Ménage IT

Web Site Trust and Credibility

2010-01-20T07:48:00.000-08:00

Privacy statements on Web sites don't usually get noticed, but the statement I found on the site of non-linear creations (http://www.nonlinearcreations.com/whitepaper/index.asp?id=12) is noteworthy for its intent and quality of execution.

The privacy statement has the effect of building trust and credibility with users, and doing it very quickly. I discussed with co-workers this statement and its effects on users; there was broad agreement that it is exemplary. The statement follows:

Privacy Statement: We are happy to provide you with complimentary access to this whitepaper. But, of course, nothing in life is truly free. You need to provide us with a live, business email address to receive the paper.

And, in exchange for this whitepaper, you agree to allow us to send you one follow up email within six weeks and a second follow up email within six months. We promise: ignore these emails and you will never hear from us by email again.

Making explicit the terms of the relationship, and expectations of the users has powerful trust-building effects. Of course, once the whitepaper is downloaded, it will be crucial that the terms be faithfully followed.

Is Accessibility Hard?

2009-11-22T06:19:00.001-08:00

The 20 Second survey

I recently sent out a survey to the PSUWeb community asking them a simple question - "Is accessibility hard?" I added a second question - "Why is it hard?"
, and gave them some broad answers to select from:

lack some of the required skills
lack management support to devote the time
too much work to do
don't have the tools to work effienciently
not a priority

Respondents could select more than one answer. Respondents were webmasters, designers, developers, writers and media content authors, system administrators, and other specialties that fall into the Web worker category.

This survey has flaws. It's was not designed with rigor in mind, but to take a simple snapshot of community opinion.

2/3 say accessibility is hard

A little under two thirds (63%) of the respondents said that accessibility was hard. Several followed up with more elaboration of their opinions.

For all the reasons

There was a broad range of reasons why people think accessibility it hard. All the reasons listed above were chosen by 37% to 55% of the respondents.

answer	# responses	% respondents
lack some of the required skills	21	55%
lack management support to devote the time	20	53%
too much work to do	21	55%
don't have the tools to work efficiently	14	37%
not a priority	15	39%

People could select more than one checkbox, so percentages won't work out to a clean 100%.

Summary

I have been claiming for years that accessible design and content is not rocket science. I still stick by that assertion. True, routine production of transcripts for audio and captions for video is strictly an organizational and budget, rather than technical, problem. It continues to vex us, although the recent announcement of automated video captions may be a tipping point in the debate.

But clearly others disagree, and I have to respect that. But we as an institution have a problem called compliance. We operate in some part with public funds, and as such we have obligations to have accessible Web sites and applications. So, onward we march, reluctant soldiers.

We have to transform accessibility from an afterthought to part of the process, at a cost in money and people-talent we can sustain.

--

Some related posts:

iPhone 3GS Accessibility Features
(http://www.cjohansen.org/2009/10/iphone-3gs-accessibility-features.html)

New Roles for Accessible Web Publishing
(http://www.cjohansen.org/2009/08/new-roles-for-accessible-web-publishing.htm)

Open Source is Good for the Web (Accessibility)
(http://www.cjohansen.org/2009/10/open-source-is-good-for-web.html)

Web City: visioning our Web presence?

2009-11-08T07:07:00.001-08:00

It's a truism that the Web has changed everything. From its humble beginnings as a network of hyperlinked resources scattered among distant outposts, the Web has grown extravagantly in size, sophistication and effect. Complex technical and social structures have emerged that unite geographically dispersed people and small groups into communities of content and purpose.

The Web changes lives and society, and we in turn change the Web. We no longer control the rules of engagement, nor is it any longer desirable to do so (Community: From Little Things, Big Things Grow - http://www.alistapart.com/articles/fromlittlethings/); but the Web is influenced by the experience we design into it. Web City has sprawled and merged the old isolated outposts and gated network communities to nearly cover the entire earth, into a giant city that never sleeps.

We know that, already. Or do we? A map of the community of Web workers at Penn State still looks like we're scattered among lonely outposts. Sure, we party and show our stuff at conferences and lunchtime gatherings - and that is a good thing. But after the event, we return to our solitary routines and do the best we can; which is pretty good; well, ... it's not bad; but it could be better.

We could have a Web czar. If she's a good czar, she will rally and exhort and inspire her subjects into alignment and cooperation, produce creative strategies to ramp up economic exchange and tourism, and generally have a strategy for the many communities that live in her City.

But we don't. What we do have is a community of skilled people.

How can we manage ourselves without a czar? Let's look around and find examples of communities of people, geographically scattered, that produce valuable and useful products for: artistic and scientific content; scholarship and teaching; degrees and certifications; software and services; collaboration and project management.

I think that the best examples are successful open source projects: a community of highly skilled designers and engineers geographically dispersed; working collaboratively and with agility towards a set of common goals; using tools and techniques that support collaboration and quality; self-organizing and self-governing where leadership emerges from within the community.

Linux, Apache, Mozilla, Python, Plone, Drupal, OpenOffice, etc. It's a very long list.

We use the products of open source development every day. In fact, we absolutely depend on it. When we browse the Web, we use an infrastructure that is largely open source. The many successful projects have evolved remarkably similar sets of tools and processes that embrace the best characteristics of collaborative development. Based on my own experience working with open source, the personal lessons and rewards of "membership" are as important as the functionality they provide.

Here's a snapshot showing how open source-style collaboration at Penn State could work: I have a passion for accessible web design. There is an emerging assistive technology called ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications), and I'd like to explore its application and adoption at Penn State.

I have gone to a list of collaboration / presentation topics at the PSUWeb community wiki (https://wikispaces.psu.edu/display/psuweb/presentationtopics). I add the description of the topic by following the examples already on the page, and then I claim responsibility for that topic. That means I communicate my intent to facilitate a group to develop a project plan, vet the plan with the PSU Web community; begin the planning process; sponsor one or more hands-on design and code sprints; maybe create a presentation; start a list discussion or forum; start implementation of ARIA in an application that I'm working on - all with an overarching goal that we learn as a group by doing and sharing hands-on work.

I am especially mindful to make the space for others who want to join, or wish to have a leadership role, because I need their help, expertise and point of view.

Our special group on ARIA technology quickly discovers the need to have in place the tools that help collaboration. I like IRC, personally. But if others want to use the tool they already know - twitter - OK, then we use twitter, and we standardize on tags #psuweb and #aria to aid communication.

We also need to share code, and email just won't do it. I use the subversion code repository, but nobody else uses a tool to share code. So, I'll teach them how to use Subversion. We'll quickly be at the point where we can start real work on the project. Months later, somebody may present a prototype template and lead a discussion at a hastily planned birds-of-a-feather session at the Web conference. Somebody else may present a (also hastily planned) lightning talk. This is agile, and it's all good.

Web City at Penn State: an agile, social and collaborative response to the continuing challenges that confront our Web presence. This is how open source communities do it, and prosper. This is how we could do it, too.

Open Source is Good for Web Accessibility

2009-10-21T06:46:00.000-07:00

I am fascinated by the social aspects of IT and its effects on the quality of services delivered. Even problems that seem to have technical solutions (say, Web accessibility) are strongly affected by social characteristics of the organization. Open source communities provide a model for improving the quality of Web applications.

At the Illinois Web Accessibility Conference (http://webaccessibilityconference.illinois.edu/) I presented the idea that Open Source is good for accessibility (http://www.cjohansen.org/2009/10/open-source-is-good-for-web.html). I was not arguing the technical advantages of open source, rather that the shared attitudes and practices of the community of successful open source projects, like Linux and Apache, are good models for improving Web accessibility. OS community dynamics enables software improvements, hence the assertion that fixing Web accessibility is equal parts technology and culture. The cultural side is generally not discussed among developers, so what an opportunity to surprise a technology-focused conference.

I hit the target. Both Plone and Drupal are gaining mindshare at the University, and at Illinois state agencies. And yet, the critical importance of the developer/integrator communities supporting these large and successful open source projects is underappreciated. That's amazing to me, since engaged communities are the very reason open source is successful. It's the same in our institutions. Staff participation will not only improve chances of project success, but ultimately contributes to improving the user experience worldwide - including accessibility. I know this from my own work with WebLion and Plone.

Here's how it works: say developers in a university software shop are modifying and deploying an open source Web application - they want to improve the structure of their template markup. The team follows OS development best practices for collaboration and sharing code. Changes are documented in the project's ticketing system, where other members comment on the code and user interface, and discuss alternative ideas. In the care of a champion, the changes enter into new releases, and thereby new and updated installations. Mission complete; the developers have enhanced a product that is used worldwide.

But here's how it's more often done: The Department of Old Patterns has some developers that decided to replace their home-rolled CMS in favor of a popular open source CMS. They know they can customize the code to suit their special needs, including fixing the same structural problems in the templates. The modified code is landlocked on developer hard drives, never to be shared. In a building on the other side of the street, developers in Another Department decide to use the same CMS, and apply similar modifications. Sadly, they will waste resources, and neither do their change see the light of day.

That was the message that resonated with the conference attendees. Not only is a siloed organization inefficient, but they are a real barrier to progress. Web accessibility is a social problem and a technical problem, with known fixes. Look at the collaborative development model of open source for real progress.

iPhone 3GS Accessibility Features

2009-10-11T08:11:00.000-07:00

[A response to Cole Camplese in which he asks about iPhone and Accessibility.]

I recently attended the Illinois Accessibility Conference to conferences to present on open source projects and their superior model of implementing and improving accessibility to software releases. There was a lot of excitement about the accessibility of Apple's latest iPhone product release - iPhone 3GS.
In summary, the new iPhone 3GS is an important advance in interaction design and accessibility. Blogs and lists are also enthusiastic (some wildly so) about the effectiveness of VoiceOver technology integrated with the operating system and applications. There are some naysayers, to be sure. But, in balance, Apple has scored a huge hit with the community of blind Web users.

VoiceOver will influence iPhone development and adoption by the community of disabled users with the concurrent release of the software development kit (SDK). The Blind Wiki notes the increasing number of applications that have been upgraded to support VoiceOver, but to claim broad support will undoubtedly take more time.

But the real story is the rapid adoption of iPhone 3GS by blind users. At a recent conference I wanted to surprise Victor Tsaras (twitter @vick08), Senior Accessibility Program Manager at Yahoo! with (I laugh, now) demonstration of the VoiceOver interface. But, before I could finish my sentence, he pulled his iPhone out and gave an impressive demo of his own style of interaction.

There are currently 94 members in the accessible iphone Yahoo! group, and 316 members in the visually impaired iphone Yahoo! group.

There are some useful and interesting lessons for Web designers from the iPhone story. The most compelling is the effect great design can have on delivering expanded affordances to users. It's completely counter-intuitive that there could be an effective touch-screen device that is also accessible, but Apple introduced it and it was received with positive reviews by the blind / VI community. It was forward-looking universal design - a truly great creative leap - that bridged the touch and speech interfaces.

New Roles for Accessible Web Publishing

2009-08-03T10:49:00.000-07:00

Despite our best intentions and attempts to train Web developers and designers in accessible Web publishing, progress in making the Web accessible has been disappointing, at best.
While it's important to increase awareness of the barriers to access we unintentionally build, institutions cannot guarantee the accessibility of their Web presence through the collective effort of individuals. Institutions generally meet technical challenges with responses at the organization, or process, level. That's what I propose here.

It's clear that the solution to Web accessibility must change. We also need to acknowledge that the problem itself has changed. Publishing systems are replacing hand-built static sites, so, the focus of accessibility is changing from the page to content. Digital media shares - even dominates - the content well with text, increasing the burden of creating alternate content for video, audio, dynamic content and data visualization. The standards themselves have changed; even so the way those standards are applied to testing methodologies. Don't look for handy checklists in WCAG2; the new standard supports expert review and best practices, but does little to support simple automated testing (to the loud protests of the Web community).

If the nature of the Web is changing so quickly, and accessibility standards have become more complex, how can educational institutions meet their legal obligation to make their sites accessible? Training for Web workers in modern techniques of accessibility is necessary, but we've already found it to be far from sufficient. The guidelines and tools of WCAG1 no longer suffice. What's needed is a process that fits the operations of Web shops within the institution. Web publishing workflow needs two roles: 1) quality control acting as the final step in the publishing process, and 2) the technical expert. Quality control checks content against best practices, users, and devices. Remedial action and training goes to the technical expert who either has the answer or knows how to get it. Note that I say roles. The roles can be filled by one or more people. Quality control and expertise can be the responsibility of one person, or not. They can be designers, developers, media producers, writers, or editors. A role can be a new position, or more likely just new responsibilities. The best qualification for the role is a passion for user satisfaction.

This solution may not apply to the multitude of one-person Web shops. If that's you, I feel your pain acutely, as I used to be a shop of one. If you are a hero, you have two new roles to fill, and bless you for your effort! Or you and your Web community, or your college/unit staff, can organize a collaborative process. What must not happen is a strategy that relies on an ad-hoc, reactive approach to accommodation requests. That's a train wreck.

Mobile Phones and 2D Barcodes Enable Signage and Lifehacks

2009-03-28T10:01:00.000-07:00

I stumbled onto a conversation on the use of machine-readable 2-dimensional optical codes (A.K.A. 2D matrix code, barcode and symbologies) to communicate with mobile phones equipped with cameras and scanning software. Applications of 2D barcodes have expanded from its origins in tracking automobile parts and shipped packages to include convenient access to information for wayfinding and advertising
; well, at least those are the earliest and obvious applications as of today.

Consider the case where Kim is new on campus and wants to take a bus back to her dorm, which is on the other side of campus. Kim sees the QR-encoded (a 2D symbology) sign below the usual bus stop sign, captures the image with her camera phone, starts the application which reads the URL encoded in the image, and which then launches the phone's browser to display the bus schedule. Kim selects her destination; the Web application reads her location from the phone's built-in GPS and the current location of the nearest bus arriving at her destination (read real-time from the bus' GPS unit) and displays the estimated time to arrival.

Another day, Kim walks through downtown. As she passes the theater, she notices a few plays and concerts that pique her interest. She pulls out her mobile phone and photographs the 2D barcode in the theater's digital sign. She will look over the schedule when she returns to her room. Ah!, the new Korean restaurant. Her phone can usually read signs across the street, so she's got that captured, too.

This is not the future. It is life today in urban Japan, soon to arrive in your neighborhood. I simulated the experience using barcode displayed on a computer screen, and captured images on an iPhone. I downloaded the application 2D Sense (free) from the iPhone App Store to read the sample 2D barcodes on this post, on theiMatrix site and on Wikipedia. For example, the image on this page should take you to my blog at cjohansen.org. If you have problems, as I occasionally did, you can zoom the barcode images before capturing it, and the actions will be more likely to work. You can create your own barcodes, which is where I created the image above. 2D Sense delivers on encoding for URLs and text, however, it doesn't currently support Google maps for location information - that is way too bad, but I'm sure will be fixed soon enough. Note that mobile phones bought in Japan have made the experience seamless, and the sight of 2D barcode signage is said to be common.

There it is: 2D barcode signage - a new aspect of the ambient information ecosystem. Tell me, oracle, what beasts lurk here?

A Kindle in Every Backpack?

2009-03-18T12:51:00.000-07:00

The Kindle 2 does one thing really well: it allows you to read books. The display is superbly designed, allowing the user full reading time free of eye strain. The device is light-weight, mobile, with a simple interface for paging.
However, the designers of the Kindle must have felt that reading books was not a compelling basis for commercial success, because there's lots of additional functionality. Now, adding features beyond the core design is risky business behavior; Amazon won a few bets, and so far, have lost a few.

Sleepy operation

The Kindle is operated with a drop-down menu and navigated with a multi-selector button. It's a familiar design pattern from smart phones that most people will understand with a little practice; that is, if they can stand the wait. Sluggish response is, by far, the most common criticism of the interface - in operation of the device, and in paging through a book. Especially annoying is the black-flash of the screen when paging through a book. Despite the quality of the reading experience, the flash turns some peoples' enthusiasm to rejection. It's amusing that so many people try to interact with a touch screen. I feel myself badly wanting a touch screen at times.

Annotations and User Content? Not yet

The Kindle allows the reader to search, bookmark locations and write annotations using a multi-selector button and full querty keyboard. It seems natural to operate the keyboard with two thumbs because of the way you hold it. However, unreasonable force is required to press the keys, which slows the speed of writing. The keys have a diminished tactile quality which discourages touch typing and further slows the write speed. Taken together, the design choices seem peculiar and user unfriendly. Neither are there keyboard shortcuts like those found on an iPhone - two spaces print a period, for example. And what about your data? If it's locked in the Kindle forever, it's not very useful. It turns out that bookmarks and annotations are stored in files associated with the book, and already the Kindle has been hacked, but so far Amazon has not developed a solution for mere readers.

Note to content sources: design for mobile devices

There are other problems. Imagine a commuter dashing off to the train. She's wants to read up on the todays' parade of misery and horror in The Wall Street Journal. Jakob Nielson tested this use case and concluded that there were design errors that created an "awkward interaction design and poor support for non-linear content [in English: the short article format of newspapers]." Undoubtedly, that sluggish menu and the odd multi-selector button is irritating to use, however, the interface of a news source is decidedly not a problem with the device, but with the information design of the news source itself. And however distasteful to Web designers, people do in fact learn the tricks of navigating important sites - and so convention eventually becomes a "standard".

Easy reading for the disabled?

The Kindle has some interesting and useful innovations. The buzz around the new machine-generated text-to-speech capability seems to have created a hope that it may help people with certain disabilities. Sorry to disappoint, but the audio is limited to content only, and does not assist in the *operation* of the Kindle. Whereas the Kindle is not ready for people with blindness or poor vision, simultaneous reading and reading the text display may indeed have some applications for reading and learning disabilities. We eagerly await the time when text-to-speech is extended to include device operation.

It's a mobile device, not a workstation

Kindle also is shipped with an experimental web browser. How you judge the effectiveness of the browser depends on how you view to the Kindle itself. Is it a computer? Is it a mobile device? Is it merely a book reader with an odd, experimental browser that might come in handy? Comparing the browser to Firefox, or Safari will disappoint. It's black-and-white rendering seems quaint, it doesn't respect style sheets, and will rearrange the structure of the sight in ways that will horrify designers. However, compare the Kindle's browser with those in other mobile devices and you can tell a much different story. It is now understand that sites designed for Firefox, Safari, IE, and other large-screen devices provide users of mobile devices a very poor experience. The old Web standards mantra of good rendering across multiple platforms is largely a false hope. If a site's stakeholders want mobile visitors they must provide alternative page designs for them. And for those sites that do - not surprisingly, Amazon happens to be one of them - the experience is excellent. To conclude: think of the Kindle as a mobile device, accept that most Web sites suck when viewed in mobile designs, and you will be happier.

Finally, there was one really awful behavior that desperately needs to be changed. While I was happily absorbed in a science fiction novel the Kindle suddenly blanked and performed a software update. Grrrrr. The update process took only 4 minutes, including restart, but it brought me back to Home rather than the page I was reading - kind of rude and unrefined, that Kindle.

Is .mobi the Return of the Web Content Ghetto?

2008-12-06T10:48:00.000-08:00

In 2003 I built, if not the first, one of the earliest web sites for mobile phones and PDAs at Penn State. Addressing the common criticism of stale (i.e., forgotten, and presumably static) content on separate, mobile-optimized sites at that time, this site was dynamic, pulling its content from the same database used by the main site. The only technical difference was that the templates used WAP2 markup and offered a single column for content, simplified navigation, and limited market branding.

Nonetheless, the problem of content ghettos serving mobile devices has contributed to the relatively slow adoption by early users. But these early attempts at least tried to address the limitations of the small form factor and engage the mobilized users. The larger barrier has been, of course, the complete unsuitability of most sites to rendering in mobile devices' browsers - until recently.

Enter dotMobi, an industry consortium to fix what ails the mobile Web, and to innovate for better user experiences. Great, right? Well, maybe, but .mobi introduces new problems of it's own. .mobi had a surge in popularity when the initiative started. And today, .mobi and kindred WAP sites account for about a quarter of the mobile web traffic. But, the trend is down as devices and browsers are increasingly sophisticated and able to provide the rich application functionality of their larger implementations. Traffic to social web sites accounts for about 40-60% of web traffic worldwide, and you can be sure that WAP sites won't deliver the user experience that drives their popularity. We can adapt a yarn from Wall Street here: don't fight the trend.

Moreover, since .mobi is a top level domain, it has already segmented itself from most web resources in education, government, non-prophet and personal domains, i.e., those who are least likely to own and manage additional TLDs. In fact, the mission of .mobi is primarily to serve small and mid-sized business. Even the 4 letter TLD itself is problematic, as on many devices "mobi" requires 9 keystrokes. Why, those same devices could type out "wap" in just 3.

Sites with a .mobi TLD would have access to some powerful applications. For example, a device database service hosted by .mobi will allow fine customization of web sites for any of the hundreds of devices on the markets. If that sounds a little insane to you, I suggest that maybe you're right. (Although, it does sound like a boon for developers ;-). If making content ghettos sounds evil, how will you reckon with ghettos of user experience. I've had similar concerns about customizing markup to optimize for iPhones' Safari browser. And while evangelizing standards and accessibility I railed against code forking during the Microsoft and Netscape browser wars. Yes, these are concerns and my position is inconsistent, but I'm still trying to justify the hassle because the iPhone user interface is exceptional. Confused? So am I, but I'm watching with fascination as standards and best practices emerge. What do you think?

Create Your Personal Narrative with a Portfolio

2008-11-14T05:27:00.001-08:00

The social software market makes me dizzy. I don't have time to test drive every new idea, and it's crazy to have to reinvent a new account and identity for each service. Most services that I try, I just hand back the keys and keep walking, leaving a few crumbs on the carpet. A few have stuck to my windshield, and they do make work and life better and fun - those services I use and very much appreciate. With some services I have a love-hate relationship, like Twitter. In the end, I find my homes-on-the-network mostly by the testimonials and referrals of colleagues and friends because, well, I want to hang out at the same bazaars as they do.

It struck me recently how important these same services could be in more personal ways. Consider: I leave digital artifacts in many places. They're the work of my profession - code, ideas put to business and technical documents, presentations, blogs, email - lots and lots of email (!!!), random notes. They're also the things I produce because I breathe - photographs, more email, more blogs, resumes, random notes - lots and lots of random notes. That's a staggering amount of crap!

Sometimes, especially when I need a little order, I wish for some principle to make order happen. Something like a file cabinet for the random notes, a glass display for showing off the really nice stuff, white walls to hang photographs, a safe for privacy, plans to keep hearth and home safe.

What brings this to mind was a presentation and meeting with scholar and author Darren Cambridge at the IMS Consortium meetings at Penn State. Darren "is fascinated by how people use technology to craft the narratives of their lives". He studies portfolios and how, among other things, they can be used to effect organizational change. All great stuff, with lots of potential for my team and institution as well, but what struck me was more personal. Portfolios are the basic currency of artists and technologists in many fields; why had I forgotten that? Extending the standard idea of portfolio as a body of evidence, he developed the idea of portfolio as a narrative of personal life which connects all the pieces of digital life into a "symphonic self". That's when bells rang.

So, the new tasks at hand: consolidate, narrate, organize, and put a few of the thousands of photographs online. Create my personal cacophony. More on tools for portfolios later. Find out more about Darren Cambridge.

Lessee, where are those taped recordings from my Afro-Cuban-Latin band days? And do I still have that photo of my first cat Ling Mew?

Traveling light

2008-08-15T08:54:00.001-07:00

On a recent trip to the CIC Accessibility and Usability Group meeting at Michigan State, I took a risk by leaving behind the Macbook Pro in exchange for the opportunity to trim 5 pounds of laptop and a few more pounds of extra gear. In its place, I took my iPhone (version 1.4 FW). Notes typed, information read, and videos viewed on a 3 1/2 inch screen. And enough flash memory for my african/latin playlist to leave the iPod home, too. Even cut my clothes to a minimum, bringing only a loin cloth. Not.

I was surprised and delighted by how quickly I adjusted to working exclusively with the iPhone. The Safari browser and touch screen interface made nearly all information retrieval and reading easy. Many web sites suck beyond redemption and are unsuitable for small screens, but none were completely unreadable if I really needed to. Mail, thanks to Google IMAP, was great. I couldn't (or didn't know how to) read the Word attachments that still pass for collaboration with some groups, but that feature is touted for version 2 of the operating system. But I did edit several wiki pages, and yes, the styles for wiki pages suck enough on a desktop screen, and are just horrible for small screens. (I mean, didn't anybody tell the designers that 140 character length lines with 9 pixel fonts are torture to read on any device?) But, yeah, when it had to be done, it was done.

Notes were terse because how can they be otherwise with a one-finger non tactile keyboard; but with focus and an emergent shorthand they were actually better for it. This post was written and published on the iPhone, and you can thank me that it wasn't in my shorthand ;-). Phone, music, video and business on the same device - that really was cool, and very travel friendly. And I feel a trend acoming, as devices continue to grow in capacity and sophistication.

What I miss most on the iPhone is the lack of concurrency of applications. I can't keep IRC chat going as I pull in a web page. I have to leave the Settings app as I try to log in to ambient Wi-Fi. Lack of concurrency is, in my view, the key weakness in Apple's application strategy. Watch out, here comes Google Android.

Technology Changes Patterns of Work: The Case of CMS Deployment

2008-04-20T08:49:00.001-07:00

As deployment of Web content management gains traction in the institution, the technology advocates and champions assume that the promised benefits will sweep through the work-a-day culture toward its fulfillment. Lo, we are perplexed and saddened when disappointment sets in. In one college, fours years after these early adopters shelled out huge licensing fees and annual maintenance fees for a CMS solution to what seems an organizational problem, only small sections of their Web presence are ostensibly under content management. I say ostensibly because the content consists of entire pages from the old static sites - markup, navigation, presentation and all (yes, even <font> tags) - have simply been dumped into a database. The resulting site uses few of the advantages offered by content management such as smart navigation, plain text content, metadata, content re-use, and scheduled publishing. Distribution of content maintenance might happen, but authors have been assigned to maintain the old “content” - embedded, bad markup and all. Failure is nearly a certainty. Pain exchanged for pain is still pain. Somebody, please, end this endless cycle of pain.

I just demonstrated the anti-pattern at work: without changes in processes and practices, failure of new technology deployment is probable. But who do we have to blame but ourselves? How can we expect our people to deeply understand the extent to which our work changes if we don't change our processes as part of technology deployment? Better still, shouldn't we try to predict the acceptance of new processes before the decision to deploy is made? We are not Borg - resistance to change is certain and will often kill any chance for success.

Evaluating return on investment in new web technology is difficult - but not impossible. But, we are overworked and understaffed, so important metrics are not developed simply because the effort isn't bearable; crucial data isn't identified and collected; evaluation of success or failure becomes merely an opinion. Worse is the suspicion that in some cases it may not be even a clueful opinion. In the end we cannot truly evaluate the success of technology projects in the absence of data. And so it goes with planning new technology investments.

Blogged with Flock

Manage and Share Mail Lists with Gmane, Opera and Del.icio.us

2008-02-01T06:12:00.000-08:00

My inbox sags from the weight of unread email. I curse the thousands of unread messages enumerated on my client. Many of my unread messages originate from lists. That is why I love gmane.org - "Gmane -- Mail To News And Back Again". Gmane is a mail list archive best explained at gmane.org/about:

Mailing lists are funneled into news groups. This isn't a new idea; several mail-to-news gateways exist. What's new with Gmane is that no messages are ever expired from the server, and the gateway is bidirectional. You can post to some of these mailing lists without being subscribed to them yourself...

But now there's new problem. To read netnews I need a netnews reader. It typically downloads the lists locally, so now I'm filling my hard disk with crap, and I have a new client to maintain. Wonderful... But I avoid trading one problem for another using the built-in news reader in the Opera browser, and I track *and share* news groups in Del.icio.us. Opera handles the news:// protocol very nicely and allows easy integration with tagging and bookmarking.

A typical use case: is to search del.icio.us for tagged news links and locate the news group at Gmane. (Clicking a news link with Firefox is harmless, if a little confusing at first, because it does nothing and gives no feedback). Links to new news groups are pasted into Del.icio.us with added tags and descriptions; they're ready for recall, and to share among your colleagues and network. The Web interface of Gmane allows easy searching, sorting, browsing and viewing of list posts.

Gmane is not a comprehensive archive of newsgroups, but it's easy to subscribe a list. A important feature for list owners is that you can also import list archives.

HTML meets good ole netnews and everyone wins.

Keyboard Accessibility to OS X via QuickSilver

2007-12-15T05:53:00.001-08:00

QuickSilver is a little OS X application that provides keyboard access to virtually all applications, system tasks and data. Why, you might ask, would anyone want to bypass the slickest mouse-driven interface in the (commodity) computer world? Well, maybe you wouldn't want to, but for power users, for whom a mouse interface just slows them down, it could be the answer to their frustrations and dreams. And it is.

It's late night, the house is quiet, headphones blazing, and you're working on a design project. On the screen is the Illustrator work space and a half dozen palette and inspection widgets, and nothing else -- just the way you like it. Ah, time for THE PLAYLIST. [Cmd-Space] pops up a tiny window. Type "it" and the iTunes icon comes to view. [Tab] "s" [Tab] "thpl" and the action Search "The Playlist" pops into view. [Enter]. The screen clears and you flow...

A few keys and hints on the keyboard and iTunes starts another playlist. And that's just for play. Try it with your work tools, combine scripts, *nix utilities and Automator. You're stompin'!

Yet, trying to explain to many newbies what QuickSilver does is really difficult! The GUI generation is so married to the mouse that there is nothing in the story to grab hold of. More often than not evangelism is rewarded with blank stares. OK. Think with me. I read things like "...find what stuff on your system is accessible to you through Quicksilver's interface...". Bingo.

You can access via personalized keyboard commands any kind of searchable content on your system and on a network. You can't do that in a GUI if you can't see, can you? Yes, add to QuickSilver's list of uses - assistive technology for visual disabilities. Web and desktop applications receive the good favor of the community of less-abled users, as well as power users, when they provide a good keyboard interface. QuickSilver is that, in large. However, I find one important feature lacking - voiceover does not announce the content of the noun and action panes. That is a serious problem for users that want to learn new techniques with the interface. But right now, people can get the immediate benefits of binding hot keys to applications and common operations; that also means that staff of disability service units have a new tool help their clients.

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Bad Mashup: Phishers Love Your Social Data

2007-12-07T13:49:00.001-08:00

I think a lot about social Web services, the naiveté of users/consumers and the social contract between those services and you. On the one hand the Terms of Service of many social sites are distinctly anti-social (the subject of an upcoming post). On another hand, and far outside your social network and service provider, are predators that have free access to your data (by the way, not necessarily under your control, as suggested above). Those predators - the phishers of your assets, and you, make a nasty mashup in which you have nothing to gain, and stand to lose a great deal. All this seems to add up to our living in a sad period of time when you, a member of an online social network, are being rewarded for posting your content by getting the shaft from many sides.

In another post I'll talk about the Terms of Service, where you enjoy the benefits of membership in a social network, but lose control of your content and personal information. It would be theft if only you hadn't agreed to the terms. In this post, we'll just talk about how you hand over to thieves, literally, the keys to your castle.

When you post your contacts to Facebook, or to Linked-in, you expose to the public information about yourself. That's what social networking is for, right. It seems harmless, even useful, to display for all the world to see information about who you know, where you live, what your interests are, and your thoughts about work and play. In a protected environment it would indeed be harmless, and when you're looking for a job it could indeed be very useful. But while you are writing on walls and extending your network, a spider is harvesting your FOAF data, your contacts, your profile, your contact information, and other data. And using your data, someone or something is crafting an attack in which one of your contacts is spoofed in an email message with a personalized message, the purpose of which is to direct you to a compelling Web site in which you eagerly hand over your user id and password to a very private account that holds your tangible wealth. Nice, huh?

In a high profile (and controversial) experiment in which students at a Big Ten school were sent phishing emails from their friends and buddies - spoofed, of course, with data harvested from social networks. 72% of them handed over their user accounts and passwords. Seventy Two Percent!!!

Don't run and hide. Don't rip down your Facebook account. Just think about the data you post, and stop to think before you log in to a web service that your friend recommends. Better yet, send a text message and ask if the email was legit, and while you're at it, ask about the service. Look at the URL, and Google the service - do things match? Hey, your friends are no way as smart as you are, eh?

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Lenses: A New View on Web Content

2007-11-04T04:59:00.001-08:00

Lenses are a new, evolutionary step in categorizing and rating content, and sharing this content metadata with other users. Originating from the developers of Connexions, an online-authoring, free sharing and delivery environment for scholarly work, lenses were conceived as a scalable method of assessing quality for learners, while not preventing others in the broader community from publishing content. Those other authors could presumably be scholars writing in rapidly changing fields, amateur experts, lesser-known experts, faculty in developing countries, K-12 teachers, college instructors, young scholars, and other authors. Why is this important?

The open nature of the Commons [i.e., the content repository - ed] leads to a natural question about quality control and help for readers in finding, navigating, and utilizing high-quality material... (from Lenses: Proposed functional description and high level design)

Lenses can be configured to select collections of content, evaluate quality through endorsements from authorities and organizations, and provide detailed metadata. A lens is a standalone object in a repository. A lens can be contributed by third party editorial entities, professional societies, and individuals. Lenses provide different kinds of content: endorsements; vocabularies, ontologies and notations used by communities of practice. In lenses, collections of content modules are displayed in context. There are also automated lenses indicating popularity and user ratings. The developers of Connexions have published a document describing the design of lenses.

Lenses make so much sense for Connexions. Do they also make sense as a more general tool for you and I, that is, should there be web-based lensing services? Social bookmarking services like del.icio.us have always stood out as a singular tool for increasing the intelligence of the Web community. Could bookmarking be extended to collections? Could collections be organized and annotated, providing much the same functionality as document trails (an idea taking form with the trailfire service)?

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Mashup: Web Meets Desktop. Is it Love?

2007-08-17T09:57:00.001-07:00

I'm working with Google's new Gears functionality and API. From the painless, zero configuration installation of a Firefox plugin (as well as a fully featured database, although you wouldn't know it without reading the documenation) to working with the implementation within the Google Reader, the technology is astonishing in its simplicity of installation and use, and in the functional extension of the tools. My twitter post describes my first reaction:

Read feeds OFFLINE. On a flight; in the bush; while driving to work!!! Never, ever leave work.

To which a twitter friend responded:

christian: hmm... you had me till the ‘never, ever leave work’ part

Gears is a javascript API to store application data locally, and to provide asynchronous data exchange with an online application. While the application is not necessarily web-based, it's obvious that's what Google has in mind. In the case of the Gears for Google Reader extension, the user can choose to download subscribed feeds for later viewing offline. Other possible applications come to mind: new blog posts can be edited offline in situ (i.e., the airport terminal, fish market, etc.); user data from games like Second Life can be stored locally to improve performance of bandwidth hogs; offline access to email (web2.0, meet POP - is this really a good idea?); research data collected in a network free zone (this is a good idea).

Gears will leverage your local resources when they're available, but won't break the application when they're not (e.g., when you're using the office or lab workstation). The developer site is a little scant on resources, but more will come with adoption and acceptance.

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Flexible Pipes

2007-07-24T04:32:00.001-07:00

Cole Camplese's blog post ‘As a Public Service, Let Me Repeat that RSS Rocks’ has me thinking about Yahoo Pipes again. Cole's experiment is a nice, simple, clean demo of feed aggregation using Google Reader (a great probuct, BTW) that is just the thing for sites with a very sharp focus on specific topics. Especially easy and intuitive is the ability to aggregate feeds using tags to simulate a file system organization. The problem I ran into with Google Reader is too little control of sorting and filtering content, with too much unrelated content.

That led me to think about pipes. Here's the use case: I want to aggregate feeds about Python, Zope, Plone and the WebLion project. Since Pythonistas are somewhat passionate about the elegance of their language, they can get a bit wordy and wide-ranging and off my chosen topics. So, for our readers benefit I wanted to limit posts about Python to subjects related to Zope and Plone. Pipes has the filtering operators I need, and can be combined in very precise ways. The result is the PythonZopePlonePipe. Clone it, mash it, put it in a pipe and smoke it.

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Building a Testing Culture

2007-07-04T06:16:00.000-07:00

When you think about it, there's really not much difference between our university's collective group of IT staff - the set of technology people from academic, business and administrative units, and ITS - compared with, let's say, Google. Sure, everyone talks about how smart they are, but so are we. Yes, they do have THAT DATABASE, but soon we'll be as tightly integrated in our divers operations. OK, so as of July 4, 2007, they have a market cap of 166.47 Billion U.S. dollars, but that's not a fair comparison since our university is a non-profit institution. So what's the big difference that really distinguishes us from a company like Google?

I propose that the big difference, and their real advantage, is their hive mind. Not quite like Borg, mind you. But they walk around with a culture in their head, and they are like-minded in this regard: they talk data. They gather it (with a vengeance), render it, analyze it, hypothesize it, and they talk about it. I know this because I read things that assert this with frightening uniformity, and I have a couple of contacts that have admitted as much. I have also noticed that many IT folks at our university don't have the same obsession for data. I'm starting to think that's a regrettable thing.

Take for example the group I know best and identify with most - our Web development community. Smart people doing lots of very cool stuff. Lots of them are database and scripting wonks, JavaScript and UI geniuses, gadget freaks (raise your hand if you were in line for iPhone D-Day), as well as chefs of tasty mash-ups. But how many of us test our work, gather data, and tweak our user interface based on that data? Hands up, please.

My hand isn't raised, either, mind you. Despite years of reading about best practices, I don't write and distribute code with unit tests; I don't even run the unit tests handed to me in open source code. (Now I'm off to execute runalltests.py - I'm thrilled!). I rarely run usability tests on application interfaces, so when I do it it's a big deal to design the test, find victims, find a quiet place, summarize data and make adjustments and test again... Why, because it's not routine. (I well remember testing an eCommerce application for an annual fund raiser, and it was crucial that I did so; and it's still running without major changes.) Ditto testing that doesn't require much work - standards and Section 508 compliance. And, interestingly, it's rare when I'm asked for results of tests. I say it's not routine and therefor more difficult than need be, but what I'm really saying is that it's not part of the culture we work in.

And if we don't test, or analyze our logs, how can we be sure that we're giving our stakeholders a good experience? I know I sometimes have a hard time finding information in our Web cloud. Developers are too close to their work to be good judges of quality and usability. But we're in a good place to be testers.

The Accessible Web is a Bust - Now What?

2007-06-17T05:40:00.000-07:00

Our best efforts to make the Web readable and understandable by all users and agents is, for the most part, a bust. Efforts to integrate accessibility into the design and development culture are mostly a failure. Years of scolding and admonishing and hand-wringing have returned very little else than a small, incremental improvement as table layout wains and designers embrace CSS. Despite the efforts of the small cadre of dedicated experts, the sheer number of flawed new documents perception that the Web is a bad place to be with serious disabilities.

Accessible design is a moving target. New media and technologies require new responses for accessibility. But what most developers instinctively feel about integrating accessibility in their work is probably true, if only it were testable - that design for accessibility can be a drag on innovation, that their personal and professional interests understandably (if not nobly) lie with innovation more than supporting policy. (I came to this conclusion at last year's OSCON after a veteran hacker at Yahoo ridiculed me for questioning the accessibility of his AJAX widget - “duuude, ... it's a HACK!“)

We all agree that the goals of accessibility are good: 1) I doubt anyone will argue that it's not the right thing to do. In fact, 2) even the coldest economic analysis will conclude that benefits exceed costs, especially when the risks of litigation are factored in. On the other hand, there's no point in continuing a failed strategy of training people who are to take the extra time and care to make a document accessible. So, let's try something else.

Let's start with a question. How does an institution maintain a consistent and professional appearance through it's print media; in, for example, its official communications, brochures and magazines? How does it make sense of its budget and communicate the current financial condition to administrators? By using standard templates for software, refined over the years by testing and feedback. Staff don't make decisions on design and placement of trademarks, or the layout of regular budget reports - those decisions are hidden in the tools they use.

Yet, we take the standard approach of training designers and developers to make design decisions intended to make documents accessible. Tools like Dreamweaver build in useful features that are close at hand, like validators and code completion, but most developers don't use them for several reasons. Staff still have to make decisions without a foundation of knowledge rooted in experience or empathy. Clearly, we can't look to the old-school tools for solutions.

There are at least two things that are missing from the old methods and tools of Web publishing. One is a point in the publishing cycle where specialized knowledge is applied to a review of the accessibility of the document. What I am suggesting here can only happen with a tool that supports collaborative editing and work flow. And, at some point in the workflow has to be a person that can review content for accessibility. Those capabilities define the core requirements of content management systems.

Second is a lack of automation to apply the available markup to augment the accessibility of particular content types. For example, there is semantic markup available to make data tables unambiguously readable and understandable; it's right there in the HTML4.01/XHTML specification. But I rarely find it in the wild and then only see it used in scholarly articles which must be readable by machine agents like CiteSeer. More common on a relative basis, but still rare, are examples of the special markup that makes forms accessible, and old tools do indeed support it, if only most developers understood its application. Automation, followed by a quality check in the workflow could do much to improve accessibility. An important question is who in the workflow reviews content and the occasional change in templates. If you agree with an earlier post on changing roles and specialization in web publishing (The Strange Case of the Disappearing Webmaster), it could well be a specialist.

An interesting development is a set of new standards (WAI-ARIA: Accessible Rich Internet Applications) that could vastly improve accessibility. ARIA aims to embed very detailed metadata and state data into the content of the document. It would not only identify and distinguish content areas from navigation widgets, news boxes, headers and footers (ARIA “Roles”), but would indicate whether navigation trees are open or closed, and whether AJAX-driven boxes have updated information (ARIA “States”). This, folks, is a major advancement; it also involves extremely complex markup and a significant learning curve. It will only happen if ARIA markup is automated.

I will keep developing these ideas and provide some resources so that you can decide for yourself.

The Strange Case of the Disappearing Webmaster

2007-04-28T07:11:00.000-07:00

Whither have gone the webmasters? Perhaps following the footsteps of Elves and wizards to the lands across the western sea, victims of the advances of our emerging collaborative tech-culture. Maybe they have withdrawn to perpetual winter, finishing their lives around a fire swilling Windy Kilts. Either way, they hold an honored place in the short but fascinating history of the Web, and we can bid them our fondest wishes and a sweet good-riddance.

But I exaggerate, a bit. Webmasters are still with us, but with changing roles in teams of specialists. Waiting time has turned into work flow, writers and editors make content, and developers mash data and applications - thanks, in part, to better tools. They'll find their place according to their actual competencies. The more technical minded will be developers and sysadmins, the designers will be designers, and the writers will be writers or editors. The badly-coded templates will some day be the goodly-coded templates written by the CMS. The webmasters are moving to specialist roles while handing off the repetition and the slavish adherence to standards to a machine; and we should all be glad if we ever hope to make progress towards findability and accessibility.

And yet, change doesn't come without anxiety, nor with unqualified glee. As the WebLion project at Penn State rolls out at dizzying speed, there are people pushing back. Most commonly, I hear concerns that jobs will disappear as applications and servers will make staff positions redundant. (I'm paraphrasing, of course, but I've spoken to many with the same concern since 2001 when I first started pounding the table for content management systems at the Penn State Web Conference). I think most concerns I hear are related to that, and if I believed that were true, I would be freaking, too.

So, here's my story, and in its way is an answer to that concern: When I started my first position as “Webmaster” (I cringe) in 1999, my job consisted of 90% clerical and touch-up design work, and 10% development work. Having been an engineer up to that time, I was going to get bored, really fast. I had to do something. Casting about, I noticed my predecessor had been experimenting with databases serving Web content; and I had written a Web application in '96. (News flash: by coincidence, I recently learned that that application is still in use at Penn State. Knock me over with a feather, why dontcha!).

Moreover, there was talk of new applications called content management systems that allowed subject experts without web skills to write for the Web. The only problem is that they were commercial systems with unreachable prices reflecting their first-to-market advantage. “OK, I'll build one”, I said. And I did it by (forgive me, Terry Etherton, I never told you this) inflating my estimated time to deliver on my tasks, and using that surplus time to build the database and page templates. The coding and implementation really sucked, but nobody else knew, and most importantly, it saved me time. A lot of time. By 2002, when version 1 of the CMS was more or less finished, warts and bandages and all, I was spending perhaps 25% of my time on clerical work and design tweaks, and 75% on development. By version 3, my only contact with clerical duties was with special situations. I was a full time developer and feeling fine.

My answer is this. When a new category of tools come online and disrupt old patterns of work, you can turn change to your advantage. Content management systems - WebLion - is that tool.

What do you think?

Windy Kilts

2007-03-25T07:01:00.001-07:00

It was a very cold, clear day following a winter storm, there was no incentive to work outside. I wanted to settle into comfort with a book and a cat. But I had a craving for a hot drink...

I ground some darkly roasted beans and brewed a pot of coffee. Near the coffee pot was a half-full bottle of Laphroaig single malt. My muse must have been sitting on my shoulder because, all vanity aside, the result was inspired.

Ingredients:

Islay Scotch whisky, e.g., Laphroaig, Bowmore, Ardbeg. It must be Islay
Irish Cream, e.g., Carolan’s, or Bailey’s
Strong brew of dark, or if you prefer, a medium roast coffee. It needs to be a premium, smooth bean; Folgers won't do.

Find Your Bliss:

To start, combine 1 part whisky, 1 part Irish cream with 4-5 parts coffee. You'll find the right proportions, after a time.

Locate a favorite chair. Find a book, and a cat given to catatonic sleep. Enjoy a peaceful day.

Cheers!

Why do I Still Have a Web Site?

2007-03-24T07:12:00.000-07:00

I need to update some pages on my web site, upload some scripts and presentations for download, and make some corrections on my recipe for Windy Kilts (what?!?, you haven't tried Windy Kilts yet?). In a rare moment of reflective thought it occurred that my online self, that part that I control, that is, was scattered and disorganized into tiny silos. Should I really count on a search engine to make my on-line life whole?

Take for instance my web site that I used to lovingly construct and update. It's got a home page, it's got my resume, woefully out of date, it's got the recipe, it's got a script that captures browser signatures, it's got some really odd databases, it's got some presentations, probably out of date, but I dunno; you get the idea. I've got some web space at Penn State with another homey page, out of date. I've got a blog. I post at some other blogs, but I've got that organized, methinks. I've got stuff at trailfire and iTunesU. I've got a clone resume at linkedin. My digital corpus is scattered across dark little nests, and no m'am, I don't like it.

It's time to simplify, to clean this house. Why do I still have a web site when I'm surrounded by publishing tools and community sites?

Accessible Math

2007-02-16T06:37:00.000-08:00

The subject of accessibility for mathematical notation came up recently. The expressions in question are displayed as images in HTML documents, created from LaTeX source by the utility latex2html. Some interesting properties about latex2html: it creates source in HTML 3.2; and the last modification appears to be September 2001. Since I couldn't access the download area (not intentional, I'm sure) any hope of updating the utility remains just that - a hope.

In spite of the outdated markup, the quality was very good. Alt attributes were created which contained the LaTeX macros used to create each expression. LaTeX is an old and venerable system to typeset scientific papers for printing, but remains relatively unknown to the current generation of developers and students. Alt text being a text description of the image, or in this case a mathmetical expression, the problem remains how to describe mathematical expressions as text, like this one:

in which:


alt="\begin{displaymath}[-1/\sqrt{3},0]\cup
    [1/\sqrt{3},+\infty]".

Providing useful alternatative text is really the only hope of making math notation accessible. The problem, of course, is who can read LaTeX macros? The idea occured to describe the expression as a statement in a programming language. I recently discussed the idea with Phil Kragnes, a colleague at the University of Minnesota. He has done exactly that, using a personalized blend of LISP and Pascal syntax. But another colleague, Erik Rose, rightly pointed out that programming languages are limited in their ability to describe numerical mathematical expressions, not generalized notation. Duh!

So,


alt="y = mx + b"

is pretty limiting for math instruction.

There is one last method that might provide a general method for describing mathematical notation. Mathematicians are able to audibly describe expressions. Teaching math requires that skill. This method would yield, perhaps,


alt="The union of the range minus 1 divided by the 
    square root of 3 to zero, and positive one divided
    by the square root of three to infinity"

It's possible that the longdesc attribute may be helpful for liking to pages describing extremely complex expressions, or alternative methods of describing expressions; along with supplemental notes. Perhaps longdesc could link to an audio file?

The problem here is that there are at this time no standards for alternate descriptions of math expressions that are natively supported by browsers. The long term solution is the emerging standard of MathML, but as long as it remains in draft form it's unlikely that browser developers are going to support MathML.

Mobile Learning in Higher Education Conference

2006-12-12T19:46:00.000-08:00

Here are some takeaway ideas from the Mobile Learning in Higher Education Conference:

When students embrace new consumer technologies, they do it with breathtaking speed; it quickly becomes part of their everyday life. They're driving the technology infrastructure of the institution forward and with it new opportunities to teach. Are we playing catch-up while kicking and screaming or with creative reflection and engagement?

Educational goals and outcomes become animated (and anecdotally - but data is forthcoming - quality and experience is dramatically improved).

New services will live or die based on the presence and quality of support after the pilot study is over.

Mobile technology excels at performance enhancement and location-based learning. Not comparable to current technology, it EXCELS.

There is a disturbing trend toward optimizing displayed data for different devices. Apparently, some have forgotten what it was like to code for the 4.x browsers. (I spoke up for standards, separation of data and presentation.)

There was thoughtful support for transcoding uniform data formats for optimal display.

Croquet virtual machine rocks.

There are many awesome, thoughtful people with clear visions attending. A priveledge to be here.