Post Archive

› January 29, 2005

Developing sites for users with cognitive disabilities...

Developing sites for users with Cognitive disabilities and learning difficulties - by Roger Hudson, Russ Weakley and Peter Firminger.

The examples in this article are not supposed to provide definitive answers for all the problems users with cognitive disabilities and learning difficulties may experience when accessing a website. Rather, they are suggestions that developers, who are interested in making their content more accessible to a wider audience, may like to try out.

Thanks to Gez Lemon for published the article on Juicy Studios.

A more detailed article is also available on Roger's site called An Accessibility Frontier: Cognitive disabilities and learning difficulties

For those in Sydney, Roger Hudson and I will be doing a presentation on this topic for the next Sydney Web Standards Meeting on Thursday 3rd March.

› January 27, 2005

A new simple, standards-compliant HTML editor

The Man in Blue writes:

There's quite a few HTML-based HTML editors out there, but they all lack something. Most of them are fairly code obtrusive - requiring you to carve out a hefty chunk of HTML/JavaScript in order to get them to display - or the outputted code is hardly standards compliant.

So, in steps Cameron's contender: widgEditor.

› January 26, 2005

UsableType

UsableType: Web Typography Guide is bookmark worthy, I'll add it to the resource page here. It's well organized and rich with articles (with commenting), "style guide" (concepts and theory), and "CSS Guide" (all about CSS type spec'ing).

› January 21, 2005

Two big Web Standards Events in February

Brisbane, Australia, Web Standards Group meeting
Date: Wednesday 09 February, 2005
Andrew Krespanis presenting on some of the finer details of using CSS.

Wellington, New Zealand, Web Standards Group Special event!
Date: Thursday 24 February, 2005
The Wellington Web Standards Group is pleased to announce their February meeting, featuring three international speakers, food, drink, good company and a healthy dose of web standards! Speakers:

  • John Allsopp - Everything new is old again
  • Jonathan Mosen - Accessibility, boring, bland and damn hard work?
  • Russ Weakley - Coloured boxes: one method of building full CSS layouts

› January 19, 2005

Dynamic User Preference Script

Tony Aslett has just produced a User Preference Script that allows your visitors to choose color, background-color, font-size and font-family or with a little editing just about any style you wish.

Where this script differs is that you don't write alternate style sheets, you just provide some form of control for your visitors to apply different style rules. There can be as many different choices as you like.

› January 15, 2005

Tagalicious - some thoughts on tagging content

Recently, there is a lot to do about tagging online content. Needless to say, much of the hype started with services such as del.icio.us and Flickr, amazing pieces of social software that allow easy catalogizing (tagging) of digital content. At the same time, they make it easy for the user to keep track of the catalogue as a whole by means of RSS technology. The uncontrolled vocabularies that emerge through user-generated tagging are also known as folksonomies (see also Adam Mathes' fine paper on folksonomies + Louis Rosenfeld's criticism on the concept). To continue the story: on January 2nd, Brian Dear was dreaming about Taggle, "a service where you type in a keyword, and you get back all the hits that have that word as a tag". And a week or so later, Technorati launched its Technorati Tag service, allowing people to browse through blog posts, Flickr photos and del.icio.us links by means of, guess what, tags.

Now, I think all this tagging is a good thing — metadata are important, certainly when talking about visual data such as pictures. What I don't quite agree with though, are the ways in which tags are linked to the content they describe.

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› January 11, 2005

@media 2005

@media 2005 will be held in London on 9th and 10th of June.

The conference brings together the biggest names from around the world to talk about the hottest topics in web design - web standards and accessibility.

Some big names - Jeffrey Zeldman, Joe Clark, Doug Bowman, Patrick Griffiths, Andy Budd, Andy Clarke, Jeremy Keith, Ian Lloyd...sounds like a lot of fun

› January 10, 2005

podSites - a slice of the web to go

John Allsopp and I have just launched podSites - a site for those interested in publishing mini websites to the iPod.

The site explains what podSites are, how they work, how to build them, best practices for styling and publishing them. There is also a submission section, a directory for online podSites and a podSite emulator. And it comes in the usual range of mini iPod colours.

Turner.com

Turner Broadcasting System, Inc., the parent company to CNN, TBS, TNT, Turner Classic Movies, Cartoon Network and many other network brands and businesses, has redesigned their corporate website, and done so with a CSS based layout, and standards compliant XHTML markup.

Web-graphics author Arturo and I (aka Twinsparc), were contracted to produce the new design and markup. Todd Dominey produced the very flexible flash portion on the home page; more about that later.

What's interesting about this re-design, besides that a really prominent news and entertainment company has adopted web standards, is how they came to appreciate the methodology. Since its inception three years ago, Twinsparc has strived to create only standards based websites - and indeed about 90% of our work has fallen into this category, but in all previous cases we've had to put on a little song and dance to describe the somewhat abstract concepts behind it. In Turner's case, we were granted this job because they were actively looking for contractors with experience developing web standards based websites.

To me, this seems like turning point. I was really surprised when Eddie Garrett, director of communications and new media for Turner, explained his interest in creating the new Turner.com website using web standards. I thought we had at least several more years before the choice to develop big brand websites this way would come from within the decision-making group themselves.

I'd like to take a moment to thank the various folks we worked with at Turner; everyone was remarkably nice to us and it was a pleasure to interact with such a competent group. And speaking of competent, back to Todd's flash work on the home page. The animation you see there might look pretty straightforward, but what you're not seeing is that this thing dynamically loads either JPGs or SWF files, has adjustable fade controls, and even a method for linking just part of an image (sort of like making an image map) . This flash piece has real power under the hood, and because of it, the various branding folks at each of the major Turner networks can produce custom lead-ins to their current promotions with lots of design flexibility.

› January 7, 2005

Soup to Nuts

Soup to Nuts I've written an article called "Soup to Nuts" for Issue three of Design in Flight, the PDF based magazine for graphic designers and web developers. Here's a quick excerpt from the DIF website. The gist of the article - how I go about making a CSS based website, start to finish.

There's lots of great info about making CSS based layouts both in print and on the web, but much of it is spread out, divided into tiny sub-topics, and somewhat hard to piece together. My goal was to write out a very hands-on, "how I do this" type article, aimed at those interested in learning from a top-down approach.

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Opera 8.0 previews and betas

Recent heated discussions inside Opera have led to the versioning change making what was originally intended to be Opera 7.60 to now instead be Opera 8.0. A preview (alpha) for the Mac (changelog) has been released, as well as betas for UNIX (changelog) and Windows (changelog). Planned feature set remains the same, which means that what was formerly 8.0 targetted features (such as per-site preferences) will be future features. To recap the changes since the last major version:

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