Disruptive Library Technology Jester » web design

Open Repositories 2011 Report: Day 1 with Apache, Technology Trends, and Bolded Labels

Peter Murray — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 04:16:30 +0000

Today was the first main conference day of the Open Repositories conference in Austin, Texas. There are 300 developers here from 20 countries and 30 states. I have lots of notes from the sessions, and I’ve tried to make sense of some of them below before I lose track of the entire context.

The meeting opened with the a keynote by Jim Jagielski, president of the Apache Software Foundation. He gave a presentation on what it means to be open source project with a focus on how Apache creates a community of developers and users around its projects.

Slides 50 and 51 of "Open Source: It's Not Just for IT Anymore"

One of the take-a-ways was a characterization of Open Source Licenses from Dave Johnson. Although it is a basic shorthand, it is useful in understanding the broad classes of licenses:

Give Me Credit (“You can use, modify and redistribute my code in your product but give me credit”): Apache License, Berkeley License, and MIT License
Give Me Fixes (“You can use, modify and redistribute my code in your product but give me the source for any fixes you make to it.”): Mozilla Public License, Eclipse Public License, and GNU Library or “Lesser” General Public License
Give Me Everything (“You can use, modify and redistribute my code in your product but give me your entire product’s source code.”): GPL

He also explained why community and code are at peer levels in Apache. One is not possible without the other; it takes an engaged community to create great code and great code can only be created by a healthy community. He also described how the primary communications tool for projects is not new-fangled technologies like wikis and conference calls and IRC. The official record of a project is its e-mail lists. This enables the broadest possible inclusion of participants across many time zones and the list archives enable people to look into the history of decisions. If discussions take place in other forums or tools, the summary is always brought back to the e-mai list.

Jim’s concluding thoughts were a great summary of the presentation, and I’ve inserted them in on the right.

I missed the first concurrent session of the day due to work conflict, so the first session I went to was the after lunch 24×7 presentations. That is no more than 24 slides in no more than seven minutes. I like this format because it forces the presenters to be concise, and if the topic is not one that interests you it isn’t long until the next topic comes up. The short presentations are also great for generating discussion points with the speakers during breaks and the reception. Two of these in particular struck a cord with me.

The first was “Technology Trends Influencing Repository Design” by Brad McLean of DuraSpace. His list of four trends were:

Design for mobile, not just PCs. The model of a mobile app — local computation and page rendering backed by web services for retrieving data — is having several impacts on design: a reinforcement of the need for lightweight web services and UIs; accounting for how screen size has shrunk again; and having a strategy for multi-platform apps will become critical.
More programming language(s) than you need/want. Java, Python, Ruby, Scala, LISP, Groovy, JavaScript and the list goes on. This proliferation of languages has forced looser coupling between components (e.g. a JavaScript based script can consume data from and write data to a Java-based servlet engine). The implications he listed for this are that it is even clearer that true integration challenges are in the data modeling and policy domains; harder to draw neat boxes around required skill sets; and that you might lose control of your user experience (and it might be a good thing).
Servers and clusters. Clusters are not just for high-performance computing and search engines anymore. Techniques like map/reduce are available to all. He said that Ebay was the last major internet company to deploy its infrastructure on “big iron” but he didn’t attribute that statement to a source. (Seems kind of hard to believe…) The implications are that we should look to replicated and distributed SOLR indexing (hopefully stealing a page from “noSQL” handbook); keep an eye on Map/Reduce-based triple stores (interesting idea!); and repository storage will be spanning multple systems.
What is a filesystem. Brad noted that with filesystems what was once hidden from the end user (think the large systems of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s) became visible (the familiar desktop file folder structure) and is now becoming hidden again (as with mobile device apps). Applications are now storing opaque objects again; how do we effectively ingest them into our repositories?

Takeaways from Simeon: think about what to present sans label; find cues you can use instead of labels; use labels for 2ndary info. #or11less than a minute ago via TweetDeck Favorite Retweet ReplyRattus repositor
RepoRat

Tweet from Dorothea Salo

The second 24×7 talk that struck a chord was “Don’t Bold the Field Name” by Simeon Warner. And by that he literally meant “Don’t Bold the Field Name”. He walked through a series of library interfaces and noted how we have a tendancy to display bolded field labels. He then pointed out how this draws the eye’s attention to the labels and not the record content beside the labels. Amazon doesn’t do this (at least with the metadata at the top of the page), Ebay doesn’t do this, and the search engines don’t do this. He did note — pointing to the case of the “Product Details” section of an Amazon item page — that “the task of finding the piece of information is more important than consuming it.” (Again, in the Amazon case, the purpose of bolding the label is to draw the eye to the location of data like publisher and shipping weight on the page.) I think Dorothea Salo’s tweet summed it up best: “Takeaways from Simeon: think about what to present sans label; find cues you can use instead of labels; use labels for 2ndary info. #or11″

I also attended the two sessions on identifiers in the afternoon (Peter Sefton’s “A Hint of Mint: Linked Authority Control Service” and Richard Rodgers’s “ORCID: Open Research and Contributor ID — An Open Registry of Scholarly IDs”), but the time is late and tomorrow’s events will come soon enough. Given eough time and energy, I’ll try to summarize those sessions later.

New Web Expectations and Mobile Web Techniques

Peter Murray — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 01:11:09 +0000

Late last year I was asked to put together a 20-minute presentation for my employer (LYRASIS) on what I saw as upcoming technology milestones that could impact member libraries. It was a good piece, so I thought I’d share what I learned with others as well. The discussion was in two parts — general web technologies/expectations and mobile applications/web.

New Web Technologies, New Web Expectations

As libraries expand in the role of information providers on the internet with licensed/subscribed services and local collections, we enter into a competitive marketplace of others doing the same thing. Users compare how our services look and act to peer sites, and such a comparison goes beyond just the “skin” of the site graphical design that might encompass the traditional “website redesign.” This matters for what we do for ourselves and what we ask vendors to do for us. Below is a discussion of the latest trends in web technologies that impact library services.

Speed is Important

The speed of the web is now an essential part of web design. The user expectation for fast web services is now embodied in the fact that Google uses the speed of a web page as a signal in its relevancy calculation formula; faster websites appear higher in the results list. The speed of a web page is a combination of the time it takes for a web server to respond to the request and the time it takes a web browser to render the page. A recent example is the comparison of discovery layers and OPACs with results ranging from about 1 second to about 12 seconds¹. There is a growing body of best practices to use in coding web applications, operating web server farms, and designing fast web pages, and creators of our websites should be aware of them.

HTML5 and CSS3 Bring New Capabilities

The state of web technology standards is progressing. The emerging definition and use of HTML5 and CSS3² bring new techniques that improve interoperability, semantic encoding, speed, and quite frankly visually pleasing design capabilities. A new standard for embedding video and audio promises to improve access to media in a leap that resembles how Flash-based media improved on the rash of competing encoding formats and plug-ins (RealMedia, Windows Media, QuickTime, etc.). New, more semantically meaningful HTML tags signal improvements to search hit relevance and web page accessibility. New abilities to store information in the browser will reduce client-to-server overhead and enable off-line access to web applications. And new capabilities for rendering content on pages with Cascading Style Sheets will simplify the hacks that designers are using now. We should look to our vendors and software developers to weave these new capabilities into website designs.

Wide Screen to Mobile: Responsive Web Design

Demonstration of Responsive Web Design

An emerging best practice in the development of web sites is “responsive web design.” In this case, “responsive” means that the page layout modifies itself to match the capabilities of the device. Content and navigation are arranged in meaningful ways using HTML/CSS/JavaScript coding for large desktop monitors to small handheld screens. One page can service needs of users across all of these devices, and in doing so eliminate the need for duplicating content across “desktop” and “mobile” sites. (As a side effect, consolidating page views for desktop and mobile devices onto a single set of URLs improves search engine optimization efficiency – resulting in pages appearing higher in search results lists.) A demonstration of this is worth a thousand words; the video at http://vimeo.com/17603980 shows the capabilities of responsive web design.

Good Web Design is Complex, Specialized Work

Back when I started with the web in 1995 a “webmaster” was someone with three skillsets: content markup (HTML), graphic design, and server management. Even in the early days, it was hard to find one person skilled in all of these areas. Today it is impossible. Web design now includes copyediting, web-specific graphic design, HTML, Cascading Style Sheets, JavaScript, database design, application programming (PHP, Java, Ruby on Rails, etc.), content distribution networks, web server optimization, hardware clustering. If you are creating websites on your own, be ready to hire the talent you need on short-term contracts or consulting arrangements.

Mobile

Meeting Your Users Where They Are

Last year IDC Research reported “there were more than 450 million mobile Internet users worldwide in 2009, a number that is expected to more than double by the end of 2013.” EMarketer research estimated in 2009 that 26% of all mobile phone subscribers (73.7 million) had internet access on their mobile device – numbers that were expected to increase to 43% and 134 million in 2013. Users are becoming accustomed to using mobile devices to look for information at the point of need. (My own family tells me that they can’t leave a factual question hanging – be it the weather for tomorrow or the relative size of humans to dinosaurs – without me pulling out my phone for the answer.)

Mobile Apps versus Mobile Websites

Mobile services come in two flavors: mobile apps and mobile websites. Each technique has advantages and disadvantages. Mobile apps use a software development kit supplied by the operating system creator (Apple, Google, etc.) that enables programmers to develop applications for handheld devices. These applications can use some capabilities on the phone that are not available to mobile websites running in the browser (e.g., accelerometer, camera, address book). The user interface of mobile apps tends to be smoother than mobile websites, and the full graphics capabilities of the device are available for intense graphics like games.

Mobile websites are always current because they refresh themselves from on the network; there isn’t a need to submit a version to a third-party for review. Eliminating the review step also removes restrictions on what can be done with a mobile service. With HTML5 techniques, mobile websites can now store and access information without a live network connection. There isn’t a need to code separate apps for different devices – HTML is universal.

As the responsive web design demonstration shows, it is possible to create web sites that scale from desktop to handheld without duplicating content or sacrificing usability. If a library application is not making use of the unique capabilities of a mobile app, why build one?

Footnotes

Brown-Sica, M., Beall, J., & Mchale, N. (December 2010). Next-Generation Library Catalogs and the Problem of Slow Response Time. Information Technology and Libraries, 29 (4), p213. Preprint available [PDF]
Technically, Cascading Style Sheets Level 3 is a family of specifications that are all in various stages of definition and adoption.

DLTJ Now Uses reCAPTCHA

Peter Murray — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 03:05:44 +0000

DLTJ now uses reCAPTCHA on comment forms. reCAPTCHA is an enhanced version of CAPTCHA (an acronym for “completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart”) and like the original it is a type of challenge-response test used to determine whether there is a human user at the other end of the browser or if it is a software agent (such as a SPAM robot). And like the original it asks the user to type in recognized words from an image or a set of numbers from an audio clip.

Help with reCAPTCHA

The reCAPTCHA box contains three buttons to help use the service:

	Refresh the word images. If you are unsure what the two words are, select this button to receive a new pair of words. (Alternatively, just try to guess what the two words are; if you are wrong, you’ll get a new pair of words automatically.)
/	Alternate between the Audio- and Text-based challenges. If you cannot see the word images, select this audio button to hear a set of digits among random noise that can be entered instead of the visual challenge.
	Get help from the reCAPTCHA site about this human detection scheme. Also includes introductory information about the reCAPTCHA service itself.

What’s Special About reCAPTCHA

The human mind is still a more powerful computer than any silicon circuitry in place now or in the foreseeable future. With just a glance our brains can recognize the patterns among the noise — something that is computationally very expensive or impossible to do. reCAPTCHA researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, also the home of the original CAPTCHA concept, estimate that 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day with roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent in each instance. That is not a lot of time per person, but in aggregate it adds up to more than 150,000 hours of work each day.

In the original CAPTCHA scheme, that work is wasted on deciphering random strings of letters and numbers. The researchers at Carnegie Mellon realized that they could harness that work to resolve ambiguities in deciphering scanned text from books. As with the original CAPTCHA system, there are some blocks of scanned text that computers cannot decipher yet are easily readable by humans. reCAPTCHA pairs a known word with one of these unknown blocks of text. If the human types the known word correctly, the reCAPTCHA system tells the DLTJ system that the comment is coming from a human. And if enough humans type the same response for the unknown block of text, the reCAPTCHA system can be pretty sure the word has been deciphered.

So by commenting here on DLTJ you are helping make the world a better place by aiding in the digital conversion of texts from the Internet Archive. This is a bit of an experiment, so if it is not working out, please let me know.

2007 Web Design Survey

Peter Murray — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 20:43:43 +0000

Friend and former colleague Eric Meyer writes about the 2007 Web Design Survey (first annual) on his blog. It is an effort to “increase knowledge of web design and boost respect for the profession” and asks questions to learn “Who are we? Where do we live? What are our titles, our skills, our educational backgrounds? Where and with whom do we work? What do we earn? What do we value?”

I hesitate to put myself in the “we” category of web designers, but I do try to keep up on best practices by reading Eric’s blog and following A List Apart. I’ve never had a good enough business justification to attend An Event Apart event, but the possibility of winning a free registration for filling out this survey is compelling!

If you work in web design, and I get the sense that many readers of DLTJ dabble in it about as much as I do, please take a few minutes to fill out the survey.