Time to move on

.. don't look back

As noted previously there has been quite a few changes lately in the line-up of the team I work for. Luckily one developer returned from a long sick leave and so I was not the only one. But sadly for him the song continues.

• Yes, it has been more than enough.
• Yes, I have thrown the towel.
• Yes, I am happy to leave.
• No, I am not happy to leave behind good colleagues.
• Yes, I am happy to leave some of the other colleagues.
• Yes, I have a feeling that a less than satisfying period is drawing to a close.

But I don't look back in anger

Though I am bitterly disappointed in a lot of things, I won't look back in anger. It was an interesting period and I learned some valuable things and met some valuable people. I learned once again some very harsh lessons and maybe one day I will indeed use this knowledge and will not go for the soothing words and blue eyes.

Let's look back with a smile

Don't keep a grudge for life: it will never make you happy.

Bassie, famous Dutch philosopher and child and brother lover

Always keep smiling!

And luckily: we still have the pictures.

Parking habits

I did mention the parking habits of my colleagues before and here is one more example.

These cars are parked smack in the middle of the passage of the higher staff only area. There were more spots available.

More fun on the parking lot

Security is a good thing. People need to be aware. I am aware and will not publish pictures of how are security systems and rules work. Or not work. The following pictures just show that the weakest link in security are humans. And especially the nice ones.

Early one morning a van from a firm that would do some maintenance at our location arrived at the gate of our parking lot. You need a pass to get in or press a button and talk to the reception and they will let you through. This morning apparently there was no one at the reception so the van could not get in. However, a helpful colleague gave his pass to the van driver, who then got in and returned the pass. Mister Nice Guy, could not get in. The system had registered him as being inside already. So Mister Van Driver held the pass for the exit scanner and that didn't work either. So, he backed up his van and stopped in front the exit bar and tried again. The bar opened and Mister Nice Guy was now officialy out again. The system needed a couple of minutes of understanding this. Finally, he and the growing line of waiting cars were able to get in.

Just some more pictures

Looking around my office this is what I see.

Maybe just for my Dutch readers another example of the typical Dutch spelling.

p.s. I just love bananas!

Hawking

.. quick one

Just a little something to smile about.

A lovely quote

Speaking to a sold out crowd at the Berkeley Physics Oppenheimer Lecture, Hawking said yesterday that he now believes the universe spontaneously popped into existence from nothing. He said more work is needed to prove this but we have time because 'Eternity is a very long time, especially towards the end.'

Finding Zen in the garden

.. you have to look hard

When you try to find or achieve Zen you may need a life full of meditation, self refelection and inner peace. You may even need a long life filled with these ingredients.

Finding Zen is finding a pure state of existence, an existence away from bothersome thoughts and emotions. At first, this seems impossible.

Finding Zen in my humble (ignorant) opinion has to do with simplicity, with restraint. Achieving things through non-complication.

In comes the Garden

When I am talking about Zen and a Garden and when you know I am into web design and development you should immediately think of the CSS Zen Garden. The wonderful site that showed many many peopple how beautiful the web can be when one uses CSS. It proved that using CSS didn't mean you would get a blocky site. And a good job it did at that.

But we have moved on and the group of people using CSS to style websites has grown and the knowledge is spreading. Maybe it is time for the next step.

Where's the Zen in the Garden?

Getting back to my definition of achieving Zen: the simplicity, the restraint. Hold that in mind and open one of the beautiful pages of the CSS Zen Garden. Right. Admire and sit in awe. Wow!

Right, now do a view source of the page. Good chance you are not getting a feeling of Zen.

I know, I know, the HTML of CSS Zen Garden is made like this on purpose. To give CSS magicians extra divs do play with so that can achieve all these lovely designs.

But .. it's not Zen, IMHO.

Also, any good designed CSS site has loads of tags that do not directly have meaning. They are not adding anything from a semantical viewpoint. There are just placeholders. Nothing more than that. And to be absolutely sure we put placeholders around the placeholders.

Not really anywhere near Zen, IMHO.

Finding Zen

So, here is a new adventure. A new travel through the innersoul of web desginers and developers to once again purify and cleanse our code to try to achieve Zen.

I don't know whether I have found Zen in design, in the inner works of html pages, but I think I have made a small first step on a new journey.

Stay tuned to this blog and I will show my first steps on this new Road to Enlightenment.

In the meantime drink some green tea, do some yoga and meditate.

Tags:

• zen
• garden
• confused

Less is more

.. more or less

One of the things that struck me with Microformats that quite a lot of tags were needed to describe the data elements of something like a business card (hCard). I know they are necessary. When you create a database table you don't want put the entire address in one big memo field. You can not do anything with that. You split up the address parts into separate fields and then you can do sorting and finding and what ever you like to do more.

Microformats bring the same possibilities of manipulation to the data that lies otherwise hidden in a web page. So, hooray for Microformats!

But still ..

I saw all these tags and then had a look at some webpages and saw all this tags. We used to have table-tag-soup and nowadays we produce and consume buckets full of div-tag-soup. Hmmmm.

And so I started thinking ...

And I thought: do we need all these tags?

And I started experimenting.

And things started to form in my head and in code ..

And now I am compiling an article with working examples to produce clean semantic markup that still has plenty of layout possibilities.

And thus, I ask of you some patience, before I publish this article.

Tags:

• semantic
• clean
• markup

You better start to learn microformats!

.. or stay behind

Over on the great Digital Web Magazine there is an article about Learning Microformats. Although the url is a bit funny and shows they are human after all, the article is a great primer on microformats. The article include to links to PDFs of presentations that were given at Web Directions North by John Allsop and Dan Cederholm on the subject:

• Microformats for Designers and
• Microformats for Developers.

Podcasts of presentations will be available. Check out the Web Directions North site. Leaving through the slides it makes me wish I was there.

Again this is seems so natural

A few years ago I started out (again) on a journey to do something on the web. I wanted to build websites and do it the right way. I think I first was on the Internet in 1994. In those days things still ran on coal. I even put up a few web pages and showed it to a colleague. He replied that there were no images. There were links to my local C:-drive :-( I corrected that and filled up some pages and then really never bothered about them. Back in those days statistics didn't really exist. But I guess I must have had an audience of two.

The a couple of years passed and I wasn't really active in the web area. I build a couple of small applications that produced some reports in html format. I had even created a very simple templating system in Access for that. But nothing really on the wild then budding Internet Freeway. The Boom came and the Burst came and I just looked at it. One moment sad because I wasn't in it and then happy because I wasn't in it.

Then, gradually, I rolled a bit more into websites. I started making my own and I immediately had the urge to do things proper. I skipped table-based design completely. Main reason being that I didn't have the tools that produced such a design. I was (and still am) a hand coder pur sang. And how one can create a beautiful design with all these stupid nested tables I could honestly not understand. I was forced to use something else.

And then ...

• CSS
• I discovered A List Apart
• I discovered CSS Zen Garden
• I discovered all these nasty bugs
• I discovered that there were more than one browser
• I discovered bugs, quirks and hacks
• and slowly and surely, I understood

  <div>s

  and

  float:right

• and I started love CSS and web standards and semantics
• and I understood that SEO and usability were also somehow benefited from developing this way.

I became a standardista!

Then the real world application came

I made some websites for some small companies and then I got hired by a reasonable well known Dutch insurance company. I got to work on their "new" website. And I had the opportunity to put my knowledge into practice. And shaved loads of excess weight form the pages and tried to be as semantically correct as possible.

I stayed on top of things emerging on the web and implemented Google Sitemaps as soon as the website was live. And watched it succeed. I was amazed that it worked so well.

And then we had a Google Mini appliance (now we have two) and that needed implementation. I was the lucky one who got that task. Using the API and a simple web service the site was hooked up and Bang we had search implemented. And I used the <dl> tag for the first time in real life. And then later I used it again!

Hold on, Roho, don't get too excited now.

Back on earth

Having taking a deep breath and a glass of water, let's continue.

To me all these things showed me that these are great times to be involved in web development. Coding away in C#, CSS, XML and XHTML is just absolutely great.

It also showed me that doing this the right way has many benefits: leaner pages, better search results, easier to adapt layout, better usability and many more.

By doing the right thing, you fear no one

Inspired by the motto of my regiment: "By doing the right thing, you fear no one" I say "By doing the right thing, you do the right thing". Hmm, maybe not as powerful, but still right.

Regiment Huzaren van Sytzama

By doing the right thing, you fear no one

I had discovered for myself and proven to myself that these standard based xhtml and css and stuff just simply work.

And I stayed on top of the (r)evolution.

And here comes the next wave!

Now, in the last few months I found some posts about microformats. And it got my attention and I studied it. And now I am beginning to implement it on our company website. First the hCard and later more will follow.

Roho

By doing the right thing, you do the right thing

And more will come

Looking at the wonderful stuff that was presented at Web Directions North I realize that many more things are just only slowly coming our way. We have our first implementation of AJAX as well and we will put sIFR to use in the coming months, maybe weeks.

I start to see that in this business sticking with knowledge is falling behind. If you have yet to learn CSS and still stick to tables than you are already becoming more and more of a dinosaur. And we all know what happened to them!

With upcoming things like all these social networks, mashups, microformats, AJAX and many more exciting things being invented almost every day it seems, it becomes harder and harder to stay close to the leading edge. It is starting to become close to impossible once you have fallen just a tiny bit behind.

Better start studying, girls and boys

If you want to be and stay in this business you gotta learn and work and try and fiddle about.

Catch up on XHTML and CSS and then jump on the microformat bandwagon and keep your eyes open for any new developments. Learn, learn, learn!

Tags:

• standards
• microformats
• learn