Web Teacher » SemanticWeb

Useful links: top 25 books, edu conferences, blue beanie day, semantics, Think Up

vdebolt — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 14:23:57 +0000

The top 25 books for web developers and designers from .net is a good list to check to see if you’re keeping up with the latest. I noticed that several of the 25 are from A Book Apart. That led me to tweet this:

Is there some sort of brain implant that would directly feed every publication from A Book Apart into my brain?Sun Nov 13 17:26:02 via TweetDeckVirginia DeBolt
vdebolt

Oddly, there were people on Twitter who didn’t see the humor in that and suggested I should read the books. With my eyes. Because I don’t want you to worry about me, you should know that I am reading them. With my eyes.

Conferencepalooza suggests some good conferences for high ed folks. Check it out, there might be a great one there. You do know that SXSW is holding a special pre-conference for EDU this year, don’t you? It’s SXSWEDU.

Get out your blue beanie and join Chris in giving thanks for web standards on Nov. 30, 2011 – Blue Beanie Day. Why should we give thanks, Chris asks? Because the bums lost!

Installment 3 in a round robin of posts about semantics. This one from Paul Irish explains enough about the first two that you can follow even if you haven’t read them. (Why haven’t you read them!)

Think Up is new software that Gina Trapani announced was out of beta yesterday. It does all of what I was wishing Twitter would do plus more with Facebook and Google+. It’s installed or your server or can run from the Amazon cloud for a monthly fee. I think Think Up is going to be big.

Useful Links: Simple CSS, semantic web, EE

vdebolt — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 15:12:00 +0000

Chris at CSS Tricks has a great post in Little CSS Stuff Newcomers Get Confused About.

Bing Brings it On (RFDa, that is) at Semantic Web:

Bing webmaster help site that indicates Microsoft wants to play nice with whatever markup approach webmasters want to implement – microdata, microformats, or RDFa. The site mark-up overview on the page referenced says that Bing’s “crawlers do not prefer one specification over another. It’s entirely up to you to decide which of the supported specifications best fits your data.”

Contrast that with Google’s initial commentary about the schema.org structured data markup schema.

If Expression Engine is your thing, or if you want to learn it, check out this series of EE Podcasts from Emily Lewis and Lea Alcantara.

Useful Links: Web3.0, iPad AT and a tribute

vdebolt — Tue, 11 May 2010 13:22:15 +0000

Web 3.0, a documentary movie by Kate Ray describes the semantic web. It’s about 15 minutes long and worth every minute.

iPad Assistive Technology/Disability Round up from ATMac is a great resource list.

I can’t let Lena Horne’s passing go unremarked, even though it’s completely off topic here. A great woman.

Useful LInks: Twitter apps, RDFa, WCAG 2.0

vdebolt — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 12:35:33 +0000

There’s another fun web app to use with Twitter. It’s called Twitter Grader. It isn’t quite as useful as some of the apps growing up around Twitter, but it’s fun to play with and get your “grade.”

RDFa, Drupal and a Practical Semantic Web at CMS Wire is a terrific piece in clear language that explains what a sematic web is and how RDFa fits into that concept. It also will help RDFa newbies grasp what it’s all about.

WebAIM’s WCAG 2.0 Checklist. WebAIM has simplified and organized the WCAG specs into an easy to use format with simplified explanations of how you can meet the standards. This would make a great handout or required reading assignment to add to your students’ reading lists. It could also be useful as a grading rubric for assignments that are required to be accessible.

Useful Links: Twitter Fan Wiki, State of the Web, and an off topic foray

vdebolt — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 14:35:58 +0000

Thanks to a tip from the fabulous Miraz, I discovered the Twitter Fan Wiki and its page of apps that work with Twitter. I was just reading in Macworld yesterday about the Twitterific app for the iPhone, but this page reveals many more choices.

The Gift is a story of mine, totally off topic and only for the incurably curious about me. Published at The Elder Storytelling Place.

A Blog Not Limited reflects on the results of the state of the Web 2008 survey. At a Blog Not Limited, we see,

What surprised me the most (in an entirely unpleasant way) were the findings for use of HTML elements:

Seventeen percent use
Fifteen percent use
Seriously? Someone please explain this to me.

I can explain why I occasionally use and . There are times when I need a presentational effect that does not involve emphasis or strong. I don’t want to give the impression that the marked up text should be more important or in any way distinct. I just want a presentational effect that will be apparent to the majority of users and won’t confuse users with assistive software.

If I don’t have control over the CSS for a site, and I write for a lot of sites where I do not, then how can I achieve benign presentational effects like bold or italic without using or ? Em and strong have semantic meaning that I may not want to attach to text. Therefore, I may resort to bold and italic for appearance sake.

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Useful links

vdebolt — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 17:24:11 +0000

Microformats University – 100+ Articles and Resources is a helpful collection of microformats information.

Semantic Web Patterns: A Guide to Semantic Technologies at Read/Write Web: “The Semantic Web means many things to different people, because there are a lot of pieces to it. To some, the Semantic Web is the web of data, where information is represented in RDF and OWL. Some people replace RDF with Microformats. Others think that the Semantic Web is about web services, while for many it is about artificial intelligence.”

Webkit achieves Acid 3 100/100 in public build from Surfin’ Safari. It is humanly possible, people!

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