My attention was drawn to a product called “mahabis”, and now the world seems ever so slightly but irrevocably a sadder place. It’s some kind of slipper for hipsters (so why are they not called “Slipsters”?) with a website full of moody stock photography models and portentous bullshit text. For example, they are not merely selling overpriced lesiure shoes oh, no! they are “reinventing the traditional slipper” so that wearing them becomes an “everyday adventure” of “finding perfection in the mundane”. This is not copywriting. This is copy-shite-ing.
In their Frequently Asked Questions (how frequently, by whom?) they claim to be “based out of london. our product is quintessentially british.” No it bloody isn’t, or you’d say “we’re based *in* London”. Sod off. And “tell me more about the company” isn’t a bloody question. It’s an imperative that no human being ever says. Except for Venture Capitalists, bank managers and financial journalists and they are not human.
Dear Copywriter: sentences and proper nouns (like “London”) need to start with capital letters. Basic English punctuation is what I call “quintessentially British”. And tiny light-grey text on a white background is SHIT.
Mahabis are apparently the “essence of chill”. Bullshit. Essence of chill, literally, is chlorofluorocarbons or other regrigerants. Or beer.
Like every pompous brand bereft of ideas, “all our products are simple, functional, but strive for a simple universal aesthetic. endless reduction till we find something that no longer needs the complexity of explanation”. If they don’t need explaining, why is there a page of instructions on how to out them on? With bloody diagrams. How hard is putting on some shoes?
And how much does a pair of Slipsters cost?£89! They also sell candles and stupid notebooks, which tells you all you need to know.
Stylable – CSS for Components – an open-source CSS pre-processor I’ve been working on with Wix, that automatically scopes styles so they don’t leak across components, that doesn’t alienate CSS designers and which converts the Stylable CSS into flat, static, valid, vanilla CSS that works cross-browser.
Editing the W3C HTML5 spec – my glamorous life just gets glamorouser and glamorouser. I’m at Audrey Hepburn level now.
Comlink + WebRTC An Intro to WebRTC – “WebRTC is one of the weirder APIs; one of those APIs that stand out because they are not very intuitive to a web developer.”
Something is wrong on the internet – “Someone or something or some combination of people and things is using YouTube to systematically frighten, traumatise, and abuse children, automatically and at scale, and it forces me to question my own beliefs about the internet, at every level.”
Silicon Valley Is Not Your Friend – “We are beginning to understand that tech companies don’t have our best interests at heart. Did they ever?”
On 3 November, the Queen and Uncle Timbo (Sir Tim Berners-Lee to you) came round to Lawson Towers to threaten me with a punch in the face and a karate chop if I didn’t co-edit the W3C HTML5 spec.
So I said yes they look pretty frightening, I think you’ll agree.
There’s a pretty groovy and diverse team, including Patricia Aas who works on the Vivaldi browser; my friend and ex-Opera Devrel colleague, Shwetank Dixit who lives and works in India for Barrier Break, an accessibility organisation; ex-Opera chum Sangwhan Moon; long-haired digital trouble maker who does “Open Standards at GDS” (Government Digital Service), Terence Eden; Xiaoqian Wu of W3C and Steve Faulkner of The Paciello Group, another accessibility organisation.
I’m currently advising Wix Engineering on web standards. As an independent consultant, I’m not representing Wix, but obviously any relevant lessons we’ve learned by open-sourcing our Stylable CSS for Components pre-processor will be fed back to the W3C Working Groups.
A lot of people have asked me why there are two HTML specs – the Living Standard at WHATWG, and the HTML5.x specs at W3C. What’s the difference? And which should you use? The answer: it depends. (Well, this is web development, after all).
Spec implementors (primarily, browser vendors) implement from the WHATWG spec. The painstakingly algorithmic WHATWG document is exactly what we need so that browsers implement interoperably. But it’s hard for web authors (the million or so normal folk worldwide who write HTML to make websites) to get advice on how best to write good HTML from the WHATWG spec.
I’ve long used Steve Faulkner’s excellent guidance on HTML and ARIA, for example. The WHATWG spec is a future-facing document; lots of ideas are incubated there. The W3C spec is a snapshot of what works interoperably – authors who don’t care much about what may or may not be round the corner, but who need solid advice on what works now may find this spec easier to use.
For example, the WHATWG spec talks of the outlining algorithm, whereby a heading element such as <h1> changes its “level” depending on how it’s nested in <article>, <section> etc. I wish this actually worked, because it’s useful and elegant. However, as the W3C spec says “There are currently no known native implementations of the outline algorithm in graphical browsers or assistive technology user agents” and so advises “Authors should use heading rank (h1-h6) to convey document structure.”
I believe the latter spec is more useful to people writing websites today.
I’ve got lots of friends in WHATWG and believe it when I wrote that the strength of the web over last 7 years has been due to WHATWG. In my opinion, the work that WHATWG did saved the Web from irrelevance, while the W3C went meandering around XML-land instead. I’ve discussed this with some friends in WHATWG and W3C, too, to canvas opinion. They told me HTML needs a cute little mascot, so I’m stepping up to the plate.
I don’t want the W3C and WHATWG specs to diverge in substantive matters, and hope that useful authoring advice we produce can make its way into both specs.
