You can read a breakdown of the worst bits on The Web Standards Project, but here’s the feedback I just emailed webguidelines@coi.gsi.gov.uk:

Hi,

I appreciate the COI’s desire to provide roadmaps for cross-browser support, but I’m otherwise dismayed at the recent publication’s back-to-front emphasis regarding browser standards support. It feels like the publication has been put together by people who are remote from the current thinking on web standards and how best to both promote them and take advantage of them.

As a web developer I’ve had a reasonable amount of experience in developing sites cross-browser, and generally the quickest and cheapest site creation (and the least patronising or inconveniencing to the eventual end users) is effected by developing first on the most standards-compliant browser available, regardless of its user base. Then, once the site is stable and well-built according to the standards (which are there for reasons other than semantic fussiness), one can use *freely* *available* frameworks to compensate for browsers which do not follow the standards (which may be more popular). It involves more effort at the start in exchange for a much smoother site construction later on.

Let me repeat that: building sites according to web standards, then accommodating bad browser behaviour, is CHEAPER, QUICKER and MORE ROBUST than what you implicitly propose i.e. building with bad-but-popular browsers in mind, and then looking at shoe-horning in browser-specific fixes for the others.

If you inconvenience the users of good browsers because there aren’t many of them, you are taking us back to the bad old days of 1990s browsing. I haven’t seen the phrase “We advise you to upgrade your browser version” (which I take verbatim from p4 of your report) on any site I respect and trust for almost ten years. Ask any decent web developer: it’s no longer necessary, and frankly it reveals far more about the mindset of the site designers than about the state of web technology.

Like the proposal’s guidelines, its consultation is happening the wrong way round, and highlights a top-down mentality behind composing such documents. Sharp, savvy developers recruited from any of the vibrant UK web conferences—dConstruct, OpenTech, Barcamps—would have been glad to have helped the COI out before this fundamental missing of the point was published, were they to have been asked. It would certainly have saved both COI and the web community at large a lot of heat, friction and wasted effort.

Yours faithfully,

J-P Stacey

PS: I was originally going to send this via your website’s feedback form. After having read your proposals for building good sites I decided to email it instead, just in case.

You’ve got a month to comment yourself, if you’re a UK or European developer. Feel free to use the above template, only I’d recommend changing the name at the bottom.

“Gary is a self-confessed stoner and perpetrated the ‘biggest military hack of all time’ whilst completely wasted. This is clearly a sign of how lax the security of these systems was. If Gary had been clear minded and deliberate about what he wanted to achieve and was a malicious person rather than the pacifist he is - where exactly would we be now?”

(I think it’s Mathew. Wikipedia only has a page for Matthew with two t’s, but then spells his name with one t throughout. First they came for the sub-editors, and I did not speak out: because I had been sub-edited myself.)

The musical keynotes and Q&A with Rhodri and Ian went down really well: Rhodri’s laconic discussion of a musician’s experience of the new web complemented Ian’s more in-depth discussion of the way tech might solve the industry’s worsening financial problems—even if by the end of the session we still couldn’t decide whether or not they were going to solve the very difficulties experienced by musicians like Rhodri.

Having Ben lead them in with the genius of his twelve-second song about 12seconds.tv and of course You’re No-one if You’re Not on Twitter was also great to watch. Last time Ben played an OGN it was to the few appreciative people at the front who could hear him (such are the vagaries of PA): I think pretty much everyone listened in last night.

All the microslots were brilliant too, of course, but I’m going to quietly elide them right now in favour of getting an early night. We’ll be putting videos and slides up soon, and I’ll probably point at them then as there are one or two things that really resonated.

In the same way that Ben was surprised by the sudden interest in his Twitter song, we’ve had a brief mention on Metafilter and a heads-up from Tom on the Yahoo! developer blog. I hope to get writeups together for the Google OS Code Blog and the Torchbox blog after a weekend of barbecues and sleep.

An Oxford Django sprint had been mooted for this weekend. I didn’t hear much more about it, but to be honest I had the great opportunity to actually have my own sprint—against 1.0b1—in work this week, working on a fast-turnaround project. I definitely felt performance improvements, especially when running unit tests. It was also lovely to work on my first internationalized/localized site and to find that it was just a question of dropping in certain bits of middleware to make it work across six languages. We didn’t have any translations in place, but I clicked on “Polszczyzna” expecting bugger-all to happen and then suddenly realised that the English-language link read “Anglieski.” It’s characteristic of Python’s (and Django’s) refreshingly plastic and just-works behaviour. Magic.

We did encounter one bug, involving model inheritance. I struggled for a while with registering with the project trac to report it. It’s my first mediocre experience with Django: I waited a day or so for the arrival of an account-confirmation email, but eventually gave up without adding what would have admittedly been a me-too to an existing bug report. But then, email finally in my inbox, I chased it up just now, to find that it’s been fixed. Today.

Probably much like Django itself, the project’s interface with the user/consumer requires some past experience with its foibles, but the actual endeavour itself is fast, well-factored and puts most closed-source equivalents to shame.

This model of publishing in part explains the thinking behind his recent post, robustly titled Business Requirements are Bullshit. But Steve’s audience—compared to the web at large—is a small, self-selecting group. So although keeping in mind some of the details of his recent post can prevent you investing in dead-end projects, I just can’t agree with the overall conclusions about software development.

Although it’d be nice for everyone in the world to have programming skills, and to be able to behave like autonomous itch-scratching units, that simply isn’t the case. The vast majority of people need software built for them, and software builders are a demographic, with a broad range of shared interests and a vast landscape of shared uninterests. What if you can’t program but you want some software? Do you just sit there, or do you pay someone to build software for you? Should that person in turn refuse the money, saying “that’s too risky: Steve said so?”

Steve’s rant is aimed at CEOs instead, but the principle still stands. To what extent to people have to clamour for a particular feature before a CEO will say “well, I don’t want that, but I do want your money?” Personal phone calls? Petitions to their local MPs? Pre-ordering? Pressing themselves against the windows of electronics shops and drooling on the glass? Demanding it be available on the welfare state? Well, the canny software house would have started building the software before any of the above had happened. But how could they know, if they’re not secretly telepathic? Well, among other methods, by gathering business requirements.

From Steve’s point of view it’s less of an issue, because he works at Google, the House of Blue Sky Development. And I don’t begrudge him that privileged viewpoint at all, because Google has earned the business success that bankrolls schemes like twenty-percent time projects. If every business had oodles of cash to throw at developers as they wander off along tangential projects, then maybe none of them would need to through half an oodle at a discovery phase. But as long as money is a locally limited and unevenly distributed resource, then there will need to be different solutions to the problem of working out what to actually build.

The ultimate direction of software development proposed by Steve is just far too exclusive, and it’s been the bane of open-source projects for years. Project after project caters for its tiny community, never reaching out to what other communities might need; they start to cool off, then founder; the codebase is mothballed, and the project finally expires. Worse, in Steve’s world, we’d have to wait for blind people and RSI sufferers to write their own FOSS voice recognition software: maybe the blind person could hold the keyboard and mouse, while the RSI sufferer tells them what’s on the screen. Meanwhile, able-bodied programmers develop that sort of stuff for Vista without a qualm, and they can charge the earth for it because people want it.

Ubuntu’s recent successes might be almost entirely attributed to the fact that (a) the project is well managed and directed and (b) they reach outside their own community, and solve problems for people other than computer programmers. Despite Ubuntu, Gartner recently announced that Linux had a 4% market share. 96% of consumers opt for software built by people who on the whole weren’t solving their own problems.

The first commenter on Steve’s recent post says:

I find that a lot of Free Software is awful for exactly this reason — the authors built it for themselves. Their software only works for other hardcore programmers because they can put up with the same complex implementation and integration problems and not even notice them, and if it’s not quite right they lose a million potential worldwide users for every mistake.

The recent success of Ubuntu as Open Source Software shows that a lot of other projects still don’t get it. The first thing an OS community needs is outreach: scratching other people’s itches and not their own.

Actuallly, he says almost exactly the opposite, but then: he emails people with patches, so he’s probably a software author himself. At the very least, he’s in that four percent, preaching to the rest of the already converted. Meanwhile, the rest of the market went thataway. And if Warren Buffett were to take a break from spreading thickly his easily-believed homespun down-to-earth nonsense for a minute or two, what would he really do to capture that 96%?

Rhodri Marsden, who will cringe when I call him a guru, writes the Cyberclinic for the Independent, plays keyboards in Scritti Politti, and has long and varied experience with the music industry: he’ll be discussing how recorded media alone will no longer support an up-and-coming band. And Ian Hogarth, who is CEO and co-founder of Songkick, will explain how recordings can channel users into , where arguably the real money is these days.

If you want to be successful in the modern music industry, and you’ve read Steve Albini’s essay on the subject, then you could do worse than sticking round for the post-keynote questions and answers slot, where we’ll invite these gurus—sorry again, Rhodri—to take questions from the floor. No asking either of them to buy your album, though.

After the Q&A session, we’ll move into more traditional OGN variety fare, with talks about online payment, the open web, cloud computing and the long-awaited release of Django 1.0. If I can get it together, we should also have a book raffle. And thanks to Torchbox and Google for their sponsorship, entrance is still FREE. How can you bear to stay at home?

Self-deprecation is fine, just realize that there’s a dear line between embracing your own ignorance and ensuring a prophesy of certainty.

David’s career path sounds similar to mine: although I played with Linux as an undergraduate, I didn’t start programming until my PhD, and only really developed my XSLT, Perl and scripting skills prior to coming to Torchbox; since arriving here over three and a half years ago I’ve learnt “everything else”, from Transact-SQL and Coldfusion to Django and Drupal. But until maybe eighteen months ago I really felt like I was behind the technological curve, yet couldn’t quite work out how to get ahead. A year and a half later and I’ve clawed my way forwards, if not to that cutting edge then at least to the point where hacking away is no longer the effort it used to be, but I couldn’t give anyone else any tips on how to do it.

One big problem is there are so few resources to help people over that gap—and there is a gap, not a continuous curve—from uncertain n00b to excited, interested programmer. Established OS communities can be cliquey and quite scathing, and it’s hard to get into even friendly communities without prior knowledge of how these things work: what’s the chain of command; do I need a CVS account; can I get a CVS account; how do I earn brownie points in this particular version of a meritocracy?

There’s Wikipedia, of course. One of the few areas in which it isn’t a tragicomedy in thrall to undeclared conflicting interests (Cornish separatists, religious cults) is its technical pages. But they’re tremendously dry, and not at all of tutorial standard. That’s not the point of an encyclopedia, of course, which you’ll hear a lot of if you ask why your recent edits have just been reverted.

We need more tutorial sites like Why’s Poignant Guide to Ruby, and fewer like ONLamp’s An Introduction to Haskell. The latter is well written, and says a lot about programming languages in general, but it reads like the prologue to an entire Haskell book for professional programmers, rather than an actual introduction. Since visiting them both, I’ve actually written some Ruby (even though I didn’t get on with it particularly), but I’ve just finally bit the bullet and uninstalled ghc6, still with its wrapper on.

Being a geek, though, I was most surprised to spot that they were using Drupal; in fact, they’re on the mostly patched Drupal 5.7 version at the time of writing. This piqued my interest further, and I emailed No2ID to mention that I’d been reminded to join them—which I ought to have done years ago—by the very people whose perniciousness they were trying to militate against.

At the same time, I remembered from OpenTech that No2ID had begun a recruiting drive, and I was sure that Simon had blogged about it but couldn’t at the time find the post. I actually asked Guy Herbert at No2ID about this, and rather politely he explained that, no, it wasn’t them: it was the Open Rights Group. He refrained from adding “you buffoon.” But now, thanks to mylifemyid.org, I’m a member of both No2ID and ORG, two organisations I should have joined long ago.

In all its years of oppression, subjugation, scaremongering and offences against the person, the Home Office has never spread so much love. Thanks, Home Office: you’re a pal!

Still, fighting the good green fight can feel pretty lonely, and sometimes you forget not just how many people are on your side in the next office or town, but also of the billions of people who have something to lose to climate change. So as a bit of fun, and to remind ourselves what it’s all about, we’ve recently given the green finger to climate change. Here we are, doing just that:

Want to join in? You can respond to the original YouTube video.