Web design & FOSS

A few years ago, I read an excellent A List Apart article called ‘The Dao of Web Design’. The author, John Allsopp, called for a flexible and simplified approach to web design; in essence, letting things be as they are. Back in the day, designers used to try to force physical, static, print design onto screen-based, fluid, web design.

I was reminded of this article by my work for The Ministry (a top secret governmental organisation). I shouldn’t really tell you but I will – I’m working on the intranet, tidying up the CSS and XHTML layout. My job really is to make the design consistent and radically simplify the CSS. Simplicity takes time – working out what’s fluff and then cutting it away.

I was also reminded of The Dao article by a web site consultant called Gerry McGovern. His approach was very refreshing: simply find out which features the users rated and concentrate on the top 4-5, which usually make up 80% of the traffic. Again, this process of whittling away to the core raison d’êum;tre of the site takes time. Surveys, results, analysis and time. And at the end, the owners of the web site start out with a much better idea about their core business.

Balanced against this is The Kludge. Back in the real world, you very often don’t have time to write “correct code”. You kludge (it’s a verb too, you know ;). Hell knows, I’ve done it before. But I always try to leave a note (ie /* KLUDGE, sorry */) for the poor soul that has to clear up my mess.

My educated guess is that kludges are not so important when they have a short and isolated lifespan. It’s when they inveigle themselves into the long-term core structure of the site. This is what’s happened with some stylesheets I was working on recently – six stylesheets pretty much identical but all slightly different. Yep, I started from scratch, the whole site had kludge writ large.

Which brings me to the closing money shot – my company slogan, which is:

That’ll do

with the proviso:

for now

Simplicity is perfection, but perfection has a price and the job is the paymaster. So, I kludge when necessary, with comments.

Of late I have been working for The Ministry, a top-secret department located in the heart of our country’s great government. The secrecy and security extends to their locked-down IT policy, as I’ve highlighted elsewhere. Bearing in mind those wise words: “Necessity is the mother of circumvention”, I started to play around with PortableApps.com.

A portable application is simply a program that will run from a USB stick. PortableApps.com is an open platform for Windows that has a compiled a collection of Free Open Source Software customised to run on a USB stick, so that no personal data is left on the host computer. There is also a rather nifty PortableApps Menu, an elegant way to access your apps.

The advantage of all this is that I don’t need Administrator rights at work to run my useful software (eg Firefox with all the Add-on trimmings & bookmarks). Indeed, I can run the software (with personalised settings) on any Windows PC on my travels.

There is a wide range of applications, and the base suite installers are all very easy to set up. There are alternatives, such as U3 and Ceedo: however, the advantage/disadvantage is that these both run and are proprietary software.

For me, one of the most useful applications is XAMPP, an Apache/MySQL/PHP/Perl web server. Web on a stick! This means I can set up a development server on my local machine without having to fill in forms in triplicate and wait a few months to be told “No” ;)

And finally, one very cool piece of functionality is the ability to run standalone versions of Internet Explorer — you can download the browsers from evolt.org, put them into the PortableApps folder and they should appear as if by magic in the PortableApps menu.

A List Apart, a perennial favourite site for web design and building, has apparently been cyberjacked! How irritating, as I was going to reference a very nifty article about Mountain Top Corners (hard edged white pixel corners that give the appearance of rounded corners). And how embarrassing to be cybersquatted as well, for a site so illustrious and respected.

Here's hoping they sort it out soon.

Meanwhile, back at The Ministry of Secrets, I had an interesting discussion with a co-worker about shortcuts. It arose from the fact that I’m not allowed to install fonts, and the default monospace font is Courier New. I’m not a big fan really, as it’s a bit squidgy and rounded, and, horror of horrors, the 1 looks identical to an l. This is not a good idea if you’re typing lots of code which has numbers in (and most of mine does).

PeterD pointed out that back in the days of golfball typewriter, typists used to use l rather than 1 because of this identicality and because the key is quicker to reach. No problem until the whole department he was working in was computerised, and a generation of workers had to abandon their old trick habits.

My current contract is at a top-secret governmental organisation (just one more contract job, then I'll move out to the country, try my hand at some remote working and other rural pursuits ;). Not surprisingly the security policy is very strict:

* Can't install programs * Can't change the screen resolution * Can't install fonts (no profontwindows for me) * Can't enable “Group similar tasks on taskbar” * No Recycling Bin * No Instant Messaging

Most of this is understandable (though screen resolution ?!?), but I am a Free Range Freelancer, and for too long I have roamed out in the wilds, installing nefarious apps willy-nilly. However, as the saying goes “necessity is the mother of circumvention”.

First up is PortableApps – Free Open Source Software for Windows, adapted to run from a USB stick so that you can take your favourite apps with you. I love it; there's even a PortableApps menu which sits in your System Tray :)

And then there's XAMPP – Apache, MySQL and PHP! On a USB stick! This means I can set up a test server without filling forms in triplicate. Plus it's easy to install and configure.

Finally I have stumbled across Google Talk via the Google Mail page. Any contacts you have with a Google account and chat enabled (which is about, er, 3 people that I know!) can send you little instant messages in discrete boxes. It's useful to know that you can use a web-based chat client if everything else has been locked down.

And finally finally, just to balance out the headline, I have been writing a lot more web content recently, and have started writing in Markdown, a plain text markup syntax. It's quick to learn, easy to read and there's an online converter which spits out HTML. My friend Michael said “grud on a stick, it's like slicing raw munce”. But I wouldn't listen to him…