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Protect yourself from BigBrotherRegardless of the government you live under, your actions on the internet are being tracked. Your every search recorded and kept in a database for future use/abuse. US citizens have had their web traffic monitored by the NSA and AT&T, and their every search history subpeaned by a Federal Judge. As we move towards a more wired and connected society, the potentials for abuse grow exponentially. Imagine a future where your past searches label you as a threat to your government. Or where your browsing history is known by everyone. It's possible now. http://www.travelingforever.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=21&Itemid=45read more:
Authority?I was watching Catalyst last night, it had an episode about lie detection, the part I found interesting was the fact that we as humans find it hard to detect deception. They think the reason we can't reliably detect it is because we evolved in small trusted groups and it was to the benefit of all the young to trust the other members of the group. Its interesting that this is innate in us, because I think an essential skill for our generation and future generations is critical thinking. For our parents generations (baby boomers) they really only had a handful of sources of information. They could watch the TV listen to the radio or read the newspaper, mostly the interests of these media groups were all the same, so if they all have the same political agenda, an alternative view might not be conveyed. These days we have the internet which allows people to put out any view, skewed or otherwise. But how does innate ability to not be able to detect deception affect us? Take for instance the blogging world, how do I know the person I'm reading is an authority on a particular subject? I think we need to put more effort into educating our young ones that what you often read, hear or see isn't necessarily what’s really happening. It's already clear that this is what’s happening, even when I was at school critical thinking was present and pushed, but maybe it's place needs to be stepped up a little more. From a technology side of things it's possible to measure the number of hits and other metrics that could in a simple way see how much of an authority a particular outlet is, but just because a large number of people frequent a particular 'authority' doesn't mean they are in fact one. In the end I don't really think there is a definitive solution, but an open medium that allows us all to put a view out is probably the best answer, you just need to think about what people are saying and decide for yourself, which in my experience is something people don't like to do (thinking ... do I have to ..).
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HTML vs. XHTML on standards compliant websitesFor the last few years there's been a recurring debate on whether we should use XHTML vs. HTML among those of us who care enough about markup to ask ourselves such questions. Sean Fraser has taken a look at fifty standards compliant websites to find out which doctype they use. He presents the results (which, not surprisingly, show that the vast majority of the examined sites use XHTML) along with a discussion in Why XHTML™?. Sean concludes the article by stating his reasons for currently using HTML 4.01 Strict: - XHTML 1.0 is not forward compatible; XHTML 2.0 will not be backwards compatible.
- Serving XHTML as application/xhtml+xml does't (sic) work in IE.
- HTML 5 purports backwards compatibility.
Only three of the fifty sites Sean examined use HTML 4.01 Strict. This site is one of those three. In the end, my view on HTML vs. XHTML is that it doesn't really matter. Just remember to write your HTML or HTML compatible XHTML with real XHTML in mind. And use a strict doctype. Visit site to read or post comments…Add this to del.icio.us, Digg this, or Seed this. Add 456 Berea Street to your Technorati favorites. Posted in: read more:
2006 first half-year reviewHere in the faraway Sweden, not quite as close to the North Pole as some believe, we have this long-standing tradition of taking a really long vacation during our short but beautiful summer. For the last few years I have been following this tradition, and I will do so this year as well. That means there will be very little activity here until my five week vacation is over at the end of July. There may be the occasional Quicklink, but don't expect a whole lot to happen. I'll try to stay away from the computer and spend my time reading books, working in the garden, going fishing, and being lazy in general. Read full post and comments…Add this to del.icio.us, Digg this, or Seed this. Add 456 Berea Street to your Technorati favorites. Posted in: read more:
Case Study: Artorg MakeoverArtorg.co.uk is an online community for artists and designers. At first view, this is a really nice-looking site. Hunt, Benread more:
Indicating language choice on the WebIf you want a summary of some of the methods you can use to make users aware that a website contains information in more than one language, check out my article Indicating language choice on the Web. The article is published as part of the June 2006 edition of EPiServer TechNews, a newsletter aimed at developers who use the EPiServer CMS. I was first asked for permission to republish my article Indicating language choice: flags, text, both, neither?. Not being very fond of having articles republished in full elsewhere, I declined and instead offered to rewrite the article a bit. Oh, if you read the article, please resist the urge to view source. I am told that the site will be redesigned during the next couple of months. Let's hope they drop the XML declaration they are currently inserting before the HTML 4.0 (sic) transitional doctype ;-). Visit site to read or post comments…Add this to del.icio.us, Digg this, or Seed this. Add 456 Berea Street to your Technorati favorites. Posted in: read more:
Explore the DOM with FirebugA very useful Firefox extension that makes it both easy and fun to explore the DOM is Joe Hewitt's FireBug. Firebug logs JavaScript, CSS, and XML errors to a console. You can configure which errors to log, so if you don't want CSS errors in the Firebug console, just turn them off. Want to explore the DOM of the document you are viewing? Just open the Firebug Inspector and the DOM is right there. Click the 'Inspect' button and you can use your keyboard to navigate through the DOM. Anything you select in the inspector is highlighted on the rendered page. When your scripting doesn't work properly and you can't figure out why, use Firebug's lightweight JavaScript debugger to set breakpoints and examine your scripts as they execute. Firebug does more than just inspect. It will also let you edit the values of existing attributes, which can be very useful when debugging. If you want to use another approach than 'alert debugging' when working with JavaScript, you can use JavaScript to write text and objects to the FireBug console. There's more to FireBug than what I have described here, so try it out for yourself. Visit site to read or post comments…Add this to del.icio.us, Digg this, or Seed this. Add 456 Berea Street to your Technorati favorites. Posted in: read more:
Got a view on videogames?I'm writing an article for a magazine (The New Statesman), provisionally titled “What have videogames ever done for us? A look at the economics of videogames in the UK”. I'm looking at the variety of jobs, how old the industry is here, who's involved, what research is being done here (both in terms of R&D and possibly academically), investment, numbers of companies, exports, and what they are doing to make money. read more:
Environment is Inherited
The Ghost in Your Genes "At the heart of this new field is a simple but contentious idea – that genes have a 'memory'. That the lives of your grandparents – the air they breathed, the food they ate, even the things they saw – can directly affect you, decades later, despite your never experiencing these things yourself. And that what you do in your lifetime could in turn affect your grandchildren. The conventional view is that DNA carries all our heritable information and that nothing an individual does in their lifetime will be biologically passed to their children. To many scientists, epigenetics amounts to a heresy, calling into question the accepted view of the DNA sequence – a cornerstone on which modern biology sits." "And Reik's work has gone further, showing that these switches themselves can be inherited. This means that a 'memory' of an event could be passed through generations. A simple environmental effect could switch genes on or off – and this change could be inherited." So you're fat because your grandparents were in a famine. A recent article in Nature suggests that vitamins taken during pregancy have a permanent effect on subsequent offspring. It certainly should place more responsibility on future parents - doing drugs or whatever may affect your children even if you stopped before having them. Epigenetics on Wikipedia. read more:
Check your site with The ScrutinizerIf you like keeping an eye on how your site is doing in various areas you probably already use tools like the W3C's validator services and Alexa's Traffic Rankings, just to mention a few. But there are many other tools and services that let you study interesting trends, statistics, and technical facts for your site. In fact there are so many that it's hard to keep track of all of them, which is where The Scrutinizer comes in handy. The Scrutinizer was created by Rosano Coutinho and is a service that allows you to analyze, assess and validate any link using various tools and testers on the web . I spent some time having fun by feeding the URL of this site to most of the services The Scrutinizer links to. The actual value of several services is questionable, and a couple unfortunately seem to be defunct. Of the services that were new to me, my favourite is UrlTrends, which displays ranking and link popularity trends for a page. Do you know of any other useful online tools or testers? Visit site to read or post comments…Add this to del.icio.us, Digg this, or Seed this. Add 456 Berea Street to your Technorati favorites. Posted in: read more:
Fidel - A short film by Isaac RentzIsaac Rentz's "Fidel""A boy learns to face his fears when he finds out that Fidel Castro is murdering his friends at an exclusive private school." read more:
HTML validation with Safari TidyA great extension for Firefox is the HTML Validator extension, which uses Tidy to automatically validate the HTML of every page you open in Firefox. This extension is one of the reasons I have for keeping Firefox running all day alongside Safari, my main browser. But now, thanks to Kasper Nauwelaerts, you can add the same functionality to Safari. The Safari Tidy plugin works in a similar way to the HTML Validator extension, but it does miss a few features. When Safari Tidy is installed, the rightmost part of the status bar at the bottom of the browser window will display the status of each page you visit. If a page contains invalid HTML, a warning or error icon will be displayed along with the number of warnings or errors. If you view source, all errors and warnings are shown in a list and will be highlighted in the source. This is the first release of the Safari Tidy plugin, so maybe more features will be added later. (via Veerle) Visit site to read or post comments…Add this to del.icio.us, Digg this, or Seed this. Add 456 Berea Street to your Technorati favorites. Posted in: read more:
Getting Things Done (Book review) Do you feel like you're not being as efficient as you could be? Do you tend to procrastinate and worry that you have forgotten something important? I'm like that, but after reading Getting Things Done (GTD) I think I have improved a little.
If you've never heard of Gettings Things Done before, it's a complete system for relieving your brain of a lot of the work it is currently doing, which will enable you to relax and as a result of that become more productive and reduce your stress level. Read full post and comments…Add this to del.icio.us, Digg this, or Seed this. Add 456 Berea Street to your Technorati favorites. Posted in: read more:
Safari brings high resolution to the WebEver used a high resolution screen? I mean high resolution as in 'more and smaller pixels stuffed into the same physical area', not just the raw pixel count -- higher DPI (dots per inch). If you are using a reasonably new Wintel laptop chances are that your screen has a higher DPI than the 72 DPI or 96 DPI that used to be the most widely used resolutions. None of the screens I use on a regular basis are of higher than normal resoulution, so I haven't given it much thought. But the other day I used a colleague's new laptop to take a look at a prototype of a website we're building, and everything was tiny. Sure, increasing text size helps, but only for the text. The images are still tiny. Read full post and comments…Add this to del.icio.us, Digg this, or Seed this. Add 456 Berea Street to your Technorati favorites. Posted in: read more:
Troll's View The overnight flight to Oslo was uneventful and the weather on arrival Monday morning was as rainy as it was leaving New England -- Norway is 59 degrees north latitude (and ten degrees east longitude) so it is not too far north of home. Opera Software is a short cab ride after taking the clean and comfortable train from the airport to central Oslo.
After the board proceedings a some follow-on meetings, it was time for a taxi ride to the Holmenkollen Park Hotel where a special dinner would be held for my friend and Opera chairman Christian Thommessen who will be leaving the board to take on an important position as a diplomat at the United Nations Development Program at U.N. Plaza in New York. I am sorry we will be losing him from the board but am happy that he will be putting his time and energy into some really important work and also that he and his family will be close enough for more frequent visits. .jpg) During my last trip to Oslo in February, I was determined to find the "Troll's View" geocache which is hidden across the street from the world famous Holmenkollen Ski Jump. The first jumps at the "Holmenkollrennet" took place in January 1892. The world's skiing elite meets at Holmenkollen every year and 50,000 spectators watch the jumps from the 180 feet high spectacle. The view of Oslo and the fjord below is breathtaking. The cache is in the woods near the famous Kollen Troll but it was so cold and there was so much snow and I was not dressed for the hunt. I finally had to give up.
.jpg) Yesterday when I got to Holmenkollen, the rain had stopped and the weather was perfect. I remembered where to have the taxi stop to wait for me. It did not take too long to follow the needle into the woods and find a blue bag hanging in a tree exactly at the latitude and longitude where it was supposed to be. I signed the logbook and headed back to the taxi and on to the hotel. It was a late but delightful evening with my colleagues from Opera Software. Results for the first quarter were posted during the day.
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New Documentary DVD Movie Trailers Online: 'Fightland'Hollymood Entertainment, www.heDVD.com, is proud to present the release of 'Fightland' the DVD. You can view the documentary movie trailer online and the promo trailer for the 6 full length fights that are included on the DVD at www.heDVD.com and www.heDVD.com is the exclusive retailer of the 'Fightland' DVD. (PRWEB Jun 21, 2006) Trackback URI: http://www.prweb.com/zingpr.php/UGlnZy1Db3VwLUVtcHQtQ291cC1JbnNlLVplcm8= read more:
Software Maintenance is a Solution, Not a Problem (An Excerpt from Software Conflict 2.0) By Robert L. GlassThe traditional, problem-oriented view of maintenance says that our chief goal in maintenance should be to reduce costs. I think that's the wrong emphasis. If maintenance is a solution instead of a problem, we can quickly see that what we really want to do is more of it, not less of it. And the emphasis, when we do it, should be on maximizing effectiveness, and not on minimizing cost. An excerpt from Software Conflict 2.0. Click here for the full article.
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Use AJAX scripting responsiblySome regular readers may get the impression that I dislike anything related to Ajax and other advanced scripting. I don't. I do however dislike when JavaScript is used inappropriately and without stopping to think about whether it is actually necessary. I know the feeling you can get when you learn or read about a new trick or technique - you just want to find a problem to apply your new favourite solution to. But a lot of the time the solution fixes a problem that doesn't exist and only creates new, more serious problems, especially when you consider accessibility. The key is to use scripting to add value for those who can take advantage of it without causing problems for those who, for whatever reason, cannot. I like the term 'Progressive Enhancement' since it describes a mindset and a way of using technology that will help you create usable and accessible websites and web applications. Build the basics first and make sure everything (within reason) works without JavaScript, and then use event handlers to inject usability enhancing functionality. Shaun Inman's article Responsible Asynchronous Scripting contains more good advice for web developers who want or need to use asynchronous scripting when building a web app. Visit site to read or post comments…Add this to del.icio.us, Digg this, or Seed this. Add 456 Berea Street to your Technorati favorites. Posted in: read more:
CSS World AwardsAt the CSS showcase site CSS Mania, a contest is being held to select the best sites submitted during the last year (May 2005 to May 2006). Awards will be given in ten different categories.: - Site of the Year
- Associations
- Blogging
- Business
- Entertainment
- Institutions
- Media
- Portal
- Web Design (Companies and Portfolios)
- Web Tools
As opposed to many other similar contests, the winners will not be decided by public voting. Instead five judges will vote for their favourites among the nominated sites. As it happens, I am one of those judges. The others are Andy Budd, Cameron Moll, Molly E. Holzschlag, and Sergio Villareal. And no, sites created by any of the judges will not be included in the contest. I will place a lot of emphasis on code quality and accessibility when I pick my favourites in each category. Appearance is obviously also important, but I'm not going to vote for a site that only looks good on the surface. If you're not a judge you can't vote, but you can browse the CSS World Awards categories to find out which sites are nominated. Anyone here involved in the creation of a nominated site? Visit site to read or post comments…Add this to del.icio.us, Digg this, or Seed this. Add 456 Berea Street to your Technorati favorites. Posted in: read more:
Apache developers start weblog communityA weblog community has been launched for members of the Apache Software Foundation. Planet Apache is organized through syndication, presenting an aggregated view of weblogs published by Apache developers. It currently includes Sam Ruby, James Strachan, Stefano Mazzocchi, and several dozen others. read more:
Disability Rights Commission web accessibility study points to a need for trainingThe latest E-Access Bulletin has an article about the most recent findings from the Disability Rights Commission's web accessibility study. There was a poor response among organisations participating in the study to the quesion 'How interested is your company in web accessibility?' - and those who did respond showed a lack of awareness of the issues. The investigation team conclude that there is a need for more training in this area.Interestingly in response to questions about the usefulness of the W3C access guidelines the view seems to be that they are hard to follow; one respondent described the guidelines as 'gobbledygook'.The study is being carried out by Helen Petrie, professor of Human Computer Interaction at City University's School of Informatics. read more:
Start with the assumption that you cannot predict the access needs of your audience.This weeks tip: start with the assumption that you cannot predict the access needs of your audience. For example, a person with Dyslexia may need a particular combination of text and background colours to comfortably read text on a web page. You could contact a person with this particular impairment and ask them about their preferred colours; but do all people with Dyslexia have the same access needs? Unfortunately ? from a web designers point of view ? the answer is no.A better approach is to design pages so that the presentation of content can be changed by the end user; in the case of the above example, ensure that each person can change the colours to suit their own needs (e.g., via browser preferences or a style switcher). This approach can be applied to all presentation aspects, whether it be text size, layout, or the choice to leave graphics on or off. read more:
AutoStitch -- Free program to create a panorama from multiple imagesAutoStitch is a free program which will take a multiple digital photos of an area and blend them together smoothly to create a panoramic photo automatically. AutoStich is the world's first fully automatic 2D image stitcher. Capable of stitching full view panoramas without any user input whatsoever, AutoStitch is a breakthrough technology for panoramic photography, VR and visualisation applications. from Lifehacker read more:
A Conversation With Jeffrey Zeldman On Web StandardsThe website Meet the makers has an interview with designer and HTML standards advocate Jeffrey Zeldman. I am reading Jeffrey's book 'designing with web standards' at the moment - it is extremely good (although I disagree with his advocacy of pixels as the appropriate unit of measurement for setting text sizes on the web).Accessible web text - Russian translationYura Zemskov of http://www.computerlibrary.info has translated my article about accessible web text into Russian:' Part 2 'Accessible web text - sizing up the issues.' done. http://computerlibrary.info/view/article43/'Thanks Yura.Problem with RSS feedsThe 'blogs' page is not available at the moment because I am having a problem with the script that does all the work to fetch and display the feeds. Hopefully it will be back up-and-running again soon.Update: the RSS feeds are healthy again. read more:
'In My Eighth Decade and Other Essays' available from Trust"In My Eighth Decade and Other Essays" by Alan Bush (published Kahn and Averill, 1980) can now be purchased direct from the Alan Bush Music Trust. This collection of essays includes the autobiographical title essay where the composer outlines his social and philosophical outlook. Click here to view a shortened version of the title essay. To obtain a copy of the book, write to:
The Hon. Secretary
Alan Bush Music Trust
7 Harding Way
Histon
Cambridge
CB4 9JH Price £8.50 (including p&p). Please mail info@alanbushtrust.org.uk for further details. read more:
CSS Reboot participants far from standards-basedWhile doing research for an upcoming article I was browsing through a bunch of sites submitted to the CSS Reboot Spring 2006. Most of the time, the little HTML Validator icon in the lower right of my status bar did not display the green checkmark that indicates valid markup. Many sites made the poor thing display the yellow warning triangle, and for several sites it even had to bring out the red icon that means there are errors that Tidy cannot automatically fix. I would have thought that most people who have invested the time to learn CSS well enough to participate in CSS Reboot would also have spent some time learning the basics of HTML. Or, if that proved too difficult, at least run their sites through The W3C Markup Validation Service. Seems like I thought wrong. Shouldn't valid CSS and HTML be some sort of lowest level of quality control for any site that participates in CSS Reboot? Yes, that is a rhetorical question. Sean Fraser has gone through all sites participating in the CSS Reboot of spring 2006 to validate their use of HTML and CSS as well as make note of the doctype they use. The details are provided in CSS Reboot as Web Standards Validation Indicator. In summary: 71.8 percent of CSS Reboot participants use invalid HTML, CSS, or both. 71.8 percent! And that's on a gallery site meant to showcase web standards-based redesigns: May 1st 2006 Rebooters simultaneously launched their standards-based redesigns
Not quite. Visit site to read or post comments…Add this to del.icio.us, Digg this, or Seed this. Add 456 Berea Street to your Technorati favorites. Posted in: read more:
Why is the style attribute allowed in strict doctypes?The strict HTML and XHTML doctypes encourage the separation of semantic and presentational markup by disallowing the use of elements such as center, font and strike, and attributes like align, bgcolor, and border. So why is the style attribute allowed in strict doctypes? And why is it allowed (but strongly discouraged ) in XHTML 2.0? I admit that I sometimes use the style attribute. One example is when a site is designed to have a decorative photo as a background image in the masthead, and the client needs to be able to use the CMS to upload their own images. If the image is purely decorational it doesn't belong in the markup and should be specified in the CSS, preferably in an external CSS file. But doing so would require the CMS to make changes to the CSS file, which few CMSs are set up to do out of the box. Using a style attribute is much more convenient. Every time I use one I feel a bit dirty though. It's like using the javascript: pseudo-protocol or specifying event handlers like onclick inline. I'd rather avoid it. An alternative approach would be to make the CMS write the necessary CSS to a style element in the document's head section, using a class or an id to apply it to the element that holds the background image. While not the ideal solution it will at least let you get rid of those style attributes. After reading the above, you'll hardly be surprised that I agree with Emil Stenström: Inline CSS should not be allowed in strict doctypes. It seems like the logical choice since disallowing it would help enforce the separation of semantic and presentational markup. Then there's always the faint hope that it would send a message to those CMS vendors who are particularly guilty of sprinkling style attributes all over the markup their products produce that they are not following best practices. Visit site to read or post comments…Add this to del.icio.us, Digg this, or Seed this. Add 456 Berea Street to your Technorati favorites. Posted in: read more:
More Web Services News...View more Web Services news and analysis from Computerworld.com. 
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Abstracting Allocation: The New new ThingAbstracting Allocation: The New new Thing. Nick Benton.
We introduce a Floyd-Hoare-style framework for specification and verification of machine code programs, based on relational parametricity (rather than unary predicates) and using both step-indexing and a novel form of separation structure. This yields compositional, descriptive and extensional reasoning principles for many features of low-level sequential computation: independence, ownership transfer, unstructured control flow, first-class code pointers and address arithmetic. We demonstrate how to specify and verify the implementation of a simple memory manager and, independently, its clients in this style. The work has been fully machine-checked within the Coq proof assistant.
This is, of course, related to TAL, PCC etc. If you find the deatils too much, I suggest reading the discussion (section 7) to get a feel for the possible advantages of this approach. read more:
Web accessibility to become mandatory in EuropeA long-running discussion related to web accessibility is whether it should be required by law or not. Some believe it is the only way of making organisations ensure that their websites can be used by everybody, while others argue that it should be up to each organisation to decide. My opinion is that for the private sector the 'let everybody decide for themselves' argument may have some validity, but only some. Public sector websites, however, must be accessible to all, regardless of which browsing device they use or if they have a disability. That's why I find it very interesting that on 12 June 2006, ministers of 34 European countries endorsed A pan-European drive to use information and communication technologies to help people to overcome economic, social, educational, territorial or disability-related disadvantages . Two of the targets of this Riga Ministerial Declaration are to ensure that all public websites are accessible by 2010 and by 2007, make recommendations on accessibility standards and common approaches, which could become mandatory in public procurement by 2010 . Very interesting, and about time. There is a related memo (Information and communication technology for an inclusive society -- Frequently asked questions) that mentions WAI, so WCAG will probably be used or referenced in some way. The full press release is available online: Internet for all: EU ministers commit to an inclusive and barrier-free information society. Visit site to read or post comments…Add this to del.icio.us, Digg this, or Seed this. Add 456 Berea Street to your Technorati favorites. Posted in: read more:
Microsoft Developer Toolbar for IE announced at PDCMicrosoft has created its own HTML Developer Toolbar (similar to Fiddler and other similar toolbars on Firefox): Developer Toolbar for IE and released it during the recent PDC. With the IE Dev Toolbar, you have several features at your fingertips to go deep into existing pages or pages that you are currently creating. You will be able to explore the DOM tree and find elements on the page, disable IE settings, view information, outline elements, control images, resize pages to common screen resolutions and have a powerful ruler that lets you measure pixel perfect content on your page. It also will help you to validate against existing standards and provides pointers to W3C specs. via Microsoft's IEBlog read more:
More Web Site Management News...View more Web Site Management news and analysis from Computerworld.com. 
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Fix for 'hibernation kills my USB' issue....Here's a problem that I've been seeing on my laptop for the past few months ... USB devices would never reconnect after I came out of hibernation. I tried everything that I could think of to fix it (reinstall drivers, install all XP patches, search web forums, with no success) .. until I just ran across the following little nugget on Steve Bass' PCWorld column: Smart, Free Fixes for Your USB Hassles column. Hibernation Blues
The Hassle: When my system comes back from hibernation or standby mode, some of my USB devices just keep on dozing.
The Fix: That happens because Windows XP wants to conserve power, so it turns off the USB root hubs. You can change the default setting: Open Control Panel, Performance and Maintenance (if in Category view), System, Hardware, Device Manager, and click Universal Serial Bus controllers. Double-click USB Root Hub, choose the Power Management tab, and then uncheck 'Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power'. Repeat this procedure with each occurrence of a USB root hub.
Note: On a notebook, this trick will cost you some battery life.  read more:
A turbo-charged style-sheet switcherProviding user customisation options by making css files scriptable.During a recent discussion with Gez Lemon of Juicy Studio, about the best way to set the text size on text pages - and the merits or otherwise of using web page based scripts to provide customization options - Gez reminded me that many users do not know they can change text size (and many other things) using their browser preferences. I have to admit, that in the past, I was not an advocate of providing an alternative interface for setting presentation elements on a page - my reasons included: It is rarely a good idea to undermine common browser interface elements and preferences. Users can change the settings themselves, and have more control in their browser preferences than they are likely to get with a style sheet switcher or other server or client side tools. Most such tools use javascript and cookies - so they will not work for all users.However - having agreed that many user do not know they can change the preferences in their browser - I am more sympathetic towards the use of embedded user interface changers (If I could think of a better phrase I would use it). I am inclined to think that - if implemented properly - they have a role to play.An important aspect of accessible web design is giving the end user the ability to change presentation elements to suit their own needs. Ensuring that your web design practices don't get in the way of the users ability to change their browser preferences is one way to do this; providing alternative style sheets is another. Unfortunately, unlike in Mozilla browsers where alternative style sheets can be chosen from the view menu, Internet Explorer provides no such facility. A style sheet switcher can be provided easily enough either by using Javascript or by using a server side scripting language such as PHP.However, style sheet switchers tend to be rather restricted in what they can do; the number of choices that can be provided to the user is limited to the number of style sheets provided by the developer:If you wanted to provide the options for visitors to your site to choose a text size anywhere between say, 80% and 150% of the default size (sometimes small, medium and big is not enough choice), and you also wanted to provide a choice of background colours of say 10 colours; to provide each combination of colour and text size from these two variables (assuming increments of 1%) would require 700 style sheets. Even if you just wanted to provide 10% text size increments you would still have to provide 70 alternative style sheets; clearly from both the users and the developers point of view, this is not a particularly flexible solutions. If the choice of font is also regarded as an important accessibility issue - and you wanted to provide a choice of fonts (e.g. specialist fonts suitable for a person with Dyslexia, or someone with a visual impairment) this would increase the number of required alternative style sheets to an even more unmanageable number.With this is mind, it occurred to me that perhaps there is a place for using a simple web form and a server side script to let users control some common page elements such as colour, text size and preferred font. One HTML form, some lines of PHP code, and a way to control the values within a style sheet provides us with the ability to set a large number of colours, contrasts, text sizes and font combinations. And we still have the opportunity of providing alternative style sheets to deal with the broad issues such as page layout, and where to position the main menu on the page.I have created a text size and colour combination switcher as an example of how a form and associated scripts can be used to alter presentation elements.I have provided the scripts and code used in a more complete article in the learning section. read more:
The MCU contributes to European Commission Social Inclusion WorkshopAs a representative of the Making Connections Unit I was invited to Brussels to attend a workshop to discuss how 'Cultural and Memory Organisations' (i.e. Libraries and Museums) can use digital technologies to increase social and economic inclusion. The workshop and research is being carried out by Ecotec Research and Consulting on behalf of the European Commission. I was invited to provide my expertise in relation to accessibility issues.The main objectives of the study are: To identify where cultural and memory organisations (CMOs) already contribute to social and economic inclusion, using digital technologies; and To specify which issues deserve particular attention for new or further research, taking into account the needs of CMOs in a European context and the development of content-based services for all sectors of the community.The study will lead to recommendations for CMOs in Members states and the EU in relation to building new services and applications. Unfortunately, from my point of view, there wasn't much of a focus on how the web could be used to promote social and economic inclusions. Perhaps if there had been more time (a wide range of topics were covered) we could have talked in more detail about the role of the web and the issues of accessibility.If you have any thoughts in relation to this I am happy to pass them along the study (please add your comments below). read more:
Google Mobile MapsDuring a meeting with Mike the other day, he mentioned traffic may be an issue going to the airport that afternoon and mentioned a good way to check using my blackberry. Introducing Google Mobile Maps. Logging on to the site www.google.com/gmm from my phone, it recognized the device instantly and then proceeded to download the software. Less than 5 minutes later everything was up and running. Pretty cool, oh and I made the flight with little traffic. :) ======================== Combining directions, maps, and satellite imagery, Google Maps for mobile is a free download that lets you find local hangouts and businesses across town or across the country - right from your BlackBerry. To download, visit www.google.com/gmm on your BlackBerry browser. (US, France, Italy, Germany, Spain) Detailed directions: Whether you plan to walk or drive, your route is displayed on the map itself, together with step-by-step directions. Integrated search results: Local business locations and contact information appear all in one place, integrated on your map. Easily movable maps: Interactive, draggable maps let you zoom in or out, and move in all directions so you can orient yourself visually. Satellite imagery: Get a bird's eye view of your desired location. Real-time traffic:New! See where the congestion is, and estimate delays in over 30 major US metropolitan areas. read more:
Linux: Batched WritesHans Reiser [interview] described a recently posted patch as, "it revises the existing reiser4 code to do a good job for writes that are larger than 4k at a time by assiduously adhering to the principle that things that need to be done once per write should be done once per write, not once per 4k." He went on to explain, "this code empirically proves that the generic code design which passes 4k at a time to the underlying FS can be improved. Performance results show that the new code consumes 40% less CPU when doing 'dd bs=1MB .....'" Referring to generic_file_write(), he further noted that currently when writing 64MB of data, "it may go to the kernel as a 64MB write, but VFS sends it to the FS as 64MB/4k separate 4k writes." It was acknowledged that this could also be accomplished in a non-generic way, howevever earlier feedback had suggested that such improvements should be made available to all. Andrew Morton [interview] responded to the proposed changes saying, "there's nothing which leaps out and says 'wrong' in this. But there's nothing which leaps out and says 'right', either. It seems somewhat arbitrary, that's all." He pointed out that reiser4 was currently the only filesystem to benefit from the changes, "to be able to say 'yes, we want this' I think we'd need to understand which other filesystems would benefit from exploiting it, and with what results?" In the resulting discussion, it was determined that both FUSE [story] and XFS [story] would benefit from these changes prompting Hans to ask, "Is it enough?" Andrew agreed, "Spose so. Let's see what the diff looks like?" read more:
Programming project is eating my lunchI've been maintaining Radio silence this week because of a project to republish the Chef Moz restaurant database as Dining.Name, a dynamic Web site created with Java and Perl and served with MySQL and PHP. I started the project with two goals in mind: Getting more experience developing real-world Web applications and promoting Chef Moz, a corner of the Open Directory Project devoted to restaurant listings and reviews. Chef Moz offers its entire database under an open license, but no one appears to be doing anything with it. I'm beginning to understand why. There are a lot of obstacles to overcome when dealing with 134 megabytes of XML data that isn't well-formed, contains hundreds of illegal characters, and isn't in the UTF-8 character set as described in the documentation. (I was so desperate at one point I turned to Perl, which is my language of last resort.) I'm hoping the project becomes a useful consumer-friendly interface to Chef Moz, which is designed more for project contributors than hungry diners, as shown in this before and after view. At a minimum, it should give me plenty of fodder for programming articles here on Workbench (and future books).
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Me-centric Information StructuresIn Web Style Guide, Patrick Lynch and Sarah Horton describe three basic structures that “govern the navigational interface of a Web site and mold a user's mental models of how information is organized.” These three information structures are sequences, hierarchies, and webs. Sequences “may be chronological, a logical series of topics progressing from the general to the specific, or alphabetical, as in indexes, encyclopedias, and glossaries.” Hierarchies “are particularly suited to Web site organization and very familiar in corporate and institutional life.” Webs “mimic associative thought and the free flow of ideas, allowing users to follow their interests in a unique, heuristic, idiosyncratic pattern.” Though every Web application tends to have some sequential organization (registration flows or wizards), some hierarchical organization (help systems) and some Web-like linking, the more functional productivity applications I’ve helped design predominately employ hierarchical information structures. People are mostly using these programs to get specific things done like data management, e-commerce, reporting, etc. An understandable and familiar information structure helps them achieve their goals quickly and easily. On the other hand, the more entertainment or community-focused sites I’ve helped design tend to be primarily organized as a web. Lots of links between content enables people to explore freely and pivot a data set along many different parameters. Found a piece of content you like? Pivot the data set by the author, category, tag, rating or more. A web-like information structure enables you to follow whatever path meets your needs at the time. Lately I’ve become more attuned to an increasing focus on identity within these Web-like information structures. Many social applications have a strong personal component. For example, “My Profile & My Contacts” on LinkedIn or “My Q&A” on Yahoo! Answers. Despite the inclusion of a personalized view of content and actions, these applications still lean toward either hierarchical or web information structures as their primary organizational structure. Looking at Ben Schneiderman’s circles of relationship (PDF) presents a potentially different way of “governing the navigational interface of a Web site and molding a user's mental model of how information is organized”: a me-centric way. This type of information structure is organized by the relationships between people (and thereby content) within a Web site. Me and My Stuff is the central hub. My Contacts (content from friends and family), Community (content from all registered members of a site), and the Web (content outside the site) govern the rest of the site’s navigational interface and information organization. Within such a structure there may be a need for a dashboard that provides a horizontal view through the relationship layers (mostly snapshots of and links to content) to encourage exploration and highlight features. Though it could serve as an effective primary organization model for social applications, a Me-centric structure is likely to contain a mix of multiple information structures like the intermingling of Sequences, Hierarchies, and Webs we see in most Web sites today. Tags: navigation, user experience, Web applications, Web conventionsread more:
Linux: High-Res Timers and Tickless KernelThomas Gleixner and Ingo Molnar [interview] posted an update of their high-res timers kernel patches for the 2.6.17 kernel, "upon which we based a tickless kernel (dyntick) implementation and a 'dynamic HZ' feature as well". The patch currently works for x86, with ports to x86_64, PPC and ARM in the works. Thomas explains, "the high-res timers feature (CONFIG_HIGH_RES_TIMERS) enables POSIX timers and nanosleep() to be as accurate as the hardware allows (around 1usec on typical hardware). This feature is transparent - if enabled it just makes these timers much more accurate than the current HZ resolution." He goes on to discribe the tickless kernel: "The tickless kernel feature (CONFIG_NO_HZ) enables 'on-demand' timer interrupts: if there is no timer to be expired for say 1.5 seconds when the system goes idle, then the system will stay totally idle for 1.5 seconds. This should bring cooler CPUs and power savings: on our (x86) testboxes we have measured the effective IRQ rate to go from HZ to 1-2 timer interrupts per second. "This feature is implemented by driving 'low res timer wheel' processing via special per-CPU high-res timers, which timers are reprogrammed to the next-low-res-timer-expires interval. This tickless-kernel design is SMP-safe in a natural way and has been developed on SMP systems from the beginning."
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Levels of HTML knowledgeInspired by Emil Stenström's Levels of CSS knowledge, I started thinking about the extreme difference in HTML knowledge among people working in the web industry. It spans all the way from people who know next to nothing about it to those who know it well enough to write the actual HTML specifications. I thought I'd describe a few different levels of HTML knowledge. For some people, these levels are stages that they pass while learning more and more about HTML, gradually understanding concepts such as web standards, semantics, and accessibility. Others are at a certain level because it matches their attitude towards HTML and coding in general. Many people never advance beyond the first few levels. For some that is just fine, while for others it is not. Read full post and comments…Add this to del.icio.us, Digg this, or Seed this. Add 456 Berea Street to your Technorati favorites. Posted in: read more:
RIP FrontPageAfter nine years of being an award-winning Web authoring tool, FrontPage will be discontinued in late 2006. We will continue to serve the diverse needs of our existing FrontPage customers with the introduction of two brand-new application building and Web authoring tools using the latest technologies: Office SharePoint Designer 2007 for the enterprise information workers and Expression Web for the professional Web designer. Link >> Yeah, I know. Most web-heads will read this announcement from Microsoft, let out a snort, and say 'It's about time!'.For me though, it's not without just a bit of sadness and sense of loss that FrontPage goes quietly into the night.You see, I was working as a software developer at a Microsoft Solution Provider when Microsoft first purchased the FrontPage product from Vermeer. As part of our partnership we received beta copies of all the new MS software, including FrontPage. FrontPage was my introduction into the entire world of web development. I mostly learned HTML by creating pages in it, then switching over to see the source code it had created.And yes, I realize it created a lot of junk code, and was the basis for many nasty looking websites - but no more, in my opinion, than Geocities did 6-7 years ago or even MySpace is responsible for today. I still think the way FrontPage would build navigation bars from a flowchart view of a site is pretty nice - although it could have been nicer but MS hadn't updated it for probably 7 of those nine years of production.At any rate, I haven't actively used FrontPage for years now, and the world of web authoring and content management has taken great leaps in terms of functionality and price.But I wouldn't be where - or who - I am today without Microsoft Frontpage, so I truly mean it when I say 'Rest In Peace'. read more:
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