Buried in this Reuters article is a paragraph stunning in its implications for journalism, even if only by accident:
Kerviel could not be reached for comment. A headshot of him cut from a trading Website showed an earnest-looking young man. At the start of the afternoon, when his identity was revealed, he had 11 friends listed on the facebook.com social website. That number later dropped to four.
I’m speechless. Welcome to the social web?
The title of this article is (of course) referring to the browser DOM. Don’t get me wrong, the DOM abstraction was a great invention. IE4 was incredibly innovative, the progenitor of Ajax as we know it today.
But as the Ajax evolution continues on, I keep waiting for a “killer” UI platform that nudges us back toward the simplicity of HTML markup. Remember that? Back in the early days of the web you wrote server-side “scripts” that generated markup on-the-fly. Some people naively thought that manually generating HTML with C/Perl/whatever was OK. Others realized that you could incorporate read-only processing instructions in the markup, rather than markup in your application code, and thus was born tools like Velocity, TAL, and other such templating systems. It wasn’t hard to see the value of these tools, how much better than the alternative, how much easier than stateful programming.
Eventually the abstractors barged in, tried to change HTML to XML, tried to change templating to XSL. And they had…mixed…success.
And meanwhile we got sick of having to go back to the server and regenerate pages every time our customers did something interesting. We wanted small, nay miniscule, updates that allow us to do more with less. And thus Ajax was born.
But what a diversion! What happened to that simple markup we used to write? The server-side frameworks didn’t have enough time to sort out their differences, to evolve to the right level of simplicity. Yet we’ve already moved on. The clarity of execution flow in generating a web page? Gone. The simplicity of learning curve? Absent.
Am I the only one who yearns to circle back?
Here’s the problem as I see it: the UI I’ve coded, what you see on the screen, is a reflection (some would call it a transformation) of the data sitting in memory in my JavaScript objects. So why is it that every time the data changes I have to go twiddle something in the DOM? Shouldn’t that just happen automagically?
Why should I have to wrap my head around two UI representations, the markup and the DOM? Markup is easy to read but captures a small sliver of the UI gestalt. The DOM captures everything else, but sits in memory. Can’t it all just be markup, so that I don’t have to spend so much time visualizing data structures whose only representation is either in code or in Firebug?
The DOM is hot property, a cool kid these days. So it won’t surprise me if this plea falls on deaf ears. But I believe that the world could use UI that is described rather than commanded, stateless rather than iterative, that puts the V back in MVC.
I can’t help but feel we’re moving inexorably in the wrong direction, bit-by-bit, and no one is noticing.
And so I sit waiting patiently, occasionally scheming…
Dan discussed “flow” recently and made some observations that stunningly mirror my own life. Quoth Dan:
I’d deliberately side-stepped IM and Twitter, but without consciously noticing it, I let my email and blogs reading habits — distractions on their own — to become interrupts…Previously, I’d get to the end of the day and feel unsatisfied. One of the ways I feel satisfied when I’m creating and learning, so I’d go looking for something new to read about in blogland and, before I knew it, it’d be 1:00am.
Dan plans to re-arrange his life so that all of his activities — work or leisure — are broken into uninterrupted chunks. That means scheduling time to check email and read blogs, rather than letting such activities creep in throughout the daily routine.
I’m so sympathetic to this it hurts. But I have a problem: my workday tasks contain empty space. Much of my worktime consists of the following cycle:
Steps 3 and 4 are mostly automated, so they don’t require a lot of active engagement. Furthermore, they take time enough that it’s difficult to sit and stare at the screen and wait for them to finish without doing something else. But they’re not long enough to really dig in and engage in other work-related tasks.
So I often fill my time in steps 3 and 4 with activities like emails or a blog reading. (For example, I’m writing this amidst build-and-test cycles.) But I find the context switch to be tiring by day’s end, thus leaving me in what I call “disphoria” — an over-stimulated, partially-connected brain-state that’s productive but unfulfilled and disorienting. Exactly what Dan describes.
So what does one do during these empty mid-task moments? Meditate?