HTML5 Grid Layouts

I have to take issue with the swarm of "responsive grid layout" systems that have been cropping up lately. Yes, they're great for wireframes and prototypes. No argument there. And yes, they take care of a lot of the legwork involved in producing a responsive layout. Great. But in the process, they throw semantic markup and separation of concerns out the window.

The idea of semantic markup is that your document structure, IDs, and classes should describe the content of the document. Separation of concerns, in HTML and CSS, means using classes and IDs to identify what something is (not how it should appear), and using CSS to identify content and determine how it should appear; this allows you to change content without having to change appearance, and vice versa: the concerns of document structure and appearance are kept separate.

That means, as far as I'm concerned, as soon as you put a 'class="two column"' into your HTML, you've lost the game. You've chained you structure to your presentation. Can you change your presentation without modifying the markup? Not any more. All we've achieved in this is bringing back the days of nested tables for layout, with a pretty CSS face on it. With one dose of "clever" we've traveled back in time 15 years. Only this time, there *are* other ways to do it. There's no excuse. It's just plain laziness.

Is building a truly semantic, responsive, attractive layout possible? Absolutely. Difficult? Yes. Is it worth the effort? In the long run, I think it is - except for those cases mentioned above, prototypes and wireframes, code that's meant to be disposable. But any code that has to be maintained in the future will be hamstrung by these systems.

Web development has made tremendous strides over the last 10 years. It's amazing how far we've come in terms of what can be done and how. Don't take all those advances and use them to regress all the way back to clunky old table-based layouts. Try using them to do something new, and interesting instead. There's no reason the idea of software craftsmanship should be missing from the web design world.

Assumptions

We all make assumptions. It's the only way we can get anything done. If every time you found a bug you started at the iron - testing the CPU to make sure every operation returns an expected result - it'd take you months to troubleshoot the simplest issue. So we make assumptions to save us time, when we know that the likelihood of something being the cause of a problem is far less than the time it would take to verify it.

We also make assumptions out of sheer bloody-mindedness. You can spot these assumptions by phrases like "that couldn't possibly be it" or "it's never been a problem before" or "I wrote that code, I know it works". These are the kinds of assumptions that can get us into trouble, and they're the exact reason why it's important to have developers from different backgrounds, with different perspectives, who make different assumptions.

Since we all make assumptions, the best way to challenge those assumptions is to have someone who makes different assumptions look at the issue. They'll bring their perspective and experience to the matter, challenge your assumptions where they don't make sense, and make you prove those assumptions to be accurate or not. This stands as a strong incentive to hire a team with diverse backgrounds and areas of expertise. They bring not just talent to your team, but a different perspective.

It's also a good reason to invest the time in learning different technologies, languages, and development philosophies. Getting outside of your comfort zone can open your eyes to things you might not otherwise have considered, and help you to gain new perspective on your work - helping you to challenge your own assumptions.

Stupid Internet Tricks

A few weeks ago I picked up the delightful ASUS Transformer Infinity tablet. About a week ago, I finally replaced my aging, flaky Linksys WRT310N router with a fancy new ASUS RT-N66U router. For one thing, the difference was surprising. They're both Wireless-N routers from major manufacturers; however, while the wifi on the Linksys was unreliable and suffered random device compatibility issues (I had particular issues getting and staying connected from both Android and iOS mobile devices), the Asus is rock-solid. The speed and range are also a tremendous improvement. What more could you want from a router?

Stupid internet tricks, that's what. I spent a few minutes in the (notably snazzy) administration UI for the new router. I set up my (free) ASUS dynamic DNS host name and the (built-in) OpenVPN service, and I can now VPN into my home network securely from anywhere with internet access. A quick install of VNC onto my desktop machine, and I no longer have any use for LogMeIn; I have a free service that does the same thing, but entirely under my control.

The router has some other neat features, including a Guest Access option for the WiFi that allows internet access but blocks LAN access; optional complete separation of the 2.4GHz and 5GHz WANs; dead-simple static IP assignment; and, well, more advantages over my old router than I can even count. Definitely worth what it cost, assuming that it has the reliability and longevity I've come to expect from ASUS products.
Some additional features that influenced my decision to buy the RT-N66U that I've yet to tinker with:

• The router has 2 USB ports. My printer already has WiFi and Ethernet connectivity, so I don't need them for printer sharing, but I fully intend to hook two USB HDDs up to the router for network file service (which, of course, will then be accessible over the VPN!)
• The router has full IPv6 support. I tried to set this up at one point and it failed miserably; this is apparently because the shipped firmware (3.0.0.4.122) has a fatal failure in the IPv6 implementation that causes the router to become completely unresponsive when you turn it on. I had to factory reset to get back into it. I've since updated the firmware, but I haven't yet attempted setting up IPv6 again yet.

The Semantic Web: Practical Semantic Markup

There's been a lot of talk, for many years about the coming of "the semantic web" - all markup will include semantics that automated systems can read and understand for as-yet-undefined purposes, though prognosticators will speculate on all manner of technical advances that could come from semantics. What about the here and now, though? Right now, today, semantic markup can help you. Semantic markup does one very useful thing: it makes building and styling web pages a heck of a lot easier, if done right.

So, how do you do it right, and reap those benefits? Starting from a blank slate, start filling in your content. Don't even think about layout or styling - worry only about organizing the content in a clean and sensible way. Your headings should be in h* tags, with lower-level headings using lower-level heading tags. Your content should be in p tags, with no br's. Enclose the main content in an article tag, enclose sidebars in aside tags, and so on. Enclose your header, navigation, and footer in the appropriate tags.

Load the page. It'll look like crap. All you're looking for right now is a sensible document flow. The page should read cleanly from top to bottom with no styling. If not, reorganize your markup until it does.

Now that you have a well-organized, semantically-tagged document, start identifying the parts of the page that are specific to your document. Add id's to unique elements on the page. Add classes to just about every container on the page to identify its purpose - even if it already has an ID (more on this later.) Name your IDs and classes based on what they identify, not how it's supposed to look. For example, don't use "small" or "bold" as class names; if you want your copyright footer to be small, name it "copyright" and worry about the appearance later. If you want text to be bold, use the strong tag if it's appropriate (e.g. a bold segment of body text), or use a class name that says what the thing is that you want to be bold (e.g. class="announcement" or class="specialOffer".)

Try to use a consistent naming scheme. I use CamelCase for all classes and IDs, with IDs starting with a capital letter and classes starting with a lowercase letter. This is just what makes sense to me personally; it doesn't matter what your standard is, as long as you find it intuitive and you stick to it.

After all this, your page looks exactly like it did before. Excellent. Now that you've got semantic tags identified with semantic classes and IDs, you're ready to start styling your document. It doesn't really matter what you start with, but I tend to start with typographic styling. The reason behind this is that typographic styling will change the font metrics, and many parts of a responsive design will be relative to your font metrics, so starting with typography gives you a solid foundation on which to build your layout.

For typography, start at the bottom and work your way up: start by applying your default font style to body, and then use that as a base to style any other elements you need to style - headers, paragraphs, strong/emphasis, a, blockquote, and so on. Start with the most generic styles, where you can apply the style to the tag globally, with no class name or ID specified. Work your way in deeper, first with those cases where you can still identify with only tag names, but based on ancestry; for example, you may want list elements inside nav to look one way, list elements inside article to look another way, and list elements inside an aside to have a third, different styling. This is still global based on document structure, not based on classes or IDs.

View your document again; the layout still sucks, but the document should be readable, and your typography should be pretty close to what you want in the finished product. Identify the places where certain uses of an element - which should already be identified by semantic classes and IDs - should be styled a certain way, and start defining those styles in CSS. Avoid using IDs in your CSS; identifying elements by class rather than by ID lends more flexibility to your code.

Once you have your typography more or less like you want it (at least the font families and sizes), start thinking about layout. Your document is already well-organized, but the layout is very 1995. Now is the time to fix that. Presumably you already have a final design in mind, but if not, take the time to quickly sketch out a rough layout for the page, where you want everything to be, and how you want the document to flow in its final incarnation.

You should conveniently already have all of the blocks that you want to lay out in appropriate tags with appropriate classes, so it should be easy to identify them in CSS. If not, review your markup and clean it up. Again, start with the big chunks and work your way deeper from there. Adjust the layout of the main page elements: header, footer, body, columns/grid. View your page, and start tweaking the layout of the elements within those main containers; adjust the layout of inline elements like sidebars and images, adjust the layout of your navigation items, and so on.

Now that your typography is set, and your layout is looking good, you can start on the fancy stuff, like borders, backgrounds, rounded corners, drop shadows, spriting, and so on and so forth: all of the interface fluff that takes a site from usable to beautiful. We're on the home stretch now!

If you're building a modern website, you're probably going to be implementing some fancy UI behaviors using something like jQuery. Depending on the complexity of what you want to achieve, this may be quick and easy, or it may be weeks worth of iteration. Regardless, you've already given yourself a significant advantage: all of that semantic markup, the careful selection and classing of elements, gives you a huge boost using a tool like jQuery, for a couple of reasons. First, it makes it easier to identify the elements you're trying to control in your scripts. Second, it makes your code more readable automatically, because you can quickly tell from the way you've identified an element what you're trying to do. "$('p.boldRed')" doesn't tell you much, but "$('p.callToAction')" tells anyone reading the code that you're manipulating the call to action paragraph on the page. They know what to look for in the HTML, they know what to look for when they're looking at the page in the browser, it's all immediately clear from the identifier used.

This is the basic process for building a semantic web page. This doesn't cover the finer points of responsive design, which is a whole can of worms that I look forward to opening in a future post.

A Programmer's Comparison of Java and C#/.NET

I've been developing in Java for almost ten years, and in C# for only a few months, so this comparison may not be as thorough as it could be. If I've missed something please feel free to comment.

Java is far more portable than C# for one. I've built applications on Windows, and ported them to Linux and Mac with minimal effort. With Android running on a Java-based platform, porting to Android is made far easier. There's no fussing with Mono and the like, no making sure you don't use any API functions that are only available in .NET.

Java also has a wide array of available IDEs with excellent features, and a huge, active community. There are libraries available for just about any technology you can think of, usually more than one, such that one of the options will likely fit your specific situation.

Java's runtime generics seem to be easier to learn and work with than C#'s compile-time generics; however, compile-time generics are likely better performing. Java's overridable-by-default scheme also makes development a lot easier in many cases. While I do understand the idea behind C#'s final-by-default scheme, I prefer a language that leaves those kinds of choices up to the developer rather than enforcing good development practices through language features.

The JVM is also now expanding to support other scripting languages, including PHP, Python, Ruby, Scala, and others.

C# has some excellent language features that I would like to see in Java, however. Extension methods are extremely useful for adding functionality to classes without having to subclass, particularly useful in adding functionality to library classes. C#'s delegate features are really excellent, and beat any workaround Java has for its lack of closures for callbacks and event handlers. The upcoming Java closure functionality looks like it will still pale in comparison to C#'s delegates.

LINQ is something I would love to see come to Java; the ability to query collections like databases is extraordinarily useful and eliminates a lot of tedious code iterating over collections. I've yet to use it for querying against a database, but it seems more than adequate for that purpose and likely much friendlier than JDBC. And while porting is more complicated, Mono is a very strong platform, and there's even a Mono module for hosting web applications through Apache.

Speaking of web applications, I have no experience so far with building web applications in C# .NET, but I have done some research. Based on that research, I have to say I significantly prefer JSP/JSTL/EL over ASP.NET. I prefer the syntax, the workflow, and JSP's tag library system over ASP.NET, which reminds me a little too much of PHP or old-school JSP (pre-JSTL/EL) for my tastes.

All in all, I can't say one is superior to the other; like any development decision, it comes down to which option is best suited to the situation and the developer. If you've had the opportunity to make that choice, please leave a note in the comments and let me know what you chose and why, I'd be happy to hear it!