There are so many posts about HTML 5 and RDFa flying around these days that it’s hard to keep up with them all. But here’s one that takes a different approach, Burningbird’s Maxwell’s Silver Hammer: RDFa and HTML5’s Microdata.
I found this wonderful video among PBS’s Digital Nation videos. Charlotte Ashurst McDaniel explains how digital tools have changed her life for the better.
I suspect that many of us have stories about how digital tools have changed our lives.
This blog changed my life. In the late 1990s and early in the current century, I was teaching basic HTML and web page creation with Dreamweaver in a community college. I couldn’t find a book I liked. In those years, now familiar concepts such as web standards, symantic HTML, using CSS to create the appearance of a web page, and accessibility were all under heated discussion. I became a believer early on—partly because of my frequent attendance at SXSW Interactive where I sat at the feet of people like Eric Meyer, Molly Holzschlag, and Jeffrey Zeldman while they talked about what they were doing.
Being a believer and trying to teach that way were almost incompatible in those days. The books at the time were still teaching table-based layouts, font-tag appearance controls and other not so wonderful techniques. I decided that I needed to go public with my complaints about the books that were available, and I started this blog. That was in about 2001.
The book reviews I post now are generally fairly positive. The wheel has turned. But for several years after 2001, they were very negative. I began to hear from publishers and writers. I was asked to look at tables of contents, to review chapters, to comment on proposed work. I was asked to write teacher’s editions. I did all those things and soon realized I’d made contacts within the world of computing book publishers.
I used those contacts to find out where to submit a proposal for a book of my own. I had this crazy idea that books should teach HTML and CSS at the same time. When a student learned a tag, they also learned how to present it with CSS. I truly did not want to make students learn a whole lot of useless HTML (like font tags) for the first half of a semester and then be told to forget all about it at the end of the semester when CSS was introduced. Learn both at once. I found a publisher–Sybex–who accepted the proposal. Sybex came up with the idea of calling it “Integrated” HTML and CSS.
I wrote the book from a teacher’s perspective. I’m not a computer science person—I’m not a programmer. I pulled together the best ideas for teaching I could and applied it to learning HTML and CSS.
So I had my own book, thanks to my blog. Publishers asked me to do more jobs: tech edit other people’s books. Write a second edition of my own book. Help other writers with their Dreamweaver books. Be the writer for a Dreamweaver book. In my own small way, I put the best web standards based material I can out into the world.
Then, a couple of years ago at SXSW, I met Aarron Walter. He talked about the notion that the Web Standards Project Education Task Force should get some volunteers together to work on a web standards based curriculum. I got involved in that. It seems to me now that this is where I was headed all the time. Because that involvement, that project, that group of people, may make a big difference in web education. The WaSP Edu Task force created a curriculum and called it InterAct. At this time, the first round of courses for the InterAct Curriculum are online. More courses are in development. The core group from InterAct have expanded to include business, education and schools in a just-forming group at the W3C called The Open Web Education Alliance (OWEA). OWEA will bring industry and education together in pilot projects, education projects, outreach projects and in many other ways that will impact the education of web professionals in the future. One of those projects is the Web Education Rocks tours, which bring web standards professional educators to a location near you for training.
My blog changed my life. Dreams I didn’t even know I had are part of my life, part of many lives, part of the future of web education.
How has digital technology changed your life? I know you have a story. Please share it.
Diagnostic Styling Reloaded from Jens Meiert provides a bookmarklet that uses CSS to highlight accessibility issues on a web page. It points out things like deprecated elements, layout tables, missing alt attributes, style attributes and more.
Peachpit Interview with Zoe M. Gillenwater talks about Zoe’s new book Flexible Web Design and all sorts of web design issues. (Work alert: the podcast plays automatically and there are no controls to pause or change the volume.)
Collecta is a real-time search tool. It’s in beta. It checks news sites, social media streams and “popular” blogs. Take a look and see if you find it useful.
Echo is another beta you may want to check out. Echo is embedded in your site and gives you all sorts of social media features and tracking abilities.
Bruce Lawson from Opera talks about HTML 5 at OSCON in a 43 minute video. A little history of HTML 5, an explanation of the new elements, and a makeover of Bruce’s blog with HTML 5. It’s worth your time to watch.
Bruce mentions HTML 5 Demos and Examples at the end of the talk. Thought I’d provide a link in case you don’t last all the way through the video.
NFB files Section 508 complaint against Small Business Administration is another in a string of suits by the National Federation for the Blind to get web developers to wake up to accessibility. It’s a shame that we have to do this one lawsuit at a time when the information on how to do it right is available everywhere and is so old it’s practically ancient.
★★★★★ Foundation Website Creation with CSS, XHTML, and JavaScript by Jonathan Lane, Meitar Moscovitz and Joseph R. Lewis is from Friends of ED (2008). I recommend this book. It is not the usual heavy dose of XHTML and CSS that I normally like. This book is more comprehensive. It begins with a history of the web, chapters on project management and planning, covers the basics of XHTML, includes both a basic and a more advanced chapter on CSS, goes into JavaScript basics, and finishes up with a look at testing, launching, Ajax, social software and server-side technology.
Chapter 4 is Writing Markup with HTML and XHTML. In about 50 pages, the authors managed to cover the most important facts of HTML and do it in a standards-based way. The first CSS chapter is Chapter 5, Exploring Fundamental Concepts of CSS. Chapter 6 goes into more detail with Developing CSS in Practice From Design to Deployment. Then Chapter 7 covers Creating Interactivity with JavaScript. Surrounding those four key chapters is a complete manual on the management, planning, business use, and deployment of a website. The book has 10 chapters with an afterword called The Business of the Web, but don’t be fooled into feeling that the basics are overlooked. They aren’t. Chapter 6, the one with more detail about CSS is 70 pages long. However, including the rest of the concepts needed to successfully build and maintain a website along with the basics gives his book a real edge in terms of usefulness.
I think it would be a good book for an introductory or overview class. As soon as I finish writing this review, I’m headed over to the WaSP InterAct Curriculum site to add it to my list of recommended readings there.
One small point that prickled a bit. Several chapters conclude with a “Profiling Profession” section about a real person. All the real people are men. I know the three authors have worked with some women who could have been profiled. They even mentioned some in the Acknowledgments. If this book were a tech conference with three male speakers who only talked about the work of other men, I would urge people not to attend. But it isn’t a conference, it’s a book. Therefore, this is just a small complaint about a book that is excellent overall.
Web Design Education Sucks at Boagworld starts a discussion about what’s wrong with the current state of web design education and offers some suggestions for change. Go participate in the discussion.
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