You know that when the Microsoft Security Program Manager has to run Firefox things are not good for IE on the security front.
Browse Happy highlights stories of real people who have chosen browsers other than Microsoft IE and are quite happy with the change.
Paul wants to "set up one of those link-sidebar thingies again" for his quick link list. Actually I am finding those the side link lists, like mine cause problems for folks tracking referrer links back and for search engines. Context of the links is helpful, but so is being able to find the date and page where these links came from. The way Paul is doing his quick links now works well. I was able to point directly to these links, the links he make have context, even if it is only a list of links.
Quite similar to the Fixing Permalink to Mean Something post the other day, the links in the side bar are temporary. I find links from Technorati back to my site from some poor soul looking for what comment and link vanderwal.net had placed. These links do not have a permalink as they are ever rotating. I have received a few e-mails asking where the link was from and if I was spamming in some way.
Why do I have the quick links? I don't have the time to do a full or even short write-up. I clear my tabbed browser windows and put the items I have not read in full in the Quick Links. Some things I want access to from my mobile device or work to read the info in full or make use of the information. Other things I want to keep track of and include in a write-up.
The other advantage of moving the quick links into the main content area is they would be easier to include in one aggregated feed. I know I can join my current feeds, but I like the sites that provide the feeds in the same context as they appear on the site as it eases the ability to find the information. This change will take a more than a five or ten minute fix for my site, but it is on my to do list.
Microsoft redesigns and takes a great step toward standards. Do they have everything right yet? No. Will they get there? They do not have far to go. They do need to fix the site to work better in Standards-based browsers that people are moving to. They need doctype and some other essentials, but at least they are showing they are learning.
One thing that stands out to to me is the lack of uppercase and mixed-case tags and attributes. This is huge as their tools that are in production for consumers do not do this. To date the Microsoft development tools fail the developers as they have not made it easy to output proper tag and attributes in the standards compliant case (for XHTML), which is lower case.
Thanks to Matt's write-up and Doug's write-up, which ties back to his own previous comments about thowing out tables.
I need to give a pointer to one of the wonderful redesigns of late, Jeff Gates' Life Outtacontext is something I find wonderful. I have been enjoying it for a couple weeks now. I particularly like when I scroll to the bottom of the page. Jeff does not update his wonderful content frequently, but the design has me going back often.
Chevrolet has redesigned with fully valid (one minor issue in the style sheet) XHTML (strict) and CSS. It is beautiful and wonderfully functional. All the information can be easily copied and pasted to help the discerning car buyer build their own crib sheet. The left navigation (browsing structure) is wonderful and not a silly image, but a definition list that is expandable. The style layer is semantic, which is a great help also (for those IAs who understand). Those of you so inclined, take a look under the hood as there are many good things there.
The Web Standards Project (WaSP) has launched (and will continue to sponsor) Browse Happy. Browse Happy is a site that focusses on web browser alternatives to Microsoft IE. Many computers come with IE installed, either as part of the operating system or as an arrangement with the producer of the operating system.
Over the years Microsoft has listened to complains about their browser's lack of standards compliance (no browser was doing this well at the time). They took a huge leap and built a browser that was much better at complying to the standards than others. This allowed the developers of sites and content to work to no longer build to each browser but build to one standards. IE at this point was not perfect, but it was so much better than it ever was and it truly allowed the developers to build to specifications and have it run well on standards compliant browsers. Nearly everybody loved Microsoft for their advancements.
Unfortunately Microsoft thought good was well enough and stopped IE development in 2001. It was not and is not fully standards compliant. On standards IE is now far behind nearly all the other browsers that are standards compliant that a developer must hack their perfectly valid code to get it to work properly in an IE browser. Sites that develop for IE have serious problems when viewed in other browsers, which is becoming more and more the trend as mobile devices take off and people are forced to replace IE because of security problems.
Enough about the poor little developer, it is the people who are the user of web browsers that should be the attention. Many have realized that are are better options than IE. As IE development stopped in 2001 (except for excessive security patches) the rest of the browser developers continued to make progress. As it is with any technology, if one stands still with development others will pass them and possibly make them irrelevant.
Other browsers have now passed IE on, not only standards compliance, but accessibility (do you have problems reading all sites because the type is too small, well nearly all other browsers let you easily change the type to make it larger and easier to read), render the pages faster (this makes the pages show up much faster on the screen), very few rendering bugs (all the content will show up on the page), better user experience with ease of use (tabbed browsing, pop-up blocking, etc.), and more secure (U.S. Department of Homeland Security has not warned people to stop using other browsers as the security problems, while they occasionally arise on other browsers, are not regular events that require people to continually update their browser).
Browser Happy is a collection of real people who have found the world of non-IE browsers and have found the painful experiences of IE are not needed. They have found the other browsers are very easy to load on their machine. These real people have also found they can return to the joy of browsing the web that they once knew in more innocent times.
This has been a very busy week and this weekend it continues with the same. But, I took two minutes to see if I could solve a tiny problem bugging me. I get links to the main blog, Off the Top, from outside search engines and aggregators (Technorati, etc.) that are referencing content in specific entries, but not all of those entries live on the ever-changing blog home page. All of the entries had the same link to their permanant location. The dumb thing was every link to their permanant home was named the same damn thing, "permalink". Google and other search engines use the information in the link name to give value to the page being linked to. Did I help the cause? No.
So now every permanent link states "permalink for: incert entry title". I am hoping this will help solve the problem. I will modify the other pages most likely next week sometime (it is only a two minute fix) as I am toast.
I had a wonderful experience where my own Personal InfoCloud worked successfully (I have had many problems having the right informaiton I need at my fingertips). I had been having general conversations about a lunchtime presentation or roundtable as part of a string of Adaptive Path training, but I was not exactly clear on the concept or the format of the discussion. I knew it was to be informal, but could also use slides if wanted. I thought I would just use some handouts of the content of the Accessibility is Little More Than Web Best Practices presentation (10 copies surely would be enough for a roundtable. When I go the the training session I looked around and could not figure who other folks doing roundtables would be so I asked the manager who else was doing the lunchtime stuff and the format. I was the only one and the format was wide open.
That morning I had converted the presentation from Keynote to PDF and e-mailed it to my mobile phone address and my gmail account. I was standing next to Bryan and mentioned I had my presentation in PDF on me, which got an inquisical look until I said it was on my phone (Treo) and I could e-mail it to a laptop and present from that. So I sent the presentation to Jeff's laptop, which had WiFi (they all had WiFi actually). In a couple minutes a PDF version of the presenation was available to click through and present from.
Not only did I have the times and addresses in my phone, but I had my presenation as a back-up. The PDF was fine for these slides as they are designed as handout to use as lists. Were it not this way I would have been kicking myself for not also having the Keynote version.
As a sidenote the number of Treo users was impressive. I know of eight Treos that I saw at the sessions. I also saw many Macs laptops of attendees taking notes and only saw one or two PCs. This would be in a population of 40 or so folks.
Today I gave my Accessibility is Little More Than Web Best Practices (124kb PDF) to the Adaptive Path User Experience Week 2004 DC attendees as a lunchtime presentation discussion. It was good to find folks that are in the DC area interested in Web Standards (a very big part of best practices) and figuring how to sell accessibility to their clients that are required by law to have accessible sites. This presentation is quite similar to my STC presentation, but has the addition of the few things that are required for accessibility that are not part of web best practices (these apply to tables and forms).
A new design forum has been announced, Design Engaged has been organized by Andrew Otwell and will be held in Amsterdam, Netherlands November 12 to 14, 2004. The format sounds very tempting.
Coming back from six plus days of being untethered from the net I found I had 1117 unread RSS feeds. This is worse than my personal e-mail stack, which was just over 550 (I get to my work e-mail stack tomorrow, which averages about 80 e-mails per day). The RSS feeds really threw me as I was not expecting it to have snowballed like that.
There were a few things I was wanting to follow that I knew may pop their heads up while I was away so I followed these on my Treo 600 on Google News and del.icio.us aggregator. I was able to find most of what I was looking for and do a quick read and then e-mail an annotated link to one of my personal e-mail accounts. I did find some things on del.icio.us that I just copied into my del.icio.us bookmarks so I could come back to them later.
I got far less done on the writing front as my son was along for the vacation, which made it a real family vacation and not the usual working vacation with the laptop on my lap on the front porch when I am not playing in the waves. No, I would not say I am rested, but I do have more wonderful memories of a great summer get away. Our time schedules shifted to a 10 month-old's eating and sleeping schedule. When we drifted to our normal shore vacation schedule we had a cranky kid, which only took two days to convert to a vacation fully focused on the kid. We met many wonderful new people, stayed in a different B&B, and found a new restaurant to add to our favorites.
I am now ready for the last two days of the week and to start responding to e-mail tomorrow. I am also ready to tackle my writing assignments that are well over due. My laptop is also fully updated with OS and software updates that make it really sing, too bad Windows updates never make the machine perceivably faster.
Things will be quiet here for a few days, unless I post from the mobile, as I will not have the usual connectivity. I may try and find wifi, but the goal is to relax, write, and read. Those that want to say hi can use my mobile e-mail, if you have it. Gmail will also work using my normal moniker when I post about the web. Untethering is tough, particularly when there is cool stuff going on that I want to stay on top of.
A word to the wise, don't use naked div or span tags in your markup, as you are asking for trouble. Many validation tools will let you know you have messed up, but you will soon realize this as you start extending your design with CSS.
What is a naked div or span? Look in your markup and if you see <div> or <span> you have naked tags. A div or a span tag should always have an id or class attribute that defines what it is doing. Calling div or span in your CSS is one giant hint this are going wrong. Add CSS modifications to the semantic markup that must be in place and use an id or class to place all other presentation layers.
Sooner or later a class or id attribute will be dropped in the div or span and it may lose the intended value, but since the CSS and markup were not used correctly the headache begins. Naked div and span tags lead to embarrassment at best or headaches and cursing for those that have to clean up the mess.
Gene supplies a good overview of Folksonomy, which is the bottom-up social classification that takes place on Flickr, del.icio.us, etc. It would be great to have a tool that could help organizations develop a folksonomy over time. Gmail from Google could develop a great folksonomy that could be overlaid on ones own searches.
Marry this idea with Paul Ford's "Google beats Amazon and eBay at Semantic Web" and you have a wonderful jump on the Semantic Web that is personalized. Take Gene's idea of building a thesaurus or crosswalk of terms within and across systems and things can really take off. There would need to be contextual tools added to handle the multiple definitions like Macintosh is a synonym for Mac, but Macintosh is an artist and a computer, while Mac is a computer, artist, and British term for raincoat (short for Macintosh). Hence the Semantic Web adds context to get these things straight.
Having trouble figuring what group will help you in your carreer as as a web designer that keeps information architecture, usability, interaction design, experience design, etc. in your toolbelt?
It seems there is a group that has come togther to help be the glue and bring all of these splintered groups together. UXnet aims to be the glue that draws the groups together. Many designers and UX/IA/ExD/Etc folks are lost in finding one good home and one or two good conferences. There are many resources, too many is what much of these designers and researchers say. Many of us wear many hats and need a good cross pollination to get better.
I have hope that UXnet will help close the chasm that keeps everybody apart. There are representatives from many groups as a part of the team pulling things together.
I am the current InfoDesign Profile - Thomas Vander Wal. This was harder than I thought it would be an many alternate answers ran through my mind, but I finally narrowed it down as much as I could. Peter has many other wonderful profiles and interviews at InfoDesign Special. I have been inspired and found new resources from these glimpses into other designers lives.