Tuesday, May 4, 2010

Ben Ward says "Link to it!!"

Ben Ward's post about the difference between web-like rich applications and real web content is awesome.

I think it pins down some distinctions that have been brewing for a while, and solidifies several of my own thoughts about it.

For example, his statement:
"If you want to build the most amazing user interface, you will need to use native platforms."
This is the fuel behind java applets, Flash, SVG, VRML and every other extension to the web developed so far. It's about presentation. It's something the W3C does exceptionally poorly, and I think they shouldn't attempt to do it at all. It's also something that every tools company has struggled with: the only way to extend kick-ass native platforms into the browser is to create a new plugin. The only way to get a new plugin recognized is ubiquity among the user-base. Flash arguably won that battle, but it's a losing war in the long run because now it's Flash or nothing. The other "open" alternatives are attempts that are valid in their own right, but have never been quite ubiquitous enough. And HTML5 simply shuffles a bunch of capabilities from plugins to the browser, which certainly makes those capabilities ubiquitous, but doesn't necessarily make them better, or even more open (as Ben points out about H.264).

But Ben also makes a brilliant case for content:
"Want to know if your ‘HTML application’ is part of the web? Link me into it. Not just link me to it; link me into it. Not just to the black-box frontpage. Link me to a piece of content. Show me that it can be crawled, show me that we can draw strands of silk between the resources presented in your app. That is the web: The beautiful interconnection of navigable content. If your website locks content away in a container, outside the reach of hyperlinks, you’re not building any kind of ‘web’ app. You’re doing something else."
This idea, the linking of content, is exactly what the W3C has always excelled at. It's awesome, the idea that I can simply link and connect pieces of content from all over the world and make my own connections and conclusions and in turn become a piece of content for someone else. This was Tim-Berners Lee's original vision of the web and I agree with Ben, it shouldn't be lost. We should fight for it. Maybe the real problem is that presentation and content have gotten so tangled and confused that we've forgotten the difference?

This galvanizes me to talk about some experiments I've been doing recently to make simple websites that make the distinction VERY VERY clear. Let me show you an example:

This semester, I had to produce "mini-sites" for class homework assignments. These mini sites had to basically run as static html because they had to be viewed from the local filesystem of a TF after being zipped up and submitted. They had to be viewable on the wide range of platforms used by the TFs, which effectively meant vanilla HTML/CSS, but I didn't want to have to code a TOC by hand either. What I came up with was an xml file tuned exactly to my content.

Take a look at the finished html page: writeup.html

This was generated from a handcrafted xml file: homework.xml. (You'll have to "View Source" to see the xml if you're in a XSLT capable browser like FireFox because it will automatically render the HTML for you). There are very few presentation aspects in this xml file, and quite a few "new" custom elements I created that are specific to the structure of my assignments. It's small and ad-hoc, which is fine. It's basically a micro-format without all of the extraneous divs.

I render it with xslt using this file for the presentation layer: homwork.xsi. This file contains all the rejiggering and mucking about that presentation layers require. Even so, I tried to make it as clean as possible by utilizing CSS where I could and getting creative with XSLT. It can even provide microformats-compatible semantic markup in the generated div elements -- the best of both worlds! Finally, I generated the static html file using a very simple ruby script: genhtml.rb.

Sure it's rough and simple (I didn't have a lot of time), but it highlights what I want to show: we don't need fancy web platforms or standards to separate content from presentation. We can do it right now, today, with the tools we have, it just requires the right mind-set.

I'd love to see WebGL, Processing and Flash sites that have separate RESTful urls that flay out all their internal content in browseable xml or JSON microformats, easy to link to, easy to transform and include in other pages or references. (btw, Processing already does this somewhat by putting links to the source code in the applet page -- brilliant!)

I'd also love to see brilliant new presentation layer technologies form, like WebGL, Processing for the web, javascript, Flash, webkit, etc. because I want to innovate and create that new killer interface and interaction model for my content that no one has thought of before and no one else has implemented before!

I think Ben's post and my experiments show a way that we can have both of these things at the same time as long as we don't get confused and tangled up in the standards war or the RIA platform war and forget the difference between content and presentation.

2 comments:

Jeff said...

This post reminds me that I wanted to advocate for this on a brand new web app we're developing at work. Linking directly to content makes it such a better experience for users and, in my experience, makes it easier for tech support or developers to debug issues.

Larry Kyrala said...

When I graduated, the source I link to for this article went away. I've since moved some of the source to a GitHub gist so that readers can still see the original context:
poor man's webcomponents, circa May 2010

In some ways, my approach then was similar to creating custom elements in WebComponents now. Interesting!