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Dave Rupert, Lead Developer at Paravel, talks with Treehouse Teacher, Randy Hoyt, about new HTML5 tags, accessibility, British websites, and the importance of side projects.
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[? music ?]
0:00
Welcome to another episode of Treehouse Friends.
0:15
I'm Randy Hoyt, and I'm here today at the In Control Conference with Dave Rupert.
0:17
Welcome Dave. >>Hey, thanks for having me. I really appreciate it.
0:20
Dave's the lead developer at Paravel.
0:23
Could you tell us a little bit about your role there and what kind of work you do?
0:25
Yeah. So Paravel is a 3-man team based in Austin, Texas.
0:28
We are going to stay 3 people. We like being 3 people.
0:32
But it's 2 guys I've known since high school really--Trent Walton and Reagan Ray.
0:37
You guys may know them from the Internet.
0:42
Yeah, so we're just 3 guys.
0:44
We are based in Austin. We do good work.
0:47
Yeah. Excellent.
0:49
I saw today your talk was on HTML5 features.
0:52
What are some of the features that you are excited about in HTML5
0:56
that you're already using in your work at Paravel or some that you're looking forward
0:58
to being able to use in the future?
1:01
Right away you have the semantics side of things--the new elements and stuff like that.
1:03
Those are really easy to get using.
1:09
They're fixable in older browsers, but I still, even today,
1:12
I find that people have hesitation about using them.
1:16
There are things like the new HTML input types.
1:20
Input type equals email. Input type equals URL--stuff like that.
1:23
That huge UX gain just by like changing 4 letters. You know?
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But I find people either don't do that, or they forget to do that,
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or they just for whatever reason they haven't allowed themselves to do that.
1:38
I think those are huge features.
1:44
Personally I am very excited about the location API.
1:47
I've used it a lot in the past. It's kind of old news maybe now.
1:52
Best Buy, for example, you always have to enter your zip code or any store really.
1:56
I don't want to pick on them, but you enter your zip code--
2:01
and I have to remember my zip code--but you enter your zip code,
2:05
and then it gives you a list of stores.
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We have the technology now. It's really easy.
2:13
I just hit allow, and they can get my zip code and my geolocation
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and tell me exactly how far away things are or just show me the things that are in stock.
2:21
That could be Target or--you know.
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I'm at the point--I live across the street from a Target. Who doesn't in America?
2:28
I live across the street from a Target, and I don't go there without searching
2:32
their inventory before I go there.
2:38
It would be really cool if that website knew I was next door,
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and they could just tell me the things--
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not even show me search results for things I can't buy at their store.
2:49
That would be interesting, but I'm really excited about location.
2:53
Another thing I talked about is ARIA roles and the accessibility features of HTML5.
2:57
Those are killer features. Those are really awesome.
3:03
The list kind of just goes on and on. Right?
3:06
User media is a new thing.
3:09
The ability to access webcams and audio.
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I do a podcast with Chris Coyier.
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It's coming to where we could maybe do that podcast with HTML--
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live broadcasting--and that's absurd to me.
3:24
That's like wow. This is the future here.
3:28
Yeah. That's stuff I'm excited about. I like HTML.
3:32
Last fall you released an article on A List Apart called "Mo’ Pixels Mo’ Problems"
3:38
where you were talking about retina displays and images.
3:41
I think there you recommended a solution using like a 1.5 size image.
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So it's a little bit larger--not quite double.
3:48
Is that still something that you recommend,
3:51
or is that space evolved a lot more just in the last 6 months?
3:52
I would still recommend it for medium-importance images.
3:55
Let's say you have somebody's headshot on a website.
4:01
You don't want to do picturefill and polyfill and generate 10 different sizes
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or something like that, but for somebody's headshot like on an article,
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maybe beef it up a bit so it's not junky on retina displays and stuff.
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After that article there was kind of rumors of it but no real great displays of it,
4:20
but there's this quality compression hack that you can do.
4:26
You basically make an image twice the size, but you compress the junk out of it,
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and you do zero quality out of Photoshop.
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You can have an image twice the size that looks perfect on retina.
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It will scale down, and it works perfectly.
4:46
It's maybe even smaller than the original file because it's so low quality.
4:51
That is great, but I wrestle with that one because there's kind of 2 problems.
4:56
A) You are always serving people junky images.
5:04
You're just relying on them sizing them down.
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I want like the official way. An image is a good image on the internet.
5:10
On mobile specifically, which is what it's targeting to solve,
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is it exhausts memory on an iPhone for example.
5:19
For some reason you can only have 1.4 million pixels or something like that
5:23
in an image. I don't know the actual number.
5:29
But like 3000 by 3000--image that size--will just not show up.
5:33
It's like surprise! I don't do that.
5:37
So you have to just deal with these edge cases.
5:39
I don't know if that's perfect.
5:42
I've seen it in production, and it works good.
5:45
Back to the headshot use case, maybe that's a great one.
5:47
People tend to want to have a really nice headshot.
5:52
So maybe you don't want to compress--I don't know.
5:55
Why are you asking these questions?
5:57
It's good. Thankfully picture and source set are kind of moving forward
6:00
into the specifications, so fingers crossed that that's going to turn out.
6:05
I don't know. I want it now.
6:12
The one piece of advice you give in that article that I think does still apply
6:15
is to use you brain and to try out different techniques
6:17
and see what one's going to work best for you.
6:20
Is that still where we're at where there's not really a solid answer?
6:22
You have to try a bunch of different things and settle on the one that works best
6:24
for your particular case.
6:27
Absolutely. That's what web development is.
6:29
That's why we're professionals. Right?
6:32
You know for Treehouse you can learn different techniques about how to do
6:36
maybe one thing even. You know?
6:40
There's going to be best practices, and those will always rise to the top.
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Right now you just got to think it's a no man's land and just do the best you can.
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I will say with a caveat, the problem with the 1.5x hack
6:51
is that web pages are getting bigger and bigger and bigger.
6:56
So we need to be careful. We can't just give people a 2 meg website anymore.
7:01
People are expecting less, and it's just not necessary.
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We're like the junkies.
7:17
We have the business requirements to have a hero image on every darn page.
7:19
We need to grow up I think.
7:24
We need to be careful--not grow up.
7:28
We need to be careful about how much we're sending down the pipe.
7:30
One of the things I want to talk to you about is your goals for this year.
7:35
So I know a lot of people look to you for answers,
7:39
but it's interesting to see that you, in public, are still talking about
7:41
how you're learning and how you're keeping up.
7:44
Would you mind talking about a couple of your goals for this year?
7:46
Every year everyone writes like a my life goal in 2013,
7:50
and I did the same thing.
7:55
My life goal is to write one of those posts.
7:57
For 2013 I decided to do 2 things.
8:00
One of my core concepts is always be learning.
8:04
We're never the smartest, and if you are you're about to get humbled in a big way.
8:08
I always want to be learning.
8:13
I came up with 2 goals that would help do that.
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One goal was to finish a book a month.
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I don't really have a lot--I say this--I don't have time to finish a book a month,
8:25
but if I quit playing iPhone games and stuff like that I do.
8:33
I have an amazing amount of time to read a book a month.
8:38
So I've been trying to do that.
8:41
Also another goal of mine was to spend at least a dedicated 4 hours a week
8:43
learning something I don't know for programming,
8:49
and I have this list of shame of things I want to learn.
8:52
I'll tell you. I'll just out myself.
8:57
I have not used Backbone. I need to, and I just need to learn it.
8:59
I don't use Grunt. I should. I just need to use it and add it to my workflow,
9:05
or maybe go fully Galman--or Gilman--fully Gilman.
9:11
Get on some sort of package manager for my frontend work,
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but then again I don't know if I'm the target audience there.
9:22
There's a lot of other stuff, but those are kind of my big things.
9:26
It's like gosh, this is stuff I talk about, and I want to do,
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but I just for whatever reason haven't done it.
9:32
I'm trying to dedicate at least 4 hours a week to learning that stuff.
9:35
In Austin, Texas, where I live, there are--every Tuesday night
9:41
this guy Damon--can I tell a story? >>Yeah. Please.
9:48
This guy Damon came up with this concept.
9:53
He negotiated with his wife one night a week to go out and work on side projects.
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So he got Tuesday night.
10:01
He can go to any meet up he wants. He can go to any.
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He can just sit in the coffee shop and code all night long.
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Wife watches the kids. He's in good--you know.
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So he kind of turned it into a thing like hey, we meet up here.
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Out of that actually 2 startups have been formed.
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Dudes just sitting there coding together, and they launched a startup.
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They got millions in funding. It's a success story. Right?
10:25
That's kind of the environment he incubated.
10:28
Cafe Bedouins is this thing where you just go out Tuesday night,
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you work on a side project.
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I've just been trying to go out and do that.
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There's more I can learn. You know?
10:40
I need to--I don't know every class and every function and every method.
10:43
Where it's just to learn--just to make sure I have the basics covered,
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and then that will probably no doubt help me in my day job
10:52
when I'm doing something later.
10:55
For the reading a book a month, I'm guessing those are programming books?
10:58
Maybe one on JavaScript right now?
11:02
Well actually my coworker, Reagan, did a 2012 reading list,
11:04
and he had about 2 dozen books.
11:09
I was just like that's awesome. I don't read that much at all.
11:13
Most of my books are programming books or design books or just kind of web-related.
11:18
My goal was to actually broaden out and do something else.
11:24
I just finished SMACSS by Snook--best book I've read on web stuff in the last year--
11:29
hands down. Go buy that.
11:34
I've just started reading--I'm halfway through Freakonomics.
11:37
This guy takes data--I'm sure people know. It's an old book.
11:41
The guy takes data and reinterprets it and gives you kind of a different perspective
11:47
from data, so that's cool.
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I could actually see how that would apply to my life.
11:55
It's really kind of an interesting book for me,
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and then I also just recently cracked open--I shouldn't read 2 books at a time
12:02
because I'll fail--but I cracked open Eats, Shoots & Leaves.
12:06
It's a book on how to write better--use grammar and punctuation correctly--
12:11
something I don't do if you've ever read my blog.
12:15
Excellent. I noticed recently you launched The Accessibility Project website.
12:19
Could you talk a little bit about that?
12:23
Yeah. I sure can.
12:25
So The Accessibility Project--A11YProject.com--is an open source--
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it's a community-driven effort to make web accessibility easier.
12:33
I've been making websites since I was like 14,
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so more than half my life now, and accessibility is still difficult for me.
12:40
I sort of have come to the conclusion like it's unnecessarily difficult.
12:48
Accessibility experts, and I know you guys have a course on accessibility,
12:53
that's all helpful, but accessibility experts tend to be really passionate people.
13:00
They tend to be academics.
13:07
They work for MIT, and they're publishing studies on screen reader usage
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and stuff like that.
13:17
It's so in depth that the average web developer A) doesn't have time--
13:20
can't immediately pull the best practice.
13:24
Yeah, so it's just kind of too much.
13:29
There's this further complex problem where everything is out of date.
13:32
There's a lot of out of date information.
13:37
If you think about it that way it's like the information is difficult to get,
13:40
the information is out of date, and then the community tends to be experts.
13:44
They've got jobs, and they're sort of isolated from the web developer community
13:50
like us and new kids getting started.
13:55
They tend to be a little more isolated from that community. Right?
14:01
So my goal--I just was looking at the problem, and I was just like I feel like it
14:04
has a design--accessibility has a design problem.
14:09
It should be a lot more approachable,
14:13
and we should be able to dilute the best practices.
14:16
It's a very nuanced field, and I want to oversimplify it.
14:19
Maybe I'm criticized for doing that, but there are best practices
14:23
that we can grasp onto now and stuff you don't even know.
14:29
I mean it turns out title attributes--they're really terrible.
14:32
Because people use them wrong, and they're over redundant,
14:37
and people don't like them.
14:39
Surprise. Because I've always read that they're great.
14:41
This is the best thing you could do for your website.
14:45
I'm just like everything gets a title tag. You know?
14:48
It's like DIV title the DIV.
14:52
Accessibility is just kind of over complex.
14:55
I put it on GitHub so it's completely open source.
15:01
If there's a problem we can update it, so in theory it has the latest, greatest information.
15:06
Now that's like--my most recent feedback was no, no, no, no, no.
15:12
Stop pedaling this bull expletive.
15:19
Maybe it's not working, but I'm really encouraged by it.
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I wake up every day, and somebody's fixed a typo. Somebody's added content.
15:27
Somebody's made a pull request.
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I just wake up and say open source is working. This is awesome.
15:36
Excellent. Sounds like you're trying to make accessibility itself more accessible.
15:40
You could say that. Yeah.
15:44
For me, again, it's like I'm not a dummy. I work hard at my job. You know?
15:46
So why is this so difficult. I'm just trying to pull the best resources.
15:55
There's a lot of other--I've talked to a lot of other people
16:04
who have had the same problem, and there are a lot of other people
16:07
who have pitched in.
16:10
I mean we're up to almost 40 contributors now. >>Excellent.
16:13
[Dave] It's cool. >>Are you handling all those pull requests or how does the process work?
16:17
We got a small team. There are actually 3 admins right now.
16:20
It can grow, and it should.
16:23
You don't want posts to just go up.
16:26
We've actually had a problem.
16:29
This guy committed a post. It was on access keys.
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I was like I didn't know about these. These sound like an interesting feature.
16:34
It turns out access keys are terrible.
16:38
People were like this thing has failed. This is done. They don't know anything.
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It's like well, exactly.
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That's exactly the problem is there's so much misinformation.
16:48
We'll rewrite the article to say don't use them.
16:52
There you go. Fixed. That's it.
16:55
Perfect case of open source working.
16:58
Yeah. Yep. Open source--even bad things where terrible criticism comes, it's working.
17:00
Excellent. Well, the last thing I want to ask you about is you'll be on a panel
17:07
at South by Southwest this spring.
17:10
I want to talk a little bit about that. It's called What You See Is What You Spec'd.
17:12
Could you tell us a little bit more about that
17:14
and what you guys will be covering in that panel?
17:16
Yeah. So the panel is going to be pretty interesting.
17:18
There's probably going to be a million responsive web design panels,
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but this is kind of centered around responsive web design
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and kind of design patterns--sort of like Brad Frost's patterns library
17:30
or even style guides.
17:35
It's being put on by a guy from the Guardian.co.uk.
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They're obviously investigating responsive web design to solve
17:43
a lot of their mobile traffic problems--problems? I guess mobile traffic is good.
17:46
They're kind of developing this really robust style guide.
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I feel like that's pretty English.
17:57
The British are always very thoughtful in everything they do.
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BBC.co.uk has a beautiful style guide.
18:05
These guys are very thoughtful about what they're doing.
18:10
We're going to talk a bit about just how you kind of do that workflow.
18:14
It's not just PSDs and stuff anymore.
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It's these more complex things.
18:23
Are you using those more complex deliverables in your work at Paravel,
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or how does that reflect that?
18:31
We're back to SMACSS--reading that book--really eye opening in just how
18:33
we should be doing web development--CSS specifically.
18:38
Just more modular. Everything's a module. Everything can be reused.
18:43
You can get IDs versus classes--that old HTML war,
18:49
but classes you can reuse.
18:53
Let's plan on everything being reusable.
18:56
That's our baseline. We're going to reuse that.
18:59
Then it's a matter of presenting it. Right?
19:04
You need to bundle it in a package that people can digest.
19:06
Usually the work we do is a lot of hand offs, so we'll hand off a site to somebody.
19:13
Then it's their developer team has to make inferences and stuff
19:21
to build out this project.
19:25
So you need a really good well-documented CSS.
19:28
In that sense you'll probably want to start building out something like style tiles
19:32
or a style guide.
19:37
If you go to Bootstrap--Twitter Bootstrap.
19:40
That website where you download Twitter Bootstrap--it's a documentation guide
19:43
for how every part of Bootstrap works.
19:47
I think delivering mini Bootstraps to clients is probably the future
19:51
just because you want them to have all the tools to build their website
19:56
from their CMS or whatever it is
20:00
hopefully with your help as client services so you get money, get paid.
20:05
But then again without you--because things go awry,
20:09
and you want to give your client the best thing.
20:16
That focus on reusable modularized code.
20:21
Starbucks has a great example of that.
20:25
It's a doc system that's using this style. It's a little inception, but it works.
20:27
Yeah. A phrase I've heard other professionals say, and you mentioned
20:34
in the description for the panel, is that we're building a system
20:37
and not a set of pages.
20:40
Could you explain a little bit more about what that means
20:42
and how that ties into this idea of a style guide?
20:44
Yeah. Definitely. This was actually at--so we're at In Control Conference right now.
20:46
I was at an In Control Conference in Hawaii talking to Daniel Burka
20:52
who works on Google--like Google's kind of app platform
20:56
and maybe Google ventures now--but Daniel Burka--old Digg guy. Right?
21:01
He's talking, and he's just explaining we don't make web pages anymore.
21:06
We're not--sure we can. You can make a conference page or something.
21:12
But really what you're making is a system--the word system--
21:18
but you're just making an organism that has different body parts that all fit together
21:22
that needs to be recyclable.
21:27
You're never just making 1 page even if you're building a 1-page web app--
21:31
a backbone app--you might have to use these modules somewhere else
21:37
in your app or something.
21:43
So nothing's unique anymore.
21:45
We're just heading to where the web is no longer just these pages.
21:47
They can be blogs, but your blog is actually a sophisticated web app.
21:52
It's a web app that displays content.
21:57
Once we all realize we're in the web app business, our code needs to grow up.
22:00
Andy Hume--I think he's at Clearleft--but he had a presentation called
22:06
CSS for Grownups. I recommend watching it.
22:11
It's just like how to code like an adult, and it's super convicting. You know?
22:14
If you've just been kind of like I'm going to fake it. Yeah.
22:19
Excellent. Thank you so much for your time Dave. It was great talking with you.
22:23
If people want to stay in touch with you and see some of the other projects
22:27
you're working on, where can they find you online?
22:29
Yeah. You can follow my blog daverupert.com.
22:31
Follow me online at davatron5000--D-A-V-A-T-R-O-N 5000.
22:36
You can subscribe to the podcast--Shoptalk--at shoptalkshow.com
22:42
or it's on iTunes and all that--shoptalk--one word.
22:46
By all means reach out to me. I'd love to see what you're working on.
22:49
Excellent. This has been another episode of Treehouse Friends.
22:54
We'll see you next time.
22:57
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22:59
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