Leigh Himel sensibly questions whether Crossing the Chasm is still relevant Not only are many technology products part of a mature market where design is a premium over features (expensive hifis have few features and sound good and these days iPods are like this), but Leigh suggests that people themselves as technology buyers are maturing which changes the marketplace overall.

I’d go one step further: crossing the chasm was and still is pseudo-scientific nonsense. Nonsense, because it takes something that is true but ultimately dull (the ubiquitous bell curve) and slices it into a shape that is practically impossible to translate to any mathematical model of real events and which has no empirical evidence of existence anywhere, anyway.

Crossing the Chasm works as a meme the way self help books, therapy, diet pills or creationism do - it provides a too good to be true gimmick explanation for the way things are that appeals to people who want the truth to be convenient, and easily memorizable rather than understandable and based on evidence.

To be fair, the original book was less pernicious because it was more qualitative than subsequent interpretation. But that’s to say its harmless, in the way that homeopathic water is more harmless than blood letting. Neither are provably effective.

One thing is for sure, the Internet has created a landscape for reliable, realtime, quantitative analysis of marketing, and with it the marketing landscape itself is maturing.

Have been playing around with Wordpress.com - very nice.

For years now people have obsessed with separating style from content and have thought that ’style’ is the same as ‘layout’. CSS has been used for layout, which it is a very bad language for (unlike many templating languages glancing at a CSS file does not tell you what a page design will look like which ruins the whole ‘view source’ model that made html so successful).

XML is a much better language for layout, but we are stuck with CSS, and so will have to split CSS into separate layout and style documents.

Andy Skelton & Scott Allan Wallick’s Sandbox theme is the first time I’ve seen something that moves towards separation of style from layout, not just style + layout from content. There is a lot that could be done with that - particularly if the semantic placeholders that have no real ‘layout’ component are separated out.

If that were done, and there was a convention for class names for specific types of element (e.g. a class for text can have font, size, color properties etc.) a generic css styling wizard could be built against it.

This mod re-write strategy seems to fall into the ‘duh why didn’t I think of that’ category of really simple but perfect solutions.

People use mod rewrites to trick google into indexing stuff create pretty urls.

Rails and a bunch of other frameworks force a grammar for links based upon actions and data when really most of the time there is no distinction made, there are just name/value pairs passed to the url. e.g. color=red is no different from colorit=red.

The strategy below loops through name/value pairs as url query string parameters and actually spits out the name and the value in the url:

site.com/name1/value1/name2/value2.

There are some potential problems with null values and ordering, but I like the idea.

Create Dynamic URLs With Mod_Rewrite and PHP Functions by www.Shadow-Fox.net

Next/previous, back/forward buttons - the single most important bit of web navigation are being used to mean the opposite to their original use in browsers, because of blogs.

‘Next’ on Technorati means back in time and has an arrow which points to the right. ‘Previous’ on Techcrunch means back in time and has an arrow which points to the left.

Web browsers are in many ways as simple as the universal music playing interface that has existed since the cassette player.

Music interfaces consist of rewind, fast-forward, stop and play.

A browser UI is almost the same and consists of back (rewind), forward (fast-forward), stop (largely redundant in the browser), refresh, home/url-entry (play).

Within a web page the back and forward buttons, ‘next and previous’ are ubiquitous for search results and the, increasingly archetypal, blog style UI.

Because blogs are reverse chronological lists and search engines equate ‘next’ with less relevant or less timely they do exactly the opposite of what browsers do.

The problem is that websites are increasingly following the browser model rather than the search engine one.

For Google or most blogs ‘next’ means back in relevance or time and ‘previous’ means back in browsing history.

Because blogs happen to have reverse chronological postings the ‘next’ ‘previous’ model seems like it is compatible with a browser’s history. It is, but only for this specific case.

It means that ‘previous’ can mean back in browsing history but more recent in time - which is confusing, to say the least.

The solution, I think, should be to assume that the browsers got their first, and that navigation history should be left/right arrows, where left is back in time.

For blog style navigation, where the very simple vertical list was developed, I would suggest that the arrows should be up or down, where back in time is a ‘down’ arrow and more recent is an up arrow.

If this convention were followed, there would be no ambiguity, and a single navigation device with left right and up down arrows, could be used.

In the UK in the late 80’s British Telecom carried out one of the single biggest acts of design vandalism when they systematically removed the famous red telephone boxes designed by Gilbert Scott et al.

The justification for this was that they were not accessible to people in wheelchairs. This argument was impossible for people to counter and yet hid the truth - there were other ways of making phone boxes accessible that would not have required a complete change.

People argue, quite rightly, for web accessibility, but what are the results?

If you pass some of the top web sites’ front pages to the W3C validator:

Yahoo - does not validate

Ebay - does not validate

Amazon - does not validate

Google - does not validate.

These have all been around for a while, however. What about the newer breed of online services?

Flickr - does not validate

Digg - does not validate

Del.icio.us - does not validate

Are all these companies wrong, or is there something wrong with current accessibility standards?

In the next part I’ll look at the current state of HTML and argue for a different approach.

Get a move on Apple - please don’t let a crappy half-baked service like BuyMusic.com steal your thunder and get any gullible customers before you launch your Windows music service.

Everything about Buymusic.com looks second rate; its like Tony Soprano hadn’t heard of the dotcom crash and thought he could make a few bucks.

And its not just the service that sucks - the marketing manages to rip off Apple’s TV ads so badly that you think you’re watching a skit on Saturday Night Live, but most of all it’s the product that stinks - music you can’t listen to on an iPod or burn onto a CD.

I feel better now that I got that off my chest.

One of the treats of the last O’Reilly Emerging Technology conference was to see Matt Jones’ excellent presentation design (along with some on stage air-guitar antics).

Within software, design is often treated either as a superficial veneer or as a reductionist process where aesthetics seem to disappear altogether. Unlike Jakob Nielsen, people like Jason Kottke and Matt Jones are true information architects.

ideal_process2.gif 773×544 pixels

Saw a demo of Chandler 0.1 today.

The most impressive aspect so far was that everything in Chandler has a URI and that any URI can be opened up and shared in real-time with other users. This seems to be extremely powerful and elegant

In ‘94 we did a 3d interface to Lycos where the search results were returned as a 3d model spinning around (groan) a globe. Results were shown as Cubes, Cones, Spheres and Cylinders, indicating whether the sites linked to were commercial, educational, service providers or others respectively. The size of the object represented the relevance and the color represented location, green for sites registered within the US and red for outside. The objects were slowly spinning and the speed of spin of the object represented size of document. Large documents spun slower.

The problem was that this was a toy, no matter how seductive the idea of 3 dimensional or graph based representations of search results, a list of text results is more useful for all but a handfull of specialist applications.

That is the problem I have with this and other attempts to create visual maps of search results.

The web produced some very sophisticated interfaces early on (remember Onlive Traveller) but simple interfaces are the winning formula, just ask Google.

Oh happy day!
Jason has found decent CSS styles for rounded corners. Now I can finally get around to doing a proper XHTML version of this site and ditch tables.

Albin.Net CSS: Bullet-Proof Rounded Corners