Infrequently Noted

I wrote this post well ahead of the release of IE 7, and I've been holding back on writing a follow up until things seemed reasonably settled. A year and a half since that post, and almost a year since IE 7 hit the streets, I fear things are more settled than anyone would like.

The "worst case scenario" that I've described to folks in private for a long time is that IE 7 is the end of the line. The last hurrah. The final gasp of life in Trident's creaking limbs. IE 7 could either signal the beginning of a renewed commitment to the web by Microsoft, or it could be the minimum MSFT can get away with to prevent customer mutiny. To assuage the latter scenario, I've directly and firmly asked every member of the IE team I've talked to since then to outline in public Microsoft's commitment to new versions of IE. We need to see timelines, feature targets, and distribution plans for those releases as well. This might seem like putting the cart before the horse but I think it's not too much to ask. In fact, it might even be the minimum the web development community should expect.

To contrast the IE commitment to a better future with Mozilla's, it's instructive to look at the roadmaps for each. Brendan Eich has an entire blog dedicated to communicating outward about the features that we can expect from the web as delivered by Firefox (and the platform behind it). The IE Team's blog is eerily silent on the future of what is still the most important browser on the internet. We're reduced to getting information from third parties and conference talks. The features planned for Firefox 3 are impressive and the work is being done in the open, meaning it's easy to have confidence that not only will Mozilla ship what they say they will, it'll be here when they say it will. Same goes for the excellent work the Safari team has been doing. Even Opera keeps its community on fire by shipping regular updates, showing tech previews at conferences, and blogging about the progress being made on many fronts. If the IE team is holed up working on something stonkingly good, they certainly aren't doing themselves any favors by not telling us about it. The result of their radio silence isn't mystery, it's distrust. Deep, divisive, troubling distrust of the kind you can only get when folks who break up stop talking altogether. The problem is that IE still has half of my DVDs and my friends keep telling me it's just using me. Not a great way to rebuild a relationship.

Part of the distrust springs for what wasn't in IE 7.

We did get some good things, of course. The tireless vendor-focused work of Molly Holzschlag and other (relative) pragmatists in the standards community helped get a lot of the most egregious issues fixed. But for as important as those fixes where, they were important in a historical context. They helped enable better versions of what we started to develop with in 1998.

When I caught up with Ted Leung at OSCON this year, we had a long discussion about "RIA's" in general, but in talking with him it became clear to me how little of what we (rich app developers) needed was delivered by IE 7. Of the 10 items on my off-the-cuff list, only gzip issues and memory allocation have been substantively addressed. And quite frankly, it was a reserved list; it only included things that might have been hard but shouldn't require fundamental architectural changes. Progress has been made on memory leakage, but we're still finding new leak patterns that need guarding against.

And then there are the regressions. On my list from last year was VML, and far from fixing its performance IE 7 broke critical VML functionality. Yes, yes, VML is old, bad, silly tech, but then so is the rest of what we've got to work with out here on the open web. Microsoft has subsequently released Silverlight which we're using to hack around some of VML's liabilities for limited situations, but we might as well be using Flash or Java at that point. Silverlight has nearly zero market penetration and it's yet another "draw in a little box" solution which isn't Open Web tech. Yawn. The IE team also removed the only WYSIWYG infrastructure that was worth a damn in their browser. The only reason web developers didn't raise holy hell over this is probably that every other browser is worse than even the IE fallback position.

Judging IE's progress feels like making excuses for a rotten kid with absentee parents: at some point explanations cease to matter and the behavior itself needs to be addressed. I'm not giving up on IE's potential, but it's harder and harder to trust that the baby steps taken with IE 7 are going to solidify into a pattern of real progress when we've gone a year without any real communication from Microsoft as to what's next.

I'm pretty sure the IE team isn't sitting still. Chris Wilson is heading up the HTML 5 working group and there's reports of some real progress there. HTML 5 is the most important web spec under consideration anywhere so this is truly good news. But it hasn't yet been accompanied by the kinds of communication that allow us to trust MSFT as a custodian of the web's future.

Getting IE 7 and watching it ramp up among IE's installed base has been good, but it's only half the answer. The web needs to know, unequivocally, when we can expect more information about IE.Next, what OSes it will target, and what standards, improvements, and major fixes are on the roadmap even if they slip. Without that much honesty, this relationship probably won't get off the ground again.

Last week we released Dojo 0.9, and while we're excited at how well it performs, how easy it is to use, etc. but the proof is in the apps. In particular, Plaxo Pulse, AOL's TinyBuddy (app here) and the new Bloglines beta are all 0.9 based and the experience really shows it. They're all "data stream" apps, things you fire up and then leave open or spend lots of time in, and they're amazingly useable, responsive, and useful. If you haven't tried them out, now's the time to give them a whirl and get a feel for how 0.9 is helping real apps rock.

SitePen is hiring.

To be honest, SitePen is usually hiring, so why the blog post? Because I'm hiring for a SitePen R&D Associate. This isn't your average programming job. Not only will all the work from this new position be released as Open Source software,it's a self-directed research job. Combined with SitePen's completely-virtual structure, you can work on what you feel is important and live wherever you want.

Read on for the full description:

Position

R&D Associate (title negotiable)

	<h3>Description</h3>
<p>
SitePen is a fast-growing services company with deep roots in Open Source web software and an ongoing commitment to give back to the Open Web. The problems we solve for clients sit at the intersection of Computer Science and Interaction Design while cutting across a wide variety of problem domains. As an R&amp;D Associate at SitePen you'll be responsible for investigating and developing solutions to the thorniest problems in real-world web application development and since everything you do will be Open Source, your impact will be both meaningful and lasting.
</p>
<p>
Some topics currently of interest to SitePen include:
</p>
<ul>
<li>web framework scalability</li>
<li>parametric CSS</li>
<li>ES3/ES4 implementations across VMs</li>
<li>publish/subscribe messaging and scalability</li>
<li>web-based interaction design/analysis tools</li>
<li>Open Data portability and metadata normalization</li>
<li>browser-based data visualization</li>
</ul>
<p>
But those are just the problems that keep us awake at night. What we're <em>really</em> interested in is hearing about how you'd like to make a difference in the evolution of the web. At SitePen, you'll have the freedom to pursue your interests and a mandate to work with broader communities to make your ideas reality.
</p>
<h3>Required Qualifications</h3>
<ul>
<li>contributor to at least one Open Source project (active committers preferred)</li>
<li>fluent in one functional or scripting language (C experience a plus)</li>
<li>must be able to author technical papers</li>
<li>must be comfortable presenting and defending work to groups of various sizes</li>
<li>permanant legal right to work in the United States</li>
</ul>
<h3>How To Apply</h3>
<p>
Send a plain-text email to "alex@sitepen.com" with the subject line "R&amp;D Associate Application". In the body of the email, please explain why you think you'd be good for the job, what research interests you would like to pursue, and if you have one, a link to your website/blog. Please include links to your Open Source involvement and note major contributions (planning, design, features implemented, research contributed, UI/UX/IxD, etc.).  Also, either include a link to an online resume or attach one in plain-text or PDF format.
</p>
<p>
There is no deadline for application, but the earlier you apply the better your odds.
</p>
<h3>Benefits</h3>
<ul>
<li>Senior Engineer grade pay</li>
<li>Comprehensive health insurance</li>
<li>All work product Open Source</li>
</ul>
<h3>Additional Information</h3>
<ul>
<li>
<b>Location:</b> anywhere you damn well please. SitePen is an entirely virtual organization.
</li>
<li>
<b>Travel:</b>10-25% travel, depending on personal choices regarding conferences and symposiums. Presenting papers and speaking on your work is encouraged.
</li>
<li>
<b>Job Type:</b> Full Time
</li>
<li>
<b>Reports To:</b> Director of R&amp;D (Alex Russell)
</li>
</ul>

Uniquely for an R&D job, there are no minimum education requirements. We only care how effectively you can advance the state of the art on the Open Web. If that sounds like a calling you can get behind, I'd love to hear from you.

Scott Beale's Paradise Lost party was outstanding. Jennifer and I have kind of "dropped out" of the Web2.0 scene for lots of very obvious reasons, but every now and again it's wonderful to see everyone. Folks were bummed about the lack of the planned fire displays (darned city permitting!), but the Photo Boof was awesome.

I'm back from OSCON, and while I spent more time holed up in my hotel room working on slides than I would have liked, it was a thought-provoking trip. OSCON, unlike a lot of conferences, does a great job of getting "the right people on the bus" by not tying itself to a particular technology. Full disclaimer: I was ostensibly on the OSCON program committee this year, although I was mostly a slacker about it. The hallway track this year was particularly strong. The evolved term for what OSS enables seems to be "participation", and OSCON really keeps getting to the heart of that.

Just before the official OSCON start this year was "Ubuntu Live". I didn't have an opportunity to go, but its very existence says something important about a transition that seems to be happening in the OSS world. Yes, ORA is also transforming into a conferences company with an incidental publishing arm, but I don't think that explains all of it. There are still religious partisans at gatherings like OSCON but more and more of the folks I talk to (self selection?) are "socially Open Source" people, and that's leading (I hope) to a re-balancing of priorities inside the projects they are involved with. Instead of just focusing on how free something is (in whatever sense you prefer), there's a sea change which focuses also on the end user experience. This seems long overdue and a good sign. Focusing exclusively on the user experience without any attention to negative externalities leads to a world which I wouldn't want to live in, but when there is tension between them there is hope for progress. It's market competition, but not in the sense of products jockeying for dominance (although that's one of the ways it is expressed). It's competition in the marketplace of ideas. It prompts important questions like:

• What does the web (and sites like Facebook in particular) imply for the state of competition in services?
• Is Open Data sufficient to ensure user freedoms and a functioning marketplace?
• What does it mean to be transparent and encourage participation?
• Who owns it? What rights do (and should) others have in a world where a third party always mediates everything?
• When a company "gets involved in Open Source", what should users expect other than lower prices? Should there be a code of conduct for OSS-involved firms? What are the communities responsibilities to those firms?

In fact, I suspect that the web is playing an under-valued role in this transition. Since the web is partially open by default, it closes many of the solved questions for practical intents and brings the questions of data and community and design/experience into sharp focus. How will OSS projects handle them? Can existing project structures even being to address them? We're struggling with the last one daily in Dojo.

The assumptions of OSS have always been that there's some relatively open commodity platform which is mostly knowable, but what happens when you depend on web services or plugins which behave like hardware; sans ownership? What's the imperative for the OSS community to build full web applications and services now that the desktop application is clearly on the wane? How will we address the fundamental, centralizing architecture of the web without resorting to religious discussions? What is the implication of not having an open, ubiquitous platform for user experience design and analysis?

I think these are questions that the Dojo Foundation should start to wrestle with. The answers to them may not come from us (although "us" is anyone who wants to get involved), but I'm strongly in favor of the Foundation trying to find ways to think about and address them.

A last-minute schedule change got me home to catch the last day of TAE. Having given 2 talks earlier in the week, it was great to catch sessions without stress. Like OSCON, the vibe at the last day of TAE was very low-key and hype-free. Seems the breathless nature of "AJAXWorld" may have finally blown the chaff away, leaving TAE and other smaller conferences to provide the beer-and-ideas atmosphere that is so desperately needed to keep things moving forward.