I was directed to a CSSZenGarden design created by Outline2Design that is rather beautiful… I was really impressed, so I looked at their homepage.

Their designs are extremely artistic, and valid XHTML, so I was even more impressed; I wanted to know more about their work and where they manage an office, (mostly to determine if they were a small shop, a front for a larger shop or just “a person.”)  I noticed a copyright link to Zertle, LLC.  Clicking that, I saw that Zertle owns two shop fronts, Outline2Design and PSD2HTML.

That’s when I was absolutely disgusted by the pricing strategy at PSD2HTML.

Deciding How to Charge is Hard

I realize it’s difficult to decide how to price web work; I’ve had that problem before. You kind of have to divide the effort into the creative and the technical – creating HTML, (at least, in my opinion) is the easiest of the two. Creating a brand identity and graphical assets are far more subjective tasks, therefore requiring much more work.

Converting a design to HTML, however, is much easier. You can almost feel how the document flows. Sure, there are elegant and thought-provoking approaches to noodle through, and reusability and accessibility concerns… but the process goes very quickly. Oftentimes, you use tools from your toolbox, like Microformats or common libraries.

At Cerner, when I’m handed a design, it takes me roughly two hours per layout to complete, less if the following location follows a cohesive style, (and they do). So this company promises an 8 hour turnaround time, which I think is respectful, if not aggressive if they have a large workload.

What I find appalling is their package rates and “options.”

You Want to Charge Me For WHAT?!?

Here are a few examples, and an explanation as to why they are shady… I mean, “Used-car Salesman” shady. Throughout the following examples, I’m going to draw an analogy to someone coming to paint your house: you know what color you want, and how you want textures to look, but you don’t really have the time, nor the expertise, to paint it yourself.

How Good a Job are You Willing to Pay For?

Ok, we’re all set to start. Pick a package and price range for them to convert your image into a web page.

Screenshot from PSD2HTML.com

Figure 1 – So… do you want your page done professionally or not?

Asking someone to quantify exactly how professional they want their page is like asking if they’re willing to pay more to get things that a professional should already do. You’re telling me you won’t “pay special attention to Load Speed” if I don’t shell out the extra hundred?

The trouble is, someone who doesn’t really understand the web may not understand what they’re paying for… besides, the developer should do this anyway.

The painters show up with the crew, the paint and the brushes. They’re ready to paint your house, but before they start, they ask:

“Do you want us to tape off non-painted surfaces?  Then you’ll want our Professional Painter’s Package. Do you want us to avoid getting paint splatters on your concrete and bushes?  In that case, you’ll need to upgrade to our Hi-End Painter’s Package. You see, it’s all about what you’re willing to spend.”

These aren’t options: they’re the mark of a professional job.  Cross-browser compatibility, Search Engine Optimization, semantic code, prez-layer separation… these are professional, industry standards. You could get away with asking for more time, but more money?!? C’mon…

Flex Your CSS Muscles

This one, I kind of understand.

Flexible, or “fluid” layouts can be difficult, depending on the style.  You have to decide the widths of each column, how text wraps, and even when items start to drop.  Again, asking for more time is one thing, almost expected… charging more, I could almost condone.

But isn’t this on a case-by-case basis?  Don’t you have to ask some directed, consultative questions about intent and purpose?  And how did you arrive at $29?  It just seems nonsensical to me.

After shelling out more cash, your painting crew has another question:

“Would you like us to hand-paint your house, or can we go ahead and use our sprayers for the larger walls?  You see, when we got your address, we weren’t sure about the texture or composition of your walls, so we can’t tell you right now without looking which would be better, per-se… but we’ll knock $20 off if you let us spray.”

Maybe they’re encouraging a fixed width by offering a $29 discount?  At any rate, it’s a client call, and I just don’t think it can be programmatically determined.

Moving on… because the next one is my favorite.

Nickels and Dimes Add Up to Big Bucks

I’m curious about Advanced Markup Options.

“This option gives you the guarantee…”  Are you kidding me?

You know, in my office, hack-less cross-browser compatibility is a point of pride.  Sometimes, when we do a demo, we like to give the people in the room the choice of which browser we use to demo… no-holds-barred.  We also give the option of a JavaScript-disabled or CSS-disabled configuration.  It’s cool to be challenged, to be able to show our stakeholders that no mainstream browser was ignored, no detail was overlooked.

“I’m sorry, but which side of your house faces the most people?  I mean, people who live next door to the east can’t really see the house wall… their window on that side is pretty tiny.  And most people don’t drive east on the street, so most wouldn’t see the east side.”

“Oh… and should we avoid painting the exterior window fixtures?”

To ask a client to pay more for cross-browser compatibility, or to offer a discount to let it slide, encourages the very attitudes web professionals hate: that only the majority matters… that it’s too hard to code (and test) for 99.9%.  That attitude is what allows Microsoft to continue including proprietary features, (and oftentimes, tolerating omissions): they’re the majority, make your site work in their browser.  It’s unacceptable for a professional web shop to not work in these browsers out-of-the-box.

And, I’m sorry… but $4 for rollovers?!?  Are CSS hover implementations been deemed hard enough that the code to create them is worth $4?  Are you telling me I have to pay you the equivalent of your morning Starbucks Latte for the effort?

The following, though… is unacceptable.  That’s all I’ll say:

What else can I say?

Damn, I’m Sorry, but…

I don’t mean to pick on these guys; I don’t know them from Adam.  They’ve obviously put some thought into how they’re to be paid for their work.  But the strategy is flawed: what they’re charging more for should just be included. They should just state the job will cost between $150 and $300, depending.  As I’ve pointed out, they have more questions to ask once they get the design anyway.

Will they change their pricing “menu” because of this post: probably of course not. But then again, I don’t know how much of a market there is here.  Most web professionals like to be in control of the design.

For someone like me, I’d love it if the client provided me the visual they want; I suck at drawing.  But even if they did, I would still consult with them and provide them with a quality product that another web professional would be able to edit…

… but more importantly, respect.

Then, the damn thing shut down.

I was really confused.  I messed around with it for a few minutes, then I jumped into a chat session with a Sony representative.  After suggesting the DVD was scratched or the wrong region, (uh huh, sure), he THEN recommended I reset the whole player.

Now, the thing is, this player requires you to manually type in the names of DVDs where it can’t read the standard demographic information.  I’ve got 300 discs in that player, I’d rather not lose that information.  So then he gave me a phone number to tech support and wished me luck.

But you’d better believe I started searching the Internet for any other reports of this nonsense.  It didn’t take long before I found this Amazon discussion and a blog post on erkkila.org.  A number of DVD players, a number of new DVDs… sounds fishy.

Here are the numbers I have so far:

Sony Pictures: (800) 860-2878
DVP-CX995V Support: (800) 222-7669

This does not bode well for Sony.  Is there some kind of write protection on these DVDs?

Unfortunately, as in all rules assumed in parsing, mistakes can be made:

My guess is that it was looking at “7.50 ea” and translated that into 7:50 Eastern, but I can’t be sure.  All I know is that it interpreted three items a friend of mine ordered into appointments.  No big deal, but it just reminded me that, even when some parsing rules seem simple and straightforward, someone is going to have a use case that breaks them.

Comedy Central clips back up on YouTube
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061101-8126.html

Hopefully they’ll be smarter this time, (and next time, eh?)

;-D

Many are speculating on the latest request by Viacom (read: Comedy Central) that YouTube (read: Google) take down clips of Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show, Stephen Colbert’s The Colbert Report and South Park. I’m not speculating on the business dealings… it’s typical copyright protection by a popular source. I’m just disappointed that such “hip, young sources of entertainment,” that are usually so clever and cutting edge with their business dealings, missed such a fantastic, progressive opportunity.

Blinded by the Status-Quo

I understand the concepts of intellectual property; my division at Cerner is named Intellectual Property. I also understand that the digital revolution, in all its many forms, frightens content providers. I also don’t believe these startled, reactionary tactics of lawsuits, actions and requests-that-aren’t-really-requests are going to end any time soon. I’m fully prepared to wait until the Gen-Y’ers reach the upper eschelons of management for a good compromise to be reached. In less time that it took me to wear out my first car, innovations such as the iPod, CD Ripping and media centric PCs prompted DRM, bulk lawsuits and ISP interrogations.

Business has never responded quickly to innovations in technology. Case-in-point: it was YEARS before my PC was able to detect that I was attempting the digital equivalent of VCR dubbing. (Ed. Note: Before someone decides to sue me, I was taking an excerpt from a DVD I owned for a presentation at work…) Business strategy has always been reactionary. So what’s my beef this time?

A Lost Library

From the New York Times:

“The situation is tricky for a network like Comedy Central, part of Viacom. Its audience is young and technologically sophisticated, and Comedy Central stars in the past have YouTube and clip services to interact with their audience.

“Stephen Colbert of ‘The Colbert Report,’ for example, gained great attention for his mocking speech before President Bush at the White House Correspondents Dinner, which became one of the most-viewed clips at YouTube before C-Span, which broadcast the event, ordered it taken down.

“In an interview with Wired magazine in September 2005, Mr. Stewart explained his view: ‘We get an opportunity to produce tis stuff because they make enough money selling beer that it’s worth their while to do it… If they’re not making their money, we ain’t doing our show.’”

I’ll be the first to admit I had several clips marked as favorites in YouTube that are now most likely deleted:

• Colbert’s laughing fit while describing a Royal Family scandal;
• Stewart’s hilariously funny and biting commentary on the use of the question mark as a disarming tactic in major news networks;
• Cartman’s parody of “Dog: the Bounty Hunter” in the most recent episode of South Park.

I don’t watch TV… I rely on the likes of YouTube and SpikedHumor to supply me with clips of the few shows I like and have missed because I have no cable. But more importantly: I don’t want to wait for the these clips to come out on DVD, nor do I want to search through them for the short bit I want to see. The beauty of these online libraries is that they are as robust as their fanbase is large.

YouTube was the online expression of a Venn Diagram of YouTube and Comedy Central “users…” and that merged area was massive. These individuals posted their favorite clips of their favorite shows to an online repository, which happened to be shared with people of like interests. Now, all of those clips, many existing dozens of times over, are gone.

Are you starting to see where I’m headed here?

A Confusing Change in Policy

So why were these clips deleted? Well, it’s obvious it’s about the “lost” advertising dollars. Many point to the existence of Comedy Central’s MotherLoad, an online library of select clips of popular shows and comedians. Of extreme interest to me was the fact that before this announcement, only certain parts of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, carefully titled, existed in the MotherLoad. I know this because I used both YouTube and The MotherLoad to catch up on what I’m missing; frankly, The MotherLoad was often of a higher quality.

When I look at the RSS feed from Comedy Central today, however, it’s a totally different story. They’ve gone to dividing the show into parts… parts delimited by where the commercial breaks would normally be.

Wha? Are you insane? Didn’t you delete the YouTube clips because they cut in on your revenue? To be fair, they did show me some ridiculous advertisement about some dude living out of his Nissan Altima for a week… but, come on. That surely couldn’t cover the expense of keeping these clips online.

Frankly, it’s a piss-poor change. It smacks of an immature “hey, that’s mine” mentality prevalent in archaic approaches to IP. It has always turned people off. The whole point of the Internet is dissemination of information, not its stockpiling.

On the Internet, you can always find it somewhere else; the only currency that really matters is surfer loyalty. And YouTube was loaded.

Make Love, Not War

I don’t think Viacom thought entirely hard enough about how much this might piss people off. I don’t think Google/YouTube thought about how many users would stop visiting their site if they thought they couldn’t get Comedy Central clips, (you’re reading the blog of one of them).

So what would be my proposition?

For starters, Google has a proven indexing capability. Given a few months, I’d be willing to bet their wiz-kids could have come up with an algorithm that identified all of these clips and organized them. Then, it would be as simple as creating a channel. Professional clips could be uploaded by Viacom, amatuer clips could be tagged. Call it, The YouTube MotherLoad. They could have even gone as far as to earmark the category for Viacom’s advertising dollars. Hell, you could precede them with the 15-second, nonsense Nissan clips if you wanted. In other words, they could have used the offending technology to their advantage. Utilized YouTube’s bandwidth, their fans passion, and their IP to create a money making machine.

Now, all they’ve done is create yet another mash-up opportunity where some start up or whiz kid puts together some RSS-scanning feed to provide links to the clips everyone wants to see. Frankly, I’d just as soon Viacom and YouTube/Google come to some kind of arrangement where my favorite clips can be accessed as easily as they were before.

I think that’s all anyone (who isn’t trying to make or protect money off of it) wants.

We arrived last evening. The hotel is really, really nice. It’s brand new, with flat panel televisions and really large bathrooms. It’s very contemporary furnishings and “un-crushed” chairs and couches. The computers were down, though, so after an interesting “here, let me write your information down and give a room key” transaction, we headed to the LTK restaurant down the street… quite good. Afterwards we wandered back to the hotel, and I decided to hit the lobby restaurant/bar called Sauciety and have a scotch before bed.

While I was there, I met two HR representatives from Ask.com named Kelly and Amy; very fun people. Amy works for Kelly, and once they learned I was there for the same conference, they proceeded to tout the benefits from using Ask.com, (vs. other engines I was not allowed to mention by name without a dirty look).

We were having a nice time talking, so they snuck me in to the Speaker/Sponsor reception around the corner. I got to meet a few of the speakers… most were tired from the trip and were there only to pick up their registration materials (and free iPod). A few were playing some tile game called Hive… the gameplay logistics were lost on most of us, but they looked like they were enjoying it.

After the reception, we wandered over to the other lobby bar, The Birch Bar. It was there I met the booth guys from IceSoft, a Canadian JSF/JavaScript framework company with a booth downstairs. After a couple of hours talking geek and hearing a much more, er, robust pitch about Ask.com, it was off to bed for an early morning.

It was a nice start to an exciting conference. I’ll be (well, attempt) blogging about each day I’m here, perhaps even each session. Stay tuned!

Ground Rules

First, a few ground rules for this discourse:

• I’m not going to comment on the term “standards-based browser.”
  It’s a foolish buzz-phrase used by people who (mostly through bias) prefer one browser to another. The fact is, no browser (in production) is fully compliant with the W3C guidelines… yet. Take a look at the Acid2 test and a few test results. I concede that of all browsers, IE is the least-compliant, but I’m not framing my discussion on this point.
• I’m not going to comment on security.
  Again… dead horse. I stipulate that IE is “not safe.” Point of fact, however, is that I, nor any of my colleagues, have been struck down by an IE flaw or loophole. At both the office and my home, I take precautions– I don’t surf the darker corners of the web, I have excellent virus and firewall protections, and I update regularly. Am I immune? Of course not… but I’m not impressed enough by this argument to “switch.”
• I don’t care about tabbed-based browing, plug-ins, and the like.
  As a developer of industrial, web-based solutions that are meant to transcend browser and machine, I can’t depend on proprietary technologies particular to one browser to exist. I am forced to shoot for the lowest common denominator to hit the maximum number of users, so by force of habit, I surf that way.
• I use both Internet Explorer 6 and Firefox, nearly 50/50.
  I’ve installed Opera and I use IE7 and Safari on a VMWare emulator, each for testing and compatibility purposes only. I thought this disclaimer would be important. I prefer IE6 for debugging scripts and Firefox for personal browsing, (though I sometimes click IE6 out of habit… and I’m never put out by that).

So… with all of that said, what straw broke the camel’s back and ruined any faith I had that Internet Explorer could function as the populist, mainstay (even if poorly implemented) browser?

Prerequisites for a severe, stabbing ache near the seat of my pants

My latest web solution at work has been subscribing to Web Standards since its inception. What do I mean by that?

1. Semantic markup;
2. CSS layouts;
3. Appropriate doctype usage; <- I bold this purposefully.
4. W3C validation;
5. Accessibility (where appropriate for our user landscape);
6. Agnostic browser consideration.

Wait… why did I bold #3? Because Internet Explorer screwed us.

As many website and content developers have been testing their sites in IE7, we have as well. Our web techniques are tested in each beta as it is released. But we were noticing a severe rendering problem: IFRAMES were all screwed up. Why?

Wow… does that ever suck

We’ve been using XHTML 1.0 Strict as our doctype, unless we needed an IFRAME on the page. Since this iis rare, most of our pages begin with the following code:

<?xml version="1.0"?> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en" xml:lang="en"> <head> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1"/> <title>Start Test</title> ...

Looks pretty innocuous, right? Well, take a look at this article, specifically the following section (empasis added):

XML Prolog Bug Affecting the CSS Box Model
The XML prolog is intended to specify the version of XML being used and is mostly seen on the Web in conjunction with XHTML. As explained above, in IE6 we introduced a method to switch between quirks and strict mode. This switch had to be the first line of a page. Sadly the XML prolog required the same and most authors using the XML prolog would add it before the strict type switch. This caused IE6 to ignore the author’s intention and IE6 would render the page in quirks mode rather than strict. We fixed this issue in IE7. Now, you can have the XML prolog and immediately follow the strict mode switch to render XHTML properly. Sadly some pages build their content with the assumption that IE is not in strict mode (even though IE should according to the HTML spec). Rendering issues caused by the XML prolog fix can easily be identified: Open the view-source looking at the first two lines of the page. If you see the XML prolog and a strict doctype and the page has rendering issues, it is most likely that the page author needs to update the content.

So, what does that mean? It means that, although we’ve taken great pains to ensure conformity to a strict doctype, we’ve been rendering in “quirks” mode.

It’s amazing to me… Google comes out with a Web Accelerator that basically caches the page to their server like static content, which isn’t really new, and releases it as a beta. Oh, and they also only give it out to a limited number of people.

Next thing you know, you’ve got people out there seeing that the service doesn’t work on HTTPS connections, and they change?! I mean, wow.

I think the real reason that this is happening is because Google is really effin’ smart. The concept of remote page caching is, like I said, not that new… Sprint PCS did it, Earthlink does server-side compression and caching, so why is Google’s so popular? Because “they’re Google?” Nope. It’s because they’re the first service to actually put a quantifiable number as to how much time you’ve “saved.”

People like numbers and results. People don’t trust something if it simply proclaims itself to be what you want. It’s smart, and once again, I’m privately jealous of Google, it’s clout and it’s brilliance.

Damn.