Rochester, NY
On the two planes I had to take to get from Florida to Rochester, I was reading the book Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig I downloaded (for free, natch) and then transferred to my iRex 1000 e-reader using a custom formatted PDF from Feedbooks.

The illustrations in the PDF edition are missing. Sometimes the iRex skips pages inexplicably. The iRex has no network connectivity. But still, what Lessig has to say is making its way into my brain. Maybe I’ll compare the Mobi or EPUB editions from Feedbooks on the iPad with what I’ve got on the iRex in a future post.

The iRex 1000 is the largest e-paper device around and looks like this:

Thus have I prepared myself through hands-on encounters of the frustrating kind to discuss the future of reading here at the Future Of Reading Conference. It’s being held at the Rochester Institute Of Technology and starts tonight with a kick-off talk and book signing from author Margaret Atwood whose work I am not familiar with but will be by tonight – maybe even convincingly so – through the magic of search engines and Wikipedia.

What, Nothing About the Readable Web Redesign?

Regular readers might have noticed that I’ve upped my blogging game a bit with a redesign. Still not quite tweaked to absolute web perfection but soon, soon. (Done with the aid of Joshua Wold of Sabramedia – to give credit where credit is due.)

Related posts:

1. A Future Without Flash: Microsoft and Apple Nail The Coffin
2. Designing With Web Standards, Third Edition

Boston, Massachusetts  Readable Web is getting out of the office this year. I’ll be attending and reporting on a wide variety of events.

Starting with:

AnEventApart, Boston

I’ve never attended one of Zeldman & Meyer’s traveling road shows before and I can’t wait. The event kicks off tonight with a meet and greet at the Westin Copley Hotel sponsored by Extensis who is here to preview their new web font service WebInk.

Over the next few days I’ll be posting pics, twittering, muttering, commenting about just how tall Jeff Veen really looks in person, and reporting on everything and anything that happens to spark an idea in my brain.

Details on this conference and upcoming Event Apart conferences here.

Update: After-Conference Thoughts

Call it what you want: web design, digital publishing, whatever – the problems exist on two levels.

Problem 1: Cutting The Bullshit

This problem is not unique to digital publishing but to all publishing: staying on message, staying focused, writing clearly, keeping it brief – all the trite truisms are just as true today as they were when David Ogilvy wrote Ogilvy On Advertising in 1983 and Rudolph Flesch wrote The Art Of Readable Writing in 1949. Nobody is going to give you or your product more than a passing glance. At least at first. Waste people’s time and they’re gone. Click.

This is why I perked up when Luke Wroblewski argued that you should design your small-screen mobile experience first and build your desktop experience from that kernel. I agree. Working from the inside out like that imposes a discipline that would probably not exist if you started with the desktop experience. And if you can’t seem to cut it all down to it’s essence for an iPhone or Android, it’s time to ask yourself why the site exists in the first place.

Problem 2: Re-Tasking Content For Different Devices And Screen Sizes

It used to be that the difference between user agents (browsers) was the thing that drove web authors crazy. Yes, there are still issues, but it’s easy to envision a time in the near future when that won’t be anything more than an occasional and minor annoyance. The monster facing us now is different devices and screen sizes. This is a tough one – and the mental tools publishers need are just beginning to coalesce.

Recently, on Typophile.com, designer John Hudson made the observation that, to him, websites in general resembled scrapbooks. For some reason I’ve been thinking about that comment a lot and finally realized why: minus the negative connotations of the word “scrap”, they are scrapbooks. Chunks of information being fed in and out from disparate sources on the network and placed together on the same “page”. The equivalent of taking chunks of five or six pages of a book or magazine and pasting them together. Even in an era of relatively high resolution screens this will still be the case. Content must be chunked so it can reflow into its container. And connectedness is a requirement – the idea of an “e-book” on an “e-reader” disconnected from the net is already preposterous – even though we’ll be living with that situation for some time to come.

I got a new TV delivered today. It’s connected to the network, too. A TV with web apps. A giant iPad. Who’d a thunk?

And, oh, yeah. Just to cap off AnEventApart, Boston:

How Tall Is Jeffrey Veen?

Meeting Jeff Veen in person was a bit of a shock, really. For a guy who writes and speaks about all this web stuff, turns out the guy’s tall enough to be my father!

Oops, Capped Off Too Soon

[A Bit More On An EventApart, Boston] Here’s a nice roundup of the event called Themes From AnEventApart Boston with a link also, to Luke Wroblewski’s extensive notes from the conference. Also, Luke and the concept of “Mobile First” gets a treatment on the Big Web Show.

Related posts:

1. FontCONF In Minneapolis/St. Paul
2. Designing With Web Standards, Third Edition
3. Google Starts Hosting @Font-Face Web Fonts

Required Reading

In his book, the Blind Watchmaker, evolut­ionary biologist Richard Dawkins writes:

— Explaining is a difficult art. You can ex­plain something so that your reader under­stands the words; and you can explain some­thing so that the reader feels it in the marrow of his bones. To do the latter, it sometimes isn’t enough to lay the evidence before the reader in a dispassionate way. You have to become an advocate and use the tricks of the advocate’s trade.

John Allsopp knows the tricks. And luckily, for those of us who work with things web, his field is web development. If you want to know what’s going on today and in the near term, Developing With Web Standards will take you through it all, step by step.

Snapshots And More

Like its “sister” volume, Designing With Web Standards by Jeffrey Zeldman and Ethan Marcotte, Developing With Web Standards is like flipping through a book of “snapshots”. Each chapter gives you a picture of one aspect of web technology along with the occasional zoom-in on things of particular import­ance. Seasoned web developers will find in it a valuable review. And no mat­ter how much you know, or how familiar you think you are with something, I guarantee that at some point you’ll find yourself thinking:

  “Hey, I didn’t know that. Why didn’t I know that?” Hah!

For myself, I found the chapter on Canvas and SVG especially useful because, frankly, I haven’t paid much attention to Canvas and SVG. (Is there such a thing as keeping up with it all?) And since the book is liberally sprinkled with links and sources for further study, I not only get John’s expert analysis, but a leg-up on how to learn more.

I would also recommend it highly for people who are only vaguely familiar with web development and would like to learn. It’s not a basic primer by any stretch, but it’s written in a friendly and clear style that helps a lot when you’re trying to make sense of a thing for the first time. Yes, you will learn some things, but more importantly, you’ll come away with a clear idea of what it is you don’t know. And when you’re new to field of knowledge, finding out what it is you don’t know can be the hardest part.

The Soul Of An Educator

In addition to authoring, publishing, and software development, John Allsopp is co-founder of Web Directions – which puts together incredible conferences on web development all around the world.

When I grow up, my ambition is to speak at a Web Directions conference and get to rub shoulders with people like John Resig, Steve Souder, and Mark Boulton.

John Allsopp, good luck with the book.

Related posts:

1. Designing With Web Standards, Third Edition
2. John Daggett On CSS3 At TypeCon, 2010
3. Readable Web At AnEventApart, Boston

Required Reading

As used by Jeffrey Zeldman and co-author Ethan Marcotte, the term “web standards” is a catchphrase that refers to writing web pages using, as a basis, a group of free and open technical specifications. The core specs being HTML, CSS, and Java­Script. Think of them as the three legs of a tripod upon which all else rests. In no way futuristic, this has already happened. HTML, CSS, and Java­Script are at the heart of publishing in the 21st century. DWWS3 is largely about authoring with these and other related specs in smart and efficient ways that could, more simply and accurately, be labeled best practice. The first edition of DWWS in 2003 was in large part a work of advocacy. But six Internet years have passed and today it’s main­stream. As the link says, Required Reading.

Finding The Cost Of Freedom

I’m a New York City kid raised in Brooklyn. When I was small, I used to wait out on the stoop for my Dad to come home from work. The first thing he did was check the mailbox. And I remember a day when the mail contained his yearly income tax statement. Now, paying taxes is fodder for many a sitcom joke, so even as a little kid I knew people liked to complain about taxes. But my Dad had a more accepting, even appreciative attitude. I asked him how he felt about it and he said, “It’s just the price of being of being an American, that’s all.” My Dad, a child of the Great Depression, son of immigrant parents, and a Jew, felt that whatever the tax, it was more than a fair bargain for his own personal slice of the American dream.

People who come to web design from backgrounds in print – where the physical size of the page is known ahead of time, and where precise, physical, “optical” sizes rule, and where 550 years of technological development lend stability and certainty to the end result – are often shocked by the lack of precision and uniformity that you have to deal with in web design. Likewise shocked are programmers who are used to a black and white world where the code is either error-free and compilable, or not. And who are used to writing installable programs with access to features of the operating system that web pages don’t have.
For these folks, the guesswork and workarounds and accommodations of web design seem insane. In the face of this uncertainty and unpredictability they ask, “Why is it like this? Why?”

Because there is no central authority – like Microsoft – to dictate what is “correct” or “incorrect”, that’s why. A consensus must be reached and that takes time. And because we are moving, today, through a transitional corridor, that’s why. We’re going to get it wrong or almost right for awhile before we get it quite right. That’s one of the reasons I write this blog.

I wasn’t always convinced, but I am now, that precision and predictability in web design will come in time. One of the reasons is the perceptible change in mood since the first edition of Zeldman’s book was published in 2003. In the battle for the hearts and minds of web authors, standards have won. The idea that the on-ramp to the information superhighway should remain free and clear of the encumbrances of proprietary technology – copyrights, patents, and so forth – has not only won, but in the minds of young developers, it’s a given. Twenty years ago, the default was having to pay a license fee and free was unusual. Today, the default is free and paying for a license, the excep­tion. Developers fresh out of college have trouble even comprehending any credo other than “share and share alike”.
It took a few governmental smacks upside the head to achieve it, but even within Microsoft – with regards to the core of Internet Explorer, at least – I believe the idea of keeping browser technology a commercial no-fly zone has finally won out.

And so, I look upon the current need for hacks and workarounds and forking and sniffing and object detection the way my Dad did paying income taxes: it’s the price of freedom, and of the urgent need to keep the Internet as free and open to all as it can be.
It’s a price I have to pay right now, as an author, for my slice of opportunity.

Jeffrey Zeldman, Ethan Marcotte, good luck with the book.

Related posts:

1. Developing With Web Standards by John Allsopp
2. Readable Web At AnEventApart, Boston
3. TypeCon 2010: A New Birth Of Type

Nothing quite like a leg-up from the government to get things moving…

“Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger today launched an initiative to make California the first state in the nation to offer schools free, open-source digital textbooks for high school students. The Governor directed his Secretary of Education Glen Thomas to ensure these resources are available for use in high school math and science classes by fall 2009, a critical first step in helping ensure digital textbooks are widely available to all California students.”

A turning point in moving from print to the network screen?

Read the Governator’s press release.

No related posts.