Provoked by comments on Coding Horror – I Stopped Reading Your Blog Years Ago.

If you are a blog reader: your faith in knowledge is cumulative, so learn how many imprints of a particular “truth” you need before you’re satisfied that it’s a decent reflection of reality. This threshold is your dividing line between entertainment and knowledge.

If you are a blog writer: people either read things because they have to (technical blogs) or because they don’t have to (entertaining blogs). More people read the latter, and the good ones point to the former, forming a useful knowledge ladder. However, attacking the former, whether ad hominen or direct, whether justified or not, does not encourage an uninformed reader to want to read your version of the truth. One thing I’ve yet to see Jeff do is throw his toys out of the pram, yet on nearly every post he makes, there are a series of commenters who do write valuable, technical blogs, who embarass themselves and diminish the exposure of their knowledge by piling in with non-constructive criticism.

The programming language should handle the business logic – get the stuff out of the database, make some decisions about it based on the other known factors, and end up with the data you want to display, described in a way which is comprehensible and reusable to the programming language, retaining the metadata obtained through the business logic. (for instance, pageTitle = “You’re Doing It Wrong”; bunchOfArrays = commentID, commentText, userID, userName, commentDate, gravatarID, gravatarCategory) There should be no HTML here (other than perhaps any originally embedded in commentText itself) because *at this stage you don’t even know whether you want to output it as HTML*. Here you are deciding on the data to output and how to describe it.

The data and its descriptors should then be handed over to a module which is capable of transforming it into the output language. Usually for our purposes, this is HTML, but it could easily be a CSV download, an RSS feed, or a bunch of emails. (well, why not?) This can be a templating engine which has templates for different output types, and the only logic it should really engage in is looping through arrays provided to it, i.e. foreach, and what to do when data has not been provided (e.g. a null gravatarID should mean that no img tag is output). There should be no decision making because your first stage has already provided you with all the information needed. If you are a template and are given a single variable, you output it once within the template definition. If you are given an array, you output it several times within the template definition. Here you get to define the order in which the data should be displayed, and the method (markup) you’re using to describe it. (for instance, whether it is *semantically* better to output the userName before or after the commentText, regardless of how you want it to be visually displayed.)

The final stage is presentational, usually in the form of CSS, and takes the structured markup and tells the device how to display it. Here you get to choose the color of the text, whether the userName should visually appear before or after the commentText (not the best example: think of a sidebar and body text; far too many developers output the sidebar and then the body text because the sidebar is being displayed on the left, when it is more accessible to output the body text then the sidebar, and style it so that they’re the other way round) and so on.

The first stage is defined by business logic and turns raw data into parsed data. (database -> decisions -> data+metadata)

The second stage is defined by semantic rules and usability-led, accessibility-led, platform-specific definitions and turns parsed data into structured data. (data+metadata -> output definition -> structured data)

The third stage is defined by presentational rules (design) and turns structured data into “displayed” data. (structured data -> style definition -> output data)

With embedded HTML all this is too difficult so you only offer one output stream, severely limiting your own options in the future. Also, with well designed output, the designer should never need to come back to “ask for another class”. The structured data should already contain enough semantic information in the form of the tag used and the id/class provided, to be able to hang any design elements off a set of CSS selectors.

If you are not designing your application in such a discrete way that a new “corporate image” or a print stylesheet decision only affect the presentational stage, or that a new usability issue only affects the second stage, or that a business decision only affects the first stage, then you are always going to run into trouble.

Today I resurrected the forums, after 2 years of hibernation. This is partly for historical/archival purposes and partly to see if anything interesting happens. It’ll be fun to read through those old angry debates

The chart shows fluctuation of the ECB's interest rates between 1998 and 2008, with 2 peaks above 4% and 3 troughs at or below 2.5%

This chart roughly shows the changes made to interest rates in the Euro-zone by the European Central Bank over the past 10 years. It is a follow up to the previous post discussing visualisation of interest rate data.

There’s an interesting post at PTS Blog about a chart used in the WSJ to show the decline in interest rates. There are some issues with the visualisation but I think the bigger problem is with using a very selective dataset which may serve more to support the writer’s position rather than reflecting reality. I left some remarks on the blog but here’s a very rough-and-ready view of 3 banks’ rates using a longer time-frame. The past few months do show rapid decline, but set against a different starting point back in 2004, the overall drop is somewhat less significant than the original chart makes out.

Graph showing the rise and then fall of interest rates for the UK, Australian and European central banks from 2004-2008

After reawakening this morning and seeing that Senate and House were also blue, I had a funny thought: that we would now be able to move on and start changing the world for the better.  I am from the UK and haven’t considered the USA to be a part of ‘we’ for the past 28% of my life.  Welcome back.

Time to get settled in.  Turn all your TVs to different news channels, reprogramme your multi-remote to switch audio between them, open at least 82 Firefox tabs, and hunker down!

Places to watch:

Making Light- Discussion hosted by Bruce Security Schneier
TPM have a dynamically updating dashboard

Edit: Daily Kos have a nice map too
Good luck all; the turnout at least looks promising.

Recently unearthed output from 2005 and 2006. Slightly beefed up from the only (?) remaining WAV files. Several compressors died as a result of this creation.

1. Lyxi – Farflung
2. Lyxi – Farflung (Suprext Version)
3. Lyxi – 78 (Demo)

So, we are back, and may good things emerge from it.  A lot has changed in 3 years and a lot will change over the next few months.  I am still figuring it out but hope we get somewhere.

The Register reports on the strangely heroic acts of directNIC, who’re blogging from one of the few usable buildings left in hurricane-swept and massively looted New Orleans. The intent is impeccably admirable, but I agree with El Reg: please go home and get some sleep!

Thanks to heavy-rotation and Ryoki Ikeda, and a slightly warped Korrespondence between the two, we have our pre-G8 output:

1. Lyxi – Ikeda B
2. Lyxi – Ufu
3. Lyxi – Esrever

It’s an abberation, and an insult.

But I was told to do it, and so I comply.

Tool – Eulogy (Lyxi Mix #10)

The brief: mix Lateralus with ITV’s Rainbow. Near impossible, feel. So the secondary was: Eulogy mixed with the theme tune of Cities of Gold. I hope I’ve achieved this, and yet destroyed the beautiful song even further by splicing all sorts of nonsense from my wife’s wav collection.

Oh the terrible days we own. I apologise, I understand, and will maintain. This is like jazz; everything remains, for better or for worse. It’s better this way; we can at least reflect, and say sorry – one day. You talking to me?

Congratulations to another friend who is due to be married next Saturday – may it be filled with happiness and joy, and the subsequent years be … OKish..

For this, we prepared the George MacPherson Wedding March, which prepared thee for his stag night, and which shall torment him further and hopefully last as a telling reminder for the madness which can occur.

Good luck, and all the best, friend.

Purposefully distorted, another one take output taking about two hours from start to finish, including searching for “free” acapellas to use! Lyrics thanks to Future Breeze and Virtual Darkness for providing the acapella version. Everything else thanks to a demo version of Sytrus, and a demo version of FL Studio. For a change.

1. Cruciform (featuring Future Breeze)
2. Cruciform (Instrumental)

Roger at 456bereastreet illustrates how to usefully enact a small scale usability test. I commented there; the expansion follows.

I think it’s important to stress how much usability norms can differ across different audiences and regions, and how much adaptability and approachability after publication should be more of a factor in determining requirements. A company/organisation/community with no prior experience of its audience will have no conception of the capabilities permissible, and so would have to offer the bottom line. It may turn out that that’s insufficient, because your majority audience turns out to be extremely competent and technologically advanced – they may desire the complexity, because they can use it.

See the (admittedly badly formed) article at The Register on Google and scope for some brief comments on the different perceptions that east and western cultures have of what the internet itself means, let alone usability of it.

Any designer should aim to follow the simplest approach possible, adding on optional extras as the user goes through the process, without complexifying things too much. Usability in such a case might therefore be reducible to a set of criteria, or dare I say it, standards.

But it can’t, of course, and we know why. Usability, and accessibility, are individual characteristics particular to each and every user, and so depend on a combination of user knowledge and education, and designer prediction and “leeway” to allow a vaguely balanced experience. (let’s exclude perhaps one of the least usable sites on the web, Jakob’s, which fails not by structure but by design)

All of which brings me to: usability and accessibility studies which involve “real life” users are immensely important until the designer gets it. At that point, unless they pay no attention to web trends and societal change, they have a reasonable – while not expert – understanding of what to provide.

We can try to appoint a representative council of “disabled people” to test our websites, but have we considered the depth of experience that different blind people have with different screen readers? Have we considered the lack of knowledge of basic computer usage, that many disadvantaged people may have, or the misinterpreted functions of lacklustre browsers and operating systems (alt = tooltip being a relatively minor one)?

Each person is an individual. A person is impaired by the barriers placed on them; as a designer, it is therefore critical to ensure that a website contains as few barriers as possible, without even considering the type of user who may stumble across it. It isn’t about testing whether a blind person with an advanced knowledge of JAWS can use a site: of course they can, they’ve persevered for the past 8 years trying to make sense of it all, so they can work out your silly little code. It’s about the baseline, the average user who has a very slim understanding of the internet, of the way a browser works, of the way a computer works. We have a project which looks at the way people from different backgrounds may face challenges using a VLE, but it can apply equally to websites.

In fact, in a lot of cases, you may find that disabled users are more competent than their counterparts, purely because they’ve had to try harder. That’s not a problem, but worry less about the specifics of how a particular screen reader may respond to a certain type of list, and worry more about whether the harsh black on white text you have will cause people with specific learning difficulties, people with a tendency for migraines, and people with even marginally poor vision, to react badly to your site and may even force them away.

Furthermore, reasonable is perhaps the best stage to be at. Nielsen may have an excellent understanding of usability, but he has no idea how to implement it. Joe Clark has a fabulous understanding of captioning and many accessibility issues, yet he still frightens everyone off by being Joe Clark, hence prohibiting access. Experts are absolutely necessary, but not in proliferation; here the jack of all trades is more or less enough.