WebPatterns

Well, after an extended hiatus, webpatterns is back.

The last year or so, I’ve been working hard on a related area, microformats, and from time to time, speaking on patterns, all the while thinking, sketching out my ideas, reading.

The impetus for restarting the project with some earnest comes form a couple of quarters. In particular, a lot of thanks has to go to Donna Maurer, IA extraordinaire, and conference chair of this years IA Summit in Las Vegas. Donna encouraged me to propose a paper on webpatterns, which was accepted, and in fact, turns out to have been voted one of the most interesting sessions (well, in advance, it remains to be seen whether it is still one of the most populart after I do it).

As part of the process, I have set up the long awaited Wiki, and outlined some of my ideas about the pattern language.

In the presentation itself, I’ll focus on the fact that my interest in patterns is a little different from that of most pattern language, library and repository developers – it’s on language more than pattern.

I’ve outlined extensively elsewhere why we need richer semantics for describing what we do as web designers, developers, IAs, indeed anyone who develops for the web. We need “a common vocabulary for expressing [the] concepts [we use], and a language for relating them together”.

That’s the ambitous goal of this project. Many have tried – often quickly enumerating alist of commonly used page elements – in a well meaning, but as we can see by the lack of their adoption, less than productive process. I believe it requires a lot more than simply naming things we think we use commonly. We need to clearly identify and understand these thing – these simple, or highly complex constructs, We need to understand their nature – how they work, what they do, how they go together to make more complex constructs.
When we have a clear picture, naming them meaningfully becomes much easier, and more reliable.

I don’t think I have all the answer, nor many, indeed hardly any of them. We all do. It’s the process of crystalizing this vast, powerful shared, and largely implicit knowledge. Which I hope will happen through conversation, and collaboration.

The wiki for this project is now up and running. Please feel free to contribute your thoughts on the patterns we use.

Am I asking for others to do all the work for which I can then take the credit – I hope far from it. My inspiration for the project can perhaps best be summarised in this quote by Antoine de Saint-Exupery

If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.

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