Browser Vendors, You Have Failed Us

Browser vendors have unilaterally lost sight of real problems that plague real users.
I am so angry right now. The thing that causes me so much anger is not that Google are shutting down their RSS reader product, it?s that the browser vendors sat back and allowed all the power over content to go into the hands of Facebook and now Google.

I wrote two years ago that browser vendors were failing to focus on the real problem that: users don?t want, and find it slow and painful, to trudge around their daily round of websites and that the web browser should be exposing an automatic, intelligent and ultimately useful interface to RSS.

Why can I not do something about this? Becuase creating another RSS web service to ?replace? Google Reader does not solve the underlying problem, that is:?personal aggregation of content should not be dependnt on a business model.

Google never offered a pay option. Reader had to supliment other strategies. RSS does not benefit Google+, whose aim is to centralise all the content including the ability to process and access it.

RSS is a browser feature, a browser?s responsibility. It is a personalised view upon the web, just as bookmarks and add-ons are. It makes managing daily content much easier, just as bookmarks and add-ons do. The browser?as the personal portal on to the web?is best positioned to aggregate the web for the user. It knows the user?s browsing habits better than even the most evil of evil advertisers. The browser vendors could make the web faster, easier, less cluttered and junky than any web sevice ever could. And it could do all of that with the barest minimum of privacy-intrusion, without a single ad and without a conflicting business model.

Because browser vendors failed to see personalised aggregation as a benefit to regular users, these regular users have taken to Facebook as their personalised aggregation service, taking the power over content away from the browser vendors.

Facebook will one day soon be a major technology player rivalling Google, Amazon and even Apple. Facebook are already big, yes, but for now they?re ?just a website?. When they control the technology landscape because they control access to the content then things turn very bad for users. Mozilla, prepare to be side-lined by a ?website?.

That brings me to the second big thing browser vendors have failed users with: e-mail.

It is 2013 and there is still no way to set Firefox as the default e-mail client in Windows. There is no way to make it so that when a user right-clicks a file and goes Send To > Mail Recipient that Firefox will launch with the user?s preferred web-mail.

This is no end of headaches for my customers. They are constantly slipping up because they do not discern the difference between actions that invoke the native mail client and the fact they are using web-mail. Functions they expect to work simply don?t, such as using the e-mail toolbar button in Windows Explorer. Most of my customers have unsent e-mails in the outbox of Outlook Express or Windows Mail because the native client was launched instead of their web-mail. Attaching files is an unbelievable pain because of this. Customers have to be carefully taught that no, you don?t go to the picture first, you write the e-mail first, then click attach and then have to understand the concept of a different view upon the file-system and that the Pictures folder in there, is actually the same as the Pictures folder their muscle-memory is programmed to use from the Start Menu.

E-mail sucks because browser vendors don?t care about real problems that plague real users every day.

If I were Mozilla I would integrate e-mail back into Firefox. The browser already knows the user?s web-mail user names and passwords. It could automatically configure everything. The user could have a clean interface to their e-mail without having to go through painful web-mail clients. Attachments would be easier. E-mail links in web pages would actually work. Native OS e-mail actions would actually do the right thing for once. Users would actually benefit more from this than redesigning the f*cking shape of the tabs or removing the RSS button from the toolbar.

Two years have passed. The boat has been missed. Facebook and Google control the content, how it is accessed, how it is processed. There is no way back. You have failed us, browser vendors.

A Summary

It is with much intrepidation (for life has become very uncertain) and joy (for life is no longer dull) that I can announce the news of our child, a son, due to us in early July.

Life, ever since meeting the love of it, has been upside down and changing at a relentless pace. First we met, and that was a big, unexpected change. Then I asked her to marry me. In three months we were married, and lived together?no small change for myself, which I found to be effortlessly natural (though obviously challanging). It?s only because of the news of our child that we have had to directly tackle the physical piles of stuff still not yet disseminated into everyday life. We find that having not even gotten settled in our first home we have to up-sticks and down-size (where there is no spare room to pile things) to be able to better focus ourselves on our child.

For this though I am very grateful as a blessing from God; meeting my wife has made me address many, many personal, internal burdens which have reflected?on this blog?through me giving up a great many things physical (the MacBook Pro), spiritual and somewhere in between (software projects), whilst the birth of my son forces me to address my many needs outside of the computer world.

This is where we get to the point. It will not have gone without your notice that I have neither been very active, or reliable for the last year. My more immediate needs in the real world overtake me and though even when there is the adequate time to devote to the website and other matters, I have neither the strength or will.

There is much I want to do, but it will have to wait for a few years whilst I care for my family.

I don?t expect to do much blogging here on the main site (my system isn?t working well for me under my new circumstances and it needs a complete overhaul). You can best be kept up to date with my happenings and thoughts through the system that does work well for my circumstances, my forum.

Thank you to all for your patience, understanding, generoisty and care.

Camen Design will return to irregular service in a future iteration some day. What it will be is only a hazy idea right now, but I do know for certain that I will do my own things in my own way and demonstrate to others that they can do the same.

Transliteration

Transliteration is when you replace individual characters in a piece of text with alternative characters, commonly used on the web to replace accented characters ??èìòù? with their ASCII equivilents ?aeiou? to use as filenames or URLs.

This is my take on the subject that uses different levels of fallback to gaurantee a result whatever your environment: It transliterates better than any example snippet you have seen out there as will be explained in the code and afterwards.

//safeTransliterate v3, copyright (cc-by 3.0) Kroc Camen <camendesign.com>
//generate a safe (a-z0-9_) string, for use as filenames or URLs, from an arbitrary string
function safeTransliterate ($text) {
	//if available, this function uses PHP5.4's transliterate, which is capable of converting arabic, hebrew, greek,
	//chinese, japanese and more into ASCII! however, we use our manual (and crude) fallback *first* instead because
	//we will take the liberty of transliterating some things into more readable ASCII-friendly forms,
	//e.g. "100?" > "100degc" instead of "100oc"
	
	/* manual transliteration list:
	   -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- */
	/* this list is supposed to be practical, not comprehensive, representing:
	   1. the most common accents and special letters that get typed, and
	   2. the most practical transliterations for readability;
	   
	   given that I know nothing of other languages, I will need your assistance to improve this list,
	   mail kroc@camendesign.com with help and suggestions.
	   
	   this data was produced with the help of:
	   http://www.unicode.org/charts/normalization/
	   http://www.yuiblog.com/sandbox/yui/3.3.0pr3/api/text-data-accentfold.js.html
	   http://www.utf8-chartable.de/
	*/
	static $translit = array (
		'a'	=> '/[ÀÁÂ????Ã?????????ÅÅ??????????àáâ????ã?????????å?????????]/u',
		'b'	=> '/[??????]/u',			'c'	=> '/[Ç?????ç?????]/u',
		'd'	=> '/[Ð????????????ð]/u',
		'e'	=> '/[ÈË?????????????????????èë?????????????????????]/u',
		'f'	=> '/[??]/u',				'g'	=> '/[??????????????]/u',
		'h'	=> '/[???????????????]/u',		'i'	=> '/[ÌÏ????????????iìï???????????]/u',
		'j'	=> '/[???]/u',				'k'	=> '/[???????????]/u',
		'l'	=> '/[????????????????]/u',		'm'	=> '/[??????]/u',
		'n'	=> '/[Ñ????????ñ????????]/u',
		'o'	=> '/[ÒÖ?????????????????????????????Ø?òö?????????????????????????????ø?]/u',
		'p'	=> '/[????]/u',				'r'	=> '/[??????????????????]/u',
		's'	=> '/[?????????????????????]/u',	'ss'	=> '/[ß]/u',
		't'	=> '/[???????????????]/u',		'th'	=> '/[Þþ]/u',
		'u'	=> '/[Ù??????????????????????ù??????????????????????µ]/u',
		'v'	=> '/[????]/u',				'w'	=> '/[?????????????]/u',
		'x'	=> '/[????×]/u',			'y'	=> '/[Ý????????ýÿ????????]/u',
		'z'	=> '/[????????????]/u',				
		//combined letters and ligatures:
		'ae'	=> '/[Ä?Æ??ä?æ??]/u',			'oe'	=> '/[??]/u',
		'dz'	=> '/[??????]/u',
		'ff'	=> '/[?]/u',	'fi'	=> '/[??]/u',	'ffl'	=> '/[??]/u',
		'ij'	=> '/[??]/u',	'lj'	=> '/[???]/u',	'nj'	=> '/[???]/u',
		'st'	=> '/[??]/u',	'ue'	=> '/[Ü????ü????]/u',
		//currencies:
		'eur'   => '/[?]/u',	'cents'	=> '/[¢]/u',	'lira'	=> '/[?]/u',	'dollars' => '/[$]/u',
		'won'	=> '/[?]/u',	'rs'	=> '/[?]/u',	'yen'	=> '/[¥]/u',	'pounds'  => '/[£]/u',
		'pts'	=> '/[?]/u',
		//misc:
		'degc'	=> '/[?]/u',	'degf'  => '/[?]/u',
		'no'	=> '/[?]/u',	'tm'	=> '/[?]/u'
	);
	//do the manual transliteration first
	$text = preg_replace (array_values ($translit), array_keys ($translit), $text);
	
	//flatten the text down to just a-z0-9 and dash, with underscores instead of spaces
	$text = preg_replace (
		//remove punctuation	//replace non a-z	//deduplicate	//trim underscores from start & end
		array ('/p{P}/u',	'/[^_a-z0-9-]/i',	'/_{2,}/',	'/^_|_$/'),
		array ('',		'_',			'_',		''),
		
		//attempt transliteration with PHP5.4's transliteration engine (best):
		//(this method can handle near anything, including converting chinese and arabic letters to ASCII.
		// requires the 'intl' extension to be enabled)
		function_exists ('transliterator_transliterate') ? transliterator_transliterate (
			//split unicode accents and symbols, e.g. "Å" > "A°":
			'NFKD; '.
			//convert everything to the Latin charset e.g. "?" > "ma":
			//(splitting the unicode before transliterating catches some complex cases,
			// such as: "?" >NFKD> "20?" >Latin> "20ri")
			'Latin; '.
			//because the Latin unicode table still contains a large number of non-pure-A-Z glyphs (e.g. "?"),
			//convert what remains to an even stricter set of characters, the US-ASCII set:
			//(we must do this because "Latin/US-ASCII" alone is not able to transliterate non-Latin characters
			// such as "?". this two-stage method also means we catch awkward characters such as:
			// "?" >Latin> "k?" >Latin/US-ASCII> "kO")
			'Latin/US-ASCII; '.
			//remove the now stand-alone diacritics from the string
			'[:Nonspacing Mark:] Remove; '.
			//change everything to lowercase; anything non A-Z 0-9 that remains will be removed by
			//the letter stripping above
			'Lower',
		$text)
		
		//attempt transliteration with iconv: <php.net/manual/en/function.iconv.php>
		: strtolower (function_exists ('iconv') ? str_replace (array ("'", '"', '`', '^', '~'), '', strtolower (
			//note: results of this are different depending on iconv version,
			//      sometimes the diacritics are written to the side e.g. "ñ" = "~n", which are removed
			iconv ('UTF-8', 'US-ASCII//IGNORE//TRANSLIT', $text)
		)) : $text)
	);
	
	//old iconv versions and certain inputs may cause a nullstring. don't allow a blank response
	return !$text ? '_' : $text;
}

Edit this code on GitHub • You may do anything with this code as long as you leave credit in the code

There is no ?guaranteed available? method with which to transliterate effectively in PHP; the functions that can do so vary by PHP version and are not likely to always be installed and enabled on every PHP server out there. The only built-in function strtr guaranteed to be present only replaces one character with another and doesn?t handle the common need to expand one character to multiple, such as converting ?ß? to ?ss?.

There are a number of libraries and functions out there for transliteration. Those that are comprehensive are massive and therefore total overkill for a small project and often have unhelpful licences, those that are small and compact are usually very incomplete and rely upon a single method that might not be available to you.

My method uses fallbacks so as to guarantee a result and improves upon other methods out there:

Better unicode normalisation

All the transliterations examples I have seen out there that use PHP5.4?s transliterator make the mistake of copy-pasting the example normalisation string given on the website. The results are simply wrong. My code uses a unicode normalisation method that I have worked out that has not been used anywhere else I have seen. It handles thousands of cases that no other library/function does because it uses two-stages of transliteration, first from any script to Latin-1 and then from Latin-1 to US-ASCII. This means that characters such as ??? become ?ko? where else this would fail on other code I have seen because it would transliterate ??? to ?k?? and then remove the ??? for being non-ASCII

Readability

Since the transliteration will be used for filenames or URLs, readability is important, so it?s better to convert some things to more meaningful words such as ?¥? to ?yen? instead of just ?y?. In the example above, it would be trivial for the function to convert ??? to ?k-ohm? but I chose not to since the single character ??? is almost never used on the `Web

I don?t know anything about other languages and writing systems, so if there?s something amiss in my code, please let me know via email, the forums or by editing the GitHub gist

End of an Era

The world has changed around me since I started this blog, and then I have seen a good deal of change in myself. When presented recently with the issue that my aged MacBook Pro can?t be upgraded to the latest OS X, the logical thing?as far as I'm concerned?would be to switch to some FreeBSD variant and get away from all this iCloud and closed-computing nonsense.

However I am in the thows of change once more and I have opted to sell that which has been my right arm for years. I was neither shrewd nor conscientious with my money when I dated my wife, which was my own fault, added to the unfathomable expense of getting married and moving home. To that end, where normally I would have the money for my tax bill, rightly I don?t. But that is not the reasoning behind this decision. I can earn and I can save, however, I wish not to place my electronic pursuits above the attention I wish to insist upon my wife and my home.

For those that might genuinely desire these items, I highlight them here; my laptop I'm not so bothered about, but my collection of rare Commodore 64 books I would like to find the right eyes who may use them. Whilst I am in the UK, I would consider international shipping for my C64 items as long as you contact me privately.

• Kroc Camen?s Apple MacBook Pro 15.4? - 2.16GHz C2D / 3GB RAM / 320GB HDD
• Kroc Camen?s collection of rare and stupidly rare Commodore 64 programming books
• Commodore 64 Simons Basic Cartridge + Manual; RARE
• Elite Gold Edition Commodore 64; RARE. Tape + 5¼? Floppy copy

Camen Design Competition Time!

1. Design a Theme for NoNonsense Forum
   1. Get Started:
   2. What You?re Aiming For:
2. Design a Web Page for NoNonsense Forum
   1. Get Started:
   2. What You?re Aiming For:
3. Prizes, Judging, Rules
   1. Prizes
   2. Judging Criteria
   3. How to Enter
   4. Rules

Here is an opportunity to create something and learn from others; Camen Design is running not one, but two simultaneous competitions (so that you have a choice) centered around my unique forum software NoNonsense Forum; don?t worry if you?ve never heard of it, let alone used it, all that is required is:

• Some basic HTML / CSS knowledge
• The want to contribute and learn

These are the two competitions:

1. Design a Theme for NoNonsense Forum
2. Design a Web Page for NoNonsense Forum

and they run from Sunday 5^th of August, for just over two calendar months,
until midnight UTC Sunday 7^th of October. See prizes, judging and rules for the ancillary details.

Design a Theme for NoNonsense Forum

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to turn this:

?into anything you want. Go understated or go wild, simply create a new theme as you see fit.

Do not worry, as you do not need to know PHP or be familiar with NoNonsense Forum to develop a theme for it. NNF uses a unique templating engine that allows you to use plain HTML and CSS and you never need to learn any {{special syntax}} or use PHP (unless you want to).

Get Started:

• Read the instructions on making a NoNonsense Forum theme

  • Download either the NoNonsense Forum source code (PHP) which I?ve customised ready for theme development,

  • Or, if you?re on Windows, you can download a pre-configured web-server with NoNonsense Forum installed to get yourself going quickly and easily: just run the exe, open your web browser to http://localhost and you?re ready!

• See the prizes, judging, rules section for some particulars

• Go participate, get help and see what others are doing in the forum

What You?re Aiming For:

You should refer to the judging criteria for guidance as this competition is very open to creativity.

Design a Web Page for NoNonsense Forum

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to design and create a single-page website for NoNonsense Forum.

Currently, NoNonsense Forum has no real ?website? to advertise it, just the technical project page on Camen Design, which is more of a blog post than a proper web site for it, and the GitHub project, which doesn?t exactly ?sell? the product!

Get Started:

• Learn more about NoNonsense Forum

• See NoNonsense Forum in action, you can also download a pre-configured version and for Windows users, a pre-configured portable web-server with NoNonsense Forum installed

• See the prizes, judging, rules section for some particulars

• Go participate, get help and see what others are doing in the forum

What You?re Aiming For:

• The web page can be as long or short as you want but it should highlight the features (or not-features) of the forum and provide a link to download it (github.com/Kroc/NoNonsenseForum/zipball/master) and optionally a link to the GitHub project

• NoNonsense Forum is aimed at individuals who would want to install and run it themselves, including technical persons within companies that might want to use it as an internal discussion platform; that is, NNF is not aimed at managers, but rather the people who have the technical skill to install it and potentially modify it?They are well aware of what a pain phpBB is. For example, NNF has received this testimonial:

  "

  I work for Life is good and handle their media and web design in Portsmouth. I've used NNF as an internal discussion board and communication platform. This has eliminated the messy and poor communication through paper notes. Our company?s processes and communication has improved greatly. We haven?t had miscommunication since the birth of NNF at Life is good. Thank you for this.

  NickPfen
  "

• Forums appear antiquated compared to all this Facebook and Twitter nonsense, so the site should help convince visitors why NNF doesn?t suck and why a NoNonsense Forum is a good discussion platform

Prizes, Judging, Rules

Prizes

I lied. There?s not really any prizes, perhaps not the kind you were expecting. You see, I don?t have the money to contribute a physical or monetary prize. The purpose of the competitions is to encourage participation, sharing and creativity. This is an opportunity to play with HTML / CSS and bounce ideas off of others doing the same. There is no such thing as ?stealing? here, just learning. You?re encouraged to share your ideas, designs and code in the forum and see what others are coming up with.

Grand Prize:

The overall winner of the theme competition will have their theme used on the Camen Design Forum for one month, possibly longer if I like it.

The overall winner of the webpage competition will have their design used as the official NoNonsense Forum site over at GitHub.

The SRSBSNS Award:

This immaterial feel-good award will be given to the best entry (in each competition) that takes itself seriously. That is not to say that it can?t be fun, or has to dull and bland, but that it aims to be a real design to be used for its purpose, either as forum theme that would be shipped with the product, or a webpage that would serve as the starting point of someone discovering the product for the first time.

The ORLY? Award:

Awarded to the best entry (in each competition) that does not take itself seriously.

The People?s Choice Award:

What was everybody?s favourite entry, voted by everybody on the forums. This is so that there can be an agreed upon ?favourite? without any ?criteria? to meet.

Runners Up:

The top 5 of each competition will be featured on Camen Design with my personal, detailed critique as a designer and programmer.

Judging Criteria

Myself (Kroc Camen) will be judging (except for the People?s Choice Award which will be a rough vote held on the forum).

Who am I that you would care? This site has been HTML5 with no divs, no spans and the CSS has no IDs & no classes, since 2008. I made Video for Everybody, the HTML5 video-embedding method mentioned in most anywhere HTML5 video is discussed.

These are the things I?ll be looking for:

i. Trueness to spirit

That is, how well the entry succeededs in being true to its nature. If your entry is supposed to be ?retro? or ?industrial? or even ?lolcats?, then I will be ranking based on how well your entry hits the zeitgeist. Is your design and execution close to what you purposed / intended it to be?

Entries with a schizophrenic / uncertain nature would rank poorly. Try be clear in what you want to achieve and what ?statement of design? you are making. Be bold, and stick to it.

ii. Creativity

Make stuff nobody else thought of. Find your own niche where you find pleasure and dig into it.

Extra kudos is also awarded for creatvity with the code. Clean, artistic HTML and CSS is awarded. Especially with the theme competition, kudos is awarded for twisting the HTML and the common idea of what a forum should look like.

iii. Completeness / compatibility

Extra kudos is awarded for those who can cover more ground in the time. Does it include a mobile theme (via CSS3 media queries)? Printing styles? Does it work without JavaScript? What range of browsers does it work on?

You shouldn?t focus on this to begin with though. Get the look and feel right and then with spare time you can work on broadening the features.

How to Enter

To enter a competition, just start a thread in the forum with the title prefixed with ?NNF Compo Theme? or ?NNF Compo Webpage? and the name of your theme. In this thread you can describe your idea, post some images of the design if you?ve drawn any and share code.

You can keep replying or appending to the thread to alert others of your progress and others can give you their feedback through your thread. It?s best to post early and log your progress as you go rather than hold everything back until the end of the competition.

Any time before the deadline just add a link to a download of your entry to your thread. You can continue to update your entry even after you?ve posted a download as long as it?s still before the deadline.

To cancel an entry, just delete your thread.

Rules

• The competitions run from Sunday 5^th of August, for two calandar months and two days, ending at midnight UTC Sunday 7^th October

• You can enter both competitions if you want, and you can have more than one entry for each, but you will only be represented once in each prize category by your best entry

• Please licence your code correctly to avoid your entry being rejected:

  • You should ideally use a Creative Commons CC-BY 3, or CC-BY-SA 3 licence, especially if you have derived your theme from the default ?greyscale? theme

  • Please us MIT or BSD if you prefer these, but not Apache2 / MPL / WTFPL

  • Do not use any GPL licence, or dual-licence that includes GPL,
    your entry will be rejected if you do

Anything you?re unsure of, just ask at the forums.