Web n+1: The Future of Web Interfaces Steven Pemberton, CWI and W3C, Amsterdam

About me Researcher at the Dutch national research centre CWI (the first European internet site) Co-designed ABC, the programming language that Python is based on In the 80's co-designed what you would now call a browser. Organised 2 workshops at the first Web conference in 1994 Co-author of CSS, HTML4, XHTML, XML Events, XForms, etc Chair of HTML and Forms working groups Until recently, editor-in-Chief of ACM/interactions.

What is this crazy thing called Web 2.0?

What if a Rose didn't have a Name? Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis: Connection between thought and language. If you haven't got a word for it, you can't think it. If you don't perceive it as a concept, you won't invent a word for it. For example: Dutch Gezellig

Gezellig

An example: The Meaning of Liff The Deeper Meaning of Liff: A Dictionary of Things There Aren't Any Words for Yet — But There Ought to Be By Douglas Adams and John Lloyd Such as:

An example: The Meaning of Liff The Deeper Meaning of Liff: A Dictionary of Things There Aren't Any Words for Yet — But There Ought to Be By Douglas Adams and John Lloyd Such as: PEORIA (n.): the fear of peeling too few potatoes

An example: The Meaning of Liff The Deeper Meaning of Liff: A Dictionary of Things There Aren't Any Words for Yet — But There Ought to Be By Douglas Adams and John Lloyd Such as: PEORIA (n.): the fear of peeling too few potatoes ABINGER (n.): Person who washes up everything except the frying pan, the cheese grater and the saucepan which the chocolate sauce has been made in.

An example: The Meaning of Liff The Deeper Meaning of Liff: A Dictionary of Things There Aren't Any Words for Yet — But There Ought to Be By Douglas Adams and John Lloyd Such as: PEORIA (n.): the fear of peeling too few potatoes ABINGER (n.): Person who washes up everything except the frying pan, the cheese grater and the saucepan which the chocolate sauce has been made in. DUNGENESS (n.): The uneasy feeling that the plastic handles of the over-loaded supermarket carrier bag you are carrying are getting steadily longer.

Web Examples There are new words in use which seem to upset people - "What's so special about that? I've been doing that since 19xx"

Web Examples (with the date of first sighting of the concept)

Web Examples (with the date of first sighting of the concept) Blog (1995)

Web Examples (with the date of first sighting of the concept) Blog (1995) Microformats (1997)

Web Examples (with the date of first sighting of the concept) Blog (1995) Microformats (1997) Tags (1997)

Web Examples (with the date of first sighting of the concept) Blog (1995) Microformats (1997) Tags (1997) Ajax (1999)

Web Examples (with the date of first sighting of the concept) Blog (1995) Microformats (1997) Tags (1997) Ajax (1999) Web 2.0 (all of the above)

Web Examples (with the date of first sighting of the concept) Blog (1995) Microformats (1997) Tags (1997) Ajax (1999) Web 2.0 (all of the above) These are words that let us talk about things that already existed. They create the concept. But they also signal the success of work that has gone on in the past. After all the Web was designed for all these things!

What needs a name? If I think of concepts that relate to W3C work that haven't yet got a name (which of course the Saphir-Whorf Hypothesis doesn't allow me to do), then for instance: The sort of website that you see at csszengarden, or similar

SVG as stylesheet using XBL The clocks here in the markup are of the style 11:30:00 , and the SVG stylesheet turns those into the analogue clocks San Francisco 01:30

New York 04:30

London 10:30

Amsterdam 11:30

Tokyo 18:30

Things that I Hope to see Whorfed in the Future, and Why (2) Layering semantics over viewable content, like microformats: see earlier RDFa: like microformats, making the semantic web more palatable for the Web author.

RDFa On 7th July at 11:50, Steven Pemberton will give a talk entitled Web n+1: The future of Web Interfaces at The Next Web Conference. <p about="#nextweb_talk" role="cal:Vevent"> On <span property="cal:dtstart" content="20060707T0950Z"> 7th July at 11:50</span>, <span property="cal:duration" content="PT45M"/> <span property="cal:dtend" content="20060707T1035Z" /> <span property="dc:creator">Steven Pemberton</span> will give a talk entitled <em property="cal:summary">Web n+1: The future of Web Interfaces</em> at <span property="cal:location"><em>The Next Web</em> Conference</span>. </p>

Things that I Hope to see Whorfed in the Future, and Why (3) Webapps produced using declarative markup

We live in an exponential world To demonstrate Moore's Law Take a piece of paper, divide it in two, and write this year's date in one half:

Paper 2006 Now divide the other half in two vertically, and write the date 18 months ago in one half:

Paper 2006 2004 Now divide the remaining space in half, and write the date 18 months earlier (or in other words 3 years ago) in one half:

Paper 2006 2004 2003 Repeat until your pen is thicker than the space you have to divide in two:

Paper 2006 2004 2003 2001 2000 1998 1997 1995 94 92 91 89 88 86 This demonstrates that your current computer is more powerful than all other computers you have had put together (and the original Macintosh (1984) had tiny amounts of computing power available.)

So how are we using all that extra power? Badly... Mostly for pixel pushing. Most computers spend most of their active life idle.

Our Idle Computers

Why aren't we using the extra power to make people's (our!) lives better?

(It's not the first time I've said that) High-level programming languages Interpreted programming languages Declarative approach

Applications over the Web One of the big advantages of applications over the web is that everyone has always got the most recent version. One of the disadvantages is how difficult they are to author (Google maps is more than 200k of Javascript)

Diversity of Devices The world isn't just PC's There are now more browsers on phones than on personal computers. There are browsers on many new devices: phones, PDAs, printers, even refrigerators; there are increasing numbers of form factors, sizes, resolutions.

Diversity of Users Not only do we have diversity of devices, but diversity of users too! We are all visually impaired at some time or another: At conferences

At demos

Most applications do not support accessibility to any great extent; the need for so called ten-foot interfaces is an admission of that.

By the way: Google is a blind user, and sees only what a blind person sees (which is why text in images, or flash, are a bad idea, and why spending money on accessibility is a good idea).

If you can see this you are too close to the screen

Hello mum!

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At vero eos et accusam et justo duo dolores et ea rebum. Stet clita kasd gubergren, no sea takimata sanctus est Lorem ipsum dolor sit.

Diversity of Users Not only do we have diversity of devices, but diversity of users too!

We are all visually impaired at some time or another: At conferences

At demos

When we mislay our glasses Most applications do not support accessibility in any meaningful way.

Even if you can zoom the text, the menus and dialogue boxes stay just as small. The need for so called ten-foot interfaces is an admission of lack of accessibility. By the way: Google is a blind user, and sees only what a blind person sees (which is why text in images, or Flash, are a bad idea, and why spending money on accessibility is a good idea).

Applications over the web So these are the conditions we are working under. Ease of use (for the programmer as well as the end user) Device independence Accessibility

The cost of producing applications According to the DoD, 90% of the cost of software is debugging. According to Fred Brookes, in his classic book The Mythical Man Month, the number of bugs increases quadratically according to code size: L1.5. In other words, a program that is 10 times longer is 32 times harder to write. Or put another way: a program that is 10 times smaller needs only 3% of the effort.

Constructing Applications The problem is, no one writes applications except programmers. Interesting exception: spreadsheets Mostly because they use a declarative programming model. The nice part about declarative programming is that the computer takes care of all the boring fiddly detail.

Views Late 80's after designing a programming language designed on usability principles (ABC - Python is based on it), we designed an 'application environment' that investigated usability at the system level (not just the application level). This system had an extensible markup language, vector graphics, style sheets, a DOM, client-side scripting...today you would call it a browser (it didn't use TCP/IP though). It ran on an Atari ST (amongst others).

Programming Clocks The shortest code I could find of an analogue clock was something over 1000 lines of C (the longest was over 4000 lines):

Clock Here is the essence of the code used for the Views clock example. type clock = (h, m, s) displayed as circled(combined(hhand; mhand; shand; decor)) shand = line(slength) rotated (s × 60) mhand = line(mlength) rotated (m × 60) hhand = line(hlength) rotated (h × 30 + m ÷ 2) decor = ... slength = ... ... clock c c.s = system:seconds mod 60 c.m = (system:seconds div 60) mod 60 c.h = (system:seconds div 3600) mod 24

Declarative Applications Some of the most interesting work in this area is being done by xport.net with their Sidewinder rich web browser. What they have done is combined XHTML, XForms, SVG and XBL. The SVG is essentially a stylesheet for XHTML+XForms content, being applied using XBL. For instance: The code says: <xf:output value="..." appearance="fp:analogue-clock" class="clock"> The output is then something like 11:30:00, and the SVG turns this into an analogue clock (the XBL keys off the 'appearance' attribute).

Google maps in XForms

Google maps as Declarative Application Although the example shown above is not quite complete, it does more than Google maps does and yet it is only 25Kbytes of code (instead of the 200+K of Javascript). Remember, empirically, a program that is an order of magnitude smaller needs only 3% of the effort to build. Another data point: A major company uses it for designing and implementing user interfaces. It normally takes 30 people 5 years. They recently tried XForms: it took 10 people 1 year.

Advantages The advantages of this approach are: Accessible applications : Because of the model-view-controller approach, it is just as easy to bind an accessible interface to the data as a purely visual one.

: Because of the model-view-controller approach, it is just as easy to bind an accessible interface to the data as a purely visual one. Device independent applications : Likewise, because of the late binding to the data, you can bind device-dependent interfaces just as easily. (This is comparable with the advantages of using content+stylesheets in conventional XML and XHTML)

: Likewise, because of the late binding to the data, you can bind device-dependent interfaces just as easily. (This is comparable with the advantages of using content+stylesheets in conventional XML and XHTML) Re-use : If someone develops a widget, like an analogue clock, it is available to all applications, and isn't hard-wired into an app (again, like stylesheets)

: If someone develops a widget, like an analogue clock, it is available to all applications, and isn't hard-wired into an app (again, like stylesheets) Much less coding: Declarative programming is well known for requiring much less coding, mainly because you don't have to worry about all the fiddly administration involved in traditional procedural programming.