My apologies for all the exclamation marks, but this is a big moment for me. Woohoo!
Month: February 2007
MoMB: a museum for things that don’t exist yet
What fun! MoMB: most anticipated, The Museum of Modern Betas tracks interest in unreleased betas, or
the 50 most anticipated applications in the webosphere, as measured by the number of bookmarks at del.icio.us for apps which are not publicly released yet.
They promise to update this list once a week.
After a peek at what people are longing for in beta, go to the home page and look at the various web based apps in beta release that are mentioned here.
O’Reilly Media invite
I suspect it is because I’m on the PR mailing list for new O’Reilly publications because I review so many O’Reilly books. Or maybe they think I know something about Ruby on Rails (I don’t). But I received my first ever invitation to participate as a presenter from them today. OMG, could it be that they are trying to increase the percentage of female presenters? Now that would be truly noteworthy. Most of the time I have to find places I might want to present and then figure out how to submit a proposal. So this invitation is new for me. Here’s part of the email:
To meet the increasing demand for skill building, and to spread the joy of Rails, Ruby Central and O’Reilly Media are teaming up to produce RailsConf Europe 2007, an entire conference
dedicated to Ruby on Rails. Happening September 17-19 in Berlin, Germany, RailsConf Europe will offer keynotes, sessions, and tutorials from the most innovative and successful Rails experts and organizations.
I won’t be going, but for the rest of you who may know something about Ruby on Rails or want to learn, take note of the event in Berlin in September.
My ebook’s days are numbered
I’ve been selling an ebook, A Beginner’s Guide: Writing CSS with Dreamweaver 8 for the last few months. This ebook is about to be retired from service. The reason is the upcoming release of my new book, Mastering Integrated HTML and CSS. The new book will be released on Feb. 27. It contains a chapter about using CSS in Dreamweaver 8. The chapter in the book covers basically the same material as the ebook, but the chapter does a better job with the topic. The chapter benefitted from being newly written and reorganized after learning from the initial experience of writing the ebook. And the chapter also benefitted from a couple of suggestions from the book’s technical editor, Zoe Gillenwater. She’s an expert Dreamweaver user herself and pointed out a couple of things that I hadn’t mentioned in the ebook that helped improve the DW8/CSS information in Mastering Integrated HTML and CSS.
The ebook was a help to me, because I used it to show my editors at Wiley that a chapter about using CSS in Dreamweaver 8 actually had a place in a book about hand-coding HTML and CSS. I hope it has been helpful to those of you who have purchased it for your own learning or to use in a classroom. (The license allows reproduction for classroom use.)
Technorati Tags: web design, CSS, education, web design education, Dreamweaver
Are teachers the final link in the chain?
I watched a fine interview with Molly at backstage.bbc.co.uk the other day, and it hit me that education and teacher training are the last link in the web standards chain. Well, okay, so Molly had a few things along this line to say. But not exactly what I’m about to say.
The technical people have all figured out that web standards work and make life easier. The corporate interests have all figured out that web standards bring a better return on investment and make good business sense. The accessibility advocates have all determined that web standards promote accessibility. The browser makers have all (finally, mostly) come into compliance with web standards. Everything is in place, everyone is convinced, but new sites are still being created using less-than-standards compliant code. Is education holding us back?
I’m going to generalize a bit now. It seems that all those busy, over-scheduled teachers in all the large and small colleges and universities around the country haven’t gotten the word yet. They haven’t had the training they need. They haven’t had time to figure out CSS for themselves. They don’t have the textbooks and resources they need. They are hamstrung by outdated requirements and antique regulations for technology education. And, as a result, they are not turning out students trained in standards, ready for industry jobs, who can produce sites based on best practices.
Of course, there are examples of colleges and universities where teachers are given the needed training, resources and opportunities to learn. When I find such examples, I’m quick to point to them here. But that’s the thing, isn’t it? There haven’t been many good examples to point to.
Teacher’s need to kick and scream to be sent to seminars, conferences, and classes; to have expert trainers brought to them; to hear what industry wants from their students. Yes, education is a bureaucracy, a slow-moving behemoth. But teachers can go to department heads and demand travel money to attended the right conferences, to have the right trainers, to plan a budget that will promote change.
I write books I think will help teachers teach standards. I review books to find the good ones that will help teachers teach standards. I can come to your college and help teachers learn about standards. If there is anything else that I can do for any college to make change happen, just let me know. I’ll be glad to do what I can.
Technorati Tags: web design education, web standards
Sheri German provides lesson plans
Sheri German wrote the first of a series of standards-based lesson plans for Dreamweaver at Community MX. The Dreamweaver Web Standards Lesson Plan Series – Part One. She says,
There is a concern among educators that web design is often being taught poorly–even at the college level–and without regard for standards. In some cases it is because the instructor has not updated her skills since the turn of the century. In other cases it is because there is a perception that it is too hard to teach and learn CSS. Yes, it is true that one must go slowly, start simple, and build skills in a systematic way. Still, after some experimentation and a few of my own lessons learned the hard way, I came up with some beginning exercises that seem to instill the essential concepts without overwhelming the students. In this series I would like to share some of these lesson plans with my fellow educators who, like me, would like to start their students out with ‘best practices’.”
Keep an eye on this series for future lesson plans.
Technorati Tags: web design, web design education
Time to cancel WCAG 2?
Just in time for SXSW, Joe Clark says the six year old WCAG 2 should be dumped. Time to cancel WCAG 2 (Joe Clark: Media access). He says it is unfixable and the W3C should start over with this specification.
Technorati Tags: accessibility