API’s and RESTful services are all over the web these days, but we continue to have to jump through hoops to access them. Either we have to use AJAX (which is essentially a clever hack) or we have to resort to server side technologies like cURL. This isn’t the case if the “arbitrary content” is an image, a script, some css or audio/video in HTML5. For those we have clever HTML elements like <img>, <script> <link> or in HTML5 even <video> or <audio> and if you want to fetch a whole document you can use the (imo horrendous) <iframe> tag. Most of these use a “src” attribute to go off and fetch some content, check if its appropriate for the tag, and then render it appropriately.

Why can’t we do that with a <p>, <h#> or <div> tag?

Imagine twitter has an additional API that just returns bits of text or HTML rather than XML/json for our hoop jumping ajax/curl type requests.

On my blog page, I could do this:

I could use RESTful requests directly in my page, without having to jump through hoops, without needing additional javascript & serverside code. Fetching content from a URL is effectively the core function of a browser, as is handling the resulting HTML. It just seems odd, that given HTML has this functionality (fetching and handling/rendering responses from a URL) built in for complex stuff like images, video and audio, why can it not do it for the simple stuff?

Sure this could be abused, but is it not even worth considering?

It turns out this was in the XHTML2 spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml2/mod-embedding.html So where did it go? Why didn’t it make it into HTML5?

More detail…

Updated: This wouldn’t replace AJAX entirely, as these would be synchronous requests on page load, but if we only need the content to be updated once per page refresh, it would make perfect sense. We’d still be using AJAX to submit forms etc, but there are a lot of cases I can think of where there’s no need for the requests to be asynchronous, it’s just that AJAX is the current easiest method of going to get data from somewhere else.

Also there’s the potential problem of people trying to load in all their content from different places and making tonnes of requests. Or alternatively abusing this to recreate the frameset / iframe hell of the 90′s. Whilst obviously this would be an issue, we’ve already learned the frameset lesson, and now people know how to use these tools properly (or not at all). In most cases, the request would just be replacing one that was being made some other way.

Also some people have raised the point, what would the browser do if it didn’t recognise the content fetched? This is already handled for images, video, audio etc. I don’t see why it is a hard problem to solve for HTML and plain text – this is what a browser is for!!

Some more examples…

Updated 2: It seems that I’ve not done a great job of explaining the potential benefits of this feature. If you’ve worked extensively with APIs, or if you’ve ever built a fully RESTful/MVC style PHP application, perhaps the benefits are clearer. Also if you’ve ever dealt with smarty or another templating language.

I’m not suggesting doing an API call for every single variable that might go into an HTML page, but it would still be possible to massively reduce the complexity of some templating or theme systems.

For example, in Symfony there is the concept of components. These are standalone templates which might draw part of the page – for example the menu, or a sidebar. WordPress’ templates & business logic isn’t separated in the “MVC” style same way, but it still has the concept of sidebars, widgets & menus. These components, or separate templates, are still driven by PHP but usually are completely standalone – they work outside of the context of a page. So an archive widget is still an archive widget whether it’s on page X, Y, or completely on it’s own.

In Symfony, components are pulled in using a glorified PHP include. WordPress is full of “template tag” functions which echo HTML by default and are always available to the theme.

If we had a src attribute for all attributes we could do things like:

or

or

Each time we can specify some default or placeholder content, and then rely on the browser to query the URL, and place the response into the right part of the page. All while keeping our HTML nice and clean and separating our business logic from our templates in the same way we have been separating our content & styling with HTML & CSS for years.

For WordPress, it wouldn’t make a great deal of sense currently, because you’d effectively have to have a PHP file at the location of /widgets/archive with:

But MVC style applications which use routing systems with controllers already know how to handle a URL like /menus/main-menu, send it to a certain controller to do some business logic and then render a partial template. For example an e-commerce platform may already have a product controller – this would probably take a couple of arguments, go off to the database (via a model) fetch the right products based on those arguments, then do some logic before passing the data to a partial templates.

So my /products/t-shirts/mens example would send the arguments category = t-shirts, sub-category = mens to the product controller, get all the products from the database and pass the list of products to a template to render a pre-formatted list of products. This could be used anywhere a list of products is needed on the site, and could potentially be exposed to the wider internet so that other sites can show your products (think amazon affiliate programs).

The MVC pattern is widely accepted as being one of the better application patterns – partly because it encourages a RESTful / stateless system which is basically an API with templates built on top of it. More and more websites and web applications are offering APIs and it makes sense to build your application with an API and use it yourself. I can’t help feeling that if we had this src functionality, this would encourage this style of programming much more and make the tendancy towards publishing an API even more widespread.

(And if you want to know what’s great about APIs… maybe start here)

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Tickets for the event are £10 and are still available on Eventbrite. You can follow tweets about the event via the hashtag #lwsbrowser

Representatives will be attending from Microsoft, Mozilla, Opera and Google to introduce the latest and greatest in browser-based technologies. For me it’s going to be really interesting to see folks from all four browsers together in the same space, and watch them hash out the doubtless tricky questions that will be flying around the room. I’m also interested to get the inside scoop on what the plan of attack is for each browser and handling all the magic that is meant to come with HTML5. I also imagine that they’ll all have some pretty nifty apps and demos to show us what they can do.

The HTML5 readiness interactive infographic is one of my favourite little tools for inspecting what will be available where, and determining which features will really be usable in the near future. It shows that not just IE6, but IE7 & IE8 also need to die out or completely lose market share before a lot of the new tech will be truly ready for use. I hope everyone has already heard about Microsoft’s IE6 Countdown page tracking the death of it’s much loathed browser, but is this just too little too late? You can test your current browser out at http://html5test.com/ (at the moment even Chrome only scores 282/400 for me) And this blog post is also pretty interesting for seeing CSS3 support as well.

For other random & interesting browser-based statistics & infographics (I collect these things!) check out this graph of historical browser statistics, these breakdowns of browser statistics by country, or this overview of browser performance statistics.

Drop me a comment/tweet if you’ll be there too!

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I’ve been home 2 days, and haven’t yet brought myself to deal with my email, read any news, or write a tweet. I’ve been on facebook, but that’s because it’s where my friends, family and wedding photos are. I’m only half using my iPhone… I’ve only had my PC on a couple of hours a day… I’m feeling slightly intimidated.

Normally when people are addicted to something, they’re told to avoid it completely. Some people go cold turkey, other people wean themselves gently, but the key to giving up is giving up entirely. I’m addicted to being connected to the internet, but my life dictates I can’t give it up entirely – it’s my livelihood and to be honest it’s who I am.

I believe my earlier conclusion was correct: I need a better balance – to disconnect once in a while. At the moment I’m worried that once I get back on twitter, catch up with everything that’s going on, get my iPhone notifications all switched on again etc, I’ll forget how to disconnect again and get lost in the ether. So this is my reminder to myself (before I take the plunge) to turn my iPhone off once in a while, to disconnect – you don’t ALWAYS need to know what’s going on – and to take a little time to relax “Cuban style” once in a while.

Cuba doesn’t really have the internet. There is an expensive data network (not 3G) I can access from my phone and a very slow broadband connection available on the islands for tourists, but the locals can only gain access by queuing for hours at small, rare internet cafe type places. Two weeks here have been an interesting experiment.

The initial feeling of panic that overcame me with the realisation I no longer had constant access to email, Google & the wonderful exercise in crowdsourcing that is Twitter, was quickly replaced with a serene calm. Being disconnected feels good.

Normally I’m constantly checking email, Twitter, Google Analytics, news feeds & other sources of information that feed a thirst for knowledge which only grows and deepens. A question posits itself: what’s the weather going to be like? what other film is that actor in? what’s the proper CSS for text shadow again? how long does it take to drive to the train station?… I can’t help myself, a few clicks or taps and I’ve got the answer. There’s not really even any reason to remember it as I can always find it again later.

Here I have to think, remember, use my powers of reason and deduction. I’ve read fiction books, something I’ve not done in a long while, and it’s been tantalising and frustrating to have to figure out or guess at what words mean instead of looking them up, to not be able to quickly wiki some battle or historic figure or religious icon because it sounded interesting. It’s been liberating, I feel like I’ve freed my mind.

Surely that’s what a holiday is about right? Taking time out, relaxing, leaving the world behind, reading a few books and having time to just be. This however has been something more, this has been the realisation that although the internet feeds my passion for knowledge (and knowledge is power) it also somewhat quashes my imagination, my ability to think for myself and to have original thought.

With the advent of broadband, and not much more than a year ago my obtaining an iPhone, I have reached a stage where I am never disconnected. It is time, I think, to work at getting some balance back.s at

I thought I’d post a link here, as I wanted to add my top 5 resources. The following 5 articles go into more depth regarding what Twitter is about, do’s and dont’s and how to make best use of the service. Enjoy!

1. Twitter Glossary – 15 Common Twitter Terms Explained
2. Practical 101s: Getting started with Twitter – from Dave Fleet
3. My Twitter Rules : What not to do - from John O’Nolan
4. 7 ways to use Microblogging Services for Traffic and Brand Exposure – from DoshDosh
5. How to Track your Success or Failure on Twitter – from Rich Page

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ExplicitWeb came from a series of conversations between John O’Nolan, Rob Hawkes and I regarding the state of web industry podcasts. We felt that the existing podcasts were often overly long and self-indulgent, many focus on one subject per show making them hit-and-miss, and most are done by professional podcasters, or people who have become professional podcasters meaning they no longer practise web design and development on a daily basis. The three of us saw an opportunity to do something new & different and ExplicitWeb was born.

Doing things differently means shaking it up a bit (and invariably making some people unhappy). Here’s a few features of ExplicitWeb:

• ExplicitWeb is short – the average show time is around 39 minutes. Hopefully this means you won’t get bored.
• ExplicitWeb is in 3 segments – each host presents a topic, meaning that in those 39-odd minutes you get 3 bite-sized looks at 3 very different subjects.
• ExplicitWeb is flexible – we regularly play with the format: one episode was a 30 minute interview and in another we added an extra segment presented by a guest. We’re open to ideas and always looking to improve.
• ExplicitWeb is diverse – we’re from agency, freelance and student backgrounds, developer, designer, and somewhere in the middle and yup we’ve even got the token girl ;)
• ExplicitWeb is informal – we try to present our topics like we’re having a chat down your local. We don’t try to be holier-than-thou and what we say comes from our real world experience in a hopefully down-to-earth way…
• ExplicitWeb is Explicit – …not because it’s smart or funny, but because that’s how we talk normally.
• ExplicitWeb is how it comes (warts and all) - we don’t censor and rarely edit. It keeps it quick & easy to produce and hopefully gives the show that “in the pub” feel!
• ExplicitWeb is bi-weekly – despite our time-cutting measures we still only realistically have time to produce a show every 2 weeks. This is definitely the biggest gripe of our listeners! Honestly we’d all LOVE to have the time to do it weekly, but we don’t. Hey, at least it’s not monthly!

The entire point behind ExplicitWeb is that we are web industry professionals, not professional podcasters. We hope that the benefits of this approach outweigh the negatives. That the content we produce is better for it, even if it means less frequent shows.

Check out the show and if you like it please don’t forget to subscribe on iTunes or to the feed if you prefer. Whether you have positive feedback or constructive criticism, let us know and maybe vote for your favourite episode? If you’ve got ideas for topics, or would like to present one yourself, get in touch.

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Originally intended as a small group of friends supporting each other to reach their goals, there are now over 700 members and I’m really interested to see how this develops into a workable system.

Last year I promised to write once a week and failed, so I’m hoping this might spur me on to achieve that goal this year. The intention is that a tracking system will be created to monitor progress of group members. If the system works (once it goes live) I’ll also be purchasing a mug as a daily reminder – I just wish they did one in purple!

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Web Hosting is a minefield…

Seeing the web hosting feature in the latest edition of .net Magazine has confirmed my feelings about the web hosting industry: it’s a minefield. A completely over saturated market of small-fry & big brands, most of which you will never have heard of unless you’ve heard a horror story or two. In my experience it doesn’t seem to matter where you turn, something unexpected goes wrong.

For years I was a happy client of Lonex. Their support was good enough although there was no status page, the servers were reliable, and generally things went ok. Then they got DDoSed and never recovered – my sites suffered downtime a few times a week, everything was slow, and I couldn’t get support to acknowledge or fix the problem.

So I moved to Surpass: a seemingly huge company with a public community, status pages, good support, and reliable service. Then I started work on this blog and found the pages loaded really slowly. I queried this and after ages of back and forth with support I got a message which simply read: “Thanks for your patience. We have completed some work on this server and performance is back to normal. Thanks for hanging in there.” – Nothing had changed as far as I was concerned.

Next I opened a single account on PeartreeUK and started prepping my blog for launch. For some reason I couldn’t get WordPress to work properly. In my frustration I gave up without giving them a chance and tried yet another company.

This time it was Clook. A more expensive company but they had good reviews from friends so I figured I’d get what I paid for. My blog had the same WordPress problems  & I realised it was entirely my fault. So I got it all fixed and launched my blog on Clook.

4 months later and I have two niggles with Clook:

1. Because Apache is running as “noone” PHP scripts create files that I can’t delete through FTP. There is no way to remove the files through the control panel so I have had to install a PHP File manager which I really don’t like. It just makes my life far more complicated than it needs to be, especially when trying to work with a publishing platform like WordPress.
2. For some reason there is no way to setup recurring payments. I have to remember to pay my bill each month. Yet again just something dumb that makes my life harder than it needs to be.

PeartreeUK – my Web Hosting Solution

So last weekend I  decided to finally sort out my hosting life. With all my resold accounts still hanging around on slowly-slowly-Surpass, and my blog on clunky-Clook, I’ve turned back to the one place I know I’ll get what I pay for – PearTreeUK. They may be relatively small, but there’s nothing like being able to get hold of an intelligent human being whenever you need one! Having kept my original account open as a test bed, I have now upgraded to a reseller with them.

I doubt you will find better customer service than PeartreeUK’s -  having one person consistently deal with you from day one means that you are always taken care of without the frustration of trying to explain yourself AGAIN everytime there’s a shift-change. If you’ve visited here before you may notice how much faster pages (and FTP) now loads – my WordPress backend feels like it’s on speed. Add to that their prices & the excellent attitude of their employees and you have a value-for-money service that I highly recommend.

Note: Expect an update post in 6 months documenting my experiences with Peartree!

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Personally, I strongly disagree with those who say web folk should stop supporting IE6 now, that we should use special stylesheets to make sites look particularly ugly in IE6, or more worryingly that scripts should be used to prevent sites from working in IE6 at all. It is the job of a web developer to support all major browsers (of which IE6 is still one) and punishing unwitting users is not the solution. It is Microsoft’s job to cease support of this ancient and incapable technology not ours.

The problem lies with the large number of companies and organisations that depend upon either Windows 2000 (which only supports IE6 not 7 or 8) or IE 6 for their internal business applications to function (think public sector in particular). It is these sources of revenue which force Microsoft to continue to support old technology & which keep the IE6 usage statistics high. All of these companies are aware that these technologies will be phased out eventually and should have plans in place to upgrade their systems, but again it’s not our place to force these changes.

Microsoft are now pushing IE8 through automatic updates and will cease support for Windows 2k in July next year – with this I can see the lifespan of IE6 finally drawing to a close. With the death of the OS which supports only the abominable IE6, it will be feasible for Microsoft to finally cease supporting IE6 too. When Microsoft say IE6 is dead, and only then, will IE6 really start to die – so the web design community needs to stop wasting it’s breath on users who can’t do anything about it – and tell it to Microsoft.

For now IE6 is still here and web folk still need to do their jobs. This means continuing to develop websites which support IE6 even in a slightly downgraded fashion, but it also means pointing clients towards a future without IE6 and guiding them them through this transition by removing all reliance on it. Cheer up, just think of all the work that will come flying in when IE6 does die.

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I had no idea that the article had been written or that I was in it, so imagine my surprise when I woke up this morning to find I’d gained 20+ new followers in the middle of the night!! This is a prime example of how the combination of micro blogging and social bookmarking has become a powerful tool for networking and marketing. It is allowing more and more people to have their say, and is exactly why I love the internet.

I also want to say thanks to Mariess and WollyMittens for enlightening me to the mystery of the midnight followers!

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