Month: March 2005

Haven’t you heard? DHTML is cool again. Now, before y’all run out scriptin’ your own little cans of Asynchronous JavaScript + XML , let’s pause for a second and consider these observations:

1. DHTML has inherent usability issues. These issues are still present to various degrees even in all new, slickest applications. As Scott Isaacs states in his post
   

   The user-interface issues revolve mostly around history and refresh. (For example – In GMail, navigate around your inbox and either refresh the page or use the back button. In Spaces (IE Users), expand and view comments and hit the back button.  I am willing to wager that what happens is not what you really want).

2. DHTML usability issues are here to stay. Unless some visionary scripting genius strikes again, they will keep DHTML as an application platform in the category of audacious hacks. Of course, the usability undoubtedly will be sacrificed on the altar of coolness: “What? You can’t click back to the album from a picture on Flickr? Well, boo-hoo! What would you rather have, a clunky extra click or the wholesome goodness of Flickr? Fuggetaboutit!”.

So, what is the nature of these issues that Scott was talking about?

DHTML vs. Usability: The Crash Course

In the typical world of Web, clicking on a link makes the browser fetch request to a Web server and deliver a new page.

At the moment of the click, the page you are on is deemed departed and added to the browser history (so that you can click the back button to return to it later, if you’d like)

DHTML provides the capability to intercept a click and, instead of fetching a new page, stay on the same page and do something with it (like open a menu or unhide a section of the page, or make a creepy clown jump out from the bottom).

At this moment, we are faced with an interesting dilemma: even though we clicked on a link, we haven’t departed the page. So, how should the fact of the click be recorded in browser’s history? Is this just a click or  some kind of weird “virtual“ click? And, if the back button is clicked, what should occur? Should DHTML script recognize this fact and adjust the state of the page accordingly? Should the creepy clown retreat back beneath the bottom of the page?

While there are are various ways to answer these questions, the fact that remains is that browsers were not originally designed to account for that kind of state change. There is no definitive way to detect the event of clicking back button. Heck, you can’t even see where we are in browser history from inside of the page!

The issue was further complicated when the XMLHttpRequest capabilities were introduced. With XMLHttpRequest, clicking on a page may result in content being loaded from the server and added to the page without leaving it.

Naturally, this opened doors for the thinking that maybe the user never needs to leave the page. Glory! Glory! We can build entire Web applications that are based on just one page, which changes its entire appearance using nifty server roundtrips behind the scene. “But… what about my back button?“, asked the ordinary user.

Web Page Paradigm

Developers, I am here to remind you of the Web Page Paradigm, put in words so eloquently by Mark Hurst:

On any given Web page, users will either…

– click something that appears to take them closer
to the fulfillment of their goal,

– or click the Back button on their Web browser.

Now, please repeat after me:

The browser back button is an essential part of user experience and every effort must be made to make it operate flawlessly within your application.

There. Whether you develop DHTML applications as part of your job or just as a hobby, it would not hurt to memorize and stick to the statement above. Feel free to print it out and frame it. Or cross-stitch it. Or put it on a t-shirt (Now, there’s an idea!)

Of course, with the back button comes its buddy, the forward button, which must also work in complete accord with your application. In other words, your application must be “clickable” back and forth transparently, as if the user was visiting the old-fashioned, pre-DHTML pages.

As an extra caveat, consider the bookmarks. In the Web browsing experience, any page can be bookmarked. So, not only your application must be “clickable“, it must also be “bookmarkable“ (I don’t think that’s a real word).

As a person who spent a lot of time working in DHTML trenches and looking on the Web, I have to admit that I know of no application or technique that universally makes any DHTML application adhere to these principles in all major browsers. In my experience, you can only go so far with what we have today. From limitations like the absense of an event model that would allow DHTML to react to history buttons to bugs that disable even a possibility of establishing the correct current location, this  is a tough one.

But I can’t know everything. Maybe — just maybe — there is a workaround or a hack hiding somewhere that brings normalcy to DHTML Usability.

So, you’ve revolutionized the way people access information. Again. Just after the novelty of a search engine wore off, the ingeniously simple magic of content aggregation is taking the world by storm. Now, you don’t look for the information — the information comes to you. More than that, with the advent of casual blogging, everybody and their grandmother — quite literally — can be producers of this information. Spaces, Blogger, the oft-forgotten LiveJournal, and other online services make it almost too easy for you to start your own personal feed, ready to be subscribed to in a matter of seconds. Type away, grandma! The world is listening.

And type they did. Suddenly, everybody has a blog (“online journal” is so two years ago, you know). People are pouring out their emotions, latest tidbits of news, however big or small, linking to each other, expressing their thoughts, ideas, from asinine to wickedly brilliant. The collective chatter is getting louder and more diverse, adding more and more harmonics, fast approaching the complexity of a white noise… And when my desktop aggregator tells me every two hours that there are 500+ new posts found in 100+ feeds, I know something’s gone terribly wrong. The magic spring of information turned into the busted open hydrant of blabber. Now what?

Welcome to the field of Social Content Management. Just a couple of years ago, its older cousin Enterprise Content Management (ECM) was all the buzz. But unlike ECM, Social Content Management is not here to support and enforce business rules, workflows, and an overarching information architecture of content. You can’t enforce workflows on a blogging community. Suddenly, it’s all about what sites you link to, what others think about you, whether and in what context they link to you. Rather than business rules, it’s cliques, networks of friends, and circles of interest. In this new world, content management is a byproduct of social interaction. There is no editor. There is no producer or reviewer. Instead, editing and reviewing activity is woven into the process of blog surfing. Whether it’s commenting on a post, clicking thumbs up or down button, pinging a TrackBack, even adding a link to the post — each of these actions is used to infer more information about organization of content.

Speaking in definitions, Social Content Management is a set of concepts, methodologies, and standards, which enable and facilitate creation, organization, and maintenance of content by means of social interaction of individuals online.

To avoid being egged mercilessly, I must disclaim that I didn’t come up with this term first, and certainly didn’t invent the notion. Slashdot is a shining example of Social Content Management, and this site has been around for a while. All I am trying to do is organize and orient the various thoughts regarding this subject to gain a better perspective on the field.

Of course, just naming the process does not solve the problem. By definition, Social Content Management produces highly compartmentalized and biased content structures. Not having centralized due process makes objective organization impossible, which makes it hard to get out of the boundaries of compartmentalization. However, centralization or accumulation of content organization leads to various issues of ranging from API or even problem domain disparity to identity verification and privacy. In other words, the field is wide-open. Actually, it’s more like a steppe, with rolling tumbleweeds and wild grass hiding treacherous ravines.

All the more exciting, isn’t it?

Developers of the MSDN Library site, I feel your pain. You’ve perfected technology years ago (and I am not talking dog or Internet years!), quietly enjoying its success, only to have all of its coolness taken away by Google. Then, some hotshot comes along, slaps a four-letter moniker on it and bam! — you are so out of the picture, it’s not even funny.

For those who haven’t been paying attention (Watchful Mary Jo and even the Noble Scoble included, methinks), Microsoft had used AJAX in production sites for many, many years. How many? Well, let’s just say that there wasn’t an XmlHttpRequest spec properly implemented in Mozilla. And certainly before the term AJAX was coined. Observe Exhibit A, the tree menu of the MSDN library site: asynchronously loaded using JavaScript and XML, beta in 2001, live in early 2002.

What can you do, Microsoft dudes? You just don’t know how to coin cool four-letter acronyms. Although I have a feeling you could think of a few four-letter words right now…

Jeremy Keith has a very nice and complete summary of pitfalls of using augmented client-server interaction on a page (the term Ajax seems to be catching on).

In short, just because you’ve mastered XmlHttpRequest or IFRAME tricks doesn’t mean that your page had suddenly overcome all traditional limitations of a Web page browsing paradigm and now you are free to do whatever you feel like. All this Ajax stuff do is offer you a capability to enhance the user experience, but applying it to actually achieve better user experience is a far more difficult task.

In fact, this task is now actually more complex than it was prior to Ajax existence. Now you have to carefully balance between the old-fashioned page paradigm and new functionality and make sure that neither steps on each other’s feet.

Here are two more examples of poor progressive enhancement:

• GMail. Don’t take me wrong, I love my GMail, but have you looked at the source code of this thing lately? Don’t — it will blind you. It’s not even valid HTML. GMail now offers “less-fancy“ version for “less-supported’ browsers. Well, there’s a novel idea — you might have not needed to create a separate version of your service if you started your coding with progressve enhancement model in mind.
• MSN Spaces. It seems that while the rest of Microsoft is slowly catching up with structural markup movement and starting to understand importance of valid and accessible HTML code, the Spaces seem to be stuck in the 1999’s “World’o’Tables“. I won’t go into details (but I can, if you ask me :), but their user experience could have been dramatically better if they used progressive enhancement and structural markup.

Here’s the latest iteration of the Credentials Screening module (for more information see this and this posts). It further improves the way credentials screening operates, introducing things like Windows authentication cookie reminder (because sometimes Explorer “forgets” that it had already authenticated with the site and issues a new challenge), better browser detection (since no other browser supports silent authentication, only MSIE will invoke the credentials screening process), corrected support of Forms authentication, and last, but not least — Authenticate event, which your application can subscribe to by simply implementing a CredentialsScreening_Authenticate method in the Global.asax.cs class. The signature of your method should look like this:

protected void CredentialsScreening_Authenticate(Object sender, EventArgs e) { /* body of your method */ }

This method will be called any time the Credentials Screening module successfully authenticated a user. Neat, huh? Oh, by the way, almost forgot:

If you want to explicitly make the login dialog pop-up (for example, you have a “Login” button for those who couldn’t authenticate through screening), use this static method to retrieve it:

public static string ScreeningModule.GetManualLoginUrl(HttpRequest request);

Well, this about sums it up. Let me know if you find any more bugs or opportunities for improvement.