knowing JavaScript. I'll probably survive another several months. But all of the new reasons for learning JavaScript, mostly having to do with AJAX, are still valid, so this is something I do still want to work on in the months ahead.
There was a brief scare when it looked like we would have to actually add non-standard markup to our pages if we wanted to be sure that our non-standard browsers operated in standards mode. Said another way, even though our page was technically perfect, and several good browsers would render it as intended, for a few weeks it looked like we might have to actually add a line of unnecessary markup to that page in order to be sure that one Name Brand Browser operated in standards mode. The scare quickly passed, as we received assurances from Microsoft that their upcoming Internet Explorer would, right out of the box, operate in standards mode. If the books said it should look like this, IE would render it like this. I love a story with a happy ending.
There were lots of references to Dreamweaver. You can change Dreamweaver. You can adjust Dreamweaver. You can select preferences and options and tune-up Dreamweaver just about any way you might like. You should learn keyboard shortcuts. You should learn anything you can about Dreamweaver. One of the biggest interruptions this year was the introduction of Dreamweaver CS4.
Now, suddenly, everything you know is wrong, right? Well, no, not quite. A great many things have changed, but there is plenty that is still very familiar about Dreamweaver. The workflow has been streamlined and improved quite a bit. But it's going to take some time to realize gains from doing old things in new ways. Some of us may struggle, but for the most part I believe the journey will be worth it.
We talked a little about accessibility. We talked a bit about alternate access methods. I got an iPhone and discovered I needed to almost entirely re-write a short workshop I'd put together on The Handheld Web, about writing Web pages for today's Blackberry and iPhone users. This is going to be an area where we see the most excitement in the years ahead, I'm pretty sure. Today's machinery is kind of a baseline. We should not expect that tomorrow's Treo or Blackberry or iPhone will be in any meaningful way slower or less-capable than today's. So there may come a day, soon, when most of our page visits are coming in via these little devices. We owe it to our audiences of 2010 and 2012 to create pages that can be used, and useful, in handheld devices. Don't include media in file formats they don't understand. Don't rely on old technologies that may not be fully supported or supported at all in handheld devices. And realize the key differences. It's not just a smaller experience. It's a different experience. You cannot "hover" over a link on a Web page with your finger, for instance, and have that link change color, size or shape to reinforce it's selectedness, the way you can in a Web browser.
Outside of the Web, the world either went to Hell or came back from the brink, depending upon your point of view. Our retirement accounts evaporated in the heat of the lawlessness Wall Street refers to as "deregulation". As the economy tanked in various cities we waited to see what the effect might be on us, here on The Prairie. Like one of those giant falling-domino displays, we don't even know for sure when things will hit here, let alone how bad it might get. But already the upper levels of administration are warning us to do more with less, turn out the lights and look for ways to save. In a system where one of the biggest expenses is payroll, that does not bode well for anyone Making Plans for next year.
All we can do is try very hard to become better. And if you can create a dozen pages in the time it takes me to build ten, there's a good chance you'll be here in two years while I might not be. Maybe that recasts things like learning keyboard shortcuts in ways that mean more to you now. I hope so. I'd hate to lose any of us, including myself.
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