Design in the Drupal community

From a fantastic piece by Christopher Calicott looking at how front end design and development is treated within the Drupal community.

Having such high standards for writing PHP code while playing so fast and loose with front end code and treating it as though it’s a non-issue, even while the rest of the world does it this way, is not only a gross double standard within the Drupal community, it is currently beginning to get the attention of the Web world outside of Drupal — and not in a good way. We’re positioned in the press to take off like a rocket and gain real longevity, and yet in the web design community – people who talk around the world at conferences, on podcasts, et cetera – are starting to hear that Drupal, despite the good things about the code they’ve heard, makes minced meat of their beautifully executed, semantic XHTML, and there are no plans within the leadership of the Drupal community (yet) to raise the standard for front-end code to the same degree that they have on the backend.

Firstly, developers take writing code very seriously and have stringent – but ultimately plain and simple – coding style rules to follow with their module development. Designers have the same sorts of practices. It’s what they do and it’s equally as important. It is time that that is fully recognized in the Drupal community and an effort be made to bring this paradigm (elsewhere largely already in practice) into our community. Designers feel just as strongly about a developer playing fast and loose with improperly written, unsemantic XHTML as developers do about designers who make dumb mistakes with PHP or try to talk shop when they are out of their depth. In fact, dare I say it – if you’re writing poor, unsemantic XHTML markup, it’s due to your lack of understanding of what you are doing, at this point. Web standards are widely adopted in the Web world. Drupal ignores this fact at its peril.

It’s an issue that’s been bubbling under for a while, and this is the best treatise I’ve seen on it yet. Required reading for anyone involved with Drupal on any level.

HTML is interesting again

Simon St. Laurent on the O’Reilly Radar talks about the rebirth of the conversation around HTML after the relative quiet of the past five or six years:

Today, though, the HTML conversation is reborn. Standards development around HTML seems to actually have a chance of influencing user experience in the browser, and Microsoft itself is participating in the HTML 5 conversation despite still holding roughly two-thirds of the browser market. While Microsoft’s market share is only slowly eroding, developer mindshare seems to have shifted decisively to the band of WHATWG upstarts, Microsoft’s competitors.

The reason for this, I think, is that HTML 5 clearly has a bright future in a place that Microsoft can’t presently block: mobile web browsers. When I ask people about the future of computing, the word I keep hearing in their answers is “mobile”. Even if it’s small now, it has a much greater effect on how people evaluate what’s coming.

Microsoft has a mobile presence, certainly, but it’s hard to argue that it has anywhere near the visibility of the iPhone, or even the Android. Mobile web browsing has kept Opera going for years, but the iPhone and Android give Apple and Google much more visibility for their HTML 5 work, and Apple’s decision to keep Flash off the iPhone in particular gave developers further cause to rethink their dependencies. (The WebKit browser engine these share will also be integrated with Blackberry soon, and is also on the Palm Pre.)

What’s especially interesting to me is the amount of mobile systems that are going with WebKit as their rendering engine of choice. It’s not just RIM and Palm, but you now have Symbian and Nokia coming together under the Symbian Foundation as well.

And as final food for thought, a demo of what Webkit is now capable of with just HTML and CSS Transforms (requires a recent Webkit nightly build or you can view a video of the demos at Dailymotion).

Design

Don’t make something unless it is both necessary and useful; but if it is both necessary and useful, don’t hesitate to make it beautiful.

- Shaker design philosophy

(via Joshua Porter)

At the book fair

The first shots from the Zeiss Ikon I bought earlier in the year have been developed. I think I have a new favourite camera.

Police face prosecution for obstructing photographers

From the Press Gazette.

Police were warned today about wrongful use of anti-terror laws to stop photographers taking pictures of officers.

Lord Carlile QC, who reviews anti-terror legislation, said officers who use force or threats against photographers to make them delete images could face prosecution themselves.

Section 58A of the Counter-Terrorism Act, which came into force in February, bans photographers from taking pictures of the police if the photographs could be useful to terrorists.

Lord Carlile said this was a “high bar” and should not be used to interfere with day-to-day photography of officers which is “as legitimate as before”.

…

It is inexcusable for police officers ever to use this provision to interfere with the rights of individuals to take photographs.

(Hat tip: John Naughton.)

Keep libel laws out of science

Simon Singh is currently being sued for libel by the British Chiropractic Association. Sense About Science has launched a campaign asking for reform of the English libel system so that it does not stifle scientific debate and journalism in general. Please sign the statement of support and encourage others to join the campaign. This is an issue that affects anyone who cares about science, journalism and free speech.

Fallen down

This is how Social Media really works

Matt Haughey points out the obvious flaw in the logic of bandwagon marketeers and companies who just don’t get it.

So maybe instead of getting your company on twitter, paying marketers to mention you are on twitter, and paying people to blog about your company, forget all that and just make awesome stuff that gets people excited about your products, hire people that represent the company well, and when your stuff is so awesome that friends share it with other friends, you may not even need “social media marketing” after all.

Concentrate on what you do well, give great service, and people will talk about you and evangelise you. Do it badly or try to game the system and people will still talk, but for all the wrong reasons.

(And while I’m on the subject, if one more account with the phrase “social media expert” in their description tries to follow me on Twitter heads are going to roll. Seriously, just piss off will you.)

I can’t believe we still have to link to The Cluetrain Manifesto 10 years after it was first published.

Agile development is more culture than process

The coolest thing about a waterfall process is that it allows me personally to succeed, to demonstrate skill and competence, while the end result of the process is a dismal failure. Cleverly built into a waterfall process are a variety of scapegoating mechanisms that allow us to blame other people, or outside influences for failure.

- Jeff Patton.

Preparation

JP composes himself before the start of Oxford Geek Night 11.