1. 99% of implementations are naive

The basis of OpenID is the idea that anyone can become an OpenID provider. So that means if I wanted, warpspire.com could start giving out OpenIDs to people. Let’s say I have 30,000 people signed up for a Warpspire.com OpenID, which they’ve used to register for 50,000 services. Then next month I decide to discontinue the service.

As of right now, those people would mostly be locked out of their accounts. There’s a few services that let you add multiple OpenID’s (like ma.gnolia), but almost none that I’ve found that give you a way to recover your account in the event that your OpenID has become invalid.

With a distributed model, it should be assumed that at any given time any given node could be disconnected or go out of service. Most implementations today do not afford this luxury. You can’t enter your email address to recover your account. You can’t change which OpenID you registered with. And you simply can’t access your account should your provider be having some technical difficulties.

When I look at the currently implemented OpenID ecosystem, I just see a tightly coupled system that is going to fail at some point for a large amount of users.

2. OpenID just doesn’t work for the mobile web

OpenID sucks hardcore for mobile sites. It demands more typing (OpenID urls are generally much longer than usernames), and forces most users to load an entire new external non-mobile website. In many cases, the open id login website could be 3-4x the data transfer of your application’s page! There’s no caching since it’s another server, and you just have to hope that their site works on the mobile browser you’re targeting.

We don’t live in a desktop-only world, so why should your authentication method assume so?

3. OpenID assumes the internet is full of good-natured human beings

It’s no lie that the internet is generally filled with a bunch of scam artists, thieves, and generally bad people. When I attended the SXSW panel on OpenID, the subject of phishing came up. Using OpenID means that you have one authentication method for all of your sites. It means that if someone malicious got ahold of said username and password, you’d be screwed pretty hardcore. The panel’s response was more or less “well, let’s hope it doesn’t become a problem.”

PayPal is the closest example of how this is such an epic failure The sheer amount of paypal-specific phishing sites is astonishing. Users are generally lead to these phishing sites by “purchasing” products from fraudulent storefronts. The only real way to know whether you’re being phished or not is to check the URL and it’s associated security certificate.

With OpenID, we’re re-opening this giant can of worms. Each time someone logs into any one of their N sites that use OpenID, they’re thrown back to their OpenID provider. This already creates an illusion of phishing — the site’s design suddenly and abruptly changes without warning. At any point in time, this provider page could be phished and a malicious 3rd party could intercept your username and password.

4. One Two Three N OpenIDs to rule them all!

The idea of OpenID is that you have one OpenID to rule them all. Right now I have six, only having purposefully registered one of them. Sure, it makes it easy for people to get on board. It also makes it damn confusing. For people who aren’t tech geeks, if the idea of OpenID isn’t confusing enough, the idea of having multiple OpenIDs and which one to use definitely will be.

The appearance of OpenID 2.0 and extensions such as SREG can only lead to even more confusion. Which version does your OpenID provider support? Which does your consumer demand? Why are they both called OpenID? The entire OpenID ecosystem breeds confusion in my opinion, and I wouldn’t know how to explain it to my mother without writing out step by step instructions on how to use it for each time she wanted to use it on.

5. It’s less user friendly

I’m a designer by nature so I look at the experience first and foremost. By utilizing OpenID, you add an entire step to the sign in process. What once was login -> done is now login -> open id login -> done. It’s slower. It’s more steps. It’s more typing. And it’s an unknown experience. What if your user’s OpenID provider doesn’t show an error message for typing a wrong password in? Your users are frustrated and may not be able to log in to your service.

I don’t care how you argue it, it’s just less user friendly.

Don’t blame the protocol for the implementation

I know that many people will respond to this article saying that there’s X or Y workaround for Z problem, and that they’re solved if you use C provider. But that’s not really the point here — I know there are workarounds, but hell, what was so broken about the original model? (registering for sites) I like the freedom of having multiple passwords — it allows me to keep tiers of security around my accounts. Should someone gain access to one of my passwords, it’s only going to affect a small pool of my internet presence. Forcing me to have one authentication method is less secure.

OpenID only limits me, it doesn’t make my life any simpler. If I want my logins to be ubiquitous across sites, I will just do that. Instead of choosing kneath for a username, I could just as easily chose warpspirekneath which has about 0.1% chance of being taken on any given service.

And now I leave it to you to convince me why I’m so wrong.

ENTP

I can’t tell you how incredibly stoked I am to be joining up with the rockstars at ENTP. The team is made up of the most skilled people I’ve ever known in my life, and they make products that I actually use every day. Best of all, everyone over there has the same crazy idea-driven mindset that I do, and the skillset to pull it off.

Helvetino

Helvetino is going to be my official front-end to all these random projects I’ve had tumbling around in my head for years. Sites like Poetry with meaning, Total Spore will be immediately joining the ranks, and sites like Drum Report, The Hostr will be joining soon after. It means that I’ll be taking all of these side projects seriously and finally give them the love and attention they deserve.

Learning and giving back

One of the strongest driving factors in this move in my life is just the quench for more time. I want to have time to sit back and just learn Actionscript, or just release a new project. I haven’t had that so far in my life — work or college has always taken up all of my time. Any learning time was the time after work that was already split between my projects and friends.

This move is going to give me much more time to work on the things I’ve always wanted. I’ll be able to learn new technologies and techniques right — the first time. Most importantly I’ll have time to give back to the communities that have made my job so enjoyable.

In short: keep an eye on my little github universe — good things are coming.

Warpspire

The third leg of this move is of course Warpspire. For the longest time Warpspire has fallen silent compared to the glory days of old. I’ll hope to have time to start updating Warpspire regularly now. I’ve never had a shortage of ideas for content here, I’ve just had a shortage of time to craft those ideas into coherent paragraphs. I looked at the drafts collection in my Wordpress dashboard and found that I had a draft from 2005 — almost three years old! No more will that happen — I hope to establish some sort of regular publication schedule, and maybe even finish the site some time (cough lifestream cough).

Web Associates

I do want to point out here that my choice to move on had little to do with WA in particular. WA has given me amazing opportunities in the past three and a half years. I’m 23 years old and I’ve lead projects that have served millions of users and shipped on millions of machines. Come this time next year, I’ll be able to walk into nearly any computer retailer and see my product on their LCD’s. I can’t even describe how amazing the projects and people I’ve gotten to work with have been. They’re a stellar company with a track record of excellence, an amazing culture, and have some of the lowest average work weeks I’ve ever seen in an agency (this is a pretty amazing thing — finding an agency with even a <50hr/wk average is uncommon). If you’re looking for a job, I’d seriously look at WA.

My decision to move on was spawned primarily by my craving to screw up my life — umm, I mean, take chances. When I graduated in June (2007), I transitioned straight into full time with WA, which was pretty much a dream job for me at the time. But in many ways it was the safe road, and allowed me very little time to exercise my crazy ideas I have bouncing around in my head.

So here we are — the dawning of a new day. Are you excited? I sure as hell am!

As such, I’d like to pose a simple question to those front end developers out there: What do you think the future of UI technology will look like?

Where we are right now

Right now, we have a huge group of platforms to develop with. We’ve got platforms for the web, platforms for the desktop, and platforms for both. In the past few months, we’ve seen the desktop and the web reach out toward one another, and the line is really starting to blur.

Web

On the web side of things, HTML is the prevalent technology, with XML and Flash following closely behind. The web has seen a revolution is technologies that enable rich interfaces. We can deliver high definition video, manipulate XML through the browser, and change HTML & CSS on the fly reliably across all popular browsers.

Sites like Scrapblog have proven rich interfaces on the web are possible and practical

Along with the rise of technologies that give us the ability to create rich interfaces has been a rise of rationality and code design. We’ve seen terms like the semantic web being thrown around as well as the rise of highly refined ideas like microformats. Developers have taken a relatively small orthogonal toolset — HTML, CSS, and Javascript — and refined it into an art.

Unfortunately the two movements have happened very much in parallel with little to no crossover. We have some extremely powerful technologies that allow us to create incredible rich experiences — but few rational and idealistic methodologies for creating rich user interfaces.

Desktop

In the past two years, the desktop has seen nothing short of a revolution in interface design. With the release of Windows Presentation Framework in Vista / .NET 3.0, and the rise of OS X technologies like Core Text, Core Image and Core Animation we’ve seen immense power become available to the user interface developer.

Most desktop frameworks have moved to core technologies — such as OS X and Quartz’s Core technologies

No longer does creating interactive 3D interfaces require a Ph.D in OpenGL — the power has been brought to the surface and now developers have great tools to create amazing interfaces with little effort through scripting languages and frameworks.

Where we are headed

Now for a little more proclamation, and a whole lot less supporting data. I’m excited for where we’re headed in UI development, and I think you should be too.

A semantic web

The semantic web goes much beyond building table-less layouts with CSS for styling. It goes to the core of the information we’re presenting. It means providing information in an open format for all to consume. Specifications like RSS, Atom, and even microformats like hCard and hReview provide standard templates for providing and consuming data.

We’ll see more services valuing their API more than their front-end. Twitter has orders of magnitude more traffic on it’s API than it does on it’s website. This is because they provide their data in semantic form.

I think we’ve seen the first revolution in the semantic web: RSS. The next step in my mind is seeing more and more JSON provisions. JSON is a logical next step: it’s lighter, simpler, more easily consumed, and even more flexible than XML. However with flexible back-ends like Rails, we’re seeing an almost transparent conversion between XML, JSON, and Enumerables — so it’s anybody’s guess if any format will even win out.

CSS will not evolve

I am confident that CSS is an excellent technology for typography, however after using Flex and WPF I am not convinced that it will ever translate into a full-on styling engine. Using real-time vectors, gradients, and animations is something that a styling engine needs to support: and it’s something that CSS simply is not made to handle.

Furthermore, any improvements made to the CSS spec from v2 on will not be adopted readily. Don’t get me wrong: portions of CSS3 will be adopted by individual browser makers and eventually they will be available on a large portion of people’s machines. But I do not believe that CSS3 in all its glory will be implemented and in production use within the next decade. By the time CSS3 is supported we’ll have moved past CSS3 and it’s limitations.

CSS support will be refined to the point of perfection for typography. One will be able to specify embedded fonts, anti-aliasing, kerning, leading, as well as performance on screen and in print through CSS. WebKit will be the first rendering engine to tie into OS-level typographical controls with pass-through attributes to Core Text. Soon afterwards Flash will refine the new text rendering in FP10 to be available through CSS. Windows developers will remain to have poor control over anti-aliasing for several years: despite having the best sub-pixel text rendering engine, ClearType has been abandoned since it’s inception and Microsoft shows no concern for designer’s pleas for typographic control.

Devices like the iPhone have revolutionized how people interact with mobile devices.

Rise of the device

For so long web developers classified “devices” as small, hand held mobile devices with limited resolutions. But we were wrong. Today there are more Wii’s in the world than there are tablet PCs. We’re finding online-capable devices like the XBOX360, the Wii, the PS3, the iPhone, and even dashboard navigation devices in our cars pop up all over the world.

One thing I’ve learned is that we don’t know where the market will head with devices. All we know is that the resolutions game isn’t terribly applicable anymore. We must think further past resolutions, and think about input methods and connection speeds. These are the variables we should be designing for.

The device will be huge. It is huge. Deploying to one platform is a thing of the past — instead we will be targeting the platforms of our choice.

Should we spend time optimizing our website for IE6, or the Wii? This question isn’t too far off.

Object Oriented

The recent past has proven that the object-oriented pattern has not only suited itself perfectly for visual scripting, but become extremely popular among hobby developers (the ones who start trends). We’ve even seen prototype languages like Javascript beaten into submission until OO techniques could be implemented with frameworks like Prototype and MooTools.

I would say that weakly typed languages will win over strongly typed, but with the awesome success of Actionscript 3 and C^#, I can’t say that will be a reality. I do believe developers all of the world would lead happier lives with a weak typed ECMAScript based language, but I can’t see it happening in lieu of performance gains through strong typing. You can always improve the power of the back-end machine, but rarely the client’s machine (where visual scripting is executed).

Relevance to the real world

Early interface development revolved around allowing humans to access functionality — programs like Microsoft Office are the epitome of this design. The interface’s sole goal is to help you use the functionality behind the glossy buttons — to crunch numbers in excel or save hundreds of pages of formatted words into a printable format.

However, interfaces will start gravitating towards real-life connections. Interfaces will be built that help you communicate with Tom in Virginia, or help you bake that special German chocolate cake your mother used to make.

CoverFlow in iTunes simulates browsing album covers on top of a glossy surface

People have misjudged this shift towards interactivity as a shift towards user-generated content. This is simply not the case. Sites like Facebook and Twitter prove that people want to interact through technology, not with technology. Applications like iTunes have proved that people want to have a physical connection to real world objects through their UI.

Convergence of the “Desktop” and the “Web”

Internet connectivity has become status quo. The choice of whether to build a desktop application that connects to the internet — or an internet application that connects with the desktop will become a design choice, not a technology consideration. A small handful of technologies (like AIR, Prism) will tie in os-specific functionality into a common UI framework. Meanwhile, a small handful of specifications (like RSS, ActiveResource) will standardize data available through the internet.

The end result will be the same: while the syntax of the technologies will differ, their approach will be extremely similar. I’ve already seen this happen: developing an application with WPF (desktop technology) is almost identical to developing an application with Flex (web-based technology). It’s also fair to note that WebKit will most definitely be a part of this end result. The ubiquity of this rendering engine across Adobe’s AIR runtime, the iPhone, Windows, and OSX make this rendering engine a clear winner.

Share your opinion

I really want to hear people’s opinion on this. It’s something I’m very passionate about, and have thought about a lot. I want to hear arguments, disagreements and proclamations of what’s going to happen. No one ever got anywhere agreeing with everyone — let’s hear your side.

Browser Adoption is s..l..o..w

We need to remember the most prominent browser in our market is IE6. A browser released in 2001. When we break down the facts, the majority of people surfing the web are using a rendering engine that does not support CSS2 or XHTML 1 (with an xml content type).

The language of the semantic web is primarily HTML 4 (released in 1997), and very little XHTML 1.0 (released in 2000). Keep in mind XHTML 1.0 is backwards-compatible with HTML 4. A <div /> is still a <div />, you just have more rules in XHTML 1. For the most part, browsers interpret XHTML 1 and HTML 4 documents identically. HTML5 is not backwards compatable — there is no HTML 4 or XHTML 1 equivelent of a <section />.

As for CSS, we still don’t have full support for the CSS 2 specification (released in 1998) among the majority of people browsing the web. The most prominent browser on the market (Internet Explorer 6), puts a shame to the word “support” for CSS 2.

Recap: It’s 2008. We still don’t have full support for specifications released in 1998 and 2000, and the vast majority of the web is still running on specs released in 1997. How long do you expect it will take browsers to adopt a technology once it’s finalized? 10 years? 20 years? I don’t honestly know — what I do know is that the web moves at a pace much faster than browser manufacturers can keep up with.

Other technologies are simply a better option

Let’s look at another technology for deploying web content: the Adobe Flash player. Flash player 1 was released in 1996 and has undergone 9 major iterations with the most recent (Flash Player 9) released in 2006. The Flash Player 9 has been downloaded over 3.2 billion times. It’s penetration is above 99% in mature markets. What W3C specification can boust a 99% penetration rate on consumer machines less than two years after the specification’s finalization?

The current flash player has support for semantic data structure (powered by XML), separation of style from content & behavior, and even things like local storage and streaming video. In almost every arena — Flash player beats out HTML/CSS. It’s technically more advanced and more ubiquitous.

HTML5 and CSS3 aren’t a complete loss

Ironically, one of the areas HTML5 and CSS3 have the highest potential is from within the Flash Player in the form of AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime). AIR is currently supports Webkit (the same engine used by Safari and the iPhone) and will render HTML and CSS. With Webkit leading the market in adopting W3C specifications (some of CSS3 and HTML5 is in the current Webkit build) — it’s only a matter of time until they get ported over to AIR.

And then there’s that 6-letter word: iPhone. The fact that the iPhone is powered by Webkit makes a huge difference. There are hundreds of iPhone specific websites out there — and all of them know that they’re getting iPhone. An iPhone running WebKit. Apple has the power to implement specifics of HTML5 & CSS3 and push it out to all iPhone users through iTunes. I predict in the near future, we’ll be able to start using these specifications for iPhone websites.

Wrap up

I really want to believe that the W3C is on our side — and that they’re working with the community instead of preaching to it — but I just can’t see it. The past decade has taught us that simply throwing specs into browser developer’s hands isn’t enough to get them onto people’s machines in a functioning form.

What’s your thoughts on HTML5 and CSS3? Do you really believe that they have a chance at becoming supported? Or do you just want them to become supported?

Me? I’ll be sitting in the corner dabbling with the Flash, Flex, Cocoa, WPF and the future of the web that’s here today. No need to wait.

It’s been known for a long time that Technorati has had some trouble with creative direction but this is just ludicrous. Did we not learn that <marquee /> was bad? Did we think that a <vertical-marquee /> would be better?

Because it’s not.

A long while ago, Technorati was seen as an innovator in an empty space — near instantaneous indexing of the world’s blogs. In an age when Google might take up to a month to index your content — Technorati had it indexed within a few minutes. They even fed off blogger’s egos and ranked them based upon the number of blogs linking to them.

But through a few burning crashes, Technorati started fixing the results — excluding good blogs because they happened to have created a Wordpress theme, or maybe just created a cool toy that everyone linked to. Soon the “democratic” ranking of the top 100 bloggers was really a hand-picked list of those blogs worthy of all-mighty Technorati’s adoration. For example, Warpspire is currently the 8th most popular blog on Technorati. But you won’t find it listed anywhere. The rank means nothing, of course — but it’s funny all the same.

In between a few hundred server crashes, and ever-slowing indexing of sites — Technorati started to fall behind technologically. Their bigger, badder, meaner, richer brother Google had started to beat them at their own game. Google BlogSearch indexes content faster, and searches better. Sometimes regular old Google herself will index content faster than Technorati. With a failing ranking system and technology architecture, they turned toward Web 2.0.

On came the drug-induced Jolly Rancher art direction coupled with awesome features named after acronyms. WTF. Where’s the fire. Hah. It sure doesn’t look anything like Digg, nope.

Soon we saw the family started to fall apart. They lost three key members within a couple of days. Soon after the whole team had nearly disintegrated and employees started smoking off in order to burn through cash at a slower rate.

And now we’re here. It’s like watching a zephyr slowly burn and crash to the ground while the pilots throw bottles of rum at the fire to slow it’s pace.

WTF Technorati.

But then I saw that the remaining 4gb models were only $300. To me, 4gb is equivalent to 8gb (or 16 or 32 for that matter) — not enough for my whole library, but plenty for music on the go. The next day, I went down to our local Apple Store and picked one up. In and out in about 3 minutes — and I had my JesusPhone. Another 5-6 minutes activating at home, and I had completely replaced my phone on my lunch break. (Another 20 minutes attempting to input our 64-character wireless access code at work, and I was cruising on Wi-Fi).

I think what pushed me over the edge was the ability to feel like I was on the bleeding edge (I got it just after the price drop) without paying for an unproven device. It didn’t hurt that Apple’s announcement came within a few hours of my paycheck landing on my desk.

Cherry Popped

The iPhone is the first “smart phone” I’ve had. Hell, it’s the first mobile device I’ve had with a camera let alone access to what is currently called the mobile web. In fact, I’ve only owned two mobile devices in my lifetime: the old Nokias with the removable faceplates, and some LG flip phone that I got for free.

You can call me addicted at this point. Only a few days with it and I can’t imagine how I lived without this thing. I love everything about it. I want a tattoo of “iPhone = <3” stamped on my shoulder.

Lazy Sunday Device

One thing I’m noticing the iPhone is exceptional at is my procrastinating surfing I do — the lazy sunday surfing. Checking up on forums while I’m chillin’ watching some TV, or reading the latest Newsvine has to give me (through Leaflets, of course). It’s the perfect device for wasting time on the internet.

Watching YouTube videos on this thing is phenomenal. I’ve never been one to browse YouTube — but for some reason, it’s so much nicer to do on the iPhone. It does help that YouTube interface has been simplified and you get high quality videos out of it. Same goes for watching movie trailers (through Apple’s Trailers). If you had asked me a week ago what I thought about watching video on such a small device — I would have told you that you were stupid. Call me wrong: watching videos on the iPhone is absolutely wonderful.

It does also leave me wishing that Adobe & Apple would settle their differences for a little while and include Flash (player) on the iPhone. With that missing piece of the online-video puzzle — I think we could see some seriously amazing things on the iPhone.

About those iApps

I’ve also been playing with my fair share of iPhone applications. There’s a lot of good here, and a lot of bad too. But it’s something that’s really, really intrigued me (as of this week). I’m starting to believe in this whole mobile web — or at least, the iWeb. Incidentally, I’ve been reading Mobile Web Design (got the company to pick up a coupe of copies) — and while most of it is common sense kind of stuff, it’s exactly the common sense us web developers need. Kind of like the fasten seat belt signs on airplanes.

Anyways… I think that this whole mobile web thing is really going to start taking off now. I can’t help but think that people like R.I.M. aren’t already firing up their internal engines to come up with a rival browser to MobileSafari. The truth is — the “mobile web” that exists today (iPhone sites excluded) is still pretty boring in my eyes. It can get you the information you need — but it’s not fun. The iWeb is fun and useful. It’s got me fired up about design again, and really given me a whole new paradigm to think about when designing.

Perhaps I’ll leave the ranting about iPhone apps for another post.

Topics are a year behind

After searching for the technologies I was interested in, I realized that more than ever panel speakers are talking about old topics. Who the hell cares about how to create a CSS-based layout? Who cares about how embed a Flash file semantically into XHTML? This has been done a million times. It’s old news.

I want to hear about what’s coming up. I want to hear about Javascript 1.6. I want to hear about Flex 3. I want to hear about Silverlight. I want to hear about H.264 video on the web. I mean fuck people! There’s not even a panel on AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime). That’s one of the most exciting things happening in the interactive space since Flash!

I do not want to learn techniques that are currently in place as standard practice.

This is a professional space

This is a professional space. A place for professionals to present quality presentations. Not for people to beat dead horses. I read a large amount of panel ideas that were just crap honestly. I wonder if these people realize they’ll be presenting these in front of live human beings?

I guess I might be alone in the fact that I don’t want to debate Fuji Apples or Granny Smith’s any more. There’s professional topics to be discussed out there: let’s hear it.

The popular kids are going to win

The other unfortunate result I see out of all these ideas is that the ones with the most comments are not the ones with the most interesting ideas. They’re the “A-listers” and the “famous” people in the interwebs. Most of the ideas presented by them were mediocre (compared to the rest of the panel ideas). A lot of them are presenting ideas that they do not work with every day. I think it’s a shame we’ve regressed back to high school again.

Ideas I like, and ideas I want to hear

Here’s a few picks from the few panels I’m genuinely excited about, and a few suggestions as well:

• The Future of Javascript, Today
• Scalability Boot Camp
• Design Contests vs. NO!SPEC
• Photoshop, Flash, Acrobat and Flex: How Adobe is changing the face of online interactive
• Flash Player 9: A journey from tweening to HD video delivery
• Stateful interface: How RIAs are changing the face of web design
• Web design as a profession: where we are, and what needs to be done

Why don’t you do it?

I was kind of surprised to hear a few of my friends suggest that I should present a topic. Why shouldn’t I? I could I list a million reasons, but I guess it comes down to the fact that I don’t have experience doing presentations. I don’t want to present a shitty panel, and I kind of hope more people would think about this when presenting their ideas. Just because you can submit a panel doesn’t mean you should.

Oh well, I guess the quality of the panels will help me not worry so much about sleeping in. Maybe I should just shut the hell up and pay my registration fee already.

The frameworks themselves are very good

I’d like to start this off by saying there’s nothing inheritly wrong with any of the CSS, HTML, or ideas put into these frameworks. I also think it’s an absolutely fabulous idea that people are writing them — it gives newcomers an easy way out to create professional looking designs using semantic XHTML and CSS.

Advantages of Frameworks

Most CSS frameworks offer three primary selling points:

• Speed up your develoment (don’t have to write all that HTML/CSS)
• Don’t worry about those nasty IE bugs!
• Normalize your code/class base

Speeding up your development

For those who have intimate knowledge of the framework, I do believe the frameworks will speed up development. But for the average user, I think that the time required to understand the architecture of the framework far outweighs the menial task of coding it from scratch.

Over the past three years, I’ve built unknown dozens of layouts, with most of them being extremely visually complex. On average, it takes me about 8 hours to build out a Master design into a functioning bug-free template. Of that time, I would have to say that doing the basic layout & typography (framework material) takes less than 20 minutes. That’s less than 5% of development time.

You may save time, but the question quickly becomes how much time, and at what cost? We’ll cover that later. My point being that frameworks do not solve the hard problems in CSS — the ones that pop up when you’re knee-deep in HTML and suddenly the goddamn box doesn’t show up in IE6. These are the problems that take the majority of time when developing a website.

Don’t worry about IE bugs

Well, gee that sure would be a wonderful thing if that were the case, wouldn’t it? The truth is the frameworks do eliminate some bugs — but they’re the easy ones to pick off. The ones solved by a quick display:inline or height:1%.

The frameworks don’t solve bugs where none of the public hacks work. Or where IE inexplicably adds a 30px top margin to your element, but then dissolves in when you hover over your main navigation. It doesn’t solve the problems when IE displays the same HTML and CSS differently on two different computers.

It doesn’t solve the hard problems.

Normalize your code base

This is one area I think frameworks are great at: getting a large team of people all using the same code structure. But then again, I think this can be solved by an internal styleguide just the same.

Disadvantages of frameworks

There are a few pretty severe disadvantages of frameworks in my eyes:

• Familiarity with your code’s architecture
• Inheriting someone else’s bugs
• Not learning

Familiarity with your code’s architecture

This is the largest reason I’ve never built or used a CSS framework. By building a site from the ground up, you gain a knowledge of your site’s architecture that can’t be learned through any study or documentation. When a programmer asks you a question about restructuring the HTML, you can answer right away. You know where the CSS styles are (hopefully) and you know how the layout works.

This is increasingly relevant in today’s Javascript-out-the-ass world. Once you start manipulating the XHTML/CSS of your site through dynamic scripting: you better know how it’s laid out. Javascript-based effects are tied very closely to the CSS structure of the site. You’ll have to know when you can use float and when you can use position to lay out elements. Should you use line-height, margin, padding, or height to get that container to extend? It’s a very important decision: and laying out the architecture helps you achieve this.

Inheriting someone else’s bugs

At the end of the day, no framework is perfect. No design is perfect. But instead of fixing your bugs, you’re fixing someone else’s bugs. Do you know how much it sucks fixing your own bugs? It sucks 10,000x worse fixing someone else’s bugs.

Not learning

Again, on my mantra of why I wouldn’t recommend frameworks comes the lack of knowledge gained by fixing those problems frameworks solve. I’ve advocated before how important it is to build websites. I can guarantee you that if you keep building sites from the ground-up, you’ll learn new things each time. You’ll learn not only how to fix and avoid browser bugs, but how to make your markup more elegant. You’ll transform the act of building websites from a job into an art.

Conclusion

Hopefully this clears up a bit of why I don’t like CSS frameworks. It’s not that they’re bad — it’s just that I don’t think they offer enough value for the drawbacks. It all comes down to intelligently analyzing your situation before you jump head-first into someone else’s code.

The one “framework” I do use

On that note, there is one framework I do use. It’s the CSS reset — not that I’d even call it a framework. Here it is in all its glory:

    /*------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
      Global Styles
    ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------*/
    * {
        padding:0;
        margin:0;
    }
    h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, p, pre, blockquote, label, ul, ol, dl, fieldset, address { margin:1em 0; }
    li, dd { margin-left:5%; }
    fieldset { padding: .5em; }
    select option{ padding:0 5px; }

    .hide, .print-logo, .close-button{ display:none; }
    .left{ float:left; }
    .right{ float:right; }
    .clear{ clear:both; height:1px; font-size:1px; line-height:1px; }
    a img{ border:none; }

What’s your take on frameworks? Do you use them? If so, what other benefits have you gained from using them?

The Basics

Let’s go back to the basics for a second.

This is a grid.

This is not a grid.

This is also not a grid.

Okay, so we’ve got that straight?

It’s not a grid: it’s symmetry

Now that we’ve got the basics of grids down, we can start to see that so called grids are nothing but symmetric vertical columns that may or may not be used in integer multiples.

In my opinion, integer columns are not grids. They’re simply symmetry. Going back to grade school to find the lowest common denominator and multiplying your grid across.

Integer multiples are not the only multiples to use

Throughout ancient history there has been a different ratio used instead of integer multiples (2x, 3x, 4x, etc). It’s called the Golden Ratio, and it’s a number so engrained in our brains that it can’t help but be great design to use it. It’s the number that built the Pyramids, and practically all ancient infrastructure.

It’s the number that’s built into mother nature herself. It’s the number plants, animals, and all life follows. Nothing on our body is twice the size as something else: it usually conforms to the golden ratio.

Golden Ratio: 1.618

I don’t use grids

On that note: I don’t use grids. I don’t honestly see much point in lining things up so that integer multiples are the basis of the design. I much prefer to use what I feel looks right. It makes my head a lot less dizzy, and my readers don’t notice.

Don’t get me wrong

Don’t get me wrong. Use “grid design” all you like. In fact, lining things up is one of the most basic principles of design. I’m a huge fan of so-called “grid designers” like Khoi Vinh. But, please guys… let’s stop calling it grid design and start calling it design.

Fuel for the fire

Music plays an overpowering role in my life. It’s strange, but all of my visual creativity spawns from music. I design best while the music is turned up to 11 and the walls are shaking. This particular design came about through inspiration from The Roots (hence its namesake). The final touches and realization were brought to you by Led Zeppelin. If you look close enough, you’ll find bits and pieces of this design that resemble musical ideas — such as the lifestream header (Listen to Led Zeppelin - Whole Lotta Love).

And here you thought I was being original? Ha!

Foundations

The foundations of this site remain relatively unchanged. Wordpress of course powers the blogging and CMS portion of this design. There’s a good amount of extentions from core around here, but Wordpress makes it so easy to mold, there was no need to even consider another engine. MooTools is a newcomer around here, and I’m glad to have him. I’ve fallen in love with MooTools, a love that’s most likely unnatural. Needless to say, all the Javascript around these parts was birthed from Moo. You’ll also see a splash of Flex somewhere around here. Thought that particular page will have to wait for further explanation.

Superstructure

The most noticable difference in this version of Warpspire is the return of the header image. I’ve added custom images for Featured entires such as this one, and brought back the good old V-dub from Version 3 for the back pages. The rest of the site is mostly HTML, with a couple of Microformats thrown in here and there for good measure.

You’ll notice a lot less backwards-compability around here. IE6 support has been dropped more or less; it represents less than 10% of my visitors, and I don’t want to deal with it. You’ll also notice the rather heavy pageload, especially on the homepage. That was a conscious decision, and one I’m not turning back on. We live in a bandwidth age now, so we’ll just have to get used it.

Heading

The most noticable change for me is the purposeful redirection of Warpspire. No longer am I the rambling college kid I once was. I’ve found my direction in life and know where it leads. This design reflects that in many ways, and so this site will be much more useful for the majority of you. Warpspire will now reflect the little snippet on the home page:

On the web since ‘98, web professional Kyle Neath provides resources, tips and commentary on all things web. Here you’ll read about topics covering design, programming, copywriting, and information design.

I’ve split up the site into three main sections:

• Featured Articles: These are commentary pieces on the web and technology.
• Tips & Resources: I’ve compiled a massive list of little tips here and there that I’ll publish on a regular basis.
• Marks: I’ve grown tired of the inspiration galleries I’ve found. These will be my own little personal subtitution. These are sites that I think deserve mentioning.
• Reviews: Reviews of music, books, whatever spurs my fancy at any given moment.

That being said, I anticipate there will be a lot more content than previously. For those reasons, I’ve provided some additional feed options to your right (don’t worry, nothing’s changing with the current feeds).

This new direction also facilitated a bit of pre-created content. So coming along with this redesign is a host of new articles / content pieces. Here’s the content that came along with the redesign:

Marks

• Dave Werner’s Okay Dave
• Joyent
• Ordered List

Tips & Resources

• Hack Markdown’s <code> (PHP)
• Exit with grace (Javascript)
• Truncate with fashion (PHP/Wordpress)

Most of the “old” content has simply been re-routed to the Tips & Resources and Feature’s category where appropriate.

I hope you guys enjoy it! Let me know of any funky behavior (I’m sure there’s about a thousand things I’ve missed).