HTML Archives - Page 16 of 31

Useful Links: The future of the web, shared passion, valuable blogs

The future of the web, shared passions about web education, and the most valuable blogs. More . . .

A battle of Beliefs: RDF, Natural Language Processing, and the future of the web at Burningbird pulls together information about HTML 5, RDF, the past, present and future—all with insight. Give it a look.

Shared Passion by Derek Featherstone shows that I’m not the only person who had a great time at Web Directions North 2009. He comments,

The premise was simple: bring together educators, web professionals and industry representatives to create a kind of think tank on improving the quality of education for the next generation of web professionals.

If you care about the things that Derek mentioned, check out the Web Standards Project Education section and see where you can help.

The Twenty-Five Most Valuable Blogs from 247 Wall Street talks about the blogs that generate the most income and views, although they say themselves that it’s impossible to assign a value to a blog.

Report from WDN 09: Educating the Next Generation of Web Professionals

Live blogging the first morning session . . .

This is a full day workshop about educating web professionals. People involved in the presentation include Chris Mills, Stephanie Troeth, Aarron Walter, and Bill Cullifer. Others involved include Dave Shea, Derek Featherstone, Jeffrey Brown, Glenda Sims and Leslie Jensen-Inman.

Chris Mills from Opera explained that we are all here because we care about training web professionals. He’s the standards evangelist at Opera and was instrumental in developing the Opera Curriculum.

The speakers introduced themselves and then there was time spent finding out about the people attending and why they are here.

Steph talked about the fact that although it’s easy to implement a web page, it’s difficult to do it well. Aarron mentioned that education needs help keeping up. Industry needs to reach out. Adequate and appropriate materials were also mentioned.

Available right now is the Opera Curriculum. Coming soon is WaSP Interact. This will be public March 16 and will be the WaSP Curriculum Framework. These two projects dovetail in that the courses are based on competencies, with related assignments and evaluation rubrics for each assignment.

They handed out a pamphlet full of example assignments from the WaSP Interact curriculum. There was a markup assignment, a presentation assignment, a scripting assignment and an accessibility assignment. Each assignment contained a description of the assignment requirements for the student’s use, and sample answers. There were other assignment ideas for related work, plus a list of books and articles to assign related to the assignment.

Mike Smith on Markup

Mike Smith talked about markup. Semantic markup is markup that encodes meaning into content. Semantic markup transforms a document into an information source. The information becomes usable in unanticipated ways when the structure is reusable. In addition, semantic markup is portable in the sense that it isn’t specific to a particular device but works across a range of devices and contexts. Accessible markup does not exclude users of any particular class. The same techniques that make markup semantic also make it accessible. He talked about using class names and id values well so that markup is maintainable.

There are two syntaxes for storing documents: text/html or XML syntax (XHTML). Don’t serve machine-generated XHTML with a text/html MIME type because it may not work in every situation. And, don’t use self-closing tags served as text/html. HTML doesn’t enforce much structure on documents. Therefore, authors need to build structure in consistent ways, e.g., make good use of heading elements and div elements. Use other structural elements such as microformats and RDFa. Do it earlier rather than later. Some examples of adding semantic meaning that might be useful include adding title attributes to <a> elements to help people decide whether or not to click on a link.

Smith talked about the controvery over the use of the alt attribute with the img element. He mentioned that an image can be used for different purposes, and the alt text should be appropriate for the purpose the image serves in a particular context. Good alt text writing is a major needed skill. He’s on the side of the argument that says alt text does not need to be a required part of the schema but that WCAG should list alt text as a requirement. Interesting way to approach the idea and one I need to ask him more about later.

Smith talked about definition lists. He said they are for associating ideas and don’t necessarily have to be lists, as such.

In HTML 5 <em> will be emphatic stress and <strong> will be strong importance, if the current draft becomes a reality. He also mentioned that in HTML 5 <i> and <b> may be given some sort of semantic meaning as opposed to the strictly presentational use they now have. This is not a done deal yet either. He said the HTML 4 spec that said to use <cite> for names of people is wrong and <cite> should not be used to markup names of people.

He said SVG is going to be massively important in the future.

Review: Universal Design for Web Applications

by Web Teacher

Universal Design for Web Applications: Web Applications That Reach Everyone (Amazon affiliate link)

★★★★★ Universal Design for Web Applications by Wendy Chisholm and Matt May is from O’Reilly (2008). This is a great little book. It manages to take a new approach to accessibility that includes HTML, CSS, scripting, AJAX, RIAs and does it briefly in a clear and simple way. A perfectly accessible book.

Anyone teaching HTML, CSS, scripting, AJAX, RIA or topics such as creating iPhone apps should have this book on hand. The thing I like most about this book is that it does so much with so little space. I didn’t really learn anything new about accessibility—I’m fairly well informed on the topic. But someone who was not already knowledgeable could get the essentials with ease from this book. Although the authors stress that the book is not a WCAG 2.0 tutorial, they also make it clear that the information in the book can be used to achieve Level A success with WCAG 2.0.

If every student coming out of a class on HTML, CSS, scripting, AJAX, or some RIA had the background in this small book, the web would be well on the way to universally accessible.

Here’s a look at the table of contents:

Introduction to Universal Design
Selling it
Metadata
Structure and Design
Forms
Tabular Data
Video and Audio
Scripting
Ajax and WAI-ARIA
Rich Internet Applications
The process

There’s also an appendix with a cross-reference to universal design for web applications that uses 20 questions based on Level A Success Criteria on WCAG 2.0 specs.

Summary: Easy, practical, and comprehensive. Good for reference or a course in accessibility.

Technorati Tags: Universal Design, book reviews

Summary of eHow articles for December

The bare trees of December reveal a full moon rising over the Sandia Mountains. Happy holidays!

These are the articles I posted at eHow this month.

In the article called How to Have a Website on a Budget, you’ll find a list of every article I’ve posted at eHow up to now that talks about sites that provide free web design and hosting plans.

Useful Links: History of HTML, end of life for print?, social media and recorded history, slowblogging, and Useful Links in general

HTML History on the ESW Wiki at the w3.org site may be useful to teachers. I can’t find any explanation of what ESW means, but the wiki purpose is

for connecting the people who make the specs with the people who build on them. Pages here have no formal status but may have WikiConsensus. Questions & answers here may be misleading, or just plain wrong. Or, they may be useful.

There’s an RSS feed.

PC Magazine Goes Web Only. It started in 1982. The last print issue will be Jan. 09. This is on the heels of similar announcements from US News and World Report and Christian Science Monitor. The times, they are a changin’.

5 Ways Social Media Will Change Recorded History by Ben Parr at Mashable talks about how the plethora of available information created by social media will change recorded history. One of his conclusions:

It’s often said that history is recorded by the victors. Now history is recorded by computers and anybody can pick up that data and come to their own conclusion. The study of history will dramatically change as more and more people use and rely upon social media for daily interaction. No diary, history book, or recording can compare to the data available through social media. My belief is that social media may prove to be as pivotal as the printing press in the study of history.

Haste, Scorned. Blogging at a Snail’s Pace about a movement toward slowblogging. Slowbloggers post less and think more deeply. One comment really struck me as significant:

Technology is partly to blame. Two years ago, if a writer wanted to share a link or a video with friends or tell them about an upcoming event, he or she would post the information on a blog. Now it’s much faster to type 140 characters in a Twitter update (also known as a tweet), share pictures on Flickr, or use the news feed on Facebook. By comparison, a traditional blogging program like WordPress can feel downright glacial.

In evaluating my own blogging habits in light of the paragraph just quoted, I thought about my Useful Links posts. These really are a kind of mental bookmarking process for me, a way to keep what I want to remember here in one place. But I’m using Tumblr to store links I know I’ll want to return to for one reason or another. I’m using StumbleUpon to share links to pages that I think are excellent and worthy of notice by others. I’m using Twitter to share links and stay in contact with people. Should these useful links posts be retired from service? Are they at the end of life just like the print magazines mentioned earlier?

Are these posts of useful links only useful to me, or do you find them helpful as well?

Summary of eHow articles for November

Every fall the sandhill cranes return to the Rio Grande bosque and the wetlands along the Rio Grande for wintering. Watching them is a favorite annual activity. This year my Tai Chi instructor suggested we do Tai Chi with the cranes in an Open Space area near the river. A previous Open Space visitor left behind this small toy, which seemed to do Tai Chi with us, at least the lift hands part of the form.

In between several days a week of Tai Chi, I wrote these articles for eHow.

Another great place to observe the sandhill cranes and a multitude of other wintering birds is the Bosque del Apache Wildlife Refuge, near Socorro. For those of you not from the southwest, bosque is Spanish for wood or woodland. The term is used here to mean any low-lying area near the Rio Grande, densely forested with cottonwoods and other deciduous trees.

Findability: Is your blog as findable as possible?

Everyone has heard of search engine optimization, right? But have you heard of findability? I hadn’t, until recently.

The term “findability” seems to originate with Peter Morville, who published a book called Ambient Findability in 2002. Blogger DonnaM wrote about it in 2004 in Usability testing for findability. Jakob Neilsen wrote about it in 2006 in Use Old Words When Writing for Findability. In 2008, I happened to read Building Findable Websites: Web Standards, SEO, and Beyond by Aarron Walter and I got very excited about how simple changes to my blog might make it more successful.

In fact, when I wrote Review: Building Findable Websites on my blog, I said,

Building Findable Websites: Web Standards, SEO, and Beyond by Aarron Walter (New Riders, 2008) is one of those rare books that is so full of good ideas, it makes me enthusiastic about what I can do when I put the book down and go work on my blog or website.

As Walter defines it, findability includes accessibility, usability, information architecture, development, marketing, copywriting, design, and, oh yeah, search engine optimization. Walter continues to try to popularize the concepts, and recently published Findability, Orphan of the Web Design Industry at A List Apart. He starts right off with the orphan metaphor and works it all the way through:

Once upon a time in a web design agency, there lived a sad little boy named Findability. He was a very good boy with a big heart for helping people…

* find the websites they seek,
* find content within websites, and
* rediscover valuable content they’d found.

He used his arsenal of talent for planning, writing, coding, and analysis to create websites that could connect with a target audience.

A bit later in the article he sums up findability as,

The fundamental goal of findability is to persistently connect your audience with the stuff you write, design, and build. When you create relevant and valuable content, present it in a machine readable format, and provide tools that facilitate content exchange and portability, you’ll help ensure that the folks you’re trying to reach get your message.

What are some of specific techniques for findability discussed in the book? The book talks about markup strategies, which include web standards, accessbility, and microformats.

In terms of web standards, that means to separate stucture (the (X)HTML) from presentation (the CSS) from behavior (the JavaScript) to create sites that are accessible both humans and machines. Use modern code that follows the rules and check how you’re doing with a validator. Use alt attributes with images, encode characters, use tags that communicate semantically by making page hierarchy clear. There are a number of other markup tips such as which tags are essential and whether or not to use meta tags. Regarding images, get rid of image maps, and if you replace headings with snappy looking images make sure you do it accessibly. Microformats include hCalendar, hCard, hReview, hResume and others. These are nothing more than standardized ways to present certain information with HTML and CSS that the search engines (and a lot of other apps) recognize. I’ve been using hReview on Web Teacher for some time now. I can verify that reviews I write this way make the search engines very happy.

In terms of server-side strategies, the book talks about building file structure, 404 pages, URLS, and server optimization for speed. It discusses naming everything from the domain name to files, folders, and URLs. There’s advice for moving pages or whole domains and how to use redirects and custom file-not-found pages to keep them findable in the new location.

Creating content that drives traffic is another important aspect of findability. Walter says quality content is on topic, fills a niche, conveys passionate interest, is trustworthy, appealing, original and appropriate. There are also many types of content beyond the blog post. You could consider other types of publications such as white papers or articles, links, reviews, recommendations, syndication, and user generated content in comments and forums as part of your content. You can also add RSS feeds from other sources such as Last.fm, Flickr, job sites, events and other worthy feeds to your content.

Of course, most of us here are concerned with blog findability. The strategies include regular posting, linking and trackbacks, original templates, post titles, archives, topics, and special sections on the blog for things like popular posts and recent posts.

Be sure your site has a search feature. If you use Ajax, Flash, audio and video be sure you are not locking out some of your potential readers. If you have a normal web site and not a blog, try to build a mailing list so that you can contact readers and lure them back to the site regularly.

Merely summarizing the high points here created quite an imposing list of things to do. Fortunately, Walter thought through which actions are the most important and beneficial for you. The final chapter in the book tells you how to prioritize the changes you may need to make and helps you tackle them starting with the most useful first.

I happen to know Aarron Walter. We work together on a curriculum project for the Web Standards Project. I contacted him about this article and asked him to identify the two most important things a blogger could do to improve findability. Here’s his response:

1. Customize your permalink structure to include keywords in your URLs. Many blog platforms make it easy to define the structure of each blog post URL. Ideally you want each URL to contain the same keywords as those in your post title.

2. Define your update services. When you publish on your blog, it automatically notifies (called a ping) many tracking services instantly so your content gets indexed by search engines and various other services. Be sure to define which update services your blog should notify. WordPress keeps a comprehensive list of the top updates services at http://codex.wordpress.org/Update_Services.

Helpful resources for making your blog more findable:
– Aarron Walter’s site: free download of Findability Strategy Checklist
– Findability Checklist
– A Blog Not Limited: Getting Semantic With Microformats, Part 1 the first of a series on microformats by Emily Lewis
– SEO Blog: 10 Coding Guidelines for Perfect Findability and Web Standards
– SEO Blog: The 10 Worst Findability Crimes Committed by Web Designers & Developers
– BlogHer: Melanie Nelson’s Basic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Tactics

Cross posted at BlogHer.