Episode 182 of The SitePoint Podcast is now available! This week our regular interview host Louis Simoneau (@rssaddict) interviews John Allsopp (@johnallsopp) about the series of conferences he works on, Web Directions and more.
SitePoint Podcast的第182集现已发布! 本周,我们的定期采访主持人Louis Simoneau( @rssaddict )采访了John Allsopp( @johnallsopp )关于他从事的一系列会议, Web Directions等。
下载此剧集 (Download this Episode)
You can download this episode as a standalone MP3 file. Here’s the link:
您可以将本集下载为独立的MP3文件。 这是链接:
SitePoint Podcast #182: Web Directions with John Allsopp(MP3, 41:25, 39.8MB)SitePoint播客#182:John Allsopp的网络指导(MP3,41:25,39.8MB)
剧集摘要 (Episode Summary)
Louis and John talk about the Web Directions conferences, what has been added to them in terms of startup talks, and his history of the web timeline at WebDirections.org/history using Timeline JS.
Louis和John在WebDirections.org/history上使用Timeline JS讨论了Web Directions会议,关于启动演讲的内容以及他的Web时间线历史。
Browse the full list of links referenced in the show at http://delicious.com/sitepointpodcast/182.
浏览http://delicious.com/sitepointpodcast/182中显示的参考链接的完整列表。
面试成绩单 (Interview Transcript)
Louis: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the SitePoint Podcast. With me on the show today, returning to the show, is Mr. John Allsopp. Hi John.
路易斯:您好,欢迎收看SitePoint播客的另一集。 今天和我一起回到节目中的是约翰·奥尔索普先生。 你好,约翰。
John: Hey. Good to be back. Thanks for having me.
约翰:嘿。 很高兴回来。 感谢您的款待。
Louis: It’s good to have you back. John is best known as one of the founders of the Web Directions series of conferences of which the flagship event, Web Directions South is coming up in just a couple of weeks, so I really appreciate you taking the time out of what I imagine must be a very busy schedule this time of the year.
路易斯:回来很高兴。 约翰(John)是Web Directions系列会议的创始人之一,其旗舰活动Web Directions South即将在短短几周内到来,因此,我非常感谢您抽出宝贵的时间来想象一年中的这个时间安排非常繁忙。
John: Yeah, it gets hectic. You think you’d have all your ducks lined up, everything ready to go, but there’s always keynote speakers who can’t make it.
约翰:是的,太忙了。 您认为所有的鸭子都准备好了,一切准备就绪,但是总是有主旨演讲者无法做到。
Louis: Yeah.
路易斯:是的。
John: Actually, it’s the first time it’s ever happened, but it’s always very challenging, and, you know, I’m continuing to do “hacky” things that hopefully we can do at the conference, “Well, let’s just see if they work.” So I probably should have put the whole thing to be about a month ago, but, “No, no. Let’s just see if we can build this thing over here that’s really cool that people will talk about.”
约翰:实际上,这是有史以来的第一次,但是它总是非常具有挑战性,而且,我知道我正在继续做一些“棘手的”事情,希望我们能在会议上做到,“好吧,让我们看看他们是否工作。” 因此,我可能应该把整个事情放在一个月前,但是,“不,不。 让我们看看我们是否可以在这里构建这个东西,人们会谈论的真的很酷。”
Louis: Well, that’s what makes those conferences great. I definitely know from the ones I’ve attended that it’s always a great experience. So you guys have got a lot of great speakers this year.
路易斯:那就是使这些会议很棒的原因。 我从参加过的会议中肯定知道,这总是很不错的经历。 所以你们今年有很多出色的演讲者。
John: Yeah, no. It’s a pretty amazing line-up. It gets sort of bigger and better each year. I think we’ve got 65 people this year, and one particular reason for that is we’ve added a start-up track to the conference this year. Obviously, start-ups are the hot, hot thing, and, you know, there’s a lot flying around about the whole kind of starting up your own business thing. We’ve been doing that for a long time and been involved really since the early ’90s, I guess with what’s come to be known as start-ups, and I see a lot of hype and a lot of nonsense out there. What we’re really trying to do is address that by having people who’ve gone out and done it come back and share what they’ve learned. We’ve basically given people the brief to say what they wish they’d known before they started out. So that’s what that’s all about. Then, of course, a great range of people across the design and development kind of world, and then people who kind of think big telling us about what they think is happening out there. So yeah, it’s lots of fun, very challenging to put together a great program year on year, you know, to get people to come all the way out here or across the country, but always very rewarding and a fantastic couple of days, which increasingly, we actually get to enjoy, whereas in the past we’d be so stressed that we probably wouldn’t see or do anything and just run around trying to put out fires. But now I think we’ve just kind of learned to accept that it goes okay, and we can participate as well.
约翰:是的,不。 这是一个非常了不起的阵容。 每年都会变得越来越大和越来越好。 我认为我们今年有65人,这其中的一个特殊原因是我们在今年的会议中增加了启动时间。 显然,初创企业是一件很热门的事情,而且,您知道,关于开展自己的商业活动的整个过程有很多飞跃。 自90年代初以来,我们就已经这样做了很长时间,而且确实参与其中。我猜这就是所谓的初创公司,我在那里看到了很多炒作和胡说八道。 我们真正想做的是通过让外出并完成任务的人回来并分享他们所学到的知识来解决这个问题。 基本上,我们已经给人们提供了简短的信息,让他们在开始之前就说出他们希望知道的事情。 这就是全部。 然后,当然,在整个设计和开发领域中,有很多人,然后一些有远见的人告诉我们他们在想什么。 所以,是的,这很有趣,年复一年地组织一个很棒的计划是非常有挑战性的,要让人们一路走到这里或全国各地,但总是很有意义,花了几天的时间,越来越多,我们实际上变得很享受,而在过去,我们是如此的压力,以至于我们可能什么也看不见,也什么也没做,只是四处奔波试图扑灭大火。 但是现在我认为我们已经学会了接受一切顺利,并且我们也可以参与。
Louis: Right. I should mention for anyone listening from outside of Australia, I don’t imagine there are very many people who are going to be able to swing last minute tickets to Australia for a conference that takes place in less than two weeks; however, it’s still pretty much available worldwide because you guys put up a lot of video and audio and slides from all your events.
路易斯:对。 我应该向任何来自澳大利亚以外地区的听众说,我不认为会有太多人能够在不到两周的时间里为参加会议的会议提供最后一分钟的门票。 但是,由于您在所有活动中都放了很多视频和音频以及幻灯片,因此它在全球范围内仍然可用。
John: We perhaps had one of the first fully-podcast conferences way back in 2005, which included what we believe is a world first which was the world’s first podcast fire alarm which went off right at the end of a presentation by the famous and fabulous Tantek Çelik. If it would have happened to anyone, I’d be happy to tell you, he literally had just finished. So we got audio and slides online from hundreds of presentations back several years, but we started out with video particularly so we have all the video from our recent HTML5 and JavaScript-focused conference down in Melbourne which a lot of SitePoint folks were at.
约翰:我们也许是在2005年举行的第一次全播客会议之一,其中包括我们认为是世界第一的会议,这是世界上第一台播客火灾报警器,在著名的著名演讲结束时就响了TantekÇelik。 如果这件事发生在任何人身上,我很乐意告诉你,他实际上已经完成了。 因此,几年前我们从数百个演示文稿中在线获取了音频和幻灯片,但是我们特别从视频入手,因此,我们拥有最近在墨尔本举行HTML5和JavaScript主题会议的所有视频,很多SitePoint人士都参加了该会议。
Louis: Yeah, it was a lot of fun.
路易斯:是的,这很有趣。
John: So all the videos are online, except a couple of things that didn’t quite work out. That’s always going to happen, and going forward very hopeful that pretty much all the conferences we do will kind of have all the video online and I guess at some point hopefully, for those who aren’t fortunate enough to be here, even live, live streaming video so you can kind of participate to an extent online. So, you know, we’re trying to walk the talk here. We’re trying to kind of explore and use all the technologies, but I guess one step at a time.
约翰:所有影片都在线播放,除了几项效果不佳。 这总是会发生的,并且非常希望我们所做的几乎所有会议都可以在线观看所有视频,我想在某个时候是希望的,对于那些没有足够的精力来这里甚至参加会议的人,实时流视频,因此您可以在某种程度上在线参与。 因此,您知道,我们正在尝试在这里进行讨论。 我们正在尝试探索和使用所有技术,但我想一次只迈出了一步。
Louis: Yeah, you mentioned that you’ve got the start-up track for the first time this year. Was it feedback that you got from attendees of previous conferences who said “Oh, it would be good to have some more business-focused content in the conference?” Or was it something you just sort of felt the general atmosphere of what’s being talked about on the web is a lot of people doing start-ups, and so you figured we should focus on that?
路易斯:是的,您提到您是今年第一次参加创业。 您是从以前的会议的与会者那里得到的反馈吗?“哦,在会议中增加一些与业务相关的内容会很好吗?” 还是您只是感觉到网络上谈论的一般气氛是很多人在创业,所以您认为我们应该专注于此?
John: Look, I think it’s more of the second. I guess there’s a cohort of people who’ve been involved coming along to Web Directions for many years now, and I see this natural progression. We’ve watched people from students through their first jobs through running teams. Like I said, we’ve sort of seen this progression, and I think part of that progression for a lot of people is the sense that perhaps they want to go out on their own. So really it’s in no small part focusing on people who have already been coming to Web Directions for a long time, giving them something in addition to the core professional content because we sort of see it as almost like a natural progression. Obviously not for everybody, but for quite a significant percentage of the, you know, the community of people who come to web directions. Now obviously, too, it’s such a hot, hot thing out there. More broadly, you know, people might see it as a bit of a cynical thing. “Well yeah, it’s someone else doing a start-up thing,” but I guess as I said in the little intro, we’ve been essentially running start-up software and now event-focused conferences for nearly 20 years, and we learned a lot, and I’ve been involved with some very successful start-ups, TypeKit in particular. So, you know, I guess we’ve got some experience here, and we know a lot of people who’ve done very well, and we know a lot of people who gone out and tried and done various things. So we kind of feel we’re uniquely-placed to bring all these people together to share what they’ve learned and their experiences. And I guess the other thing is we don’t really have a dog in this fight. You know, we’re not a fund. We’re not any start-up co-working space. It’s not to say there’s anything negative about any of those particular organizations. They have great roles and they really help the ecosystem, but I guess we have no other agenda. We’re not trying to kind of promote our investment fund. We’re not trying to promote, you know, anything other than really bringing these people together and connecting them with each other and helping them learn from each other. So I guess that’s another thing we can kind of bring, as Web Directions, to something that’s focused on start-ups.
约翰:看,我认为这是第二个问题。 我猜想已经有很多人参与Web Directions了很多年了,我看到了这种自然的发展。 我们已经看到了来自学生的人们通过他们的第一批工作,通过运行团队。 就像我说的那样,我们已经看到了这种进展,并且我认为对于许多人来说,这种进展的一部分是他们也许想自己出去的感觉。 因此,实际上,它的重点绝非只是针对已经使用Web Directions很长时间的人员,除了为他们提供核心专业内容外,还为他们提供了一些东西,因为我们认为这几乎是自然而然的过程。 显然,这并不适合所有人,但对于访问网络指导的社区来说,却是相当大的一部分。 现在显然也很热。 从更广泛的意义上讲,人们可能会认为这有点愤世嫉俗。 “是的,是别人在做启动的事情,”但是我猜想,正如我在小介绍中所说的那样,我们已经运行了启动软件,现在已经有将近20年的以事件为中心的会议了,我们学到了很多时候,我参与了一些非常成功的创业公司,尤其是TypeKit。 所以,您知道,我想我们已经在这里积累了一些经验,并且我们认识很多做得很好的人,并且我们认识了很多人出去尝试并做各种事情。 因此,我们感到我们处于独特的位置,可以将所有这些人聚集在一起,以分享他们所学到的知识和经验。 我猜想另一件事是我们在这场战斗中真的没有狗。 你知道,我们不是基金。 我们不是任何起步的共同工作空间。 这并不是说这些特定组织有任何负面影响。 他们发挥着重要作用,并确实为生态系统提供了帮助,但我想我们没有其他议程。 我们并没有试图促进我们的投资基金。 您知道,除了真正将这些人召集在一起并使其相互联系并帮助他们相互学习之外,我们没有在尝试促进其他任何事情。 因此,我想这是我们可以将另一种方式(如Web Directions)引入专注于新兴企业的方式。
Louis: Yeah, that’s great, because, I mean, it’s true what you say, the web industry does lend itself particularly well to people going out on their own and being able to start their own thing.
Louis:是的,太好了,因为,我的意思是,您的意思是对的,Web行业确实非常适合那些自己走出去并能够开始自己的事情的人们。
John: It’s funny. I look back over all the fantastic speakers that we’ve had over many years, particularly international ones and just off the top of my head I can think of very few who haven’t ultimately gone in that direction, whether that’s starting their own studio, whether it’s starting their own working space, or, of course, so many of them going out and starting more kind of traditional software, technology-focused start-ups. So, you know, it just seems such a natural progression for so many people in our industry that it kind of makes sense, I think, for us to provide an opportunity for people to kind of get more of a sense about that whole world. Now, the other thing, just to say briefly around this particular track, is this is very much focused with people who haven’t necessarily started up yet. Now, that’s not to say that people like that won’t get something from it, but really it’s about helping people make some of the important decisions and think about some of the issues that maybe you think “Oh, we’ll worry about that later,” and of course later comes and it’s a big issue and you haven’t dealt with it. So whether that’s the kind of organization that you create, whether that’s the responsibilities of the various founders, whether that’s of course funding models, you know, do you use Kickstarter, do you get Angel adventure capital, do you bootstrap, do you go through an incubator, all the way through to what about business models? You know, how are we going to actually generate revenue? Those sorts of things are what people really should think long and hard about before they take their awesome idea and make it a reality. But while it might sound strange, for the most part people don’t, I think, think enough about those issues. We, you know, we love building stuff right, so we think, “Wow, I’m going to build this awesome app,” or “I’m going to build this awesome thing,” or “Make this great game,” and we focus on that, but really that’s only a small part of success or more importantly failure. I think unless you make other very good decisions around the business right from the beginning, I’ve said it more than once, people, you know, who followed a plan really do plan to fail. So that’s what we’re really trying to focus on, you know, to help them make really good decisions about the kind of business they’re going to build, how they’re going to fund it, what it’s going to look like and to address, I guess, in the famous words of a former U.S. Defense Secretary, “The unknown unknowns.” Which, you know, I think it was Rumsfeld. He was kind of widely pilloried for that particular statement, but the term unknown unknowns, I think is really important because when you’re venturing into a new world, it’s what you don’t know you don’t know is what’s going to get you. So that’s what we want to at least try and illuminate. What are the things that you should think about you haven’t even thought you needed to think about yet?
约翰:好笑。 我回顾了我们多年来拥有的所有出色演讲者,尤其是国际演讲者,但我的想法几乎没有想到,只有极少数最终没有朝那个方向发展的人,无论那是否是他们自己的工作室的开始,无论是开始自己的工作空间,还是当然,有很多这样的公司出去并启动更多类型的传统软件,以技术为中心的初创公司。 因此,对于我们行业中的许多人来说,这似乎是自然而然的进步,我认为这对我们来说是有意义的,因为我们为人们提供了一个机会,使人们对整个世界有更多的了解。 现在,关于这条特定路线简要地说,另一件事是,这非常集中于尚未开始的人们。 现在,这并不是说像这样的人不会从中得到任何东西,而是真正在帮助人们做出一些重要的决定,并思考一些您可能会认为的问题,“哦,我们会为此担心的”稍后”,当然稍后会出现,这是一个大问题,您尚未解决。 因此,无论是您创建的组织类型,还是各个创始人的职责,是否当然是融资模型,您是否知道,是否使用了Kickstarter,是否获得了天使冒险资本,是否进行了引导,是否经历了一个孵化器,一直到商业模式如何? 您知道,我们将如何实际产生收入? 人们在采纳自己的出色想法并将其变为现实之前,应该认真思考这些事情。 但是,尽管听起来有些奇怪,但我认为大多数人对这些问题没有足够的思考。 我们知道,我们喜欢正确地构建东西,因此我们认为,“哇,我要构建这个很棒的应用程序”,或者“我要构建这个很棒的东西”,或者“做出这个伟大的游戏”,我们专注于此,但实际上这只是成功的一小部分,或更重要的是失败。 我认为,除非您从一开始就围绕业务做出其他非常好的决定,否则我已经多次说过,遵循计划的人们确实会失败。 因此,这就是我们真正要致力于的重点,以帮助他们就将要建立的业务类型,如何为其提供资金,业务的前景以及如何做出正确的决策。我想用美国前任国防部长的名言讲“未知的未知数”。 你知道的,我想是拉姆斯菲尔德。 对于那种特定的表述,他有点被嘲笑,但是“未知的未知数”这个词我真的很重要,因为当您尝试进入一个新世界时,这就是您所不知道的,您所不知道的将会得到什么您。 这就是我们至少要尝试阐明的内容。 您应该考虑什么甚至还没有想过的事情?
Louis: Yeah, that’s great, and especially for, like you said, the majority of your audience is going to be more technical or designed-focused people who, as you said, you can become all- consumingly focused on the product that you’re building. Most of us didn’t get into doing web-designer development because we were interested in business; we got into it because we wanted to build things.
路易斯:是的,这很棒,尤其是对于您所说的那样,您的大多数受众将是更多技术或特定于设计的人,正如您所说,您可以全神贯注地关注您所购买的产品重新建设。 我们大多数人没有从事Web设计器开发,因为我们对业务感兴趣。 我们之所以加入它,是因为我们想要建造东西。
John: Right. I mean, I look at the experience from my own life that when people ask me what I do these days, you know, I kind of want to talk about all the things I build, and the books I’ve written, but truth is I’m kind of a businessman for want of a better term. You know, I spend my life in strategy meetings and partner meetings and business development and for the longest time that kind of got me down, but I sort of accept that’s a reality now. Like it used to be I saw that stuff as the stuff I had to do but really my core business, my core work was, you know, playing with stuff, building new things, writing fantastic articles or crap ones or whatever, but the truth is once I accepted “Look, really you’re a businessman who does all this other stuff rather than a developer who has to do with a business,” I think it was very beneficial for my own mental health. I think it was beneficial for our business. I think it’s just a natural path we progress along, although I think, I would always recommend people were passionate about building things to keep that space to do that because as much as anything, I guess, unless you keep on top of technology you fail to see opportunities, you fail to see emerging risks and threats. I think it’s no accident that if you look at very successful U.S. companies whether very big or very small in the technology space, they’re not run by MBAs, and they’re not run by lawyers, they’re actually run by technologists or technologists have a very important role to play. And the companies that are, big technology companies that are more run by kind of classic MBA business-types maybe don’t do quite as well. Anyway, so there’s an important place for both those things. You know, I think it’s a reality people shouldn’t turn their back on but in order to be successful at building stuff and doing cool stuff, you know, you need to generate revenue and you need to make sure you don’t waste a whole heap of money. You need to make sure you focus your credit in importing the things that ultimately are going to sustain a great business, so and I guess, over time we recognize that. So that’s really what the start-up track is about is to help, at least over a couple of days, people start thinking more deeply about the business side of things.
约翰:对。 我的意思是,我回顾自己的生活经历,当人们问我这些天我做什么时,你知道,我有点想谈论我建立的所有东西以及我写的书,但事实是我有点想失去一个更好的条件的商人。 您知道,我一生都在战略会议,合作伙伴会议以及业务发展中度过,这在最长的时间内使我失望,但我现在已经接受了这一点。 就像以前一样,我将这些东西视为必须要做的事情,但实际上是我的核心业务,我的核心工作是玩弄东西,建造新东西,写出奇妙的文章或胡扯的文章等等,但事实是我接受“我看,实际上您是做其他所有事情的商人,而不是与业务有关的开发人员”,我认为这对我自己的心理健康非常有益。 我认为这对我们的业务有益。 我认为这只是我们前进的自然之路,尽管我认为,我始终会建议人们热衷于建立事物以保持其发展空间,因为我想除非您掌握了技术之上,否则一切都会失败看到机会,就看不到新出现的风险和威胁。 我认为,如果您考察的是非常成功的美国公司,无论它们在技术领域是大还是小,它们都不是由MBA经营的,也不是由律师经营的,它们实际上是由技术专家或技术人员扮演着非常重要的角色。 而且,那些更像是经典MBA企业类型经营的大型技术公司可能做得也不尽如人意。 无论如何,这两件事都有重要的位置。 你知道,我认为这是现实,人们不应该拒绝,但是为了成功地建造东西和做酷事,你需要创造收入,并且需要确保不浪费资源。整堆钱。 您需要确保将自己的功劳集中在导入最终将维持良好业务的事物上,因此,我想随着时间的流逝,我们会意识到这一点。 因此,至少在几天之内,这就是启动轨道的真正帮助。人们开始更深入地思考事物的业务方面。
Louis: Right. You touched a little bit there on not losing touch with wanting to build cool things, and I think your latest project is one that I thought was really cool. You put up this little timeline of the web on the Web Directions website at webdirections.org/history, and it’s just this sort of nice, I guess, slider-style timeline of a lot of major events mostly early on in the web and when things were introduced. Where did the idea come from to build this thing?
路易斯:对。 您在这里不想失去与制作精美事物的联系而感动了一点,我认为您的最新项目是我认为真的很棒的项目。 您在Web Directions网站上的webdirections.org/history上放置了这个小的时间轴,我想,这是许多主要事件的滑块式时间轴,主要是在Web早期以及何时东西介绍了。 这个想法是从哪里产生的?
John: Well, probably the original idea, in some ways, goes back to something that I thought of about eight years ago on my honeymoon on the beautiful Cook Islands where I took with me the first two of The Baroque Cycle by Neil Stevenson, are fantastic. I think I recounted this recently when I was talking with Eric Meyer on the Web Behind as well, but we might have a chance to look at just, spend a couple more moments on it. So basically The Baroque Cycle is just this massive, fantastic, entertaining, stimulating series of novels by Neil Stevenson which are all set in the late 17th and early 18th century. I might be 100 years out there, but anyway, so essentially the rise of the modern world.
约翰:好吧,也许最初的想法可以回溯到八年前我在美丽的库克群岛度蜜月时想到的地方,在那儿我带了尼尔·史蒂文森(Neil Stevenson)的《巴洛克自行车》的前两个。太棒了。 我想我最近也在与背后的Web上的Eric Meyer交谈时重述了这一点,但是我们也许有机会看看,花更多时间。 因此,基本上,巴洛克循环只是尼尔·史蒂文森(Neil Stevenson)创作的这部庞大,奇妙,有趣,令人振奋的小说系列,这些小说都定于17世纪末和18世纪初。 我可能在那里已经100年了,但是无论如何,从本质上讲,现代世界的兴起。
Louis: I think that’s right.
路易斯:我认为是正确的。
John: So we see the rise of modern economics or modern finance, the idea that we move away from a cash economy to a credit economy. We see the rise of modern science, so natural philosophy becomes science. We see the rise of kind of a global trade system. So it actually addresses these really big philosophical concepts but in a very entertaining way. The characters are everyone from Isaac Newton to Half-Cocked Jack who’s this fantastic, crazy pirate figure who would make Jack Sparrow seem like someone you take home for tea, but what’s really interesting about it to me is its full of an amalgam of historically-accurate information and a whole lot of confected stuff, a whole lot of made-up stuff. So we see the great fire of London, we see the plague in London in 1666-1667, that sort of time frame. We see, you know, Isaac Newton. We see, you know, the founders of the World Society, all sort of amazing historical characters doing historical stuff and woven through that we have these confected, created characters, someone who ends up effectively creating the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the backwoods of Massachusetts back in the late 7th to 8th century. So what was interesting to me was to follow the events that happened and think about “Okay, which of these are real and which of these are made up?” So I imagine this project that I termed “WWWWWW” or something, it was the who, what, where, how, when, I don’t know. There’s an H there, but anyway, who, what, where, how, the idea was sort of essentially was going to be wiki-driven theme where you put all these, you know, you could put events in there and then it would pull it out and display that information. So you could sort of track it in various ways.
约翰:因此,我们看到了现代经济学或现代金融的兴起,即我们从现金经济转向信贷经济的想法。 我们看到了现代科学的兴起,因此自然哲学成为了科学。 我们看到全球贸易体系的兴起。 因此,它实际上以一种非常有趣的方式解决了这些非常重要的哲学概念。 从艾萨克·牛顿(Isaac Newton)到半公鸡杰克(Hock-Cocked Jack)的每个人都扮演着这样的角色,他是一个神奇而疯狂的海盗人物,会让杰克·斯派洛(Jack Sparrow)看起来像是您带回家喝茶的人,但对我而言,真正有趣的是,它充满了历史悠久的汞合金准确的信息和很多混合的东西,很多人造的东西。 因此,我们看到了伦敦的大火,我们看到了1666-1667年伦敦的瘟疫,这种时间框架。 我们知道,以撒·牛顿。 我们看到,世界社会的创始人,各种各样令人惊叹的历史人物在做历史工作,并通过编织这些东西,我们将这些人物融合在一起,创造出人物,最终有人在马萨诸塞州的落后地区有效地建立了麻省理工学院早在7至8世纪末。 因此,对我来说有趣的是关注发生的事件并思考“好吧,其中哪些是真实的,哪些是虚构的?” 所以我想象这个项目我称之为“ WWWWWW”之类的东西,我不知道是谁,什么,什么地方,如何,什么时候。 那里有一个H,但是无论如何,这个主意是谁,什么,在哪里,如何,基本上是由Wiki驱动的主题,您可以将所有这些都放置在其中,您知道,您可以在其中放置事件,然后它将拉动并显示该信息。 因此,您可以通过各种方式对其进行跟踪。
And my idea was “I’ll start with first few hundred Wikipedia style and hopefully other people will come and do it” and I thought, “Well, this is a really cool idea but we could do the whole world history like this” but of course I quickly, you know, I got married, we had a baby, and like many of the other projects in my life it was kind of stalled, but that’s alright. I have a million things in my life that have been like that and, you know, sometimes they re-emerge, they bubble up years later. That’s sort of what happened here. I guess I was playing with a thing called Timeline JS that was a great technology similar to these and I’m not sure whether Timeline JS was built on top of it but it was called the Simile Project from MIT and the Simile Project was a simple way where you could define in comma separated values or JSON or other formats, a series of events and then it would pull it in and display it on a kind of timeline. The Timeline JS is kind of a much richer, more sophisticated version of that. So I sort of came across that and I thought about-and we’re about to launch another project that I’ve done with it. But I just sort of started playing around with it and it very quickly seemed like a very good way of approaching what can otherwise be an incredibly complicated challenge which is trying to keep a sense of how the web emerged through standards, through ideas, through technologies, browsers, editors and things like that. Because, you know, even those of us who were around more or less at the time kind of forget things, obviously, and we lose what came first which, you know, which version of Netscape came out before IE that had this feature. So I thought it was very important to maintain all that information, so, kind of, I guess it was a many-year project that combined various obsessions and interests of mine, and just finally popped out in a few hours, you know, Timeline JS is so simple to use, and really once I got up and running and saw that it was, you know, was worth doing. Sometimes you’ll have an idea and you’ll play around and you’ll actually implement it and “You know what? It’s not very interesting.” We’ve all probably done that, but this one I thought “Well, this is very interesting.” So, it’s great now. All I do it people send me emails with suggested events. I’ll spend maybe an hour every couple of days finding, you know, I’ll think about something like “Oh, I haven’t really got anything about SGML,” so I’ll kind of spend some time researching that kind of history of GML and SGML and add events that way, so it kind of gives me an opportunity to go and do some research, add things, you know, here there and everywhere, and generally, I guess, keep myself connected with where we’ve come from so it kind of serves a lot of useful purposes.
我的想法是“我将从头几百个Wikipedia风格开始,希望其他人会来做它”,我想:“嗯,这是一个很酷的想法,但是我们可以像这样做整个世界历史”当然,我很快就知道,我结婚了,我们有了一个孩子,就像我一生中的许多其他项目一样,这有点停滞不前,但这没关系。 我的生活中有一百万种事情是那样的,而且,有时它们会重新出现,然后在几年后冒泡。 这就是这里发生的事情。 我猜我在玩一个叫做Timeline JS的东西,这是一种与这些技术相似的伟大技术,我不确定Timeline JS是否基于它构建,但是它被称为MIT的Simile Project,而Simile Project是一个简单的项目。您可以用逗号分隔的值或JSON或其他格式定义一系列事件,然后将其拉入并显示在某种时间轴上。 时间轴JS是一种更丰富,更复杂的版本。 因此,我遇到了一些想法,我在想-我们将要启动另一个我已经完成的项目。 但是我只是开始尝试它,它很快似乎是一种很好的方式来应对否则将是一个非常复杂的挑战,它试图通过标准,思想,技术来保持对网络的认识。 ,浏览器,编辑器之类的东西。 因为,您知道,即使是当时或多或少都在我们身边的人,也显然忘记了事情,并且我们失去了首先出现的功能,您知道,哪个版本的Netscape在具有此功能的IE之前问世。 因此,我认为保持所有这些信息非常重要,因此,我想这是一个多年的项目,结合了我的各种痴迷和兴趣,最后才在几个小时内突然出现,时间轴JS非常简单易用,实际上,一旦我启动并运行,就知道它值得一做。 有时,您会有一个主意,然后四处逛逛,然后实际执行它,“您知道吗? 这不是很有趣。” 我们可能都已经做到了,但是我认为这是“很好,这很有趣。” 所以,现在太好了。 我所做的一切,人们都会向我发送包含建议事件的电子邮件。 我可能每两天会花一个小时,发现,我会考虑诸如“哦,我对SGML并没有真正的了解”之类的东西,所以我会花一些时间研究这种GML和SGML的历史并以这种方式添加事件,因此,这给了我一个机会去做一些研究,在这里和那里到处都添加一些东西,你知道的,而且我想通常可以使自己与我们所处的地方保持联系是从中获得的,因此有很多有用的用途。
Louis: I guess there is definitely a lot of information in some of the early spaces about very early web browsers and specifications and then as it goes on closer to the modern era, it’s a little bit sparcer, but I imagine there’s a lot of information yet to be included in there. But it does, as you were saying, some things do when you look at them, seem surprising in the order of which things arrived or how close together things were. You know, it surprised me both how young Firefox was and how old Ruby on Rails was and that those two dates, the release of Firefox 1 and Ruby on Rails 1 were not as far apart, you know, I would have given a decade between those two things happening because it certainly felt like a decade.
路易斯:我想在某些早期空间中肯定会有很多有关非常早期的Web浏览器和规范的信息,然后随着它接近现代时代,它变得有些稀疏了,但我想这里有很多信息尚未包含在其中。 就像您说的那样,确实如此,当您查看某些内容时,它们按到达的顺序或彼此之间的紧密程度似乎令人惊讶。 您知道,这让我感到惊讶,既使Firefox变得年轻,又使Ruby on Rails变老,而且那两个日期,Firefox 1和Ruby on Rails 1的发布相距不远,您应该知道,发生这两件事是因为肯定感觉像是十年。
John: Yeah. Sort of, about a year, I guess.
约翰:是的。 我猜大概是一年左右。
Louis: Something like that, yeah, it looks like.
路易斯:是的,是的,看起来像。
John: And then between them is AJAX.
约翰:然后是AJAX。
Louis: Yeah.
路易斯:是的。
John: AJAX is so, a term that I guess swept like fire through the sort of web design community. I think we’ve been stumbling around looking for a term that describes what we need, you know, like beyond that first or second generation web design, you know, and suddenly, the term arrived at just the right time, but what, a few weeks after Firefox 1 was released. But of course the online technology was implemented into XWare 5 going back kind of years and years before that.
约翰: AJAX就是这样,我想这个术语在整个Web设计社区中风起云涌。 我认为我们一直在寻找描述我们需要的术语的绊脚石,您知道,就像第一代或第二代Web设计之外,您知道,这个术语突然出现在正确的时间,但是, Firefox 1发布几周后。 但是,当然,在线技术已在XWare 5中实现,可追溯到几年前。
Louis: Yeah, like I said, it’s surprising. You think of Ruby on Rails as a very recent development, something that’s been around for a few years, and it’s kind of gaining a lot of traction now and you think of Firefox as something that’s been around forever, and to see them that close on the timeline. Obviously, it’s really interesting to see a lot of history from well back in the day before I was involved in working with the web and seeing what some of the early browsers looked like and seeing it all on a timeline where it all sort of has a sense of history that you wouldn’t get from reading a Wikipedia page about the history of the web.
路易斯:是的,就像我说的那样,这令人惊讶。 您将Ruby on Rails视为最近的发展,已经存在了几年,并且现在已经获得了很大的吸引力,并且您将Firefox视为永久存在的东西,并且看到它们紧密相关。时间线。 显然,很有趣的是,在我参与网络工作的前一天,回顾了很多历史,并看到了一些早期浏览器的外观,并在一个时间表上看到了所有这些内容,阅读有关网络历史记录的Wikipedia页面不会获得的历史感觉。
John: Well, that was sort of one of the things about it. I mean, you might have observed it, but a lot of this information’s available. I mean, you go to a Wikipedia page on the history of web browsers, there’s a ton of information there. But, you know, is it a particularly kind of illuminating way of sort of telling a story about the history of the web and it’s not. It’s really just a database of information, a very valuable one, whereas the idea behind this is very narrative-driven and Timeline JS, that’s what it’s about. It’s really about telling narratives through time. So I think that this is, again, one of the things I’m trying to do as I put the pieces of information there is to sort of add a bit of extra connection between two different dates through time. So the release of Internet Explorer 5 for Windows has XML http requests, which is just kind of something that almost no one paid any attention to, but ultimately gave rise to asynchronous JavaScript because we could then send little pieces of information to and from between browser and server. So it’s beyond simply pieces of information; it’s a story, and it helps me to try and kind of find other threads to connect to the pieces of the story as well.
约翰:恩,这就是其中之一。 我的意思是,您可能已经观察到了,但是有很多可用的信息。 我的意思是,您转到有关网络浏览器历史的Wikipedia页面,那里有大量信息。 但是,您知道这是否是一种特别的启发性方式,可以讲述一个有关网络历史的故事,而事实并非如此。 它实际上只是一个信息数据库,一个非常有价值的数据库,而其背后的想法则是叙事驱动和Timeline JS,这就是它的目的。 这实际上是通过时间讲述叙事。 因此,我认为这又是我尝试将其中的信息放入其中时要做的一件事,即在时间上的两个不同日期之间增加一些额外的联系。 因此,用于Windows的Internet Explorer 5发行版具有XML http请求,这几乎是没有人关注的事情,但是最终产生了异步JavaScript,因为我们随后可以在浏览器之间来回发送少量信息和服务器。 因此,这不仅仅是信息。 这是一个故事,它可以帮助我尝试并找到其他线索来连接故事的各个部分。
Louis: Yeah, well, I definitely have to commend you on the amount of work that went into it. I know you claim that Timeline JS makes everything nice and easy, but I do still appreciate that you must have put quite a few hours of your own time into this and it’s definitely something to check out if anyone listening wants to see it it’s a webdirections.org/history, and I believe there’s a submission form somewhere to put in ideas.
路易斯:是的,我当然要赞扬您所做的大量工作。 我知道您声称Timeline JS使一切变得轻松简单,但我仍然感谢您一定要花很多时间,这绝对是检查是否有人正在收听的内容,这是一种Web指导.org / history,我相信这里有一个提交意见的表格。
John: Yeah, if you basically just go to the front page I think there’s an email address to me there I think.
约翰:是的,如果您基本上只是转到首页,我想我那里有一个电子邮件地址。
Louis: Yeah, there’s an email, yeah.
路易斯:是的,有一封电子邮件,是的。
John: And then, there is actually at webdirections.org there’s a blog post with a submission form, so maybe we can find that URL and pass it around.
约翰:然后,实际上在webdirections.org上有一篇博客,上面有一个提交表单,所以也许我们可以找到该URL并传递它。
Louis: Yeah, I’ll throw that in the show notes as well.
路易斯:是的,我也将其放在演出记录中。
John: If they want to give us detailed information great or just want to suggest something, it’s kind of interesting, people will say, “Well, what about social media?” and it’s like, well, you know the thing is you end up with a map that is a one to one map of the whole world which kind of isn’t a very useful map.” So the point at which I guess there’s an editorial approach. And for me, there might be things like, and I’m not sure I’ve put this in there, but there were these key websites. There were, for example, there was a redesign at Wired Magazine in the early 2000’s which kind of was purely CSS based and sort of, was hailed certainly at the time as this exemplar of the ability of creating commercial, cutting edge websites that, you know, worked across multiple browsers with new standards because, you know, the idea was until then, well basically what about these older versions of Netscape and whatever. We can’t really do this. So while there’s certainly the place for these kind of exemplars, these kind of milestone sites, I guess I’m focusing more on technology than I am on the social currents and so on.
约翰:如果他们想给我们提供详尽的详细信息,或者只是想提出一些建议,这很有趣,人们会说:“那么,社交媒体呢?” 就像,嗯,您知道的事情是,您最终得到的地图是全世界的一对一地图,而这并不是非常有用的地图。” 因此,我认为这是一种编辑方法。 对我来说,可能会有类似的事情,但我不确定我是否已经将其放入其中,但是有这些关键网站。 例如,《连线杂志》(Wired Magazine)于2000年代初进行了重新设计,这种设计完全基于CSS,在当时肯定受到赞誉,因为它具有创建商业,尖端网站的能力,知道,使用新标准可以跨多个浏览器工作,因为直到那时,这个想法才基本上可以解决这些较旧版本的Netscape以及其他问题。 我们真的不能做到这一点。 因此,尽管肯定有这类示例,此类里程碑站点的位置,但我想我更关注技术而不是社交潮流等。
Louis: Yeah.
路易斯:是的。
John: So I think at this point probably we won’t see, you know, the launch of Boo.com or Facebook.com, but see, who remembers Boo.com? Do you remember Boo.com?
约翰:所以我认为在这一点上我们可能看不到Boo.com或Facebook.com的启动,但是,谁记得Boo.com? 您还记得Boo.com吗?
Louis: No.
路易斯:不。
John: So that was kind of late 90s, probably the exemplar, there’s whole books on its failure. Basically, they got tons of funding and it was supposed to be this massive online kind of high-end retail fashion store, and people forgot it now, but that was, Boo.com was like-you just have to say Boo.com to basically pooh-pooh the entire Internet back in about 1999, and yet we’ve forgotten it now, right?
约翰:那大概是90年代后期,也许是典范,关于它的失败全书都有。 基本上,他们获得了大量资金,应该是这种大规模的在线高端零售时装商店,现在人们已经忘记了,但是Boo.com就像是-您只需要说Boo.com就可以了。基本上可以追溯到整个Internet大约在1999年,但是我们现在已经忘记了,对吧?
Louis: Yeah. Whereas something like the effect that the Wired.com and ESPN redesigns had on developer mindset and the way developers approached the web going forward was, those are historical, and it’s not only relevant for that company, but for the web at large. I guess you could make the argument that the recent Boston Globe redesign would probably fall into that category.
路易斯:是的。 虽然Wired.com和ESPN重新设计对开发人员的心态以及开发人员使用Web的方式所产生的影响是具有历史意义的,但这不仅与该公司有关,而且与整个Web有关。 我想您可以提出一个论点,即最近对《波士顿环球报》进行的重新设计可能属于这一类。
John: Well, I think our friend and somewhat colleague at SitePoint, Cameron Adams, I think he’s heading in that respect. He kind of blogged about using JavaScript before midi queries were out there, or certainly the more modern midi queries. Using JavaScript to create multiple-column layouts based on the width of a browser and, in fact, the City Morning Herald and I guess, as a consequence, The Age and other Fairfax newspapers were doing this style years ago, and these are the things we lose sight of sometimes. It’s not to downgrade the importance of the Boston Globe redesign. Obviously, that’s going to be one of those moments that we refer to, but I think it’s important also to try and keep track of the other less, maybe famous, but in some ways, as significant events. So there are sort of things, I guess, I’m trying to document. And it’s been good to have people kind of write to me and say “Look, what about this thing?” and I thought “Wow,” I mean, usually I’d heard of it, but the very first entry now in the Timeline is the Mundaneum, which was this idea of collecting the entire world’s knowledge in a single building, and basically, you know, it was very analog because the original ideas came from the late 19th century. In fact, it was built in about 1910, and I’d never heard of this despite the fact I’ve been very interested in this whole field for nearly a quarter of a century. So it’s good for people, to like write to me and tell me things and I think “Wow.” So I’ve definitely learned things both by other people telling me or myself thinking “What was that? What was happening around then?” I’ll go and find something. They’ll be a reference in, you know, whether it’s one of the Wikipedia or the W3.org or these other records that I’m going back to and leads me on to something else. So, you know, it’s more than just copying and pasting out of Wikipedia.
约翰:恩,我认为我们的朋友和SitePoint的同事卡梅隆·亚当斯(Cameron Adams),我认为他正在这方面前进。 他有点在博客上发表关于在Midi查询出现之前使用JavaScript,或者肯定是更现代的Midi查询。 实际上,使用JavaScript根据浏览器的宽度以及《城市早报》的宽度创建多列布局,因此,我猜想,几年前The Age和其他Fairfax报纸都采用这种风格,我们有时会看不见。 这并不是要降低《波士顿环球报》重新设计的重要性。 显然,那将是我们提到的那一刻,但我认为,重要的是要努力去追踪另一个不太重要的时刻,也许是著名的,但在某些方面也很重要。 我想我正在尝试记录一些事情。 有人写信给我说“看,这件事怎么样?”真是太好了。 我以为“哇”,我的意思是,通常我听说过,但是时间轴上的第一个条目是世界,这是在一个建筑物中收集整个世界知识的想法。知道,这非常相似,因为最初的想法来自19世纪后期。 实际上,它建于1910年左右,尽管我对整个领域都充满了近25年的兴趣,但我从未听说过。 因此,喜欢写信给我并告诉我一些事情,对我来说是一件好事,我认为“哇”。 因此,我肯定是通过其他人告诉我或我自己的想法而学到的东西,“那是什么? 那时发生了什么事?” 我去找东西 无论是Wikipedia还是W3.org还是我将要参考并引导我进行其他工作的其他记录,它们都将作为参考。 因此,您知道,这不仅仅是从Wikipedia复制和粘贴。
Louis: Yeah.
路易斯:是的。
John: But I’m relying on, it’s a lot on my memory to shape the story, but it’s also starting to take on a life of its own which I think is the best part of it all.
约翰:但是我依靠的是,塑造这个故事的记忆力很大,但是它也开始拥有自己的生活,我认为这是其中最好的部分。
Louis: Yeah, really interesting to go back and see the stuff that sort of set the stage for the idea of hypertext well before anyone was thinking of markup languages per se. And I also wanted to commend you really quickly on using a really classic, old-school, under construction GIF as the image to represent the introduction of the GIF format in 1987.
路易斯:是的,回过头来看看真正为超文本构想奠定基础的东西真的很有趣,而这还没有人想到标记语言本身。 我还想特别赞扬您使用经典的,老式的,正在建设中的GIF作为代表1987年引入GIF格式的图像。
John: Oh, it couldn’t go past that really. I was looking, there were a whole heap of them out there. The funny thing is there’s a huge page of them, and ironically, it actually almost pretty much crashes and burns any modern browser or any modern hardware when it’s trying to run, you know, a few dozen simultaneous animated GIFs. So it’s probably a technology I’m glad has past. I was thinking about the one with the guy shoveling stuff.
约翰:哦,这真的无法超越。 我在看,那里有一大堆。 有趣的是,其中有一个很大的页面,具有讽刺意味的是,实际上,当它尝试运行几十个同时运行的GIF时,实际上几乎崩溃并烧毁了任何现代浏览器或任何现代硬件。 因此,这可能是我很高兴过去的一项技术。 我在想那个那个铲东西的家伙。
Louis: Yeah.
路易斯:是的。
John: Another classic under construction. And then I think there were, didn’t Paul Irish, a couple days ago ask for someone to redesign that using only animated CSS or something?
约翰:另一个正在建设的经典。 然后我想,几天前,保罗·爱尔兰(Paul Irish)难道要求有人仅使用动画CSS或其他东西重新设计吗?
Louis: I didn’t catch wind of that. I’m sure someone must have done it.
路易斯:我没听见。 我敢肯定有人一定会做。
John: Right.
约翰:对。
Louis: Because, yeah, the first few times you see something like, “Oh, I’ve designed a whole iPhone using no images and nothing but CSS,” you think “Oh wow, that’s really.” And then, you know, as they poured in over the course of the years, you get to the point where you think, “Okay, well you can clearly do anything with CSS if you have unlimited time and patience.”
路易斯:因为,是的,头几次,您会看到类似这样的信息:“哦,我设计的整个iPhone不带图像,只带CSS,”您认为“哦,那是真的。” 然后,随着这些年来的涌入,您知道,您会想到:“好吧,如果您有无限的时间和耐心,那么可以使用CSS做任何事情。”
John: And unlimited divs.
约翰:还有无限的div。
Louis: Yeah. There is one thing I did want to discuss with you briefly. I don’t know if you remember, the last time you were on the show, we were talking a little bit about the idea of what, at the time, were being called hybrid apps. I’m not sure if that terminology is still in use anywhere.
路易斯:是的。 我确实想与您讨论一件事。 我不知道您是否记得,上次您在节目中时,我们在谈论当时称为混合应用程序的想法。 我不确定该术语是否还在任何地方使用。
John: Yeah, not so much. It’s not used so much is it? I think it’s just apps these days and people will be less concerned about how you build them. But anyway, continue.
约翰:是的,不是很多。 它没用太多吗? 我认为这些天只是应用程序,人们将不再关注如何构建它们。 但是无论如何,请继续。
Louis: Yeah, so you had written, I think, an opinion piece at the time, and that was one of the things we wanted to talk about, and we just sort of discussed what the situation was with what the different technologies used to approach the mobile platform were. I guess your point of view, and mine as well at the time, was that the web is obviously the best choice, and I was wondering if your thinking on that has changed in any way in the intervening time. I know there have been a few things recently. One of them was Facebook’s move away from HTML5 with regards to their mobile apps, and then the other thing is hoards of iOS users move towards the web to access Google maps, and how you feel that plays into what your thinking is on the important of web technologies for the mobile platform.
路易斯:是的,我想您当时写了一篇意见书,那是我们要谈论的事情之一,我们只是在讨论使用不同技术所采用的情况是什么情况。移动平台。 我想您的观点以及当时的观点都是,网络显然是最佳选择,我想知道您的想法是否在此期间发生了任何变化。 我知道最近有几件事。 其中之一是Facebook在移动应用程序方面不再使用HTML5,然后另一件事是大量的iOS用户转向网络访问Google地图,以及您如何看待您的想法对移动平台的网络技术。
John: I think underlying it all it that we live in a multi-platform world obviously. I mean, it’s a truism, and what that means is both multiple operating systems. So, you know, for the foreseeable future if you want to reach a significant percentage of people you’re going to have to build applications that work across all, either that or build multiple applications in different technologies to reach all sort of operating systems and it’s not just about operating systems, it’s device characteristics. So we’ve seen the launch of the iPhone 5, I think it was. What are they, up to five now?
约翰:我认为,这显然是我们生活在一个多平台世界中的基础。 我的意思是,这是不言而喻的,意味着两个操作系统都是多重的。 因此,您知道,在可预见的将来,如果您想吸引很大一部分人,您将必须构建可跨所有人使用的应用程序,或者必须以不同的技术构建多个应用程序以覆盖各种操作系统和这不仅与操作系统有关,还与设备特性有关。 因此,我们认为iPhone 5已经发布了。 他们是什么,现在最多五个?
Louis: I think it’s five, yeah.
路易斯:我认为是五岁。
John: Yeah, so I get confused now because there’s iOS 6 and iPhone 5, right? But what you see if you’ve got one of those is that the iPhone 4 apps or the iOS, the apps that were optimized for iPhone 4 have this pretty unsightly black bar across the top and the bottom. So it goes to show that even the simplest changes to form factors of devices, when you use technologies that are completely designed for that device, in this case Objective C and all of that, the Apple’s Cocoa Touch, and so on. Basically, you have to redevelop even if, you know, Apple adds a few pixels to the screen, right? And this is what all those kind of lament about the number of Android, fragmentation Android platform. The truth is there’s always been fragmentation. There’s been fragmentation of devices, of screens, of operating systems, and we’ve always had it. It’s not going away, right? So I think we’ve just got to get used to that. Now, we could even celebrate it as a great thing, but let’s leave that aside. Let’s treat it as just a simple historical reality that is not going to change. So at this point, do you want to reach a whole heap of people with whatever you’re building? You can say, “Look, we’re going to pursue a niche of people and we’re going to go with a particular platform,” and that’s a perfectly valid approach. Or for the most part, whether you’re building something for a client, or you’re building something yourself, that’s a luxury, you know, you can’t afford. You can’t say to a client, “Well we’re not actually going to build you for anything other than this platform because we know this platform, we don’t know the other ones,” right? You know, I don’t think that’s the approach that’s going to work with most clients. So, given that, what are you going to do? Are you going to build something that is optimized for iPad, iPad Retina, iPhone, iPhone Retina, iPhone 5, like suddenly we’ve got five or six form factors, they’re different. Okay. Now we’re looking at kind of all these other platforms. So we’re looking at Android. You know, 7-inch tablets, 10-inch tablets, 5-inch tablet, 4-inch phones and 3.5 inch phones, right? Televisions. We haven’t even begun to see the impact of, I guess, smart TVs, whatever you want to call them, but basically they’re another screen that is going to become increasingly interactive, whereas in the past, you know, the screen was looked at far more than any other in our life is a television screen and it’s always been pretty passive and any interactions with it have been pretty much choosing the next thing we want to watch at this time. But it’s becoming an increasingly important way in which we interact with a whole heap of services. So it seems to me, in the context of all that, and then, you know, I haven’t even mentioned in-car dashboards and there are just going to be screens on everything. That’s something I’ve been saying for a while, but we’re seeing it increasingly. As a consequence, if you’re building something to reach as many people as possible, I just don’t think there’s ultimately any alternative than to use web technologies to reach them. Now whether you package them up and deploy them as native apps or not really comes down to circumstance. So at the moment I’m playing around with some new field communication stuff, you know, NFC, RFID stuff, right? Using mobile devices that have NFC on them. Now I can build something using web technology and phone gap, but I have to access those device APIs, and I can’t do that in a browser. I’m going to have to do that in a native app, whether it’s Android or Blackberry or some other platform which support NFC. Now here’s a circumstance in which I can use web technologies, and I can extend them a little bit using technologies like phone gap, and ultimately, I can build an application that is just as capable as if I’d used, you know, on Android I used Java, or on the Blackberry I used C++, or whatever particular approach that I wanted to use. I tend to try and think in the broad swoop of history, right? That’s a luxury I have because, you know, I don’t necessarily have to build things day in and day out for clients, but I do build things day in and day out, I just have the luxury that I do them for me for the most part. So, look, I guess if you look at the history timeline what we’ve just been talking about that is very much about this broad swoop of history. If you look at Type Kit which has been very successful, that came about through understanding the broad sweep of history over ten years of technological innovation around typography in the browser. So I think there’s a place, a very important place, for stepping back a little bit, taking a deep breath and having a look at where things really are headed.
约翰:是的,所以我现在很困惑,因为有iOS 6和iPhone 5,对吗? 但是,如果您拥有其中之一,就会看到iPhone 4应用程序或iOS,针对iPhone 4优化的应用程序顶部和底部都有难看的黑条。 So it goes to show that even the simplest changes to form factors of devices, when you use technologies that are completely designed for that device, in this case Objective C and all of that, the Apple's Cocoa Touch, and so on. Basically, you have to redevelop even if, you know, Apple adds a few pixels to the screen, right? And this is what all those kind of lament about the number of Android, fragmentation Android platform. The truth is there's always been fragmentation. There's been fragmentation of devices, of screens, of operating systems, and we've always had it. It's not going away, right? So I think we've just got to get used to that. Now, we could even celebrate it as a great thing, but let's leave that aside. Let's treat it as just a simple historical reality that is not going to change. So at this point, do you want to reach a whole heap of people with whatever you're building? You can say, “Look, we're going to pursue a niche of people and we're going to go with a particular platform,” and that's a perfectly valid approach. Or for the most part, whether you're building something for a client, or you're building something yourself, that's a luxury, you know, you can't afford. You can't say to a client, “Well we're not actually going to build you for anything other than this platform because we know this platform, we don't know the other ones,” right? You know, I don't think that's the approach that's going to work with most clients. So, given that, what are you going to do? Are you going to build something that is optimized for iPad, iPad Retina, iPhone, iPhone Retina, iPhone 5, like suddenly we've got five or six form factors, they're different. 好的。 Now we're looking at kind of all these other platforms. So we're looking at Android. You know, 7-inch tablets, 10-inch tablets, 5-inch tablet, 4-inch phones and 3.5 inch phones, right? 电视。 We haven't even begun to see the impact of, I guess, smart TVs, whatever you want to call them, but basically they're another screen that is going to become increasingly interactive, whereas in the past, you know, the screen was looked at far more than any other in our life is a television screen and it's always been pretty passive and any interactions with it have been pretty much choosing the next thing we want to watch at this time. But it's becoming an increasingly important way in which we interact with a whole heap of services. So it seems to me, in the context of all that, and then, you know, I haven't even mentioned in-car dashboards and there are just going to be screens on everything. That's something I've been saying for a while, but we're seeing it increasingly. As a consequence, if you're building something to reach as many people as possible, I just don't think there's ultimately any alternative than to use web technologies to reach them. Now whether you package them up and deploy them as native apps or not really comes down to circumstance. So at the moment I'm playing around with some new field communication stuff, you know, NFC, RFID stuff, right? Using mobile devices that have NFC on them. Now I can build something using web technology and phone gap, but I have to access those device APIs, and I can't do that in a browser. I'm going to have to do that in a native app, whether it's Android or Blackberry or some other platform which support NFC. Now here's a circumstance in which I can use web technologies, and I can extend them a little bit using technologies like phone gap, and ultimately, I can build an application that is just as capable as if I'd used, you know, on Android I used Java, or on the Blackberry I used C++, or whatever particular approach that I wanted to use. I tend to try and think in the broad swoop of history, right? That's a luxury I have because, you know, I don't necessarily have to build things day in and day out for clients, but I do build things day in and day out, I just have the luxury that I do them for me for the most part. So, look, I guess if you look at the history timeline what we've just been talking about that is very much about this broad swoop of history. If you look at Type Kit which has been very successful, that came about through understanding the broad sweep of history over ten years of technological innovation around typography in the browser. So I think there's a place, a very important place, for stepping back a little bit, taking a deep breath and having a look at where things really are headed.
So where do I think things are headed in the long run? I think the idea of native apps I think, as Scott Jansen recently talked about, he used the term, it’s kind of a local maximum, right? So if you think about artificial intelligence, or you look at any sort of algorithm that tries to solve a problem, a complex problem, basically, you can keep optimizing around a local maximum, but it might mean you’re missing a much bigger picture outside that. I tend to think that’s true of applications. I think they’re something we’re familiar and comfortable with: the metaphors of desktops applications or desktop computing since the early 1980’s and before that, maybe the history of application- centric. There’s one exception to that, a significant exception, which was Lisa, so, the precursor in a way to the Mac. Lisa was document-centric. You didn’t start applications. You opened documents, and, in fact, it had a rudimentary concept of compound documents. So I kind of think ultimately at the moment we’re getting things backwards when we focus on the application rather than what we’re trying to achieve, on whether that’s a piece of art, whether it’s the letter, whether it’s the book, whether it’s illustration. I know there’s a lot there. I’ve just gone on for about ten minutes, but you knew what you were getting yourself into. So, to me, I think the web isn’t focused on content. Web technologies are about content. It’s very much about enabling different services to work together, and you know, we’re only beginning to touch the surface of that. If you look at the web- intense projects or the INT, EN, NTS, the idea is that it makes it easier to build compound content where, you know, this particular service will handle this particular feature of my application. So I think in the longer sweep of history the web opens up these possibilities whereas native platforms tend to close them down. Although, you know, Android has Intense, Blackberry has Wave in Blackberry 10 and the playbook OS have a way of invoking other applications to do things for you, but I think the web kind of really starts allowing us to build those sort of solutions, and to me that’s where we’re headed.
So where do I think things are headed in the long run? I think the idea of native apps I think, as Scott Jansen recently talked about, he used the term, it's kind of a local maximum, right? So if you think about artificial intelligence, or you look at any sort of algorithm that tries to solve a problem, a complex problem, basically, you can keep optimizing around a local maximum, but it might mean you're missing a much bigger picture outside that. I tend to think that's true of applications. I think they're something we're familiar and comfortable with: the metaphors of desktops applications or desktop computing since the early 1980's and before that, maybe the history of application- centric. There's one exception to that, a significant exception, which was Lisa, so, the precursor in a way to the Mac. Lisa was document-centric. You didn't start applications. You opened documents, and, in fact, it had a rudimentary concept of compound documents. So I kind of think ultimately at the moment we're getting things backwards when we focus on the application rather than what we're trying to achieve, on whether that's a piece of art, whether it's the letter, whether it's the book, whether it's illustration. I know there's a lot there. I've just gone on for about ten minutes, but you knew what you were getting yourself into. So, to me, I think the web isn't focused on content. Web technologies are about content. It's very much about enabling different services to work together, and you know, we're only beginning to touch the surface of that. If you look at the web- intense projects or the INT, EN, NTS, the idea is that it makes it easier to build compound content where, you know, this particular service will handle this particular feature of my application. So I think in the longer sweep of history the web opens up these possibilities whereas native platforms tend to close them down. Although, you know, Android has Intense, Blackberry has Wave in Blackberry 10 and the playbook OS have a way of invoking other applications to do things for you, but I think the web kind of really starts allowing us to build those sort of solutions, and to me that's where we're headed.
Louis: Right. So for you, something like Facebook’s move away from HTML5 is a bit of a blip on the radar, and I should mention it’s a move away from HTML5 as a technique to build their native applications, but they still get the majority of their mobile usage through their browser anyway.
路易斯:对。 So for you, something like Facebook's move away from HTML5 is a bit of a blip on the radar, and I should mention it's a move away from HTML5 as a technique to build their native applications, but they still get the majority of their mobile usage through their browser anyway.
John: Right. And word is, there have been articles in the way they’ve went about building their application, and there seem to be some pretty inefficient uses of networks resources that have a lot more to do with performance challenges, right?
约翰:对。 And word is, there have been articles in the way they've went about building their application, and there seem to be some pretty inefficient uses of networks resources that have a lot more to do with performance challenges, right?
Louis: I seem to remember reading somewhere that they were actually shipping snippets of HTML over the wire and not caching things locally, so it seems like it was more of an organizational failure than a technological one.
Louis: I seem to remember reading somewhere that they were actually shipping snippets of HTML over the wire and not caching things locally, so it seems like it was more of an organizational failure than a technological one.
John: Yeah. One of the challenges I think we have in our industry right now is we’re very opinionated, and it’s a bit ironic me saying that, but I like to think that like at least if we’re going to have opinions, we should back it up with research, right?
John: Yeah. One of the challenges I think we have in our industry right now is we're very opinionated, and it's a bit ironic me saying that, but I like to think that like at least if we're going to have opinions, we should back it up with research, right?
Louis: Right.
路易斯:对。
John: So I’m very akin to research. So whether it’s somebody kind of-there was quite a bit of critique around local storage going back, like, a few months back, some relatively high-profile people talking about local storage as being dangerous. The problem was, in theory what they were talking about was worth considering, right? But we don’t live in a theoretical world. So what I did was I built some test cases, and I tested it and demonstrated for any practical purpose that you might talk about, you know, they were at least overstating the case. I think it’s really important to have ideas, have opinions, that’s great, but get out there and test them. Now, I do that all the time. I like to think that, you know, I’d like to think that if I have an opinion I’ve at least tried to justify it or at least found evidence for it, and if I can’t find that evidence hopefully, change my opinion as well. So I think that’s one of challenges right now is we tend to take sides. I mean, the whole HTML5 thing is really, it’s kind of largely seen as you’ve got native fans and you’ve got HTML5 fans, and they’re just in camps, and they’re battling it out. The truth is we have to be realistic about the technologies, why we use them, what their shortcomings are. I recently wrote a white paper. It’s called HTML5 for Creatives, and it’s really focusing on creative directive types and people in agencies and people who are responsible for campaigns, right? Now typically at that decision making level, they’re not familiar with the ins and outs of specific technologies, and for the most part that’s fine. But what I wanted to address was a lot of these myths that are out there and the things you might hear about as a kind of creative director, and I go and speak on panels and things, and I hear stuff coming out of people’s mouth that is just kind of ridiculously, but I know where I came from. I wanted to try and address all those sorts of things. One of the things that I was looking at around that were the, you know, some of these issues about Facebook performance, HTML5 because, you know, people use these things as a reason to do what they want to do, rather than a way to learn about how to do things better, right? So I sort of challenge anybody who has a strong opinion about these sort of things to go and test it, and I do that. I do that all the time. I play around with technology, and one of the things I found out was at the moment, I don’t think you can use JQuery Mobile in a way to deploy apps that are going to work particularly well for most users, you know, native apps. It just doesn’t seem good enough for me in terms of performance. There’s other frameworks out there that do work well and that comes down to testing them out and researching them, rather than kind of, you know, saying “Oh, well Facebook didn’t work therefore HTML5 doesn’t work.” That’s sort of, you can make some very bad decisions in that sort of way as far as I’m concerned. You know, you’re going to bet your entire future on somebody else’s kind of opinion that’s based on no evidence? I don’t know. But I suggest it’s really important for people to go out and do research and, you know, if you think this doesn’t work go and give it a try and if you can demonstrate why something doesn’t work, publish it. Show us what the shortcomings are. That’s what I do and a lot of really smart people do. But, you know, opinions, they’re just, I think unfortunately opinions, people latch onto opinions that kind of concur with what they already think, right? And this is why I like a scientific approach because science is all about questioning what you already think, challenging it and demonstrating that it’s kind of on the right track or maybe it’s not.
John: So I'm very akin to research. So whether it's somebody kind of-there was quite a bit of critique around local storage going back, like, a few months back, some relatively high-profile people talking about local storage as being dangerous. The problem was, in theory what they were talking about was worth considering, right? But we don't live in a theoretical world. So what I did was I built some test cases, and I tested it and demonstrated for any practical purpose that you might talk about, you know, they were at least overstating the case. I think it's really important to have ideas, have opinions, that's great, but get out there and test them. Now, I do that all the time. I like to think that, you know, I'd like to think that if I have an opinion I've at least tried to justify it or at least found evidence for it, and if I can't find that evidence hopefully, change my opinion as well. So I think that's one of challenges right now is we tend to take sides. I mean, the whole HTML5 thing is really, it's kind of largely seen as you've got native fans and you've got HTML5 fans, and they're just in camps, and they're battling it out. The truth is we have to be realistic about the technologies, why we use them, what their shortcomings are. I recently wrote a white paper. It's called HTML5 for Creatives, and it's really focusing on creative directive types and people in agencies and people who are responsible for campaigns, right? Now typically at that decision making level, they're not familiar with the ins and outs of specific technologies, and for the most part that's fine. But what I wanted to address was a lot of these myths that are out there and the things you might hear about as a kind of creative director, and I go and speak on panels and things, and I hear stuff coming out of people's mouth that is just kind of ridiculously, but I know where I came from. I wanted to try and address all those sorts of things. One of the things that I was looking at around that were the, you know, some of these issues about Facebook performance, HTML5 because, you know, people use these things as a reason to do what they want to do, rather than a way to learn about how to do things better, right? So I sort of challenge anybody who has a strong opinion about these sort of things to go and test it, and I do that. I do that all the time. I play around with technology, and one of the things I found out was at the moment, I don't think you can use JQuery Mobile in a way to deploy apps that are going to work particularly well for most users, you know, native apps. It just doesn't seem good enough for me in terms of performance. There's other frameworks out there that do work well and that comes down to testing them out and researching them, rather than kind of, you know, saying “Oh, well Facebook didn't work therefore HTML5 doesn't work.” That's sort of, you can make some very bad decisions in that sort of way as far as I'm concerned. You know, you're going to bet your entire future on somebody else's kind of opinion that's based on no evidence? 我不知道。 But I suggest it's really important for people to go out and do research and, you know, if you think this doesn't work go and give it a try and if you can demonstrate why something doesn't work, publish it. Show us what the shortcomings are. That's what I do and a lot of really smart people do. But, you know, opinions, they're just, I think unfortunately opinions, people latch onto opinions that kind of concur with what they already think, right? And this is why I like a scientific approach because science is all about questioning what you already think, challenging it and demonstrating that it's kind of on the right track or maybe it's not.
Louis: Absolutely. So I’ll definitely throw up a link to your “HTML5 for Creatives” white paper in the show notes as well. As I mentioned at the start of the show, the Web Directions South Conference in Sydney is coming up in just a little over a week, but I believe you still do have tickets available. So if anyone happens to be in Australia and hasn’t registered that’s still available at webdirections.org. Am I right there?
路易斯:绝对。 So I'll definitely throw up a link to your “HTML5 for Creatives” white paper in the show notes as well. As I mentioned at the start of the show, the Web Directions South Conference in Sydney is coming up in just a little over a week, but I believe you still do have tickets available. So if anyone happens to be in Australia and hasn't registered that's still available at webdirections.org. Am I right there?
John: That’s right sir. We’re on two weeks yesterday. I think there’s a SitePoint discount code, pretty sure. We can maybe post that. I think if you just sign up with the code SitePoint you might get a couple hundred bucks off.
John: That's right sir. We're on two weeks yesterday. I think there's a SitePoint discount code, pretty sure. We can maybe post that. I think if you just sign up with the code SitePoint you might get a couple hundred bucks off.
Louis: All right, fantastic.
Louis: All right, fantastic.
John: So, I’m pretty sure that’s out there. We often get quite a lot of people from the SitePoint family along and quite a lot of SitePoint readers and…
John: So, I'm pretty sure that's out there. We often get quite a lot of people from the SitePoint family along and quite a lot of SitePoint readers and…
Louis: There will definitely be some folks along. I won’t be able to make it this year unfortunately, but there will definitely be a few people there, probably with some books and shirts. So anyone listening who’s going to be attending Web Directions South definitely go up and say hi to the SitePoint folks, and I will, as I mentioned, throw up links to all the stuff we talked about in the show on the website. And if people want to follow you on the web or on Twitter?
Louis: There will definitely be some folks along. I won't be able to make it this year unfortunately, but there will definitely be a few people there, probably with some books and shirts. So anyone listening who's going to be attending Web Directions South definitely go up and say hi to the SitePoint folks, and I will, as I mentioned, throw up links to all the stuff we talked about in the show on the website. And if people want to follow you on the web or on Twitter?
John: Pretty much anywhere I am JohnAllsopp, so @johnallsopp. I think on my app.net it’s JohnAllsopp. Pretty much go looking for John Allsopp, and you will find me. Please come and follow me. I try not to, I try to have a 90% kind of professionally-focused content out there, and I’ll be about 10% more on the personal side.
John: Pretty much anywhere I am JohnAllsopp, so @johnallsopp . I think on my app.net it's JohnAllsopp. Pretty much go looking for John Allsopp, and you will find me. Please come and follow me. I try not to, I try to have a 90% kind of professionally-focused content out there, and I'll be about 10% more on the personal side.
Louis: You’ve got to put at least, there’s got to be at least 10% toast though, so that doesn’t leave a lot. I think you need to scale it back maybe a little.
Louis: You've got to put at least, there's got to be at least 10% toast though, so that doesn't leave a lot. I think you need to scale it back maybe a little.
John: Personal toast or professional? 5% personal toast, 5% professional toast.
John: Personal toast or professional? 5% personal toast, 5% professional toast.
Louis: Right. I understand a little bit when I spoke with Jeremy Keith earlier in the year, he warned people who might be considering following him on Twitter that it was going to be at least 50% toast so…
路易斯:对。 I understand a little bit when I spoke with Jeremy Keith earlier in the year, he warned people who might be considering following him on Twitter that it was going to be at least 50% toast so…
John: Well he used to be a baker. So maybe that’s where it comes from.
John: Well he used to be a baker. So maybe that's where it comes from.
Louis: Did he? Well maybe that’s, so maybe it is professional.
Louis: Did he? Well maybe that's, so maybe it is professional.
John: He bakes a mean loaf does Jeremy, so, yeah I don’t know. I don’t know. It’s been a while since he’s made any bread.
John: He bakes a mean loaf does Jeremy, so, yeah I don't know. 我不知道。 It's been a while since he's made any bread.
Louis: All right. Good to know.
路易斯:好的。 很高兴知道。
John: There you go. That’s why he’s probably toast oriented.
John: There you go. That's why he's probably toast oriented.
Louis: Alright. Well thanks very much, John, for taking the time to talk to me this morning.
路易斯:好吧。 Well thanks very much, John, for taking the time to talk to me this morning.
John: Great. Pleasure.
John: Great. 乐趣。
Louis: I know you must be super busy getting all your ducks in a row for the conference, so best luck with that and have a blast.
Louis: I know you must be super busy getting all your ducks in a row for the conference, so best luck with that and have a blast.
John: We shall. Come say hi if you come to the event, so come to the conference people, and we’ll catch you again soon.
John: We shall. Come say hi if you come to the event, so come to the conference people, and we'll catch you again soon.
Louis: And thanks for listening to this week’s episode of the SitePoint Podcast. I’d love to hear what you thought about today’s show, so if you have any thoughts or suggestions just go to sitepoint.com/podcast and you can leave a comment on today’s episode, you can also get any of our previous episodes to download or subscribe to get the show automatically. You can follow SitePoint on Twitter @sitepointdotcom, that’s sitepoint d-o-t-c-o-m, and you can follow me on Twitter @rssaddict. The show this week was produced by Karn Broad, and I’m Louis Simoneau, thanks for listening and bye for now.
路易斯:感谢您收听本周的SitePoint播客。 我很想听听您对今天节目的看法,因此,如果您有任何想法或建议,请访问sitepoint.com/podcast ,您可以对今天的节目发表评论,也可以下载我们以前的任何节目或订阅自动显示节目。 您可以在Twitter @sitepointdotcom (即站点点dotcom)上关注SitePoint ,也可以在Twitter @rssaddict上关注我。 本周的节目是由Karn Broad制作的,我是Louis Simoneau,感谢您的收听和再见。
Audio Transcription by SpeechPad.
通过SpeechPad进行音频转录 。
Theme music by Mike Mella.
Mike Mella的主题音乐。
Thanks for listening! Feel free to let us know how we’re doing, or to continue the discussion, using the comments field below.
谢谢收听! 欢迎使用下面的评论字段让我们知道我们的状况,或者继续讨论。
翻译自: https://www.sitepoint.com/podcast-182-web-directions-with-john-allsopp/