Bears eat those who don’t follow web standards
It has been a busy week, it’s 7:32pm (ok so I posted it Friday but it was written Thursday) and I am writing in this thing. But that is the price to be paid for going away for a week (more on that in another post). Enjoy this weeks collection.
- Microsoft’s worst nightmare delves into a little history of Firefox and it’s potential to be that platform independant environment Microsoft so fears. This brings up an interesting idea – could someone make a Firefox extension that can connect to myWaterloo, QUEST, and JobMine? It’s likely possible.
- E-Government: No website is better than a bad one and that about says it all.
- Creativity vs. Standard Layouts dives into a rant about people saying a web design is not original cause it ‘looks like
.’ Sorry folks but things look like blogs but blogs took their look from evolution. Jacob Neilson could have his usable web yet 
- Ivan will teach you a lesson. Just check it out, secrets of good design.
- Wicked cool tables. Could even say hella cool
- Common PHP mistakes. Oh ya.
- A prof is looking at repetitive strain here on campus. Now I can attest to the strain of a bad chair…
- More for that web production maturing theme. Really though, it makes sense.
- Intro to databases. Digital-web is just a great place. Wondering what this My Sequal is?
- Finally – What is a web standard? Good question. I used the analogy today of: It is a guideline to not sleep in the bush (woods, forest) with food in your pockets or a bear might eat you, web standards are those type of guidelines. They just make sense… and they could stop a bear from eating you.
Now on to cleaning this office out of things that might leave a funkey surprise come next Friday.
Navigating Accessibility
At the Accessible Technology Fair here at UW on October 28, 2004 (tomorrow), I will be presenting on a the topic of ‘Navigating Accessibility.’ There will be a repeat for UW folks on the 10th of November in DC 1304 at 9:30am.
Some ‘required’ reading of sorts:
- Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 – working draft
- Three things about screen readers
- No Accesskeys
- Hiding with display:none hides it from screen readers as well
- Guild of Accessible Web Designers
- Accessible & usable forms: Guidelines, examples and JavaScript tricks
Hope those who attend my presentation enjoy(ed) it and the discussion afterwards is useful to you. I will put a link up to the PDF of the presentation tomorrow.
UPDATE: The HTML version and links to download the PDF and PowerPoint versions are now up. If you have any questions you can contact me or post below.
Tip of the hat to IST
A big thanks to IST, Martin Timmerman’s group has been and continues to be a huge help as we start to rely more and more on automated web based systems running on Linux. As we move to new systems we learn things along the way such as mailman is probably not the best thing to parse from… It’s nice to have some help along the way.
We had a little problem over the weekend that ended up in a Sunday phone call to a unix/Linux admin to fix some stuff. Now I have to get back to this system we are working on so it doesn’t happen again – more on that in the coming weeks.
Web as a platform, web development gets serious
UW has an interestingly diverse web culture. In a presentation or two I have suggested that when it comes to conceptualizing the web’s importance, there are Four Corners (stay tuned for more on that) to consider in University web development. But that is just a larger-picture-management-what-should-be-considered sort of thinking. What about site development? What goes into that? What are you developing?
Microsoft doesn’t seem too interested in the web as a publication medium but more as a development platform. In a Buzz article on the WaSP site, Chris Kaminski discusses the web is a platform for developing and deploying applications. He also touches on the impact and where things could be going. To add some fuel to the flames a Google board member recently remarked that he believes things are going to get interesting in the browser world yet again. His comments go some way to supporting the web as a platform idea.
These applications for the web are considered brilliant because: they don’t require certain hardware/software configurations and applications that can be up updated without the user having to do anything. They include things like gmail and Yahoo. Here at UW we have things like myHRinfo,QUEST, UW-ACE, and myWaterloo to name just a few.
Publications and Applications
What makes those web-based applications and web pages just web pages? Good question, I am not entirely sure. It could be that web-based applications are web pages that run on server side code that are designed to be a specific tool to complete some task. Web pages are just publications that provide people with information. In the case of this blog, Textpattern is an application designed to assist me with publishing web pages for you to read.
An example of light web application development is how the news release site works. We are utilizing mailman but we had to develop an application to auto-magically make the content appear in a database and in an XML feed. For more complex web application development, we are building a system that works with Contribute 3, that allows for easy editing of database content and keeps a sandbox (or test site) to pass around drafts in with Contribute. More on that another time
Most pages at UW (near 500 000 or so) are just publications. They provide information to people but are not utilized as a tool to complete any tasks (ok information is a tool but not the right kind of tool).
Developer or designer or editor or contributor or …?
There is a growing identity crisis in the general web world – what is web development and what isn’t? Lets not go down the classification route (another article perhaps) but instead quickly address the similarities between web development and software development with some required reading. Drew has a great article declaring web development is software development. I would have to agree. His next few posts in his blog are worth reading. What Drew has done is applied Joel on Software’s 12 Steps to Better Codeto his web team to see how they stack up. Follow the links and enjoy.
In the next part I will go over the roles in web page development.
Off to grab a coffee.
If Architects Had To Work Like Web Designers… Wow.
There was a RSS roundtable discussion between some folks that make RSS readers for OS X. Some interesting discussion.
What happens if Google is not as good as you think it is? The worst kept secret in computer related feilds is that your Google skillz are what get you by. No one could know as much as Google But what if it was filtering useful information? Interesting article.
You have database, you collect information, you feel great about the application you purchased or the database app you created. What about that information? Recent headaches as California database hacked, personal information compromised:Taking advantage of a known vulnerability in a commercial database program, the intruder was able to access all of the information stored therein. You don’t need to have financial data to worry about securing it. Identity theft types can use any personal information, so please get someone else to check your code.
For the PHP developer in you, keep in mind those Evil Magic Quotes. We have just had a run-in with them – they should just be turned off on the development server and we won’t see them again
