Category Archives: Development

Dude! Seriously, keep your damn hands and words to yourselves!

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Ok. This is an open letter to every person on the planet. It is gender biased, written by a cisgender, straight, white male and directed primarily at the same. However, the message applies to everyone, regardless of gender, sex, preference, race, creed, or color.

You might find yourself wondering before you get to the end why I am so passionate about this subject. I can’t explain it easily, but suffice it to say that every year I hear the horror stories coming from women about their conference experiences. The stories I hear come from tech conferences and geek/fandom conferences. The most recent story I heard was from someone I’ve never met in person, but we’ve talked a lot online and I consider her among my friends. I also am a father of 4 girls and 2 boys. I don’t want to raise them into a rape culture. I do not want my sons to be a part of the problem and I don’t want my daughters to be statistics or victims. (And, honestly, since rape can happen to and by any gender, the reverse is also true. I don’t want my children to be rapists, enablers, victims, or statistics.) So I get rather enraged when I see behavior that does not adamantly condemn rape culture.

TRIGGER WARNINGS for BDSM, rape and similar concepts.

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Flash is Dead! Long Live HTML5!

So iOS devices can’t run Flash. Newer Android devices cannot run Flash. Flash will not be supported with upgrades on Android. Can we just all, as web developers and designers, just agree to never use Flash again? Let it die?

Are the HTML5/CSS3 specs solid enough and implemented enough that we can do all that fancy stuff natively? I have seen some amazing HTML5 demonstrations.

As we move closer and closer to the reality that the Web is not consigned to desktop interaction alone, we should design all of our web sites and web applications in a Mobile forward manner. I sat through a few sessions at php|tek 2012 about the Mobile Web. Everyone said the same thing…Do not design a desktop site and scale it back for mobile. Instead, design a mobile site and scale it up for desktops (with an intermediate tablet scale.) To me, designing for mobile first also means Flash should go away. Completely. Die.

Honestly, I’ve never liked Flash anyway, but I’ve been quite grateful for some of the apps that were built with it. But the time has come to scrap them all and rebuild them with the newer technologies. Sadly, the biggest hurdle to overcome is <video>. Video is where Flash is still used very heavily. Designing a site to use HTML5 <video> is a lot more complex than just dropping in a Flash player, but honestly, even that was never easy. You had to use <embed> and <object> and reuse your params and some params weren’t supported on some browsers…HTML5 <video> is a little more daunting, because even after you do the setup for the various implementations of HTML5, you still have to use a Flash fall-back….WTF?!?!?! Why can we just let Flash die?

I say we make a stand. I say we send a message to the browsers companies, that we demand properly implemented HTML5 rendering! No more fall backs! No more fail-safes! We need to design only to the highest *current* versions of each browser. We need to stop worrying about browsers that are, by all rights, obsolete. We demand satisfaction!

If only it really were that simple, no? But it’s not. The client wants there site to usable by everyone. Even people who still use IE6 for crying out loud.

This rant brought to you by the fact that I hate making my front-end dev work a sloppy mess just to make everyone happy.