entirely safe and fun

Since I have evidence that I am a talented futurologist, you should listen to my predictions about technology.

In a previous incarnation as an academic, I marvelled to the PI on my team that my (reasonably efficient) implementation of the machine-learning system we were working on had runtimes, on even moderately-sized datasets, in the week range. He told me that we’d be living almost our entire lives more than five years in the future, and it was reasonable to write software for the speedy computers of that era. As soon as I grasped this wisdom, I realized that I should also account for our interface color schemes, which would have to still be usable in the blue light that would characterize the future.

If I were allowed to photograph the inside of the colocation facility where are kept my employer’s servers, you’d see that the future is more of a purple color than a blue, but my futurological prowess is nonetheless demonstrated. So, what follows is a hot tip from the Only Accurate Technology Oracle(TM): Remember back in the Bad Old Days, circa 1996, when you were lucky to get 40Kb to the ‘Net? And how all the awesomest .coms had sites with around a meg of tiny image slices, stuffed into tons of tables for format control, so that even once you’d waited for all the HTTP GETs to 200, rendering the page took five minutes, with much hard-disk chugging and swapping? Now, I can see a world where megabyte style sheets, cobbled together by half-literate designers grabbing entire sheets from other sites to get one effect, come to Rule the Earth. Just to be annoying, most of that is embedded in the HEADs of each individual page, so caching doesn’t speed download times. Just like in 1996, browser-specific elements go into wide use, with some sort of Amdahl’s Law justification:

• “We don’t need to support Firefox - it’s just a lunatic fringe of maybe 50 users who depend on our markup not to break their browser!” or
• “No one using IE will ever breach our citadel of OSS purity!” or
• “Our iSite is too cool for those Windows losers and free software geeks!” or I guess
• “Here in NORVAY have ve NO Users of the non-OPERA buROWsers.”

And, just like in 1996, you, the poor user, will wait, and wait, for the rendering, to happen, so you, can enjoy, the full force, of, like, the, designer’s, vision. My prediction, in sum, is that the future is going to be just like the past, but there will be more of it for many values of “it”. We are falling into Santayana’s trap - we cannot remember the past, due to the late nights and the plummeting value of our options and the resulting PTSD, so we are doomed to repeat it.

I hereby resolve to fight the future. I am not going to stop using complex CSS tricks, but I will test my work against the latest versions of IE, Firefox, and Opera, and I will occasionally dragoon a Mac-owning friend to load up my pages and tell me what breaks. I will limit my main style sheet to 20k, and will occasionally refactor it (as I recently did) with a goal of 10k including comments. If I notice a rendering performance problem, I will dike out the offending bit posthaste. I hope that when I have readers, they will point out to me when I have sinned. I will validate for XHTMLness and accessibility, so that in a happy future browsers can stop DWIMming broken HTML and confidently render well-formed markup.

Not funny, but part of a charter for this still charterless site, I guess.