Category: Personal

Posts about stuff that is related to me, and not to Web design & development.

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Personal

Vendor prefixes, the CSS WG and me

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The CSS Working Group is recently discussing the very serious problem that vendor prefixes have become. We have reached a point where browsers are seriously considering to implement -webkit- prefixes, just because authors won’t bother using anything else. This is just sad. 🙁 Daniel Glazman, Christian Heilmann and others wrote about it, making very good points and hoping that authors will wake up and start behaving. If you haven’t already, visit those links and read what they are saying. I’m not very optimistic about it, but I’ll do whatever I can to support their efforts.

And that brings us to the other thing that made me sad these days. 2 days ago, the CSS WG published its Minutes (sorta like a meeting) and I was surprised to hear that I’ve been mentioned. My surprise quickly turned into this painful feeling in your stomach when you’re being unfairly accused:

tantek: Opposite is happening right now. Web standards activists are teaching
 people to use -webkit-
tantek: People like Lea Verou.
tantek: Their demos are filled with -webkit-. You will see presentations
 from all the web standards advocates advocating people to use
 -webkit- prefixes.

Try to picture being blamed of the very thing you hate, and you might understand how that felt. I’ve always been an advocate of inclusive CSS coding that doesn’t shut down other browsers. It’s good for future-proofing, it’s good for competition and it’s the right thing to do. Heck, I even made a popular script to help people adding all prefixes! I’m even one of the few people in the industry who has never expressed a definite browser preference. I love and hate every browser equally, as I can see assets and defects in all of them (ok, except Safari. Safari must die :P).

When Tantek realized he had falsely accused me of this, he corrected himself in the #css IRC room on w3.org:

[17:27] <tantek> (ASIDE: regarding using -webkit- prefix, clarification re: Lea Verou - she's advocated using *both* vendor prefixed properties (multiple vendors) and the unprefixed version after them. See her talk http://www.slideshare.net/LeaVerou/css3-a-practical-introduction-ft2010-talk from Front-Trends 2010 for example. An actual example of -webkit- *only* prefix examples (thus implied advocacy) is Google's http://slides.html5rocks.com/ , e.g.
[17:27] <tantek> http://slides.html5rocks.com/#css-columns has three -webkit- property declarations starting with -webkit-column-count )

That’s nice of him, and it does help. At least I had a link to give to people who kept asking me on twitter if I was really the prefix monster he made me out to be. 😛 The problem is that not many read the IRC logs, but many more read the www-style archives. Especially since, with all this buzz, many people were directed into reading this discussion by the above articles. I don’t know how many people will be misled by Tantek’s uninformed comment without reading his correction, but I know for sure that the number is non-zero. And the worst of all is that many of them are people in the CSSWG or in the W3C in general,  people who I have great respect and admiration for. And quite frankly, that sucks.

I don’t think Tantek had bad intentions. I’ve met him multiple times and I know he’s a nice guy. Maybe he was being lazy by making comments he didn’t check, but that’s about it. It could happen to many people. My main frustration is that it feels there is nothing I can do about it, besides answering people when they take the time to talk to me about it. I can do nothing with the ones that won’t, and that’s the majority. At least, if a forum was used over a mailing list, this could’ve been edited or something.

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Personal

My new year’s resolution

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Warning: Personal post ahead. If you’re here to read some code trickery, move along and wait for the next post, kthxbai

Blogs are excellent places for new year’s resolutions. Posts stay there for years, to remind you what you’ve been thinking long ago. A list on a piece of paper or a file in your computer will be forgotten and lost, but a resolution on your blog will come back to haunt you. Sometimes you want that extra push. I’m not too fond of new year’s resolutions and this may as well be my first, but this year there are certain goals I want to achieve, unlike previous years were things were more fluid.

So, in 2012 I want to…

  • Land my dreamjob in a US company/organization I respect
  • Get the hell out of Greece and move to the Bay Area
  • Strive to improve my english even more, until I sound and write like a native speaker
  • Find a publisher I respect that’s willing to print in full color and write my first book.
  • Stop getting into stupid fights on twitter. They are destructive to both my well-being and my creativity.
  • Get my degree in Computer Science. This has been my longest side project, 4 years and counting.
I wonder how many of those I will have achieved this time next year, how many I will have failed and how many I won’t care about any more…
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News Personal

Dabblet blog

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Not sure if you noticed, but Dabblet now has a blog: blog.dabblet.com

I’ll post there about Dabblet updates and not flood my regular subscribers here who may not care. So, if you are interested on Dabblet’s progress, follow that blog or @dabblet on twitter.

That was also an excuse to finally try tumblr. So far, so good. I love how it gives you custom domains and full theme control for free (hosted WordPress charges for those). Gorgeous, GORGEOUS interface too. Most of the themes have markup from the 2005-2007 era, but that was no surprise. I customized the theme I picked to make it more HTML5-ey and more on par with dabblet’s style and it was super easy (though my attempt is by no means finished). There are a few shortcomings (like no titles for picture posts), but nothing too bad.

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Personal Speaking

My experience from Fronteers, JSConf EU, Frontend and FromTheFront

Reading Time: 4 minutes

This month has been very busy conference-wise. I had 4 conferences in a row, so I was flying from country to country and giving talks for 2 weeks. As I usually do after conferences, this post sums up my experiences and feedback I got from these conferences, in chronological order.

Continue reading “My experience from Fronteers, JSConf EU, Frontend and FromTheFront”
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Personal Speaking

My experience from Frontendconf Zurich

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I’m writing this blog post while eating some of the amazing Lindt chocolates I got for free 10 days ago at Frontend conference in Zurich. But it wasn’t a good experience only because of them!

Continue reading “My experience from Frontendconf Zurich”
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Articles Personal

Help the community: report browser bugs

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Thought I’d let you know that my Smashing Magazine article with that title was published today. It discusses why, how, when and where to report browser bugs, as well as how to make a good bug report.

Get comfortable and make a big cup of coffee before you dive in, as it’s quite long (4000 words).

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Personal

Why I love our industry

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I was thinking today how blessed I feel for being a part of the worldwide web development community (and the broader programming community). In a world where throwing shit at others is an acceptable way of climbing to the top, our industry is a breeze of fresh air. Here are a few reasons why I find our industry unique, in a very good way:

  • In which other industry is it common for people to spend several hours, days or in some cases even months, working on something to give it away for free, just to help people?
  • In which other industry do people help you and promote you just because they think you’re good, without getting anything out of it?
  • In which other industry do people listen to you, not because of your titles, degrees and “decades of experience”, but because of what you actually know?
  • In which other industry can you go to a big professional conference with jeans and a t-shirt and be in the majority? (And the best part is, even if you don’t like that kind of outfit and you prefer to wear a suit, you still fit in, cause appearances just don’t matter)
  • Judging whether someone’s work is good is a very rational and objective process (unlike arts). Sure, the various criteria have different weights for every person, but the criteria are the same for everyone, more or less (correctness, speed, maintainability, readability etc).
  • Even though it’s a male dominated field, I’ve never* experienced any discrimination or lack of respect due to my gender. Quite the contrary actually.
  • I’ve yet to meet a developer that lacks a sense of humor.
  • Work for us is our passion, not a chore. Yes, there are passionate people in every field, but in our industry it’s the norm, not the exception.
  • You don’t need to hide your geekiness. Instead, you’re encouraged to embrace it.

Yes, I know that not all of them are true for every single person that happened to be a web developer. I’m talking about the part of the industry that’s active and that I meet in conferences, meetups, twitter etc.

So, what are your reasons for liking our industry, if any? Lets keep this post happy and not whine about what we DON’T like please. 🙂

*Well, except one bad joke once, but he recently said he’s sorry and his intentions were good throughout, so I don’t count it.

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Original Personal Releases

twee+: Longer tweets, no strings attached

Reading Time: 4 minutes

As some people that have been following me for a while know, the 140 character limit on twitter bugs me a lot sometimes, and I’ve tried to find a way to overcome it previously as well. The most common ways these days seems to be either cutting down the long tweet into multiple pieces (yuck) or using a service to host the longer tweet and post a summary with a link to it.

The latter isn’t an entirely horrible option. However, I see 3 big downsides:

  1. I’m not very comfortable with the idea of some external service hosting my content which could close down any time due to failure to monetize their website. In that case, I’d be left with some dead links that are of no value and my content would be lost forever. Yes, they usually warn you in advance in such cases, but such news could be missed for a number of reasons.
  2. People (including yours truly) don’t plan those things in advance. They just seek services like that at the exact moment when they want to post a long tweet. Being greeted with a prompt to use Twitter Connect is NOT nice. For starters, it slows me down. Also, I don’t want to give permission to every website on the effing interwebs to post on my twitter timeline. I owe it to my followers to be responsible and not risk filling their timelines with crap.
  3. Most of these websites look like someone puked and what came out happened to be HTML and CSS. The only exception I’ve found is twtmore, but it still suffers from #1 and #2.
So, like every developer with a healthy amount of NIH syndrome, I decided to write my own 😀
My goals were:
  1. It had to be entirely client-side (except initially getting downloaded from the server of course). This way, whoever is concerned can download the full website and decode their tweets with it if it ever goes down. Also, being entirely client side allows it to scale very easily, as serving files is not a very resource intensive job (compared to databases and the like).
  2. No Twitter Connect, the tweets would get posted through Twitter Web Intents.
  3. It had to look good. I’m not primarily a designer, so I can’t make something that looks jaw-droppingly amazing, but I can at least make it look very decent.
  4. If I was gonna go through all the hassle of making this, I may as well try to keep it under 10K, so that I could take part in the 10K apart contest. (I haven’t submitted it yet, I’ll submit a few days before the deadline, as it seems you can’t make changes to your submission and I want to polish the code a bit, especially the JS — I’m not too proud about it)
I managed to succeed in all my goals and I really liked the result. I ended up using it for stuff I never imagined, like checking if a twitter username corresponds to the account I think (as it shows the avatars). So I went ahead and came up with a name, bought a domain for it, and tweeplus.com was born 🙂

twee+? Seriously?

Yes, I like it. The plus means “more”, which is fitting and + kinda looks like a t, so it could be read as “tweet” as well. Yes, I know that the word “twee” has some negative connotations, but oh well, I still like the name. Whoever doesn’t can just not use it, I won’t get depressed, I promise. 😛

Geeky stuff

How it works

  • A relatively new feature, Twitter automatically wraps URLs in t.co links, making them only 20 characters long.
  • All the text of the tweet is stored in the URL hash (query string will also work, although the output uses a hash). Some research revealed that actually browsers can handle surprisingly long URLs. Essentially, the only limit (2083 characters) is enforced by Internet Explorer. I decided to limit tweets to 2000 characters (encoded length), not only because of the IE limit, but also because I wouldn’t like people to post whole books in t.co links. We don’t want Twitter to start taking measures against this, do we? 🙂
  • A hard part was deciding which encoding to use (twitter is quite limited in the characters it parses as part of a URL).
    • My first thought was base64, but I quickly realized this was not a very good idea:
      • The encoding & decoding functions (btoa() and atob() respectively) are relatively new and therefore not supported by older browsers. I’m fine with the app hardly working in old browsers, but existing links must as a minimum be readable.
      • It uses approximately 1.34 characters per ASCII character. Unicode characters need to be URL-encoded first, otherwise an Exception is thrown. URL-encoding them uses 6 characters, which would result in 8 characters when they’re base64 encoded.
    • Then I thought of using URL-encoding for the whole thing. The good thing with it is that for latin alphanumeric characters (which are the most) it doesn’t increase the string length at all. For non-alphanumeric characters it takes up 3 characters and 6 characters for Unicode ones. Also, it’s much more readable.
    • Still, implementing it was tricky. It doesn’t encode some characters (like the dot), even though twitter doesn’t accept them as part of a URL. Also, escape() and encodeURI() behave differently and the Unicode encoding returned by the former isn’t accepted by Twitter. So I had to combine the two and do some substitutions manually.
  • When the textarea changes, the hash does too. The whole thing is a form with action=”http://twitter.com/intent/tweet”, so submitting it does the right thing naturally. I keep a hidden input with the tweet and the textarea has no name, so it doesn’t get submitted.
  • Usernames, hashtags and URLs get extracted and linkified. Usernames also get an avatar (it’s dead easy: Just use twitter.com/api/users/profile_image?screen_name={username} where {username} is the user’s username)
  • Internal “pages” (like “About” or “Browser support”) are essentially long “tweets” too.
  • A little easter egg is that if the browser supports radial gradients, the gradient follows the mouse, creating a spotlight effect. This looks nice on Chrome and Firefox, and really shitty on IE10, probably due to bugs in the gradient implementation (which I have to reduce & report sometime).

Buzzword compliance

This little app demonstrates quite a lot new open web technologies (HTML5, CSS3 etc), such as:

  • textarea maxlength
  • placeholder
  • autofocus (edit: I had to remove it cause it triggered a Webkit bug in Safari)
  • required inputs
  • New input types (url)
  • History API
  • oninput event (with keyup fallback)
  • hashchange event
  • SVG
  • Common CSS3 (border-radius, shadows, transitions, rgba, media queries)
  • CSS3 gradients
  • CSS3 animations
  • CSS3 resize
  • :empty
Let me know if I forgot something.
Oh yeah, I did forget something. There it is: twee+
Categories
Personal Speaking

CSS3 for developers: My Fronteers 2011 workshop

Reading Time: 3 minutes

In case you haven’t noticed, in addition to my talk at Fronteers 2011, I’ll also be holding a full day workshop the day before the conference. The title of that workshop is “CSS3 for developers” and I wanted to explain a bit what it’s going to be about and why I chose to target web developers only.

Continue reading “CSS3 for developers: My Fronteers 2011 workshop”
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Personal Speaking

My experience from the CSS Summit 2011

Reading Time: 2 minutes

It’s been a few days since this year’s CSS Summit and my talk there. Where most people would assume that public speaking in a “real” conference is more daunting, I was much more nervous about this one, since it was my first talk at an online conference. I wouldn’t be able to see the faces of the audience, so how would I be able to tell if they like it or are bored shitless? Also, the whole idea of me, alone in a room, giving a talk to my laptop sounded kind of awkward, to say the very least.

Contrary to my fears, it was a very pleasant experience. In some ways, it’s much better than real-life conferences, the main one being the number of questions you get. In most real-life conferences you should be lucky to get more than 3 or 4 questions. Also, they’re usually at the end, so most attendees forget the questions they had at the beginning and middle of the talk (it happens to me a lot too, when I attend others’ talks). In the CSS Summit, I answered questions after every section of my talk, and there were quite a lot of them.

The attendees had a group chat in which they talked about the presentation, posted questions and discussed many other stuff. That group chat was the other thing I really liked. It might surprise some people, but even though I’m not afraid of public speaking, I’m quite shy in some ways and I almost never talk to someone first. So, if I didn’t know anyone at a conference and vice versa, I’d probably sit in a corner alone with nobody to talk to during the breaks. The chat makes it much easier for attendees to get to know each other. On the minus side however, “meeting” somebody in a chat is not by any means the same as really meeting someone f2f in a real-life conference.

Regarding my talk, it went surprisingly well. No technical hiccups like some of the other talks, no me going overtime as I was afraid I would (since I had to be slower), no internet connection failing on my part (like it sometimes does lately). I received lots of enthusiastic feedback on both the chat and twitter. I couldn’t even favorite them all, as the tweets were so many! That’s the 3rd good thing about online conferences: People tweet more, since they’re at home with their regular connection and not with a crappy conference wifi or a smartphone on expensive roaming.

Here’s a small sample of the feedback I got:

Continue reading “My experience from the CSS Summit 2011”