To read this article in HTML 2.0, click here. To read it in HTML 4.0, click here.

There is allot of talk at the moment about HTML 5 and far be it from me to jump on the blog post band wagon and post something about HTML 5. For instance, I did not post anything about Day being purchased by Adobe and my feelings about the impending doom to Day customers who fell in love with Day’s great technical marketing and Open Source strategy. My feeling is just that, a feeling, and Adobe and Day tell us this is not the case so I probably should not worry. Anyway, I digress. I have been looking at HTML 5 and it looks to be the best thing to happen to the web since… well since ever.

Since it become geek cool to have a web page, I have had one. That is not to say I was cool, but at least I tried. I have had many, many websites; some successful, others not. In all of those sites there was probably millions of lines of code, some written in beautiful HTML and others written in the crappiest hacked code you have ever seen.

Way back when I started, there was no HTML standard. HTML 2.0 (November 1995) was the first standard and was versioned as 2.0 to separate it from the many informal HTML versions that were around since 1990. Building out pre 2.0 websites using VI, Netscape Navigator browser on our HP-UX terminals seemed like the cutting edge (it was) but now is somewhat laughable when I think about my current development environment and my browser on my phone. By the year 2000, HTML 2.0 was obsolete…

HTML 2.0 defined many features, that we now take for granted, for the first time; HTML, HEAD and BODY all made an official appearance as well as LINK and TITLE. But missing from 2.0 would be things like STYLE (HTML 3.2), DIV (HTML 3.2) and even CENTER (HTML 3.2 and already deprecated) – they might have been available but they were not standard and only available to some browsers. LINK allowed links to style sheets but there was no standard for style sheets and few browsers could even implement the CSS1 standard when it was released a year later (IE 5 was the first to a have full (99%) support for CSS and that was in 2000). To my surprise the trusted BLINK and MARQUEE have never been in a standard, it seems that someone at W3C had some good taste.

Without STYLE and DIV elements, modern web designer would be unable to make any modern design look even passable. But with my trustee P tag at hand and a TABLE or two we can get something like a nice design and get it validated against the 2.0 standard. Oh wait, there is no TABLE element in 2.0 as that was introduced in 3.2. I shall put away the single pixel gif, I have in case of emergencies, for another day.

Other resources:

• HTML 5 on Wikipedia
• W3C HTML 2.0 Materials
• HTML 2.0 Standard

What has changed the most – or rather the most obvious change – is the Content Manager Explorer also known as the Tridion GUI. In 2011, apart from running on all the major browsers and also an iPad, it features a redesign that will be familiar to existing users but also taking on board lots of new usability features.

One of the nicest features of the new interface is the ribbon toolbar. On the current version of Tridion, the buttons on the toolbar are somewhat hard to see and can make it difficult to see what the particular button is supposed to do. The ribbon features a big icon and some text as well which should make finding the function you want easy.

If you don’t like the ribbon you can always collapse the ribbon down to the more traditional row of icons.

Two more features I would like to highlight. Gone are the tabs on the publishing queue and it now shows you all options in the same area. It’s common for me to forget that I have other options on the other tab, so having them all in one place is better for the old folk like myself.

And then lastly I want to show you another nice feature. Error messages in-line to the interface, so now the option to feed more back to the user about what is going on. If you missed a message, you can also get a list back of the message history.

Anyway, I wanted to share two things that I wanted to write about but did not get the chance so far (blah, blah). First up is Clone Detective. My current project is undergoing some re-factoring both in approach and content. A natural progression of a project running this long, things change and thus we must change also. One of the things being addressed is the code that has been written and how good it is. In my part of the work on this I came across Clone Detective for Visual Studio; this neat tool discovers how much of your code is duplicated allowing you to see what methods you can merge and how you can restructure the code. In this particular case, 25% of the code was duplicated which is way more than you would have ever spotted with the naked eye. Even if you write great code, I think this is well worth downloading.

Next, for the new house (did I mention that?) I had to install a new wifi network. I opted for a N class wifi network hoping that even poor connectivity would give me a decent connection. The curse of any wifi network is that, unless you are sitting next to the access point, your connection is bound to be suspect. Whilst annoying, a long Ethernet cable is usually allot faster. To make this all happen, I needed to purchase a new wifi adapter and grabbed a Sweex wifi adapter from MediaMarkt. I chose it mainly because the price was right (read: cheap) and I figured it would work just as well as any of the others. Well good news it did! But this tale is not of the adapter itself but what was in the box.

In the box was a note from the founder of Sweex, Leon. It reads:

“I had a dream

Some time ago I had a dream in my sleep.

I dreamt that I was shipping millions of boxes around the world

(which is exactly what my company Sweex is doing).

And inspite of useful products in them,

I experienced an empty feeling in myself.

I sat with the dream for a while and pondered over it.

Then I realized – I needed to fill the boxes with my wish for you.

Here is the content:

“Dear receiver of the box, from the bottom of my heart I wish you a life full of happiness, peace and wellbeing”

Now the boxes are full.

Leon

founder and owner of Sweex”

WOW. As a result, I will buy more Sweex products because, unlike all the other companies out there, it seems this guy cares about me. OK, maybe not really, but at least I was made to feel this way and he also made this more personal than any website could ever do, because after all I had a piece of paper, in my hand, in front of me now, even when the website was closed.

As a result I have made a mental promise to write more notes to people to say something to them, but first I will write a note to myself to write more blog posts!

What is publishing?

In short, Publishing is the mechanism SDL Tridion uses to put content on a presentation environment. Content and Templates are rendered together and HTML, XML, JSP etc. comes out the other side. When you chose to publish something, you start a chain reaction that sees your content successfully published on your website. During that process SDL Tridion makes sure all your dependencies are taken care of. That single item you chose to publish might lead to a few more items being published so that the website has no errors or inconsistencies in the content.
There are a number of factors that influence how publishing behaves and how you, as a user, can get along with it. The basic factors are:

• The implementation
• The content
• The hardware

So what do we want from publishing?

Mostly you want content there as soon as possible so you can move onto the next task. However, there are allot of other people doing the same thing and on large scale environments or environments with challenges on performance you might have to queue up.

So what can you do?

You need to publish content in a way that ensures the least stress and maximizes the available time for publishing. So I have gathered here some tips that might help you.

Publish Structure Groups

When you publish anything in SDL Tridion, the number of items you select in the Content Management Explorer equals the number of jobs in the publishing queue. Each job in the queue must be completed separately and therefore has all the overhead of being treated as a separate job. However, if you want to publish allot of pages, for example; part of your site, then it makes sense to publish the Structure Group rather than all the individual pages. It will take just as long to get the task done, just with less overhead. If you are worried about failures then use the failure tolerance setting on the Advanced tab of the publishing dialog.

Use priority publishing

Most users have found the priority option in the publishing dialog. It allows you to change the standard priority to change how the publisher will pick up your publishing job. High = it goes first, Low = it goes last. Normal is everything in between. Using Low priority is handy to be able to use the available publishing time of your servers without getting in the way of normal work. So for example, you need to roll out a future site to Staging; then use low priority publishing. It will get there as soon as the publishers have time to deal with it.

Publish on off peak hours

I looked at the number of items published per day for one of my customers recently. It went like this.

• Wednesday: 16952
• Thursday: 21829
• Friday: 13279
• Saturday: 1
• Sunday: 14
• Monday: 1527
• Tuesday: 2681
• Wednesday: 357

Notice anything? Many items that could have been published were not because they did not use the weekend. The servers were not turned off; they sat there wasting that publishing time for nothing. So, scheduling a task for the weekend (or even evening) could make better use of the time available.

Publish to staging or live but not to both

Too often I see publishing jobs in a queue that are the same item but going to two different places and those two places are often Staging and Live. The staging site does need to be up to date, but Live is much more important and the process should be that once you are satisfied with your content you publish it to live, so why republish it to staging? If you must publish to staging then make it low priority or maybe schedule a complete republish to Staging in the weekend (see above). To enable low priority publishing all the time you can set the default priority to low on a Publication Target. That way all jobs going to Staging would be low priority and you never need to remember to set it.

Check the details of what you are about to publish

Before you publish, take a look at what will publish and make sure it is what you expect. You can do this using the “See items to Publish” button in the bottom left of the publishing dialog.

Plan your roll outs

When rolling out websites, plan how you are going to do it and leave enough time to get everything done without impacting regular business.

A watched pot never boils

Refreshing the publishing queue frequently might give us the satisfaction that we know that the job was completed as soon as its status is changed to “success”, but in reality it does not make the job go quicker. You might also want to change the filtering options so you only see your own successful tasks.  And do not forget, if it is in the queue, it will get published; it just has to wait its turn.

I extend my congratulations to my fellow MVPs and hope for good things in the future…

You can learn more about the MVP awards for SDL Tridion and see the full list of recipients on SDL Tridion World.

The lecture was very good (and quite detailed) and free pizza was supplied by Yahoo (hey, I have to have a motivator!). I find it good to watch leaders of (any) industry speak. It helps me understand how I should present in the future when I guest speak (next guest presentation is a few months away). I liked the style, content and even the jokes.

I personally am not a JavaScript developer, although I hacked a few things together in the past. As Crockford remarks, we rarely sit down and learn JavaScript, it is something we just often do because we have to. However, it seems there is much to gain from actually knowing what you are doing (this should not really be a surprise).

You can watch the lecture and the previous one on Yahoo! Theater:

• Douglas Crockford — Crockford on JavaScript — Volume 1: The Early Years
• Douglas Crockford — Crockford on JavaScript — Chapter 2: And Then There Was JavaScript