2006-10-19

Me! centric vs You! centric

I was just pointed (by an eagerly link-strewing friend) to Shaun Inman's recent site revamp, and felt compelled to share some thoughts to reflect upon. It is rather good and inventive as art, at the same time as it is indicative of one of the most common mistraits typical for the web, which has been with us since it came and will probably also stay with us indefinitely, or until the rise of the Third Web, a user-centric revolution which at least I hope will eventually see the light of day, eventually. (It will of course get a more fashionable name stylish at the time, and not easily confused with world wars and similar.)

I'm talking about the Me! Me! Me! mentality, the I am the site designer and I know how to use and interpret the design and interaction elements of my site mindset. It is often harmless or a refreshing touch of visual personality branding, but just as often an impediment to visitors, or consumers, in the case of a business.

Changing content-to-background tints and contrasts over time to convey content aging, is a mostly harmless trait, as long as you are aware that you will not really manage to convey that relation by just doing. Any artist is familiar with that -- some may take note of your expression and even place it in the same semantic compartment as you do, but it will either go unnoticed past or end up differently interpreted by most of your audience.

Which is okay -- post time, for those interested, is actually stated in text too, and we can read it at our leisure. Some, who found a really old article of interest, where contrast is prohibitively low, might find it annoying, and occasionally perhaps even close the feedback loop, so Shaun might cap the restyling on the right side of readable (like many designers, he does not discount for his audience not having fine-tuned their display gamma value / contrast settings, the way he and his closer circle have). Or readjust their browser's stylesheet settings, or even find Shaun's own review-with-contrast link.

Breaking behaviour from plaintext or HTML markup in the visitor comment widget, is a more harmful trend that has gained traction in recent months, with Markdown, Textile, and a few other competing WikiML markup variants, popular in some audiences. Typical often-heard arguments for these are that they offer a trade-off between plaintext and complex markups such as HTML or XML, a middle ground providing rich markup without the penalty of a burdensome, difficult markup language such as HTML.

This is unfortunately faux reasoning.

The programming language Pike used to have a manual written in one of these markup flavours, aptly and insightfully named BMML, short for Black Magic Markup Language. On the web, all forms of markup except plaintext (which is what people write with pencils on paper) or HTML, the lingua franca of web markup, which many have invested time in learning to a level they need, and which we can also reasonably assume that browsers will gain increasing levels of support for, for instance via clipboard cut and paste from hypertext enabled tools.

Everything else is black magic markup languages, whether they be called so, or phpBB, Textile, Markdown, TeX, WikiML et cetera. While each and probably all of them can claim readability, they can't claim writability, because users are not hard-wired with their syntaxes and the WYSIWYG coupling is not there; they are expected to already know, or even worse, learn how to adjust to your preferred niche markup language. Why?

And before you knee-jerk that they can just go on writing their plaintext and ignore all about the markup language, can they really? If they want to give you a *hug*, will it come out as a hug? If they convey their moods (like smiles! :-) and flirtation ;-) with emotions, do they come out as moods (like smiles! :) and flirtation ;), as intended? Or perhaps not. Ever tried posting a bit of example code on a blog which treated it as text to style up typographically? Was the example still in a state you could cut and paste and run afterward? “String constans” too? Does it react well to URLs pasted, often sporting radical characters like / and ~?

And even if your user is a highly advanced one, aware of your using an alien markup format, wanting to actually convey his intended text, character for character, and even if you did provide a short summary of the markup rules and/or gave a link to its full documentation, what are the chances that page tells you how to quote a *, or -, or some other BMML cue? The chances of figuring out that within fifteen seconds? Is it * and -? Is it even possible in your BMML flavour of choice?

BMMLs force your audience to jump through the hoops you prefer to jump through yourself. To you (and a subset of your readership, or really commentorship), BMML may improve your speed of typing, or comfort of producing the markup you intend, but to others, it imposes learning a new markup language of very limited application (other sites that jumped the same markup band-wagon).

The today common time investment of having learned one pan-web markup format or using is rendered useless on sites that do not support it, and running your own markup adds a steep learning curve to be able to write properly, for all but your closer circle of friends.

BMMLs are excellent in contexts where you can opt in on them, such as browser extensions offering BMML to HTML conversion of text area contents or comment form content type toggles, offering multiple choice text format options -- as long as the choice is with the user, you are offering improved functionality. When not, it is first and foremost an impediment to using your site or service.
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2006-10-07

Autobookmark: another day, another bugfix

Don't install a version 1.0 product! ;-)

Anyway, yesterday's automated "oh, where did I trail off reading this comic last time?" bookmarker user script was naïvely flawed, in considering typical strip 99:s more recent than strip 100:s (you know; the ol'e classic "9 is less than 1!" bug).

Just reinstall if, if you were early to the game, and you'll also be rewarded with another feature I threw in for kicks, to get to forget which comics I try to keep track of. I figured that now that I outsourced keeping track of where, why not do away with which, too; the script knows both, after all.

Thus the "Next comic" link that shows up when the "Last read" pointer is the strip you are presently reading anyway -- it will just pick the next comic in the sequence you taught it how far you have read. And if you tried out some comic you don't want to keep in the list, you'll have to remove it by hand, for now; head to about:config, type "read bookmark" in the Filter field, and you will see a row named "greasemonkey.scriptvals.http://www.lysator.liu.se/~jhs/userscript/Automatic last read bookmark.bookmarks" which you can modify to your heart's content (it also defines the comic order). In case you edit it in a way that breaks the script, you can always reset it to read ({}) meaning the empty set.

It's not unlikely I'll eventually release another version making it less messy adding new comics to it, when I come up with a better user interface. That's really one of the main issues with user scripts; they don't help you overly much making comfy, good and stylish user interfaces.
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2006-10-05

Automatic last read bookmark

Today I crafted a user script I have been missing ever since way before there were any user script capable browsers. A bookmark that remembers my progress through an archive (of comics, typically) I plow through, a few pages at a time, in random bursts, often weeks, months or years apart, without my doing any of the book-keeping, remembering or similar. A bookmark that follows me where I go, keep track of what I read last time and suggest I pick up where I was there, whenever I return to the site.

So let me present the Automatic last read bookmark (direct install link) user script, which does just that. It's predefined to hook in only on megatokyo.com, sinfest.net and qwantz.com, since those are where I always both seem to lose track and eventually return to pick up again, and since all three sites are in the fine habit of keeping a complete archive you can browse, but the script works just as well for many other sites, too, and not just comics either.

To add a new automatic bookmark for some site, just add the domain you want it to run at using Greasemonkey's Tools -> Manage User Scripts dialog for the script and add it among the include links following the pattern. Some minor meddling, that I don't mind overly much doing once for each additional site I want to bookmark.

How it works, once there?

Well, say I go to Qwantz. It's my first time there, so I don't have a [Last read] bookmark. Everything looks just as usual. Today's strip featured at the root page is number 858, but with the root page not being a permalink (it won't necessarily hold the same strip tomorrow), no bookmark is made.

Let's say I go to the Archive, and visit the first strip, from February 1st 2003. Now, the script will silently file a bookmark for this page -- since it found a number in the URL ("/index.pl?comic=1"). Head back to the root page, and you will get a sticky [Last read] link in the top left corner of the page, pointing there. For every page you visit on the site matching the same URL pattern and where the number is greater than your last bookmark, the bookmark is silently updated, and you will be suggested to pick up from there on your next visit.

The script indexes your bookmarks by site and can keep track of however many sites you want it to. And on sites like these, where there is a single numeric straight id embedded in the URL, it will warn you if you happen to bypass any number or numbers, rather than just silently warping the bookmark forward in the sequence.

One final feature: you can always reset the bookmark to some earlier page manually, if you like; just head to where you want it and invoke the Tools -> User Script Commands -> Set last read bookmark to this page menu option. Enjoy!