semantic web

Is the site logo content?

20 February 2011 - 1:47pm | Laura Scott

A brief exchange on Twitter with Jen Simmons (@jensimmons) and Morten Heide (@mortendk) about how to best incorporate a site logo into a Drupal theme got me cogitating on this question. Jen tweeted:

...What should go is the habit of hardcoding content into the theme. #separationplease #drupalwtf

—@jensimmons

"Content"? Hmmm. This got me pondering: Is a logo "content" per se? My immediate response was in the negative. But upon further consideration, I don't think it's all that clear cut; I'm definitely less certain today than I was yesterday.

This post is a bit of thinking out loud on this question. Comments welcome! (But no need to shout #wtf, okay?)

Content or architecture

To me, "content" in a Drupal site is the content, as in nodes, comments, image uploads, embeds, etc. The content is the information. Come back to an article on kitten care a year from now and the content will be the same (or at least it should be).

The logo, on the other hand, is a graphic component of the user interface as well as the branding. The logo is the visual representation of the site identity. It may change and evolve, as logos do, as user interfaces do.

But functionally the logo in the web application is really a part of the site's architecture. The logo is "home." Redesign the site, revamp the logo, change its colors, replace it altogether — it is still "home" in terms of the functionality of the application. In that sense, it is fundamental architecture.

When planning, designing and developing a custom website, the theme is custom, a part of the entire design that includes architecture. (At least, this is the assumption I'm working from.) One typically does not move a logo around on a page willy nilly. One typically does not swap out the logo for another — not unless you're also changing the theme as well, as part of an entire redesign. The logo is a part of the whole user interface, the whole user experience, the whole compositional balance of the page. Conceptually it's hard for me to split out the logo as represented on the page itself as somehow apart. Logos have their own separate life, yes, but in a user interface context matters. One might even argue that the entire user interface is all a part of the branding, with the logo just playing one part. One might....

One of the advantages of a Drupal site is that a site administrator can actually manipulate the site architecture without touching code. This helps site building happen much quicker than it would otherwise. This admin control over architecture also can be handy for site owners, even if used only once or twice in a year. And it constitutes configuration stored in the database.

But does that make architecture "content"?

Drupal is very good at blurring the lines between functionality and presentation because of this paradigm. In puritanical (small "p") terms, it's undesirable, this blurring the lines. But in terms of usability and convenience for site owners, it ends up being empowering. Site menus can be modified, added to, deleted from. Blocks can be repositioned. The user interface, in other words, ends up being extremely malleable and subject to the whims of any user with the appropriate administrative permissions.

But is it content? I guess it depends upon what you mean by content. In terms of interaction design, I tend to view the site logo as a component of the entire user interface design, as part of the architecture in terms of functionality.

In Drupal, by default the logo can be uploaded from within the Drupal admin interface, and in that regard it's something like the other architectural elements that are exposed in the Drupal back-end. But the logo's purpose is locked in Drupal core. It links to the website "home page." The administrative control of the logo is restricted to determining what graphic will be presented as the logo. In other words, the logo ends up being merely the visible face of core Drupal functionality, the site architecture.

However, in terms of design, the logo is ideally integrated in the entire page design, and ideally is not simply a drop-in graphic, swappable at a whim. What's more, how that logo appears — i.e., what that logo's graphic image might be — depends upon the site design, which in turn is greatly affected by the device for which the theme implementation is intended. For example, if handheld compatibility is being addressed, the logo on a site viewed in a desktop browser will almost certainly be different from the logo used for users viewing on a handheld device. This makes Drupal core's logo upload functionality too limited and requiring either alteration or bypassing, because when the logo is uploaded into Drupal, you just get the one logo per theme. To swap out the logo for different platforms and devices, you'll need to do some fancy theme coding to load a different image (not easy for most), use simple CSS to force-resize the image (not considered best practice), or load a completely different theme (which is often not desired).

One way to avoid this is to skip Drupal's logo upload paradigm and load the logo's graphic as a background image. This way the logo can be easily swapped through use of @media queries in CSS for different sizes and aspect ratios, to complement responsive theming for tablets and handhelds. Incorporating site logos into web design via background images using CSS is a common practice for many web designers and developers. It certainly makes it easy to do things like :hover states and other user-feedback goodness.

But maybe that's not the best approach. For one thing, it clearly treats the logo graphic as not content. What if it is?

In terms semantic

There's some interesting debate on this.

Keith on Shubox ponders the question, considers the possibility that the site logo can be considered content. He argues that for SEO reasons a logo loaded as an image can have an alt value. This doesn't convince me because the link tag that can be displayed with a background image (the logo itself) can have alt values, too.

Stack Overflow bats around the question with some very nice discussion.

One assertion that comes up is that the logo is content semantically. Again here I'm not entirely convinced — not when it comes to interaction design (for the reasons I describe above). However, I do see the site name, which may or may not even be printed on the visible page, as semantically critical. But the logo? Not necessarily. In many ways, the semantic web is not much interested in graphic logos, but rather the identities the logos represent. —Especially if you consider that logo on the same site at the same URL may be different depending upon the device you're viewing it with.

Still, the Stack Overflow discussion and other Google hits leave me questioning my assumptions. (Oh, and Google itself loads its logo in an <img> tag as content.) I'm open to convincing on this score. However...

In terms practical

In another tweet in our brief exchange, Jen noted that if the logo is loaded on a website as a background image, "nothing will print."

#facepalm

It's a good point: A logo set as a background image will not print if the browser is not set to print background images, and there's no guarantee that it will. And whether you offer printer-friendly alternative pages or try to remedy the matter in print.css, it's a challenge that wild and wooly browser-world does not make easy to solve.

In other words, the background-image approach for logo placement may well serve easy adaptability to a wide variety of devices, platforms and resolutions, it risks a #fail when it comes to presenting the logo on dead trees.

(And if the logo is missing, it will be missed, which again raises the notion that logos may indeed be content after all.)

So in terms of Drupal theming, maybe the logo refrain is: don't worry, print $logo, be happy.

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No, Google is not a monopoly

5 April 2009 - 10:47am | Laura Scott

First, some context

Henry Porter, an opinionator granted a regular podium by the Guardian, has written a bit of a rant claiming that we're victims of Google, a "monopoly."

Google presents a far greater threat to the livelihood of individuals and the future of commercial institutions important to the community. One case emerged last week when a letter from Billy Bragg, Robin Gibb and other songwriters was published in the Times explaining that Google was playing very rough with those who appeared on its subsidiary, YouTube. When the Performing Rights Society demanded more money for music videos streamed from the website, Google reacted by refusing to pay the requested 0.22p per play and took down the videos of the artists concerned.

It does this with impunity because it is dominant worldwide and knows the songwriters have nowhere else to go. Google is the portal to a massive audience: you comply with its terms or feel the weight of its boot on your windpipe.

The article is full of these kinds of claims, all largely based on what seems to be either a complete misunderstanding of the nature of the Web, or a lack of understanding of the word "monopoly."

The core of Porter's ignorance, willful or not, is revealed in this statement:

Despite its diversification, Google is in the final analysis a parasite that creates nothing, merely offering little aggregation, lists and the ordering of information generated by people who have invested their capital, skill and time.

This is true only if you think that things exist on their own, and that their relationships to you, their relationships to each other, do not exist, or are not worth looking at, let alone making available for use -- let alone making relevant to our day-to-day lives.

Google provides a means of finding relevance in that sea of stuff out there on the Web. It's like a mega-index of the "book" of the Web. That relevance was largely hidden from us before search engines. To find relevance, one had to ask friends, browse libraries, analyze the Dewey Decimal System, dig up Yellow Pages, rummage through desk drawers to find that one tidbit of information you want right now.

That is hardly "nothing."

In 1787 Thomas Jefferson wrote: "Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate to prefer the latter."

Thomas Jefferson was also against a strong judiciary, which in hindsight sounds pretty foolish, imho. But Jefferson aside, there's no indication that what newspapers are in function -- delivery systems for filtered information -- is not going anywhere. It's just the newspaper industry, and the infrastructure and market that enabled the paper to be printed, that is going away. News is still happening. It's just that how we're getting it is changing.

There is a brattish, clever amorality about Google that allows it to censor the pages on its Chinese service without the slightest self doubt, store vast quantities of unnecessary information about every Google search, and menace the delicate instruments of democratic scrutiny.

I don't like how US-owned search engine companies are going along with the Chinese Government's restrictions on the Internet, either, but let's be clear: It's the Chinese government that is censoring the Internet. Google is going along with it, along with much of the rest of the American economy, let's face it. This is about corporate collaboration with government constraints on what we consider "American values," and not about a Google monopoly or how Google is anything but pretty darned typical these days.

Now in many ways Porter is like many other people who have enjoyed the privilege of being given a special podium from which to pontificate and opinionate, who is upset that the market is shifting such that people who haven't been given such privilege are able to not only publish, but actually find an audience for what they publish.

How dare they? "Those bloggers!" is the cry we've heard over and over, often while pointing to the most outrageous or inane examples as cases-in-point -- ignoring that the vast majority of people "in print" also tend to produce an abundance of useless, inane, erroneous, misinformed information as well.

Until search engines, the only filtering agent people had was the editorial board of the local paper or the book publisher or the magazine. Now our filtering agent reaches beyond those sources -- although those sources, when right, get the most relevance -- to include others, including people who never went to journalism school, and never were given a paycheck by a media conglomerate. Oh the humanity!

So now Google is the dominant search engine, and thus potentially is a huge influencer in what sources we can find to be relevant to our needs, wants, desires ... to our lives. Such power Google has!

But is Google a search engine monopoly? Really?

Remember in the '90s? What was the dominant search engine then? Yahoo. Microsoft, with all its market dominance on the desktop, really was having trouble competing.

Google pushed Yahoo aside. How? By providing better search results. You searched Yahoo and got some good results and lots of spam and pr0n. You searched Google and got better results.

Relevance was the ticket to Google's successful insurgence. And relevance is why Google still dominates.

Relevance is a commodity. Nobody owns it. Nobody controls it. Relevance is not even a scarce commodity. There's always more relevance. Better relevance.

Want to defeat Google? Build a tool that gives better results. In other words, be more relevant than Google.

Yes, Google has a magnificent physical infrastructure worth a crapload of money.

But even in these hard economic times, there are plenty of craploads of money out there to build a new tool to defeat Google. It wouldn't even take a huge crapload of money, as craploads of money go, since server infrastructure costs are going down.

No, the scarcity is in the innovation. The imagination. The engineering to guide what that crapload of money would build.

Microsoft has been trying and failing, and nobody can accuse Microsoft of being short on craploads of money.

It's the relevance that Google has, and it has it only ephemerally. All it will take is a tool with more relevance, backed by a relatively small crapload of money, to whittle at Google's market dominance, or even knock it off of your default home page. Maybe it will be a new search engine. Or a new social media paradigm. Or something we haven't even imagined yet.

All we know is that we don't know what it's going to be like just a few years from now. Blaming Google for that is like blaming the weather vane for this afternoon's rain shower.

Hat tip to Dave Winer and others for Tweeting the Guardian link.

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Semantic meaning with Ubiquity

26 August 2008 - 3:26pm | Laura Scott

When I would talk or write about the semantic web, microformats, RDF and all that, people would often ask, "Why? Who cares?" or shudder with a "That's creepy!" Images of Big Brother tracking every move, to be indexed, measured and evaluated for Ungood behavior, or something like that. At best, people could see a kind of abstract benefit from making information more digestable by machines, you know, in the interest of having a sense of general order in the Interwebs or something.

But what about when the semantic web yields dividends back to the human experience?

It's just a little thing out of what's possible – a mere smidge of cobbled together APIs – but Mozilla Labs Ubiquity (a Firefox plug-in) is really something to see, for it gives you a peek into the kinds of things that will be possible (and now already area) with an Internet that has semantic meaning.

Check out this video, that's very much to the point:

Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.