Browser Vendors, You Have Failed Us

Browser vendors have unilaterally lost sight of real problems that plague real users.
I am so angry right now. The thing that causes me so much anger is not that Google are shutting down their RSS reader product, it?s that the browser vendors sat back and allowed all the power over content to go into the hands of Facebook and now Google.

I wrote two years ago that browser vendors were failing to focus on the real problem that: users don?t want, and find it slow and painful, to trudge around their daily round of websites and that the web browser should be exposing an automatic, intelligent and ultimately useful interface to RSS.

Why can I not do something about this? Becuase creating another RSS web service to ?replace? Google Reader does not solve the underlying problem, that is:?personal aggregation of content should not be dependnt on a business model.

Google never offered a pay option. Reader had to supliment other strategies. RSS does not benefit Google+, whose aim is to centralise all the content including the ability to process and access it.

RSS is a browser feature, a browser?s responsibility. It is a personalised view upon the web, just as bookmarks and add-ons are. It makes managing daily content much easier, just as bookmarks and add-ons do. The browser?as the personal portal on to the web?is best positioned to aggregate the web for the user. It knows the user?s browsing habits better than even the most evil of evil advertisers. The browser vendors could make the web faster, easier, less cluttered and junky than any web sevice ever could. And it could do all of that with the barest minimum of privacy-intrusion, without a single ad and without a conflicting business model.

Because browser vendors failed to see personalised aggregation as a benefit to regular users, these regular users have taken to Facebook as their personalised aggregation service, taking the power over content away from the browser vendors.

Facebook will one day soon be a major technology player rivalling Google, Amazon and even Apple. Facebook are already big, yes, but for now they?re ?just a website?. When they control the technology landscape because they control access to the content then things turn very bad for users. Mozilla, prepare to be side-lined by a ?website?.

That brings me to the second big thing browser vendors have failed users with: e-mail.

It is 2013 and there is still no way to set Firefox as the default e-mail client in Windows. There is no way to make it so that when a user right-clicks a file and goes Send To > Mail Recipient that Firefox will launch with the user?s preferred web-mail.

This is no end of headaches for my customers. They are constantly slipping up because they do not discern the difference between actions that invoke the native mail client and the fact they are using web-mail. Functions they expect to work simply don?t, such as using the e-mail toolbar button in Windows Explorer. Most of my customers have unsent e-mails in the outbox of Outlook Express or Windows Mail because the native client was launched instead of their web-mail. Attaching files is an unbelievable pain because of this. Customers have to be carefully taught that no, you don?t go to the picture first, you write the e-mail first, then click attach and then have to understand the concept of a different view upon the file-system and that the Pictures folder in there, is actually the same as the Pictures folder their muscle-memory is programmed to use from the Start Menu.

E-mail sucks because browser vendors don?t care about real problems that plague real users every day.

If I were Mozilla I would integrate e-mail back into Firefox. The browser already knows the user?s web-mail user names and passwords. It could automatically configure everything. The user could have a clean interface to their e-mail without having to go through painful web-mail clients. Attachments would be easier. E-mail links in web pages would actually work. Native OS e-mail actions would actually do the right thing for once. Users would actually benefit more from this than redesigning the f*cking shape of the tabs or removing the RSS button from the toolbar.

Two years have passed. The boat has been missed. Facebook and Google control the content, how it is accessed, how it is processed. There is no way back. You have failed us, browser vendors.

A Summary

It is with much intrepidation (for life has become very uncertain) and joy (for life is no longer dull) that I can announce the news of our child, a son, due to us in early July.

Life, ever since meeting the love of it, has been upside down and changing at a relentless pace. First we met, and that was a big, unexpected change. Then I asked her to marry me. In three months we were married, and lived together?no small change for myself, which I found to be effortlessly natural (though obviously challanging). It?s only because of the news of our child that we have had to directly tackle the physical piles of stuff still not yet disseminated into everyday life. We find that having not even gotten settled in our first home we have to up-sticks and down-size (where there is no spare room to pile things) to be able to better focus ourselves on our child.

For this though I am very grateful as a blessing from God; meeting my wife has made me address many, many personal, internal burdens which have reflected?on this blog?through me giving up a great many things physical (the MacBook Pro), spiritual and somewhere in between (software projects), whilst the birth of my son forces me to address my many needs outside of the computer world.

This is where we get to the point. It will not have gone without your notice that I have neither been very active, or reliable for the last year. My more immediate needs in the real world overtake me and though even when there is the adequate time to devote to the website and other matters, I have neither the strength or will.

There is much I want to do, but it will have to wait for a few years whilst I care for my family.

I don?t expect to do much blogging here on the main site (my system isn?t working well for me under my new circumstances and it needs a complete overhaul). You can best be kept up to date with my happenings and thoughts through the system that does work well for my circumstances, my forum.

Thank you to all for your patience, understanding, generoisty and care.

Camen Design will return to irregular service in a future iteration some day. What it will be is only a hazy idea right now, but I do know for certain that I will do my own things in my own way and demonstrate to others that they can do the same.

Transliteration

Transliteration is when you replace individual characters in a piece of text with alternative characters, commonly used on the web to replace accented characters ??èìòù? with their ASCII equivilents ?aeiou? to use as filenames or URLs.

This is my take on the subject that uses different levels of fallback to gaurantee a result whatever your environment: It transliterates better than any example snippet you have seen out there as will be explained in the code and afterwards.

//safeTransliterate v3, copyright (cc-by 3.0) Kroc Camen <camendesign.com>
//generate a safe (a-z0-9_) string, for use as filenames or URLs, from an arbitrary string
function safeTransliterate ($text) {
	//if available, this function uses PHP5.4's transliterate, which is capable of converting arabic, hebrew, greek,
	//chinese, japanese and more into ASCII! however, we use our manual (and crude) fallback *first* instead because
	//we will take the liberty of transliterating some things into more readable ASCII-friendly forms,
	//e.g. "100?" > "100degc" instead of "100oc"
	
	/* manual transliteration list:
	   -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- */
	/* this list is supposed to be practical, not comprehensive, representing:
	   1. the most common accents and special letters that get typed, and
	   2. the most practical transliterations for readability;
	   
	   given that I know nothing of other languages, I will need your assistance to improve this list,
	   mail kroc@camendesign.com with help and suggestions.
	   
	   this data was produced with the help of:
	   http://www.unicode.org/charts/normalization/
	   http://www.yuiblog.com/sandbox/yui/3.3.0pr3/api/text-data-accentfold.js.html
	   http://www.utf8-chartable.de/
	*/
	static $translit = array (
		'a'	=> '/[ÀÁÂ????Ã?????????ÅÅ??????????àáâ????ã?????????å?????????]/u',
		'b'	=> '/[??????]/u',			'c'	=> '/[Ç?????ç?????]/u',
		'd'	=> '/[Ð????????????ð]/u',
		'e'	=> '/[ÈË?????????????????????èë?????????????????????]/u',
		'f'	=> '/[??]/u',				'g'	=> '/[??????????????]/u',
		'h'	=> '/[???????????????]/u',		'i'	=> '/[ÌÏ????????????iìï???????????]/u',
		'j'	=> '/[???]/u',				'k'	=> '/[???????????]/u',
		'l'	=> '/[????????????????]/u',		'm'	=> '/[??????]/u',
		'n'	=> '/[Ñ????????ñ????????]/u',
		'o'	=> '/[ÒÖ?????????????????????????????Ø?òö?????????????????????????????ø?]/u',
		'p'	=> '/[????]/u',				'r'	=> '/[??????????????????]/u',
		's'	=> '/[?????????????????????]/u',	'ss'	=> '/[ß]/u',
		't'	=> '/[???????????????]/u',		'th'	=> '/[Þþ]/u',
		'u'	=> '/[Ù??????????????????????ù??????????????????????µ]/u',
		'v'	=> '/[????]/u',				'w'	=> '/[?????????????]/u',
		'x'	=> '/[????×]/u',			'y'	=> '/[Ý????????ýÿ????????]/u',
		'z'	=> '/[????????????]/u',				
		//combined letters and ligatures:
		'ae'	=> '/[Ä?Æ??ä?æ??]/u',			'oe'	=> '/[??]/u',
		'dz'	=> '/[??????]/u',
		'ff'	=> '/[?]/u',	'fi'	=> '/[??]/u',	'ffl'	=> '/[??]/u',
		'ij'	=> '/[??]/u',	'lj'	=> '/[???]/u',	'nj'	=> '/[???]/u',
		'st'	=> '/[??]/u',	'ue'	=> '/[Ü????ü????]/u',
		//currencies:
		'eur'   => '/[?]/u',	'cents'	=> '/[¢]/u',	'lira'	=> '/[?]/u',	'dollars' => '/[$]/u',
		'won'	=> '/[?]/u',	'rs'	=> '/[?]/u',	'yen'	=> '/[¥]/u',	'pounds'  => '/[£]/u',
		'pts'	=> '/[?]/u',
		//misc:
		'degc'	=> '/[?]/u',	'degf'  => '/[?]/u',
		'no'	=> '/[?]/u',	'tm'	=> '/[?]/u'
	);
	//do the manual transliteration first
	$text = preg_replace (array_values ($translit), array_keys ($translit), $text);
	
	//flatten the text down to just a-z0-9 and dash, with underscores instead of spaces
	$text = preg_replace (
		//remove punctuation	//replace non a-z	//deduplicate	//trim underscores from start & end
		array ('/p{P}/u',	'/[^_a-z0-9-]/i',	'/_{2,}/',	'/^_|_$/'),
		array ('',		'_',			'_',		''),
		
		//attempt transliteration with PHP5.4's transliteration engine (best):
		//(this method can handle near anything, including converting chinese and arabic letters to ASCII.
		// requires the 'intl' extension to be enabled)
		function_exists ('transliterator_transliterate') ? transliterator_transliterate (
			//split unicode accents and symbols, e.g. "Å" > "A°":
			'NFKD; '.
			//convert everything to the Latin charset e.g. "?" > "ma":
			//(splitting the unicode before transliterating catches some complex cases,
			// such as: "?" >NFKD> "20?" >Latin> "20ri")
			'Latin; '.
			//because the Latin unicode table still contains a large number of non-pure-A-Z glyphs (e.g. "?"),
			//convert what remains to an even stricter set of characters, the US-ASCII set:
			//(we must do this because "Latin/US-ASCII" alone is not able to transliterate non-Latin characters
			// such as "?". this two-stage method also means we catch awkward characters such as:
			// "?" >Latin> "k?" >Latin/US-ASCII> "kO")
			'Latin/US-ASCII; '.
			//remove the now stand-alone diacritics from the string
			'[:Nonspacing Mark:] Remove; '.
			//change everything to lowercase; anything non A-Z 0-9 that remains will be removed by
			//the letter stripping above
			'Lower',
		$text)
		
		//attempt transliteration with iconv: <php.net/manual/en/function.iconv.php>
		: strtolower (function_exists ('iconv') ? str_replace (array ("'", '"', '`', '^', '~'), '', strtolower (
			//note: results of this are different depending on iconv version,
			//      sometimes the diacritics are written to the side e.g. "ñ" = "~n", which are removed
			iconv ('UTF-8', 'US-ASCII//IGNORE//TRANSLIT', $text)
		)) : $text)
	);
	
	//old iconv versions and certain inputs may cause a nullstring. don't allow a blank response
	return !$text ? '_' : $text;
}

Edit this code on GitHub • You may do anything with this code as long as you leave credit in the code

There is no ?guaranteed available? method with which to transliterate effectively in PHP; the functions that can do so vary by PHP version and are not likely to always be installed and enabled on every PHP server out there. The only built-in function strtr guaranteed to be present only replaces one character with another and doesn?t handle the common need to expand one character to multiple, such as converting ?ß? to ?ss?.

There are a number of libraries and functions out there for transliteration. Those that are comprehensive are massive and therefore total overkill for a small project and often have unhelpful licences, those that are small and compact are usually very incomplete and rely upon a single method that might not be available to you.

My method uses fallbacks so as to guarantee a result and improves upon other methods out there:

Better unicode normalisation

All the transliterations examples I have seen out there that use PHP5.4?s transliterator make the mistake of copy-pasting the example normalisation string given on the website. The results are simply wrong. My code uses a unicode normalisation method that I have worked out that has not been used anywhere else I have seen. It handles thousands of cases that no other library/function does because it uses two-stages of transliteration, first from any script to Latin-1 and then from Latin-1 to US-ASCII. This means that characters such as ??? become ?ko? where else this would fail on other code I have seen because it would transliterate ??? to ?k?? and then remove the ??? for being non-ASCII

Readability

Since the transliteration will be used for filenames or URLs, readability is important, so it?s better to convert some things to more meaningful words such as ?¥? to ?yen? instead of just ?y?. In the example above, it would be trivial for the function to convert ??? to ?k-ohm? but I chose not to since the single character ??? is almost never used on the `Web

I don?t know anything about other languages and writing systems, so if there?s something amiss in my code, please let me know via email, the forums or by editing the GitHub gist

End of an Era

The world has changed around me since I started this blog, and then I have seen a good deal of change in myself. When presented recently with the issue that my aged MacBook Pro can?t be upgraded to the latest OS X, the logical thing?as far as I'm concerned?would be to switch to some FreeBSD variant and get away from all this iCloud and closed-computing nonsense.

However I am in the thows of change once more and I have opted to sell that which has been my right arm for years. I was neither shrewd nor conscientious with my money when I dated my wife, which was my own fault, added to the unfathomable expense of getting married and moving home. To that end, where normally I would have the money for my tax bill, rightly I don?t. But that is not the reasoning behind this decision. I can earn and I can save, however, I wish not to place my electronic pursuits above the attention I wish to insist upon my wife and my home.

For those that might genuinely desire these items, I highlight them here; my laptop I'm not so bothered about, but my collection of rare Commodore 64 books I would like to find the right eyes who may use them. Whilst I am in the UK, I would consider international shipping for my C64 items as long as you contact me privately.

• Kroc Camen?s Apple MacBook Pro 15.4? - 2.16GHz C2D / 3GB RAM / 320GB HDD
• Kroc Camen?s collection of rare and stupidly rare Commodore 64 programming books
• Commodore 64 Simons Basic Cartridge + Manual; RARE
• Elite Gold Edition Commodore 64; RARE. Tape + 5¼? Floppy copy

Camen Design Competition Time!

1. Design a Theme for NoNonsense Forum
   1. Get Started:
   2. What You?re Aiming For:
2. Design a Web Page for NoNonsense Forum
   1. Get Started:
   2. What You?re Aiming For:
3. Prizes, Judging, Rules
   1. Prizes
   2. Judging Criteria
   3. How to Enter
   4. Rules

Here is an opportunity to create something and learn from others; Camen Design is running not one, but two simultaneous competitions (so that you have a choice) centered around my unique forum software NoNonsense Forum; don?t worry if you?ve never heard of it, let alone used it, all that is required is:

• Some basic HTML / CSS knowledge
• The want to contribute and learn

These are the two competitions:

1. Design a Theme for NoNonsense Forum
2. Design a Web Page for NoNonsense Forum

and they run from Sunday 5^th of August, for just over two calendar months,
until midnight UTC Sunday 7^th of October. See prizes, judging and rules for the ancillary details.

Design a Theme for NoNonsense Forum

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to turn this:

?into anything you want. Go understated or go wild, simply create a new theme as you see fit.

Do not worry, as you do not need to know PHP or be familiar with NoNonsense Forum to develop a theme for it. NNF uses a unique templating engine that allows you to use plain HTML and CSS and you never need to learn any {{special syntax}} or use PHP (unless you want to).

Get Started:

• Read the instructions on making a NoNonsense Forum theme

  • Download either the NoNonsense Forum source code (PHP) which I?ve customised ready for theme development,

  • Or, if you?re on Windows, you can download a pre-configured web-server with NoNonsense Forum installed to get yourself going quickly and easily: just run the exe, open your web browser to http://localhost and you?re ready!

• See the prizes, judging, rules section for some particulars

• Go participate, get help and see what others are doing in the forum

What You?re Aiming For:

You should refer to the judging criteria for guidance as this competition is very open to creativity.

Design a Web Page for NoNonsense Forum

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to design and create a single-page website for NoNonsense Forum.

Currently, NoNonsense Forum has no real ?website? to advertise it, just the technical project page on Camen Design, which is more of a blog post than a proper web site for it, and the GitHub project, which doesn?t exactly ?sell? the product!

Get Started:

• Learn more about NoNonsense Forum

• See NoNonsense Forum in action, you can also download a pre-configured version and for Windows users, a pre-configured portable web-server with NoNonsense Forum installed

• See the prizes, judging, rules section for some particulars

• Go participate, get help and see what others are doing in the forum

What You?re Aiming For:

• The web page can be as long or short as you want but it should highlight the features (or not-features) of the forum and provide a link to download it (github.com/Kroc/NoNonsenseForum/zipball/master) and optionally a link to the GitHub project

• NoNonsense Forum is aimed at individuals who would want to install and run it themselves, including technical persons within companies that might want to use it as an internal discussion platform; that is, NNF is not aimed at managers, but rather the people who have the technical skill to install it and potentially modify it?They are well aware of what a pain phpBB is. For example, NNF has received this testimonial:

  I work for Life is good and handle their media and web design in Portsmouth. I've used NNF as an internal discussion board and communication platform. This has eliminated the messy and poor communication through paper notes. Our company?s processes and communication has improved greatly. We haven?t had miscommunication since the birth of NNF at Life is good. Thank you for this.

  NickPfen

• Forums appear antiquated compared to all this Facebook and Twitter nonsense, so the site should help convince visitors why NNF doesn?t suck and why a NoNonsense Forum is a good discussion platform

Prizes, Judging, Rules

Prizes

I lied. There?s not really any prizes, perhaps not the kind you were expecting. You see, I don?t have the money to contribute a physical or monetary prize. The purpose of the competitions is to encourage participation, sharing and creativity. This is an opportunity to play with HTML / CSS and bounce ideas off of others doing the same. There is no such thing as ?stealing? here, just learning. You?re encouraged to share your ideas, designs and code in the forum and see what others are coming up with.

Grand Prize:

The overall winner of the theme competition will have their theme used on the Camen Design Forum for one month, possibly longer if I like it.

The overall winner of the webpage competition will have their design used as the official NoNonsense Forum site over at GitHub.

The SRSBSNS Award:

This immaterial feel-good award will be given to the best entry (in each competition) that takes itself seriously. That is not to say that it can?t be fun, or has to dull and bland, but that it aims to be a real design to be used for its purpose, either as forum theme that would be shipped with the product, or a webpage that would serve as the starting point of someone discovering the product for the first time.

The ORLY? Award:

Awarded to the best entry (in each competition) that does not take itself seriously.

The People?s Choice Award:

What was everybody?s favourite entry, voted by everybody on the forums. This is so that there can be an agreed upon ?favourite? without any ?criteria? to meet.

Runners Up:

The top 5 of each competition will be featured on Camen Design with my personal, detailed critique as a designer and programmer.

Judging Criteria

Myself (Kroc Camen) will be judging (except for the People?s Choice Award which will be a rough vote held on the forum).

Who am I that you would care? This site has been HTML5 with no divs, no spans and the CSS has no IDs & no classes, since 2008. I made Video for Everybody, the HTML5 video-embedding method mentioned in most anywhere HTML5 video is discussed.

These are the things I?ll be looking for:

i. Trueness to spirit

That is, how well the entry succeededs in being true to its nature. If your entry is supposed to be ?retro? or ?industrial? or even ?lolcats?, then I will be ranking based on how well your entry hits the zeitgeist. Is your design and execution close to what you purposed / intended it to be?

Entries with a schizophrenic / uncertain nature would rank poorly. Try be clear in what you want to achieve and what ?statement of design? you are making. Be bold, and stick to it.

ii. Creativity

Make stuff nobody else thought of. Find your own niche where you find pleasure and dig into it.

Extra kudos is also awarded for creatvity with the code. Clean, artistic HTML and CSS is awarded. Especially with the theme competition, kudos is awarded for twisting the HTML and the common idea of what a forum should look like.

iii. Completeness / compatibility

Extra kudos is awarded for those who can cover more ground in the time. Does it include a mobile theme (via CSS3 media queries)? Printing styles? Does it work without JavaScript? What range of browsers does it work on?

You shouldn?t focus on this to begin with though. Get the look and feel right and then with spare time you can work on broadening the features.

How to Enter

To enter a competition, just start a thread in the forum with the title prefixed with ?NNF Compo Theme? or ?NNF Compo Webpage? and the name of your theme. In this thread you can describe your idea, post some images of the design if you?ve drawn any and share code.

You can keep replying or appending to the thread to alert others of your progress and others can give you their feedback through your thread. It?s best to post early and log your progress as you go rather than hold everything back until the end of the competition.

Any time before the deadline just add a link to a download of your entry to your thread. You can continue to update your entry even after you?ve posted a download as long as it?s still before the deadline.

To cancel an entry, just delete your thread.

Rules

• The competitions run from Sunday 5^th of August, for two calandar months and two days, ending at midnight UTC Sunday 7^th October

• You can enter both competitions if you want, and you can have more than one entry for each, but you will only be represented once in each prize category by your best entry

• Please licence your code correctly to avoid your entry being rejected:

  • You should ideally use a Creative Commons CC-BY 3, or CC-BY-SA 3 licence, especially if you have derived your theme from the default ?greyscale? theme

  • Please us MIT or BSD if you prefer these, but not Apache2 / MPL / WTFPL

  • Do not use any GPL licence, or dual-licence that includes GPL,
    your entry will be rejected if you do

Anything you?re unsure of, just ask at the forums.

Disentanglement

Indecisiveness, especially coupled with insecurity, is a very damaging thing. This year has been full of indecisveness for me because actually the most important and incisive decision I made in my life has so outweighed everything else that really what I'm facing is not so much indecisiveness, but the horrible position of knowing that everything I have held close before is small and perfunctory compared to what I have now and yet taking decisive action is deeply disruptive.

No longer do I have to choose between two sides of a coin, the coin has already been flipped. Really, I have to decide if I am to stick firmly to my choice and not saddle in comfort on the fence between.

Since the combination of my six year old MacBookPro not being eligible for Mountain Lion and not having the money to buy a new Mac (marriage and all that) the logical solution is to just change OS and learn something new. I'm not happy with the things Apple or Microsoft are doing anyway (?cloud? integration). FreeBSD or some BSD variant would be the logical choice for me but really I've got better things I want to be doing in life. For that purpose I'm going to disentangle my data from the Mac and sell it (along with a bunch of other good stuff).

I fortunately come from generations past that learnt to think using paper. If I have to cut off my right arm to escape computer addiction, I can do that. Generations now and especially in the future will quite literaly be unable to think straight without an electronic device in their hand. To them, life will be brutually stressful with no inner peace to be found because they will be assaulted non-stop by disingenuous companies who have every kind of life-sapping wares to peddle.

The days of buying a product and owning it wholly are gone. Now you buy a product and you neither own it, nor did you pay for it all. You paid for something that is partially given over to advertise to you. You paid to be advertised to by these ?recommendations? and you cannot turn them off. Your screen estate has been turned over to data-collection and adverts-by-other-names. You will be ?social? if you like it or not, is the drum beat. Your data is our data, goes the tambarine.

I want to escape that world before it is no longer opt-in, even if that means having no Internet at home.

410: Gone

I have come to realise that I am in a real creative slump as of late. Not creative as in ?look at what I made!? but creative as in the simple ability to express oneself. Making things is not necessarily creative; you can make babies, which is certainly creating something, but it?s not ?creative? in the slightest.

I've been mostly working on NoNonsense Forum with whatever time I've been giving to programming, but that has become very dull and lacking in creativity. My own forum doesn?t need any of the features I'm adding, and since I don?t ever see any other instances of NoNonsense Forum, nor hear from users (except on the rare occassion) I'm not getting any joy out coding for no purpose other than to bash my head against code for the sake of it being there.

In this way I feel I?ve lost myself to the lure of general pervasive apathy that permiates large portions of the Internet. I could not for a moment agree that watching YouTube or checking Reddit is more immediately important than writing a letter to a friend, but I am not rightly able to master the will to focus on such a task. It is only away from my desk that I have the power to think, and as soon as I return to it, I am drained completely. It has taken me weeks to write this alone for that reason.

Let me inform you that your ability to be creative with a computer and the depth of your knowledge of it is worthless and infantile in the face of managing a home! I have found that living with the woman I love is a very simple task; managing the home we live in, however, is quite the most challenging, all-encompassing, overwhelming amorphous blob of a problem you will likely experience. Having a firm grip on one?s life is sadly not given the attention and praise it deserves. I place such capability much higher than all secular skills. If you can manage other people?s lives through work, that?s just mediocre. If you can manage your own life, well that?s something rare and special these days.

I have many worries piled on me at home. The turmoil I have been through in one year has made me very unsettled. Unable to face the amorphous blob, I default to the computer instead every time. This has become such a problem that I have to take action against myself to hope to scrape through this year.

Just as of late, I've discovered that it appears my 2007 MacBook Pro won?t be eligable for the Mountain Lion upgrade. I am officially old-hat, behind the cutting-edge, a pain and an inconsideration for software developers. Okay, so maybe that?s an exaggeration since Moutain Lion isn?t even out yet, but there is no possibility I can afford a new Mac; I have to save that much to be able to pay my tax bill and my wife?s annual travel ticket at the end of the year.

What that means in practical terms is that?everything added up?I can no longer run Camen Design. If I can?t run the latest software, I can?t test or develop for it, and even if I could, what time I'm devoting to it is taking away from the harmony in my home. My desire to continue the site is being squeezed out of me from multiple angles.

I've put my Mac away so it?s no longer the first place I go to every morning. Since it?s no longer supported by Apple and I cannot afford another, it?s just a download slope into obsolesence and I may as well get out now before it becomes painful and difficult. I'm writing this on my netbook, which greatly restricts what I am able to practically create (3 GB free on a 16 GB SSD!).

I've come to feel that Camen Design is of no interest to anybody any more, it?s sloppy and out of date, and irrelevant in a world of wrong technlogy going in the wrong direction doing the wrong things. I'm not going to change my principles to suit the way the world has gone, I'm just going to stop being a part of it.

Looking after my wife and my home is the priority and I wish I could slap myself around the face and wake up to the urgency required, but I have known nothing else in my life than to sit in front of the computer and create. For once I must destroy rather than create and remove the anchor that weighs me down so much.

How the World Could Solve the Vendor Prefix Problem in One Month

Stop trying to solve more than one problem in one go, it won?t work. Proposals for the solution to vendor prefixes have tried to solve additional problems with vendor prefixes (that is, vendor behaviour & spec change) by adding more complexity, ?features? and meaning to prefixes. Stop making things complicated.

Let?s solve one thing, simply, and right now.

I am asking you, browser vendors, to add ?-x? as an alias to your vendor prefix in your web browser. That means that any instance of -x-feature in the CSS will be treated as -webkit-feature in WebKit, -moz-feature in Gecko, -o-feature in Opera and so on and so-forth.

Why does this solve the vendor prefix problem?

1. Incomplete Features Are Still Incomplete

It?s good practice to always include the un-prefixed declaration at the bottom of a list of vendor prefixes?thusly:

-webkit-feature: myway;
   -moz-feature: myway;
    -ms-feature: myway;
     -o-feature: myway;
        feature: highway;

But that relies upon waiting until that feature becomes unprefixed and does nothing to do away with the multiple list of vendor prefixes until that time.

How about:

-x-feature: myway;
   feature: highway;

?

That reduces the repetition whilst each browser still sees its own feature (-webkit, -moz &c.)

2. Vendors Will Be Vendors and That Will Not Change

You cannot threaten, cajole or otherwise incite Apple (or any vendor) to stop being a massively successful company that will do what it damn well likes.

Vendor prefixes are necessary. There are tons of internal features of different engines that are never going to be standardised because they are not designed to be exposed to the web or are used in producing the browser UI or are there for just plain old competition. Standards take time and companies have to ship software.

We can?t stop Apple being Apple, and we shouldn?t try stop lazy developers being lazy developers through syntax. That is an education problem that has to be solved at a level much higher than syntax. -x is incredibly lazy?for vendors and developers alike?but it?s lazy and good, rather than lazy and bad like vendor-specific prefixes.

-x will succeed because it?s lazy in a copy-paste web development world and not busy trying to hit vendors or developers over the head with a shame stick, or trying to educate the world about best-practices all within a prefix.

Imagine that in order for HTML5 to be adopted, developers had to update every HTML4 page out there? That?s what vendor prefixes are, in-effect, requiring. -x- is like the HTML5 doctype. Old code doesn?t have to change, compatibility goes both ways, we code for the future and the future supports us.

3. Specs Change, Browsers Differ

The -alpha, -beta proposal nonsense doesn?t work because it tries to imbue spec / standardisation ideas in the I-don?t-care-about-this-crap-copy-paste web developer world where old code doesn?t get updated unless it breaks horribly.

If you are using any vendor prefixed features then they might break in the future. That is reality and you can?t (and shouldn?t) try and change vendor prefixes to solve that problem.

Different vendor prefixes don?t work because it assumes that every vendor implementation of a new feature will be?by deafult?incompatible. That means that every time a vendor adds support for a feature that matches another vendor, you have to fix your code even when it?s working. -x works because it assumes that vendor implementations will be the same, unless they are different. You only change your code when it breaks. With -x, when a vendor adds support for a feature, you get it for free without having to rewrite the whole damn ?Web.

Let?s imagine this code currently only works in WebKit because only it supports that feature:

-x-feature: highway;
   feature: highway;

And then Mozilla come along and say it should be done a different way. You can just override your code:

  -x-feature: highway;
     feature: highway;
-moz-feature: myway;

You Can Do It, and You Can Do It Now

Mozilla, Apple, Google, Microsoft. You could all implement this small change very easily. You only have to alias -x to your vendor prefix. It is not asking much. There?s no standardisation involved, there?s no spec (or ?alias -x to your vendor prefix? is it), you don?t even have to arrange a meeting with each other.

Apple and Microsoft both have browsers in beta (Safari 6 and IE10). Including this tiny change would open the flood gates to developer support. Google can ship the change in 24 hours with Chrome?s update mechanism. Mozilla could ship it officially in 6 weeks. There is little holding back any of you.

Here is the gauntlet I am throwing down to solve the problem of vendor prefixes:

Announce, or ship?officially, or as a development build?support for -x within one Month?s time (July 13^th 2012).

I believe that to be quite doable, and I hope to hear from you soon.

An Indiscriminate Web

There is no easier technical platform by which to lead by example than the ?Web. This article imbues principles that I have made regarding how to be a part of the ?Web and how to allow others to participate in a non-discriminatory way.

What do I mean by non-discriminatory? Do I mean discrimination in the sense of race, gender, sexual-orientation? No, because on the Internet, nobody knows you?re a dog.

I'm referring to technological discrimination via technological assumption.
Let us begin with a solid example.

In the Land of the Blind, the One-Eyed Man Is King

If, let?s say, you choose to develop an iPhone app (instead of a web app) then you are choosing to limit who can access your content to the following profile:

Has a bank-account, or plenty of disposable cash

A bank account is required to be able to sign up and pay for a contract with a phone carrier. Not everybody in the world has a bank account. In some places, banks are so thinly distributed that people exchange phone credit as a form of currency instead. If you purchase an iPhone on PAYG, expect to pay a large amount up-front as well as for top-ups. Given economic pressures across the world, there are many people who are deeply in debt or have all their money already tied up so as not to have the means to ?simply? PAYG with an iPhone.

Is old enough for the above

If you aim your app at children, you are making the clear assumption that the child in question has a parent who is able to pay for the device because the child will neither be able to sign a contract, or have the disposable cash to just buy an iPhone PAYG. Not everybody has the privilege of a family, or even a stable one at that.

They will stick to Apple, and Apple to you

You are banking on the iOS platform being the be-all and end-all of technology, that it is in cultural favour (not the case everywhere), available in the person?s country, and commands enough of a market as to be beneficial to you to support.

If your app?s data / service / information has a long shelf life, you are assuming that your user will continue to always use an iPhone device, now and into the future, and that they will not consider switching to an alternative platform; Apple will continue to be the leader in technological platforms and that Apple will continue to allow your app?s existence on the App Store because your app does not compete with yet-unknown future plans or policies of Apple.

Agree to Apple?s policies

Whilst it may be no qualm to yourself, you are requiring that your users also agree to Apple?s data policies, including accounts, privacy, App Store terms and conditions and so forth?and that they will continue to agree to these policies as they change in the future.

As you can see, this rather narrows the scope and field of your purpose. That?s fine for some purposes, maybe you?re trying to target those very people, but in the context of the ?Web? That?s not good enough.

Denying Participation

If you make assumptions about how ?easy? it is for another ?Web user to be in the same position as you, you are discriminating against them.

If the only way to contact me was via an input form on my website, and that form required yourself to upload a copy of your browser history, I would imagine that you would have a bit of a problem with that and would stave off contacting me.

This is, in effect, what you are doing when you provide no other means for ?Web users to contact you other than Facebook or Twitter.

You are saying to these users that they must agree to the policies of Facebook or Twitter, hand over their information, and then proceed to be tracked across the ?Web, in order to be able to contact you. You are making the assumption that it is ?no problem? for any other person to register for these services because it is ?just a username and password?. As I have outlined atop, it is not ?just an iPhone?. It is an assumption that discriminates on technical grounds. Agreeing to Facebook?s or Twitter?s policies is not solely a matter of outlook on life, it is a matter of mechanical acceptance:

'We will physically collect this information, we will physically store it here, we do this with it, we will allow you this access to it, we will allow other people to access it (including advertisers) and we will not physically delete it even when you ask us to do so.?

There is nothing backwards, difficult, obtuse or cave-dwelling about disagreeing with those physicalities. There is no ?cloud? that magically suspends information in the air, there are rooms full of servers, cables and hard drives.

Allowing Participation

As a ?Web author, you owe it to yourself to be participatory.
That which you have received freely, give freely.

You do not know how many people have failed to contact you because you do not provide an uninhibited means of contact. We are not talking idiots and spammers here. We are not talking people who lay outside your clique, or are of no interest to you because they can?t be bothered to sign up for Twitter. We are talking about me: Kroc Camen; a very serious, capable and competent web author and programmer. I cannot and will not contact you if you somehow feel Twitter is the medium of the future and I'm just not serious enough a geek if I don?t have it.

I aim to fully practice what I preach: if you want to contact me and you do not have / want Twitter, Facebook or even an e-mail address (because even free e-mail addresses are weighed down with privacy implications?remember Google?s recent policy change) then you can write something on my forum where you will not require an e-mail address to speak. You will not be limited by what operating system or browser you choose (text browsers work, you could even post using telnet). You will not be tied to my forum?each post you make stands entirely on its own and forms no relationship with any other data: posts by the same name are not made to relate to a whole (such as ?recent posts by this user?), there is no database. You are not profiled. You are not suddenly part of a ?community? you don?t wish to be part of. No more a commitment is required of you than a name, a password and a message, all of which require absolutely no continuation from one post to the next.

Can you see how wholly unlike most of the ?Web that is?

And yet, with all these ?limitations?, the forum has succeeded in its goal; that we, as humans, are able to communicate. Express. Emote. The lack of requirements to participate on the forum has allowed people to say things they would never have said if they had to register / check e-mail / log in.

If you are an advocate of an open ?Web?a ?Web in which a person?s choice of platform or browser is no barrier to entry, a ?Web in which innovation comes from the small individual and not the big corporation?then surely you should not limit your participation to the traffic going through the gateways of walled gardens? If I can?t stand upon your shoulders because I need to enter a walled garden to build upon your thoughts, then where are your thoughts going to stand in twenty years? time? They are not your thoughts any more, they are Twitter?s thoughts, Facebook?s thoughts; for their benefit, for their advertisers, for their IPO.

You are not a forward-thinking, modern and progressive person because you choose to store personal and precious information with companies who have no requirement to look after that data with due care and respect, to ensure its safety, compatibility or even access to it in the future. Have you got the permalinks to every tweet you?ve made? Because there?s no way for you to simply view your old tweets now, they?re ?unavailable? so say Twitter. Why don?t you just write an SQL statement to bring them up? Oh, you can?t. Do you want a ?Web where you can only look at three months of rolling data?

I say all this with as much love as I can muster because I do not want you to fall into the kind of false thinking of the Apple advocates, that their way is the future; they will one day realise that they own nothing, yet will have lost everything.

Use Twitter. Use Facebook. I do not mean to communicate the idea that using these services is some kind of impure heresy, but that you shouldn?t use these services exclusively, to the exclusion of others.

An open, participatory ?Web will not simply come into being because you talk about it on Twitter. It is the result of allowing others to build upon the words you have spoken, the code you have written and the art you have made without the need to be a part of some business? ?exit strategy?.

Be Responsible For Yourself

• Do not place your entire online presence within the hands of brands. Make your own website. If you already have one, use it: blog more often, make it the centre of your creativity

• Companies may swing around and bite you at any time (policy change, data loss); live with this in mind always, code accordingly

• Do not include share / like / tweet buttons on your site. These slow it down, track users, clutter your site up and degrade you as a developer

Show Humanity

• Think of users as humans and not as numbers, database-fields and targets of product features. How can your website / service allow them to be more human and less network-connected-computer?

• Do not collect data just because you can. Do not require anything of visitors until it is unavoidable. Allow them to progress as far as possible before you request information from them

• Imagine that visitors don?t have, can?t have or don?t want an e-mail address. Can you serve them sufficiently without an e-mail address?

Show Humility

• Do not ask of anybody that which you would not accept yourself under a different guise (e.g. If you would never consider registering with MySpace just to contact somebody, don?t expect others to register with Facebook / your service to contact you)

• Other people do not think your website / service is as rad as you do. Do not assume they will interact with the site as enthusiastically as you intend. Do not get in their way / annoy them

• Prefer RSS over a proprietary API. Do not assume that other developers would give their full mental commitment to your API and would enjoy it. You hate learning someone?s needless API, don?t ask others to do the same

Be Participatory

• Provide a form on your website for people to contact you, or a comment system that allows unregistered comments. Spam is a technical issue and not the fault of the human wanting to contact you. Do not treat the human like a problem

• Degrade gracefully, do not require JavaScript or plugins. Do not block specific browsers or platforms. You do not need to test your code in every browser / OS in existance, just don?t place hurdles on purpose

• Make source code available via distributed version control systems such as git; people wanting to participate are not therefore forced to interact with a specific code host if they don?t want to

Code Is Art: Programming and Depression

I program best when I am depressed.
This is the story of my best code.

Kroc Camen

After some thought, I've decided writing a book is the only choice left to me that I can make meet my personal ethics as regards commerciality. I lament that such a backwards approach is the only viable option open to me, but I will be doing things in my own particular way, as I am about to detail.

The above quote will be the opening line / blurb of the book and hopefully gives you a little flavour of what I will be aiming for. However, I will not be discussing content at the moment as there are certain technical hurdles to get over first.

Availability

In short, the book will be made available to you in these ways:

1. Published here, on Camen Design, in HTML, free for anybody to read
   (possibly chapter by chapter as they are finished)

2. Purchasable directly from Camen Design, netting you PDF / EPUB / MOBI &c. formats

3. Available for pre-order, where pre-orderers will get access to drafts as I write them and be able to provide feedback through a member?s-only forum. Pre-orderers will get the final PDF / EPUB / MOBI formats once the book is finished

4. Available for purchase through the usual ebook retailers, though will be more expensive (details below)

It will be completed ?once it?s done?. I?m still in the process of gauging viability.

Cost

I do not know yet what the book will cost, however I intend to make the division of profit visible so as to highlight the practices of retailers and payment processors. For example, if I set a nominal fee of £10 for the book, and let?s imagine that I am charged 2.5% by my payment processor for orders directly through Camen Design, then I will set the price at £10.26. (£10.26 ? 2.5% = £10) The same book, in the Amazon Kindle Store would cost £14.29 because Amazon take 30% (£14.29 ? 30% = £10).

This way, I will always get paid the same amount for each sale, but the different hidden costs between retailers will be clearly visible to buyers. Will this turn people away from buying the book? Possibly, but in my opinion that?s the problem of Amazon et al. The book will be free to read on the website, so the reader isn?t being screwed by me. They will be able to make a clear and informed decision about where they choose to purchase the book (if at all).

I Need Willing Assistance

In order for this to be possible, I will need some assitance.

I need a payment system

This I absolutely dread. I would appreciate suggestions for payment systems I can use to allow people to purchase the book from me, or any service that allows you to effectively sell a digital download. PayPal is almost certainly off the cards.

Somebody knowledgable with self-publishing through Amazon / Apple / &c.,

and possibly also print, would be entitled to earn a share of the profits if they would lend their assistance with dealing with the headache-and-a-half that is ebook retailers.

Promotion

No idea. I?ll put it out there and let it do its own thing, but if you know how something like this can be promoted, then do let me know!

Anything you can contribute to the above, contact me at kroc@camendesign.com or at the forum (no e-mail account required), thanks.

Technical Stuff

Before I can put something into your hands, I will have to implement a few pieces of technology. To take pre-orders I will need a payment system, which is just a big black cloud hanging over me at the moment.

The book itself would be written using ReMarkable, just as I do to write the articles for this website. I intend to develop an additional tool or extension to ReMarkable to produce EPUB files, which are easilyish converted to other formats.