Category: Technology

#ParisWeb 2016: notes and thoughts (day 1)

I attended Paris Web 2016 on 29-30 September, a two-track conference followed by a day of workshops. I heard about the French Web conference in 2006 for its first edition, but I’ve attended only the last 3 editions. It’s such a great conference. The people are passionate and respectful –no, they are caring and it makes the conference extra special. The staff is dedicated and wonderful. The speakers are excellent. It’s probably the most inclusive conference; as far as I can tell, it’s the only conference that has:

  1. live French sign language,
  2. live translation into French of English presentations, and
  3. transcriptions projected on screen.

In addition, the conferences are filmed for streaming and posterity.

I am not a Web {developer,designer}, but I’m interested for my work in taking the pulse of the Web Community as far as Web Standards are concerned. Each of the two parallel tracks of the conference were appealing and I am looking forward to watching the videos of the talks I could not attend.

Here are my notes and thoughts:

WebAssembly

09:30: WebAssembly, une nouvelle cible de compilation destinée au web pour transpiler des programmes natifs vers le Web, nous dévoile ses secrets.


Par Benjamin Bouvier (Mozilla)

Thoughts:
The description of the presentation stated that WebAssembly was a W3C Standard. That inaccurate statement piqued my interest. WebAssembly had buzzed in June 2015, but that had died out after a few weeks and if it has buzzed again, I have not heard.
I stood up at the microphone at the end and told Benjamin Bouvier that WebAssembly is being incubated in a W3C Community Group and that the group operates independently from the core W3C-staffed Working Groups and Interest Groups which create Web standards.
Notes:
from Benjamin’s slides:

  • to port native applications on the Web
  • e.g. Telegram web app uses a small AMS module
  • threads (which JS doesn’t do)
  • sandboxed
  • [Demos of video games]
  • When is WebAssembly going to be released?
    • it’s being implemented by browsers
    • could be available early 2017

e-commerce best practices

10:20: Y’a pas d’avancement, pas de grimaces ! Suggestion de bonnes pratiques à adopter pour des sites e-commerce qui souhaitent épargner des grimaces à leurs utilisateurs.


Par Thomas Gasc

Thoughts:
A series of sensible and most relevant Opquast Best Practices for e-commerce sites, illustrated by hand-made slides with graphs and examples.

Cartography on the Web

10:45: L’épopée d’un développeur front au pays des cartes


Par Erik Escoffier

Thoughts:
Open cartography on the Web is Erik’s passion. I have heard a lot about the topic in the past decade or so, in particular OSM, without falling for it. BUT, if I had, I already had a user name for myself: osm117 (inside joke: French movie about a dubious spy).
Notes:
from Erik’s slides:

  • Cartography on the Web
  • Open alternative to Google Maps
  • OSM (the wikipedia for maps)
  • “Open” enables data visualisation. Loads of them.
  • Mapbox [etc.]

DIY Mobile Usability Testing

11:20: DIY Mobile Usability Testing. A cheap, portable, easy to make and outrageously fun way of capturing your usability studies with mobile devices. What’s not to like!

By Bernard Tyers

and Belén Barros Pena

Thoughts:
A supercharged and well-delivered talk that didn’t speak much to me, because I don’t have anything to test on mobile personally, but that I found interesting nonetheless.

Notes:
from Belén’s slides:

  • user is an abstract entity
  • usability sessions are recorded (memory aid)
  • Testing in a lab is better than no testing at all
  • [slides on ideal recording setup]
    • expensive (costs up to USD 3250)
    • vs. Meccano elements + Blu-Tack approach costs less than EUR 70
  • [live demo of usability testing and recording on stage]

eBooks

12:20: Pourquoi le web devrait s’intéresser au livre numérique. Beaucoup de spécifications sur la publication numérique pourraient se décider sans vous. Il n’est pas certain que vous le vouliez vraiment…


Par Jiminy Panoz

Thoughts:
The talk that spoke to me the most thus far, because of the involvement of the W3C in Digital Publishing. I was at home 🙂
Notes:
from Jimini’s transcripted slides:

  • W3C digital publishing IG – lacks editors, so comes to us (IDPF)
  • IDPF (merger with W3C)
    • “Je ne sais pas où ça en est. il y a des différences de culture” –Jiminy [en: “I don’t know where that stands. There are cultural differences”]
  • Notable stuff:
    • CSS multi-column layout module
    • CSS figures
    • Latin Text Layout and Pagination (mentioned Dave Cramer)
    • [W3C CSS WG + TAG Houdini task force mentioned]
    • PWP
  • Digpub IG could work on Annotations and user settings.

Open Design

12:35: Open Design : les initiatives existantes et des pistes de collaboration autour du design graphique, des fontes libres et de l’objet libre.


Par My Lê

Thoughts:
Hear, hear!
But then, ‘Do as I say, not as I do’, because if you’re like me, you love when documentation exists, but you hate to write it yourself. My take-away, which is slightly higher-level than the scope of the talk, is that sharing how we work has at least two benefits:

  1. Sounding board: you’ll know to steer your work in the right direction
  2. Skills barter: you may get helpful feedback along the way and learn new skills or tips
Notes:
(slides not found)

Designing for screenless experience

14:10: The Invisible Interface: Designing the Screenless Experience. “When we remove the screen, the experience becomes the product.” I will discuss how to create meaningful interactions for a screenless world.


By Avi Itzkovitch

Thoughts:
We tend to constrain ourselves to the medium. In the case of the InternetWeb of Things and the everyday life objects, it is sometimes obvious. I think I’ve seen this talk before, or a variation of it. Regardless, it was enjoyable and inspiring. Avi chose a collection of pertinent examples to illustrate how a product needs to cater for its user, plainly and perfectly, and how we need to design for the experience.
Notes:
from Avi’s slides:

  • Thinking beyond the screen
  • The best interface is no interface
  • quote from Mark Weiser (Xerox PARC): “The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.” (1991)
  • the world is an interface (with connected hardware)
  • how we display info: pull; push – design what makes sense

Environmentally-friendly Webdesign

15:10: Éco-conception : mon site web au régime. Doper l’expérience utilisateur de vos sites grâce à l’écoconception.


Par Frédéric Bordage

Thoughts:
Just as Avi taught us in his talk that it’s crucial to think when we design, Frédéric reminded us how ensnared we are with technology, how it makes us forget to Keep It Sweet and Simple (KISS), and why hoggish technology is so bad.
Notes:
(slides not found)

  • The Web has become fat:
    • x115 in 20 years
    • x3 in 5 years
  • environmental footprint of the Internet is huge: x2 France
  • ISO 14062
  • Tools:
    • GT Metrix identify eco-conception good practices in place on the website
    • ecoindex.fr: grade from 0 to 100 of environmental performances and technical footprint. (example: Paris-Web website, W3C Website)
  • Key good practices:
    • frugality
    • sobriety
    • Mobile First

CSS (hairy) selectors

16:35: Il n’y a pas que class et id dans la vie. La tendance est au lissage des CSS, avec des classes partout. Si on jouait avec de vrais sélecteurs bien poilus, pour voir les avantages ?


Par Gaël Poupard

Thoughts:
Gaël delivered a perfect, thorough and well argued talk to emphasize the importance of some CSS selectors in HTML elements. So thorough that it felt like it lasted longer than 15 minutes.
I couldn’t take notes at this point –the subject was too hairy (his topic, not Gaël). But his slides are on the Web

To be continued…

I have fewer notes from the second day, but only slightly fewer. Yet, there was a talk related to CSS, and I have loads to say about it. I’ll post them in a follow-up entry.

Là où on part demain, il y a Internet

Là où on part demain, il y a Internet. Cependant, les Conditions Générales d’Abonnement du forfait téléphonie et Internet (500 Mo) que nous prenons à La Réunion, contiennent la mise en garde suivante :

8.9: Le client reconnaît également être informé des caractéristiques et des limites de l’Internet et notamment, reconnaît qu’il a une parfaite connaissance de la nature d’Internet, et en particulier de ses performances techniques et des temps de réponse pour consulter, interroger ou transférer des informations.

Voilà, nous sommes informés 😉 (et vous aussi.)

Opera is no longer my default browser, Firefox is

I made a big jump last night when I transitioned from Opera to Firefox as default browser.

It is a big deal for me and using Opera is so ingrained that I have a bit of a writer’s block.

I started to use Opera 7 in March 2003. As I was using Opera M2 (the built-in mail client) it very soon became my default browser, all the way through Opera 12.16, until last night.

My favourite Opera features:

I’m scanning the Opera version history, and peruse the list of wonderful features my browser had. Here are my rock stars:

  • Sessions (1.0)
  • Nicknames (3.0)
  • Tabbed browsing (4.0)
  • Zoom (2.10)
  • M2 e-mail (7.0)
  • Drag-and-Drop of Tabs (7.0)
  • Panels (7.0)
  • Notes (7.10)
  • Wand manager (7.10)
  • RSS newsfeeds (7.50) & Atom news feeder support (8.0)
  • Fit to Window Width (8.0)
  • opera:config (9.0)
  • Widgets (9.0)
  • Opera Dragonfly debugger (9.50)
  • Opera Quick Find (9.50)
  • Alternative tab-closing behaviors (9.50)
  • Follow/Ignore threads and contacts (9.60)
  • Go To Thread (9.60)
  • Visual tabs (10.0)
  • Tab stacking (11.0)
  • Grouping and pinning of messages (11.60)
  • opera:cpu (12.0)

Between Opera and I, it’s become complicated

A few months back I heard the news that Opera was going to ship a browser based on a different engine (It has started in the meantime). Opera then shipped a stand-alone Mail application, which I’ve been using since then. Although there is still a little dev planned for the Opera 12.x series, it is a matter of time until Opera suggests its users upgrade to the Chromium based version.

But already before that, my using Opera had become an act of faith. I have migrated the same profile over the years –ten years. The Opera folder that is in my Library/Application Support/ folder has 144K items and occupies 8.17 GB on disk. Most of which is mail storage, but still, that too was migrated in each major Opera update. I have had strange bugs, common bugs, found work-arounds, etc. Up to a certain point, there was no more satisfaction in having yet another bug to work around.

An act of faith, I wrote. Yes. For some reason, Opera has become even less stable on my machine during the Fall or Winter. It would crash both during usage or when running in the background. It would crash and crash while restarting. Every time it restarted after crash I had to restart it properly otherwise clicking links in other apps had no result.

Everything put together, the cost of troubleshooting overpowers the rest, and the browser has already become foreign to me as much of the rock star features that truly made Opera my default browser are not yet available in the current release. Exit Opera. Enters Firefox.

Hooking up with Firefox

Of the browsers I use, I’ve made Firefox my default browser last night. I sorted a bit the existing bookmarks, made a backup. I sorted through my 90+ open tabs in Opera, saved them as a bookmark folder, exported my Opera bookmarks as HTML and imported this in Firefox. I went trough the preferences, grouped my tabs, place the windows where appropriate, reduced the size of icons and page zoom (struggled a bit for the latter, as I want to rely the least on add-ons). And that is it.

So this morning, rehab has started, so to speak, and there are a few things that I am still wrestling with:

  • Missing the ability to see all 90+ tabs in one bar & Tab Stacking
  • Missing the Tab trash (but History is good enough)
  • Missing Opera Notes
  • Dreading to re-set expectations in terms of search (history, bookmarks)

I wrote ‘rehab’ mostly because I have to adjust ten years or so worth of habits with a given tool. There are equivalent features in Firefox, I just need to find them and get used to them. There are other ways to work, too, that I’m considering to explore. And if it doesn’t work for me, I’ll just quit my job and try to make a living out of photography. I’m jesting. I’ll just go and try out another browser.

Stand-alone Opera Mail client

I found out today that with their release of Opera 15, Opera made M2 a stand-alone application. I question their claim that:

On popular demand we have split the Opera Mail client from our desktop browser.

But I’ll probably use it, if their business decision remains to keep the Mail client separate from the browser, despite the numerous comments I read this morning. I estimate that 1 out of 3 lamented the split in question, and much more lamented the lack of much-appreciated other features such as dragonfly, notes, RSS, bookmarks etc., just to quote those which I care about.

I downloaded the application and asked the New Account Wizard to import my data from the Opera Browser. It took a long while. The wizard was stuck with 42% imported and the application was “Not responding” for a moment. I have been using Opera and the built-in Mail client for more than ten years, so it had a lot to work with.

Import complete

It looks and feels exactly the same as the built-in client. Only the panel just has “Mail” and “Contacts” now. Even the panel is placed where it was in the browser. My 159300+ messages are still there, and the custom labels as well.

The one thing it doesn’t know to do is to open the Opera browser (which is my default browser) in order to resolve a URI that I find in a mail. But when the browser is running, clicking a link in e-mail opens a tab in the other window of the Opera Browser.

There is one thing that is missing in the mail client: a Notes panel; and here’s why.

Bring back Notes in Opera Mail!

Notes is helpful in Mail. When I switched from Netscape Mail to Opera M2, the latter lacked the notion of e-mail templates. The alternative was to create the body of such templates as notes and use them as appropriate. For example, selecting one of these notes and invoking a Compose Message window pre-fills it with the content of the note in the body.

Today I can still do a variation of this, picking the content I want to re-use from the Notes panel of the Opera Browser, and pasting it in a Compose window of the Opera Mail client. But it is a work-around.

Giving Notes to Opera Mail would be convenient. That, or real e-mail templates.

Getting used to it

I have set up Opera Mail to leave messages on server so I can stop using it at will, and take it where I left it in the Opera browser. I doubt I’ll do it. Although I really find it convenient to have Mail in the browser, I doubt that Opera will change the business decision they took and I figure I need to get used to it this way as soon as possible, rather than to be in denial and sulk.

For now I keep looking for the Mail tab in the Opera Browser window. Also, I’ll need to rearrange my windows to accommodate the new one. That means less screen real-estate (15 inch screen, I no longer use virtual desktops).

Update 22 October 2013: I have not reverted to using Mail in Opera 12.16. After almost 5 months, I have just set up Opera Mail to no longer leave messages on the server; so it instructed the server to get rid of 8987 messages (about 1800/month).