We've barely started the new year, and already there's been a spat about a conference and their lack of diversity. Rather unfortunately, they picked 22 white, young, men and only one woman (so far) to be on their invited experts panels at a developer conference. Hey, it happens, and pretty much no one would do that out of malice, and I really don't think boycotts are helping anyone, nor is hoping the event implodes due to twitter bullies.

Conferences are not the problem, they are just showing the symptoms of a severe lack of diversity, generally, throughout the industry. We can cover up the warts all we like with bolstered numbers of minority groups on stage, but we should probably be working out how to tackle the actual issue of why so few of them enter the industry, as novices/newbies/entry-levels/graduates etc., in the first place who would later become the experts we seek out to speak.

I turned up some stats from A List Apart's 2011 web survey and was unsurprised to find that of the respondents that identify as developers (the largest group of respondents by a significant amount), only 9.1% of them were women. For me, seeing a fair and representative distribution of the community at large is actually acceptable (YMMV), so I don't intend to give conferences a hard time if they don't wish to positively discriminate (such as this note I was happy to read from the PHP conf organisers, and I am also a fan of JSConf's blind submission process) and get more than that 1 in 10 for dev conferences (and, overall, nearer 1/5 for topics beyond pure development, going by the same survey results).

The argument that having role-models is important is often cited, and that having larger-than-representative numbers as speakers could help that, and I see the point at a certain level - but no kid at school, before selecting their academic interest (should they have one), is watching web dev conference videos for fun and dreaming about becoming a badass specification author. Don't kid yourselves, there are no actual rockstars or ninjas in our industry.

Role-models are helpful to those already starting out, or who have made the decision to be interested in tech and the web, giving the extra push to want to explore more and speak later, but they're already in at that point, we just have to keep them sold, but there aren't very many of them. Sure, have role-models, but remember that if it's speaking about performance issues in Ruby, or some such fun, you're already preaching to the converted.

We need to get more in, in the first place. Start 'em early, reap the rewards in the future. I don't expect to see the numbers of speakers of minority groups to go up suddenly overnight - this will take time, as most good things do.

Conferences are simply showing up the diversity problem in a particularly acute way - we will never fix it by pretending the industry is more evenly distributed than it actually is, and later blaming organisers for it. They're working with unfair numbers. Hell, if any conference these days thinks they'll slide by without some twitter fallout for "under representing", they're either brave or stupid. We're developing a very sensitive (or egg-shell-treading) conference circle, I imagine, that is more than aware that it has a quota to meet and events that allow proposals are in particular trying very hard to accurately represent the state of affairs, and often attempting to go beyond that by reaching out to those they'd like to see speak or better represented. Good work, our industry. It doesn't always work out, but the overall trend is what's important.

I think at this point we should start asking questions as to why we feel the need to poke hard at conferences, why are we positively discriminating, and what should we really be fixing for lasting change. Why are our starting numbers so low?

You want to increase numbers? Go back to your universities and high schools and ask why they're not encouraging more women into their classes and onwards to our profession. What are they doing to excite children to take maths, computer science, design, IT, etc. for long enough that they make it into the industry? How are they challenging stereotypes of what is an acceptable profession for any group of people, often defined by teachers and parents at the very earliest years?

If we're talking about women at an age and experience level to be able to be an invited expert on a panel - we're already too late to improve the numbers (this is not to say there are none, but there are going to be statistically fewer by some margin as it stands).

My mathematics lonely heart post: Seeking jovial, talented statistician to teach the ability to crunch grizzly numbers about diversity in the web industry to curmudgeonly developer. Apply within.

Some disclosures/clarifications

1. One of the panelists at Edge conf is my other half, Alex. He has had no say in this minor rant, and his participation has no affect on my opinion.
2. I am talking pretty much solely of diversity of people in web tech, where most of us work. E.g. excluding science and eng: they've got their own history, issues and role models (however, where's our version of the dreamy Prof. Brian Cox on TV, eh? Now there's a keyboard-playing, rockstar, role-model).
3. This is not a discussion about sexism amongst professional peers, which, sadly, is still a part of every day live throughout most industries for many people. This is about the fair representation of our community today and why those distributions are as they are, although we may wish to suggest that sexism/stereotyping at early age is a root cause of our industry's lack of diverse numbers later. If you think diversity is not an issue, you need to crawl out from under your rock.
4. For those that still don't understand: I am NOT pro-positive discrimination. I appreciate why it happens and how it has helped and why it continues to be necessary in some scenarios, but I am asking the question: Would we rather not have it ever, and can we not find a way to fix the underlying diversity issues that perpetuate it's need?
5. I apologise for unfairly suggesting that conferences shouldn't do their part - they absolutely should, and I think we're doing better than ever before (see previous link to JSConf for a nice example). They have an excellent opportunity to show the best and most diverse representatives from our industry. They should always strive for that, and they do often achieve this and we should be confident in letting them know, pro-actively and with good manners, when they're not representing our interests and experts.
6. I am not anti-diversity. Seriously? Did you read this post?

For the last year, I've been writing monthly for the Pastry Box Project, along with 30 other folks of the web. We're rather cutely referred to as "bakers".

I'm all done now, and you can see all the posts I've written here.

My favourite one that seemed to strike the most chords with people (that later became a talk) was:

"UX" as a single person's role strikes me as a red herring. User experience is everyone's job to get right -- from making sure servers respond quickly to having buttons that seem tangible and copy that's understandable. "Good UX" should be a core competency within every team member.

I contributed a small thought along the same lines for the She Said It advent calendar - a set of uplifting and optimistic pieces of advice from a selection of web people without a Y chromosome to newer designers and developers. You can see mine here.

Despite my advertising myself as a front-end developer, writing a lot of HTML and JS, I find my most productive days taken up considering and designing digital products and services, ideally with data and evidence.

I enjoy it a lot, but it as left me with a bit of a "am I a developer or designer?" identity crisis.

Colleagues suggest I'm in denial about being a designer - mostly because I'm not a visual designer; I don't do pictures and graphics and I don't wield photoshop as my tool of choice - I work in-browser. They also suggest that if I don't start labelling myself better, I won't be able to continue finding work doing the sorts of things I enjoy, which it turns out are mostly around supporting and, sadly, defending the user.

If I'm honest, I think I have actually just always had a bit of a problem with designers.

I unfairly (despite being very much into, and doing, art throughout my life) considered "design" to be a soft subject - engineering being the one with the greater level of difficulty. Wrong assumption, I realise, but easily encouraged during my time with computer scientists during my degree years where the concept of service design for the human-being end of software was treated as a "nice extra" and usually quite glossed over.

Along with the engineering bias, the industry as I entered it wasn't exactly doing much for changing those wrong assumptions. When I started out, I had, as many people did in the early 00s until relatively recently, a lot of up-hill conversations and experiences with designers who were traditionally working in print and had somehow found themselves on the web, and they were doing a pretty crappy job of it.

They didn't get it.

Those of us building websites then, early adopters of proper web-standards and sites that worked for lots of different kinds of users, tried desperately to make them understand that this isn't print and it is a flexible, changing, growing, responsive, versatile, medium. They didn't get it. We fell out. I had some fairly horrible run-ins with the then design director in my first job as a junior developer... Every day I am glad my current one can take me calling him an idiot and see it as a positive (not snark, genuine <3).

So, all that had left me with a fairly bitter taste. I very much knew that in my career, I not only wanted to distance myself from people who didn't get it, but also myself from being anywhere near them in terms of the work I did, which is pretty much why I have always very clearly said "I do the code, I don't do the design". I'm not one of them. As if there should ever really have been a them and us.

It has meant I have had to push back into the "design" aspects of organisations I work for, because I hadn't aligned myself from the start as part of the design team, where most of the user-orientated decisions tend to get made (which, I do think, is a mistake on most organisations part... designing for your users should be a concern from everybody on your team, no matter their role).

I think all developers should be more engaged with the overall site experience, but I realise that specialisms exist and some of us want to be nearer to that area than others. I'm one of those people who wants to make design decisions as well as code them up where I can. I want to have my cake and eat it too.

In hindsight, the problem was never really the art director when I was a junior. It wasn't the designers that didn't want to include me in decisions because I was a developer. It was the organisation, like many others at the time, as a whole not getting it. It's part of the reason why it's been great to work with other people over the years that have got it, allowing me to do the things I like and change early biases, and most recently at the Government Digital Service where I honestly believe they get it better than anyone I've ever worked for before. And that's not just down to the amazing people they've hired - they get it at a basic level in the ethos of the department. My current contract may say "software engineer" but I am in the design team and like it very much.

I don't really want a label. I hate labels. I loathe the term "user experience designer", because I still believe that "user experience" is just a fundamental to what you're doing, and shouldn't need stating. There is nothing but user experience design if you're building products for people.

I have a sneaking suspicion that's what I am though and probably have always been, in the wide world of jobs people are already doing. User experience service product developer maker dogsbody thing. I am a designer who writes code, who will defend better user experiences and probably be able to tell you how to get them. But I still won't do the pictures. Deal?

As promised, here's a list of the resources and links and other stuff I mentioned today at TXJS in my talk

• Government Digital Service Design Principles
• Designing for Usability (pdf) - IBM
• Design Processes, Not Interfaces - Tiffany Conroy
• Designing in Browser - Divya Manian
• Interview with Jonathan Ive in the Telegraph

If I mentioned anything else you'd like more background on, leave a comment and I'll find you further resources or explanation.

And my slides are available here on slideshare, although obviously my notes on the slides may be a bit too scrappy for you to re-follow along, so I'll post a link to the video when that's available.

A normal conversation in the GovUK (or any office I frequent) today went*: "Can we get some microformats on that page?", I suggest as I spot a section of our site outputting a boat-load of addresses. "No problem - but what's this about schema-org?". "Yeah, yeah.. we can hedge our bets and throw their mark-up in there too, it's just some extra itemprops. flippant scoff I'll send you a complete snippet example, because I'm just nice like that."

And that's what I did. And it looked like this:

<div class="vcard" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Organization">
  <p class="org" itemprop="name">Department for Transport</p>
  <p class="adr" itemprop="address" itemscope 

itemtype="http://schema.org/PostalAddress">
    <span itemprop="streetAddress">
      <span class="extended-address">Great Minster House</span>
      <span class="street-address">76 Marsham Street</span>
    </span>
      <span class="locality" itemprop="addressLocality">London</span>
      <span class="postcode" itemprop="postalCode">SW1P 4DR</span>
  </p>
<p>Telephone: <span class="tel"

itemprop="telephone">0300 330 3000</span></p>
<p>Website: <a href="http://www.dft.gov.uk" class="url"

itemprop="url">www.dft.gov.uk</a></p>
<p>Email: <a

href="mailto:firstname.surname@dft.gsi.gov.uk"

class="email" itemprop="email">firstname.surname@dft.gsi.gov.uk</a></p>
</div>

Holy massive-code-snippet batman. I was surprised by the size. I know, I can feel people digging up links already on attack and defence of "bloat" when using microformats alone, but seriously guys, IT'S HUGE. I felt guilty saying "this is what you've gotta add to get this mark-up to mean something". Here's a more broken down comparison:

Here's the address, raw, at just over a tweet's worth (167 chars):

Department for Transport
Great Minster House
76 Marsham Street
SW1P 4DR
Telephone: 0300 330 3000
Website: http://www.dft.gov.uk
Email: firstname.surname@dft.gsi.gov.uk

Here's the address with the elements on it to get at the separate pieces of the address, bringing us up to 356:

<p>Department for Transport</p>
<p>
  <span>Great Minster House</span>
  <span>76 Marsham Street</span>
  <span>London</span>
  <span>SW1P 4DR</span>
</p>
<p>Telephone: 0300 330 3000</p>
<p>Website: <a href="http://www.dft.gov.uk">www.dft.gov.uk</a></p>
<p>Email: <a href="mailto:firstname.surname@dft.gsi.gov.uk"
>firstname.surname@dft.gsi.gov.uk</a></p>

Now let's throw some classes on to those and get a bit of meaning in there (I mean, you may want to style them up, get things on new lines etc etc. so using the microformat classes are handy for that alone.**). We've got a vCard, people! (565):

<div class="vcard">
  <p class="org">Department for Transport</p>
  <p class="adr">
    <span class="extended-address">Great Minster House</span>
    <span class="street-address">76 Marsham Street</span>
<span class="locality">London</span>
<span class="postcode">SW1P 4DR</span>
</p>
<p>Telephone: <span

class="tel">0300 330 3000</span></p>
<p>Website: <a href="http://www.dft.gov.uk"

class="url">www.dft.gov.uk</a></p>
<p>Email: <a

href="mailto:firstname.surname@dft.gsi.gov.uk"

class="email>firstname.surname@dft.gsi.gov.uk</a></p>
</div>

And now let's make it schema-org friendly using microdata (863):

<div class="vcard" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Organization">
  <p class="org" itemprop="name">Department for Transport</p>
  <p class="adr" itemprop="address" itemscope 

itemtype="http://schema.org/PostalAddress">
    <span itemprop="streetAddress">
      <span class="extended-address">Great Minster House</span>
      <span class="street-address">76 Marsham Street</span>
    </span>
      <span class="locality" itemprop="addressLocality">London</span>
      <span class="postcode" itemprop="postalCode">SW1P 4DR</span>
  </p>
<p>Telephone: <span class="tel"

itemprop="telephone">0300 330 3000</span></p>
<p>Website: <a href="http://www.dft.gov.uk" class="url"

itemprop="url">www.dft.gov.uk</a></p>
<p>Email: <a

href="mailto:firstname.surname@dft.gsi.gov.uk"

class="email" itemprop="email">firstname.surname@dft.gsi.gov.uk</a></p>
</div>

And we're done. All I wanted to do was say "this, dear Computer, is an address". Just getting some frankly useless out-of-the-box HTML elements on the raw data more than doubles it's size (167 to 356), then we double it again to actually make it useful.

Now, I know size isn't everything, and this is a pedantic, slightly silly, and probably less than accurate example. We're not crazy obsessed with keeping our pages below a certain size anymore (Ah... I remember back when the BBC S&Gs insisted that every page had to be less than 200k down the wire including script and CSS AND images. Those were the days.), but it's not something to be sniffed at either. Particularly with mark-up. Increased size probably suggests increased complexity - more work for everyone, more chance of someone bungling the order or nesting, more simply "I can't be bothered". Colour me dubious. I just want to highlight how much we add on to HTML to make it actually do what we need.

Itemscope and itemtype, a brief diversion

I had one of those Am I crazy, but why are there two properties on these things? moments. When would you ever use one without the other? The spec says you can use itemscope alone, but without itemtype, it's a bit meaningless. I think I'd do away with itemscope and have itemtype only but with a value, either a URI or something meaningful to the internal vocabulary. itemscope seems to exist solely to say "the things in side me are related", but by the very nature of it being the parent of those items, that's already implied, and with a class name of something meaningful (say, hcard), or just the itemtype (with a useful value), explicit to data consumers.

This isn't sarcasm: I would gratefully receive an explanation as to why there are two attributes instead of one.

Back in the room: Is this seriously what we expect authors to do?

I think I'm still struggling to understand why microdata is a separate specification (or even exists if it's not being used as a mechanism to get stuff into HTML long-term). You can achieve exactly this richness with the current attributes supplied in HTML, and I don't even mean just the microformats class way. The data- attribute is pretty handy, though, and seems ripe for stuffing with machine data (why shouldn't it take a URI if you really need it?).

But I digress.

Microdata with schema-org is solving a problem we've already solved in microformats, but in an equally not-quite-there way (having to specify itemtype with a URI more than once in a page for items that are the same, but not within the same parent, feels filthy, for example). They are just as bad as each other, in slightly varying ways. Useful for proving a point, allowing growth and putting out examples (not that all of these bonuses are currently being made the best of), but crappy if this is all we can muster for the long-term, high-volume, regularly published, data representation patterns in HTML. We're asking authors to jump through hoops still for things they shouldn't have to.

Microformats, schema-org, whatever... is this really our game plan now? Just keep throwing ever more bloat into already creaking elements when you just want to do something really common? What's the strategy for getting this stuff out of this mess and into the language?

You might be asking why bother aiming to get those stronger patterns into HTML, if this mechanism basically works for getting a machine to figure out what the hell you're trying to say, but you may as well be asking why you have any semantically meaningful elements in HTML at all if that's the case. HTML version 5 is redefining some elements to have better semantic meaning because HTML is the language of authors, and to authors and consumers meaning matters.

Without a plan for gathering evidence for popularly used patterns directly from microformats or microdata (and using them as formal methods of research, testing and development), or what people (actual, real developers - not just the big search engines) are doing in general, we'll end up with no progress or the wrong progress in HTML, and I believe that a formal process for how and when this happens should be made (i.e. definitions of what constitutes critical mass of common patterns, how the information should be gathered, how they will be proposed formally in the WG and promoted into the language proper, etc.).

I want evidence-based HTML that will evolve using clearly defined mechanisms.

*Conversation shortened and re-written with an artistic license and possibly some (many; "nice" may be a stretch) inaccuracies.

**Yes, I'm casually suggesting that microformats are "free" if all you want to do is get your stuff out there with the minimum you'll need to be machine-friendly and human-eyes-pretty.