A three part series by John Allsop about semantics in HTML at microformatique – a blog about microformats: Semantics in HTML takes you from traditional HTML Semantics, to Standardizing Vocabularies, to Towards a Semantic Web.
Month: March 2007
Big Podcast WOW!
You can now access all sorts of university courses by podcast at iTunes. There are classes from Duke, Princeton, Yale, Oxford and more. Want French poetry? Psych? TED talks? Go get it.
Web Sciences and Tim Berners-Lee
Tim Berners-Lee and three other pioneers began something at Web Science. Teachers need to follow these developments because they may result in a new curriculum or degree track called web sciences that unites all the diverse and uncoordinated threads we now have running that all lead to some sort of training in web technologies. They define web sciences like this:
When we discuss an agenda for a science of the Web, we use the term “science” in two ways. Physical and biological science analyzes the natural world, and tries to find microscopic laws that, extrapolated to the macroscopic realm, would generate the behavior observed. Computer science, by contrast, though partly analytic, is principally synthetic: It is concerned with the construction of new languages and algorithms in order to produce novel desired computer behaviors. Web science is a combination of these two features. The Web is an engineered space created through formally specified languages and protocols. However, because humans are the creators of Web pages and links between them, their interactions form emergent patterns in the Web at a macroscopic scale. These human interactions are, in turn, governed by social conventions and laws. Web science, therefore, must be inherently interdisciplinary; its goal is to both understand the growth of the Web and to create approaches that allow new powerful and more beneficial patterns to occur.
You might also be interested in Tim Berners-Lee’s testimony before Congress where he said, “The Web’s next most important application is likely being dreamed up somewhere by someone, quite likely a woman.”
Technorati Tags: web design, web design education
SXSWi Tuesday Recap
Tuesday is here and it’s almost over. Here’s what I managed to jot down on Tuesday.
Web Typography Sucks
Richard talked about the difference between web typography and art with words. An example Mark gave is the ‘ and " marks as incorrectly used for quotes, hyphens used as dashes. They pointed to the UK publication The Sun and said if they can do it right, why can’t we?
Richard talked about using HTML entities for proper character use. They showed an example of a beautiful ampersand inserted into a page with a styled span element. They explained how to tweak margins and line-heights that come from the browser.
Numbers needed are a basic text-size and a line-height that works nicely with it (e.g., font-size: 1em; line-height: 1.5em; margin: 0 0 1.5em 0;) They showed how to calculate ems for the size of pixels desired. I wasn’t fast enough to get the math down, but it was a simple division problem involving the base size you started with and the pixel size you wanted to end up with.
Mark talked about the importance of creating contrast with typefaces, weight, position, margin. They showed a list with the list item numbers hanging outside the left margin and said that was the way it was always done before Word and other word processing software began indenting lists.
Richard suggested that Arial is not a good backup for Verdana because the sizes don’t match. Tahoma might be better. He suggested a list like Frutiger, Univers, Helvetica Neue, arial, helvetica, sans-serif. They mentioned several new fonts that are shipping with Vista: Calibri, Cambria, Candara, Constantia, Corbel. They suggested that people start using them and hope that they ship with the next version of Office for OS X and get into Mac that way.
Mark talked about the fact that many don’t seem to care about the details of web typography the way people care about typography in print. They suggested that designers let tool developers know what we need in the way to create beautiful typography in their creations. They pointed to the new design of the New York Times being an example of caring about how the web version looks.
12 Values Shaping Technology’s Future
Scott Smith from Social Technologies, Rachel Matney from Target, Adrea Shortell from MTV, Timo Veikkola from Nokia
Two women, two men. My first exactly equal gender balanced panel. But there is a nice mix at SXSW, I’m not complaining about this conference!
The 12 values are:
- User creativity
- Appropriateness
- Intelligence
- Personalization
- Convenience
- Protection
- Simplicity
- Connectedness
- Health
- Assistance
- Efficiency
- Sustainability
They reported on research into consumer lifestyles and changes worldwide and how businesses need to understand what the future of technology is to design products and processes that will fit these values.
Net Politics: The Internet Can Make You President
Clay Johnson, Patrick Ruffini, Mark SooHoo, Mark Strama
Mark Strama talked about online voter registration and money raising on the Internet. (He’s a member of the Texas House.) Patrick is advisor to Guiliani’s presidential campaign exploratory committee. Mark works for McCain. Clay worked on the Dean for America campaign. He now works for Democrats.org.
Mark asked if the political process on the Internet has been bottom up or top down. Clay said yes, the Internet finds candidates, not visa-versa. The Dean phenomena was a result of a meetup, not anything Howard Dean did.
There was a discussion about the value of getting email address organically from people who are already interested in working or donating vs. the value of buying a list of email addresses.
What about online fundraising? If front runners can tie in to making their big events off line tie in to their big events online they can raise more money. Clay said 2008 is going to be the year of the boring Internet. (What about social media, Clay?) Mark says don’t you think the Internet benefits the anti-establishment people? Mark said the Internet rock stars need to have a message that resonates with people, not just have a web site.
What should a candidate do? What should a candidate not do? Do not be inauthentic. Do talk straight. Don’t do anything that keeps people at home and not talking about the candidate out from behind their computer. Do not do Second Life. But do experiment.
Do candidates have to blog? Does it come off as inauthentic? Blogs can be helpful if they connect people who reach out with the message. Campaigns are not political commentary like blogs. There has to be some form of message according to Patrick.
Mark said MySpace might be the meetup of this campaign. Adding a campaign logo to a myspace page is the exact equivalent of having a sign in someone’s front yard or knocking on someone’s front door. You can call up all the people with a zip code in your district and contact them to add you as a myspace friend.
Q & A ensued.
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SXSWi Monday Recap
Monday’s recap follows. You’re getting a clue in these posts about what a horrible typist I am and what happens when I don’t have time to proof and edit my posts.
I went to the Getting Unstuck session but arrived late and didn’t take notes. The part I did hear was encouraging people to build cross-discipline teams tht have to talk to each other as part of the design process so that entrenched positions can be discussed, understood and perhaps changed.
Mobile Web Design Challenges
Kevin Cheng from Yahoo!, Matt Jones from Nokia, John Poisson, Anita Wilhelm who designs for Erickson and other clients, Simon King from Yahoo!
Simon created a photo uploader for Yahoo! that lets you upload a photo from a Nokia phone with two clicks, tags and included.
Anita talked about scanR which allows a camera phone to act as a scanner which delivers a fax or a PDF that can be emailed.
John talked about radar.net that is about sharing experience, although it involves sharing photos like Flickr.
Matt said he works inside the product, not on the web and was interested in the physical world of mobile development. Matt said it’s really important to use prototypes when designing for mobile, because things are different when they are in your hand. Simon said that testing a mobile is different from testing in a lab because you never know where or how people are actually using their mobile. For example, they might be driving, a big no-no, but a situation you cannot test in a lab.
How is mobile design different from web design? Simon said people have a shorter attention span for mobile.
How do you gauge a good design? John talked about saving clicks being important. They also consider trying to have no two adjoining letters on the same key in URLs. He said that .net is easier to enter on a phone than .com. Simon mentioned that deeply listed menus are a problem because people get distracted. Anita mentioned session time: try to move the user along in about 3 to 5 seconds. Break it up in smaller steps.
How do you help people back into an application when they get a phone call? Anita says they call it graceful failure. They ask people if they want to continue with what they were doing before. John said you cannot expect a users to do a whole series of actions because they are doing so many other things. Nothing unnecessary can be included.
There was a question about emailing photos and text from a phone. It seems that isn’t much of a problem teaching people how to do it, at least in the US. Of course, mobile designers are not thinking about a US market. Their efforts are global.
The panel was very focused on building apps for mobile devices and most of the questions were in that vein.
Growth of Microformats
Tantek Celik, Michael Kaply, Francis Berman, Glenn Jones.
Tantek began by giving the history of microformats by tee shirt. For each bit of history, he stripped off another tee shirt to reveal the next tee shirt. He must have been quite warm with all those tee shirts on at the start of the panel.
Michael talked about his Firefox operator extensions that use microformats. He demoed using microformats to find events, google maps, friends, and all sorts of relationships and connections. The microformat uses rel attributes for this. The Operator extension helps you use the information that is on a page. The Operator extension also has a microformat debugger.
Glenn talked abut backnetwork that lets people use microformats to provide information about events. He also described some ways to college hReview information with RSS and to automate collecting hCard information from one site to another.
Francis talked about microformats.org. She explained how new ideas for microformats are submitted. One of the keys to the success of microformats is to limit the number of them, not to have hundreds.
Then the Q & A period opened.
In response to one question, Jeremy Keith came up from the audience and did a demo showing how an hCard from a web page could be added to a phone or iPod address book and could also be used to make a phone call.
Someone asked if microformats were being tested for accessibility. The answer was yes.
Bullet Tooth Web Design
Dan Cederholm introduced Jason Santa Maria, and Andy Clarke
They took us through a snatch, a sting and a heist. The snatch is a quick job. A sting is a little more elaborate. Your confidence trick is to be 100% sure that you are satisfying the motivation of the client. The perfect heist is the big job that everyone wants and everyone sees–it makes you famous. Large teams are needed for the perfect heist. You must do your homework and your planning. Know everything about everybody who is involved. Get a crew of specialists. Then hire your muscle–those people who carry a stamp of authority. Make a plan. Communicate. Be prepared to deal with unplanned stuff. Be ready to cut and run if it looks like it isn’t going to work out. Take the payoff and run. Don’t leave any loose ends behind to trip you up. That’s how you make it bullet proof.
The invisible blogosphere
I was a bit late for this, but he was quoting incorrect predictions that said that blogs would not last when I got in.
The invisible blogosphere is made up of privacy (by obscurity, intranet blogs, etc.) A massive number of people are writing undiscovered blogs. Foreign language blogs: Live Journal use in Russia is not far behind the use in the US. Use in Japan is massive, particularly for moblogging. Then there is China and India.
Some services allow you to publish publicly or privately. Flickr or Facebook, for instance.
Many companies are just discovering what blogs can do inside the firewall. It is used for communication, workgroup cooperation, and internal marketing. It’s revolutionizing the way corporations are communicating.
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SXSWi Sunday report
Here’s a recap of the few sessions I was able to attend on Sunday. My own panel was on Sunday, so that cuts out some of what I could attend.
Accessibility wars: A report from trenches
Sharron Rush, Shawn Henry from the W3C, Bob Regan.
The discussion was about the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). They showed captioned video of people saying what they wanted from WCAG. A few people they quoted were Jeffrey Zeldman, Molly Holzschlag, Jen Taylor, Eric Meyer, Jim Craig, John Slatin, and others.
Bob talked about some of the tension between theory and practice where WCAG is concerned. Several of the commenters from the videos mentioned that WCAG does not translate into practical terms. There’s no set of clearly stated rules that a person can be expected to follow. But he also pointed out that when programs are created for designers that make accessibility possible (in Flash, for example) then designers have to actually take the responsibility to do what is possible.
Bob talked about the fact that the industry is moving faster than the standards can keep up, but this is a good thing because if the standards were there before the kinks were worked out of new technologies, then there would be no innovation to improve.
Shawn said WCAG is a technical spec, not a place where you send beginners. WCAG pulls together knowledge, techniques and how people interact with the web around the world. It is trying to create a single standard to implement.
WCAG is not meant for the average web developer to use every day. It’s designed for web authoring and evaluation tool developers. And for accessibility experts to use as a standard when testing. So what is needed is better authoring tools that do more toward helping designers and developers move toward accessibility. There is a checklist associated with WCAG that is useful to make sure that you have included everything you need in a web site.
One place for people to get started with WCAG is a with a document that explains WCAG. Start with the overview document. There is a Quick Reference that can get you started linked to on overview page.
Jeffrey asked from the audience if you can evaluate accessibility. Bob answered yes and then immediately no. For example, you can tell in Dreamweaver whether you put alt text in. But who is to say if it’s good or bad alt text. So there’s got to be some human brain power added to the evaluation. Sharron said there is a simple question to answer to evaluate yourself. Can every person get the same content from your web page that a visual user can get? If the answer is yes, then your page is accessible.
Ten minutes left and a huge line at the microphone. Lots of interest in the topic. Q & A ensues . . .
Non-developers to Open Source Acolytes: Tell Me Why I Care
Elisa Camahort, Dawn Foster, Annalee Newitz, Erica Rios
This a BlogHer sponsored panel to help people understand how or why open source is important to the non-programmer geek who is an everyday technology user.
Annalee explained what open source is. Just a list of commonly used open source software says a lot: Firefox, OpenOffice, GNU/Linux, BSD, WordPress, Apache, Rails, PHP. Open source material is distributed free and the source for the software is available.
Open source comes from a community of people who are cooperating on a project. But it isn’t a free-for-all. There’s often a hierarchy of leaders, members who change code, and people who use the software and report bugs. Not all of the contributors are actually writing code; some may submit logo designs or write documentation.
Does open source have customer support? Erica talked about how customer support is part of what her job is at the Anita Borg Institute. Many companies exist that provide support for open source as a way of making money around open source. You don’t pay to license the software, but may pay for support or documentation or other services can be purchased as needed around that free software. Dawn pointed out that free as in free software is freedom as opposed to the free in free beer which means no cost.
Philosophical reasons to support open source? Annalee said there were good technological reasons which should be foremost. But it’s also ethical to choose a solution that benefits the most people. When a product is created by a community of people donating their time, you get a higher quality. People care about it and own it. Dawn mentioned the voting process and how open source code would make the voting machine process transparent. The transparency of open source is a big advantage. Erica talked about how open source offers access to everyone, espcially women. There are systemic barriers to women in technology fields. Open source removes those barriers to all people, not only to women. It allows anyone to contribute to the scientific revolution that is affecting our economy.
Keynote: Phillip Torrone and Limor Fried
They showed some of the devices made by "makers" who are people whose innovative ideas are featured in Make Magazine. On Make Magazine, people share schematics, hardware, data sheets, parts lists and recipes for their innovations as open source information. Except this is an open source hardware movement. Some were highly creative.
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