Month: March 2006

SXSWi: How to Convince Your Company to Embrace Web Standards

This is a panel of folks from AOL and Time, Inc. (except Kimberly Blessing) This always surprises people because AOL has adopted standards. The panelists are Kimberly Blessing, Kevin Lawver, Steve Chipman, Alla Gringaus, Arun Ranganathan.

Kevin said that often the people trying to bring change from a large organization feel like pirates who are operating in rebellion. He said that finding a manager to support your efforts and keeping things positive rather than negatively is important.

Arun explained how AOL worked with people like banks and Firefox and other outside groups to help spread the message about standards. He said that the job is not finished yet, and he continues to work on W3C initiatives and AOL’s operation on all browsers.

Kimberly worked previously with AOL on the ecommerce segment. She quickly realized that using standards to create templates for the site would help make the site useable to everyone. Changes were made in small increments. Later she began a training program because it was so hard to find people who were trained in using standards. She brought industry experts in to do training.

Alla advises finding out what matters to your target. Listen to people and only talk to them about the parts of the process that pertain to their particular goals. She mentioned a site they just launched called Office Pirates.

Steve talked about helping introduce people to the standards community and connecting them with the blogs to read. It also helps to give people examples of how sites built with standards compare with sites that don’t in terms of bandwidth, accessibility and appearance.

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WaSP Annual Meeting

Jeffrey Zeldman gave some history to start off the first open WaSP annual meeting. Obviously, the early efforts of this group have made a big difference. As soon as IE7 is on board, every modern browser will support standards fairly well.

The Aussie from Stylemaster (John Allsop) encouraged everyone to remember that the first browser that supported CSS was IE3. Allsop said his only claim to fame is that he introduced Eric Meyer and Jeffrey Zeldman back when WaSP was trying to organize and find people to help promote their programs. WaSP worked because it effectively offered free consulting to the browser makers. They picked 10 things that really needed fixing and presented the list to Microsoft. Then they did Opera and later Netscape. They worked to be helpful rather than critical. This is a great model for a way to effect change. He said that the reason CSS works today is because of the early WaSP group of only 10 people.

Andy Clarke announced a new web site launch today for the WaSP site. Zeldman cut the virtual ribbon to launch it. The site was built by a group of designers working together. It uses WordPress.

Molly said that the new web site offers comments. Feedback has been important to growth and progress and like this first open meeting, the open comment function on the site brings a new era in the way things are done. In other words, they are inviting discussion and even more feedback.

The individual WaSP members introduced themselves. That was in process as I had to leave.

Photos at Flickr

SXSWi: WaSP Task Force: Getting the Job Done Right

This panel includes Molly Holzschlag, Drew McClellan, Matt May, Jennifer Taylor, Kimberly Blessing, Chris Wilson, and Dori Smith.

WaSP’s push for better standards support in browsers has been successful, so now they have moved on to more specialized topics. They have formed task forces to deal with these particular problems. For example, there is a DOM scripting task force, a Dreamweaver task force, and so on.

Molly described the Acid2 test, which was meant to test browsers or rendering agents for HTML, CSS, PNG, etc. This test was sponsored by Opera and written by Opera. This has evolved into a proposal for Acid3 as a rendering agent testing device. Acid3 will be a suite of tests developed collaboratively by a group of software makers, browser makers and others.

Dori talked about the DOM scripting task force. Enough browsers support JavaScript now that it’s time to generate best practices for JavaScript and to treat JavaScript as a real programming language. This task force is primarily, then, talking to client side scripters and trying to educate them about the best ways to implement standards and best practices. They are working toward unobtrusive scripting, which means accessible scripting, graceful degradation, usability is enhanced by the use of JavaScript, and behavior is separated from content in the same way that CSS separates content from presentation.

Jen talked about the Dreamweaver task force. Adobe now understands the importance of standards and accessibility because of this task force and has made decisions for the software tools that make it easier for users to create accessible web designs.

Kimberly discussed the education task force. The objects are to advocate teaching standards in programs that teach web development, IT, MIS, and CIS programs. The second objective is to create the use of standards in academic sites. YEEHAW! Go Kimberly! This task force focuses on outreach and a proliferation project. They also participate in higher ed events that support web development, such as HighEdWebDev. This task force will be putting a series of questionnaires on the WaSP web site to explore the options for progress in the education area.

Chris talked about the Microsoft task force. He wants to help WaSP be successful in guiding Microsoft and has worked on standards within Microsoft since 1995.

Photos at Flickr

Should industry expertise count as a qualification for college instructors?

I was chatting in the hallways with Stephanie Sullivan at SXSW. She is a premier Dreamweaver expert, active at Community MX, an author, and an excellent web designer. But, and here’s the ‘but’ that matters to college HR departments, she doesn’t have a degree. Therefore, the most knowledgeable person in her whole geographic area (Stephanie herself) in the subject of Dreamweaver is not allowed to teach Dreamweaver at her local college.

This trend to exclude real world experience and industry expertise is not limited to the state where Stephanie lives. I’ve seen it elsewhere, too. Perhaps that explains why college course work doesn’t seem to be able to keep pace with the latest knowledge and what industry considers best practices in web design.

I suggest that in a fast changing field like web design where technology changes are rapid and constant, using people with real world/industry expertise is a good idea. Heaven knows that full-time college faculty have very little time to spend on keeping up with technological change. Maybe the need to accept industry experience isn’t true of disciplines like history or math, but in terms of web design, it seems like an important idea to embrace.

SXSWi: Web Standards and SEO

Aaron Gustafson, Eric Meyer, and Ed Shull are the panelists for this one. They began by talking about the people who try to cheat their way to good search engine ranking. The search engines usually catch up with this sooner or later and the sites get banned from rankings. Using standards and ethical methods usually work well for SEO.

I’m in the back of the room (need the electricity) and I cannot tell who is talking, so I’m just going to quote in general most of the time.

Ed said to be sure to use a good title. They all stressed writing good copy and making the page valuable enough so that people would want to link to it. Adhering to accessibility guidelines for descriptive anchor tag text and not using ‘click here’ is also a good practice. Regarding title attributes for links as opposed to alt text, make sure that the alt text is useful. Eric did say that when he uses title attributes, he often makes it a joke or something sarcastic, but that he makes sure the alt text is descriptive.

They discussed the h1 element and how it should be used. Many try to make the h1 element match the page title. The h1 should reflect the content of the page.

Sometime the search engines have marginalized the fine points. So for an issue like the hierarchy of heading elements, they suggested using your best judgement.

Following accessibilty guidelines unlocks content and makes it available to the search engines. Good page titles, good navigation, and good anchor text are the lowest hanging accessibility fruit to be grabbing first.

Do sitemaps help? Yes, they provide links to every page for the search engines, and they provide another opportunity for good anchor text.

Can microformats help with SEO? They have potential as a way of adding semantic value that enable particular kinds of searches. As soon as one of the big search engines embrace microformats, then a search something like looking for only the resumes of people who are friends of Jeffrey Zeldman becomes a possibility. This sounds like what Liz Henry was talking about in our butt kicking panel, in looking for a way to identify female bloggers: maybe the answer is microformats.

How can we spread the word that using standards will help SEO? One guy suggested sky writers! More seriously, doing things the right way has a payoff and benefit in terms of search engine rankings so it is a self-enhancing practice.

SXSWi: CSS Problem Solving

This bound-to-be-popular panel is in one of the bigger rooms. The panel is Tiffany B. Brown, Ethan Marcotte, Christopher Schmitt, Dave Shea and Charles Wyke-Smith.

The premise is to expand the Q and A to be the entire program rather than just a bit at the end. They had asked for questions in a survey posted before the conference. The top problems from the survey were browser compatibility and page layout and/or columns.

There were hack management tips from Tiffany. She explained some basics about inheritance, specificity and the cascade before she got into hack management. It really reminds me of the way I explained it in my book. (Wonder if she’s read my book?) She used an inverted pyramid model to talk about hack management. She suggested putting hacks in a separate stylesheet and make that the last stylesheet requested by the browser.

Ethan talked about layout strategies. He demo’ed a few layouts using absolute positioning. He talked about positioning context by positioning an element and then using absolute positioning for the elements within it. This is more about micro-positioning rather than page level layout. This is the type of positioning I described in the tip “Three steps to a two column layout” that I posted a few days ago.

Then he talked about floats and their potential to “mess with you.” Then he described how to use abosolute positioning and floats together.

Charles suggested that you start a layout by thinking about your content instead of thinking about the design.He suggests you correctly and accurately markup your content before you think about styling. Get away from presentation driven idea and think about the underlying structure. I wrote an article posted at the Wise-Women site on this very idea! He mentioned the idea that setting the overflow on floated elements to hidden as a good tip.

Dave’s presentation began with the information that IE7 looks like it is going to support a lot more of the CSS rules than in the past. He showed how to use the :after pseudo selector to generate content. He explained how to make it work in current versions of IE using display: inline-block. He talked about vertical aligning material in a div with CSS, which is a problem area in CSS. He wrapped a div set to display: table and the item in the div is set to display: table-cell. Of course, this doesn’t work in IE. You can see a hacked way to make it work in IE in the online presentation. Last he talked about the margin collapsing problem in Firefox.

Photos at Flickr