Cookies in webkit

For RDS, we had an issue with cookies on webkit. I went on a quest to understand why. Webkit has an issue with “,” character in cookies. It strips everything after the comma in the value. There is a new specification in the process of redifining cookies. You can expect that some implementations to be fixed, and then creating interoperability issues.

Mailing-list

We are using mailing-list for projects archived on the Web. An interesting question has been raised on when creating a new list. So far, we tried to limit the creation of new list when we were getting new clients and not for each project. People participating can decided to subscribe or unsubscribe from each list. The person asking the question was afraid I guess of too many people involved around the project and having useless forks in the dicussions. This is indeed a possibility, but it is a reasonable risk to accept for the huge benefits:

• free archiving of the project
• people who are not directly involved in the current project can act as expert or raise a flag on something they have experimented in the past
• Searchability on one client. Some projects might have influence on other projects for the same client.

People working in Web agencies are not permanent. They just pass, but the client has a longer duration and then focusing the archiving around the client is usually better than creating tens of small mailing-lists for short period of time.

Discussions and scope

Some discussions, if not well managed by the person who initiated it, can wildly drift from their initial goal. We had an example this week on a simple idea which was posted and the threads had a few forks raising issues. The mail is a good place for discussing but not for building up the knowledge of this discussion. In this case a wiki is a lot more effective.

1. Send a message on the list with your scope and expectations
2. Discuss it on the list (asynchronous wins here)
3. Compile step by step the results of the discussions on a wiki

Careful: The people on the list have to be aware of this practice. If not, you create a misunderstanding on how to handle it. This starts with the fact you should make it clear that people except if they are in the To: or Cc: have the freedom to not read the messages.

Wiki refactoring and Techno Manifesto

One of our working tool inside Pheromone is a wiki. It helps us document certain things such as technologies, minutes of meetings, definition of employee roles, and sometimes draft client proposals. This week, I was writing the Technology Manifesto to give a reference for developers and the rest of the Team what are the main orientations of Pheromone.

En coordination avec la mission de Pheromone, le manifeste technologique définit les grandes orientations de l’agence. Le porteur du Manifesto est le CTO de l’agence. Le directeur du développement

• Technologies OpenSource
• Respect des normes Web et ouvertes
• Promouvoir les données ouvertes tout en considérant les règles de vie privée des utilisateurs de nos services.
• Respect de l’accès pour tous
• Services et APIs respectant HTTP REST
• Services multiplateformes (mobile, desktop, etc.)

Directeur/Directrice du développement

We have a job proposal for a development director at Pheromone. I encourage specifically women to apply. Note that the preference will be given to the best candidate, man or woman. But I found it quite hard to recruit women in the technological area. I would love for example to recruit a very good Web API (REST) woman developper.

W3C Workshop on Privacy for Advanced Web APIs

Last week I was participating to the W3C Workshop on Privacy for Advanced Web APIs. You can read the rough minutes of the Workshop for Monday 12 July and Tuesday 13 July. A report will be published in the future. I will probably write an article later on about some findings of the workshop.

Research on Portals

In the last two weeks, we surveyed Web portals through the world across languages and cultures. It helped us to figure out very interesting findings and some very specific elements depending on culture, techniques, etc. Basically, they all look the same and give a strong feeling of “Déjà Vu”, but there exists a few of them with very interesting features.

Another issue is that these agencies are small. It’s a lot easier to write a summary with a human touch. Pheromone has around 60 employees. This blog has been opened to talk about what matters to individual people in Pheromone, not a place for PR speak (which I have a tad difficulty with). I encourage Pherotizens to write their own. So I’ll try to keep it close to what happened around me last week in the agency and being careful about things which are confidential. Let’s start with So Last Week in memory of Celine who’s doing cool UX stuff in Montreal.

• Sharing data is a growing question in Pheromone. Pheromone is working for clients. Then the agency is not working with its own data. There is a fear of sharing data very similar to the fear of sharing information at the beginning of the Web. Having a good business case for sharing data is something, I start to think about.
• RDS has created Le Grand Club, a social network around sport (mostly hockey). Each member has a profile page which gives information about its community. RDS asked us to expose these data in a more machine processable way. FOAF is exactly the right way of doing that. Rounds of implementations and small fixes were done, but nothing is better than going through #swig channel to test it. I received feedbacks from Dan Brickley and Toby Inkster.
• Big coordination work on in-house mobile app for Montrealers which you should be getting news this week. Stay tuned.
• The week was short because of Canada Day. Less people at the agency on Friday, and it was easier to work on some stuff.
• My paper on Opacity has been accepted at the W3C Workshop on Privacy for Advanced Web APIs in London, UK. I have prepared my trip to go there. I still have to write a blog post about it to give more details. But in the meantime, I discovered a talk closely related to my own notion of opacity: The Real Life Social Network by Paul Adams. It is a must read.
• I have been doing an accessibility review of one of our client sites and I relate strongly with what Elie Sloïm explained in his OpenWeb article about l’accessibilité agile. Accessibility reviews are usually too late and gives a lot of frustration to the project manager, the developers, and most of the time the client. It is a lot better to think with UX and designers accessibility upfront at the beginning of the project but this requires a full control of the project at the beginning or that the work being done on concepts and designs are “accessibility proofed”, in the case for example of work between agencies with a client.

Ok, let’s call it a try. We will see what happens for this week if I continue the So Last Week.