Category: WebStandards

W3C Open Web Education Alliance Incubator Group: The Big Reveal

Open Web Education Alliance Incubator Group (OWEA) was announced this week by the W3C.

The mission of the Open Web Education Alliance Incubator Group, part of the Incubator Activity, is to help enhance and standardize the architecture of the World Wide Web by facilitating the highest quality standards and best practice based education for future generations of Web professionals through such activities as

  • fostering open communication channels for knowledge transfer
  • curriculum sharing between corporate entities, educational institutions, Web professionals, and students.

W3C Advisory Committee Representatives may join this XG on behalf of their organizations. Participants are automatically subscribed to the Member list when they join the group. Participants should also subscribe to the public list. Non-Participants may also subscribe.

The goal of this Incubator Group is to bring together interested individuals, companies, and organizations with a strong interest in the field of educating Web professionals, to explore the needs and issues around the topic of Web development education. This Incubator Group will detail the options for establishing a group dedicated to bringing Web standards and best practices to the process of educating future professionals in Web professions, no matter where this training and education might be provided, and will define the goals, activities, and a clear mission for such an organization, and will seek to establish this organization’s viability and role.

This Incubator Group has been initiated by various independent projects and organizations such as the Opera Developer Community, Yahoo! Developer Network/Juku, Web Directions, Web Standards Project (WaSP) InterAct Curriculum, World Organization of Webmasters (WOW), and other groups, as a united forum within which to pursue their shared goals of improved Web development education.

John Allsopp is the initial chair of the group.

W3C initiating members are

Review: HTML and CSS Web Standards Solutions

by Web Teacher
get this book at Amazon

HTML and CSS Web Standards Solutions: A Web Standardistas’ Approach (Amazon affiliate link)

★★★★ HTML and CSS Web Standards Solutions: A Web Standardistas’ Approach by Christopher Murphy and Nicklas Persson is from Friends of ED (2009). The thing I like most about this book is also the thing I like least about it. That thing is the book’s organization. The first half of the book is devoted entirely to a complete intensive in semantic, standards-based HTML. Although some things are treated a little superficially (such as making tables accessible), for the most part a person could become very good at semantic HTML after going through this part of the book.

The second half of the book looks at CSS. Again, the book is really thorough about the basics and the use of best practices in writing and using CSS. However, it isn’t until Chapter 13 that the topic of using an exernal style sheet is introduced. There’s a chapter after that with references to good resources, but basically the book is over after Chapter 13.

I like that every part of HTML and CSS is covered from a web standards viewpoint. This book is really good for that. But it bothers me that it takes the book so long to put it all together so that the reader has a complete view of what the process is all about.

If I were teaching a semester class with this book, I would would work around the organization in all sorts of ways. (An individual reader, working through the book on her own, might find the approach excellent.) From a teaching viewpoint, it this would be a great book to have as a secondary resource. The chapter on Images, for example, could be assigned as required reading when you were ready to teach images. The information is thorough, the explanation of alt attributes is helpful: it’s a good chapter.

It’s a good book for working on your own. For classroom use, it’s a good secondary resource.

Summary: Thorough grounding in the basics.

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Standards and Accessibility with Dreamweaver

Yesterday Emily Lewis and I gave a talk for Webuquerque. Here’s  the presentation:  Standards and Accessibility with Dreamweaver.

The slides are posted on Emily’s blog, A Blog Not Limited. Emily explained the principles and goals of developing with web standards and best practices, then I gave some demos in Dreamweaver to show how to implement the standards in that software environment.

Emily shares the leadership of Webuquerque this year with Jason Nakai, who made a video of the presentation. The video will provide some extra context for the slides and show the live demos in Dreamweaver, as opposted to the screen grabs you see in the slides. I’ll let you know when the video is ready.

Double teaming at Webuquerque

Tonight’s meeting of Webuquerque will feature Emily Lewis and myself double teaming on the topics of standards, accessibility and doing it all with Dreamweaver.

I’ll put up a link to tonight’s presentation tomorrow, but for now you can check out a presentation called Achieve Accessibility with Dreamweaver that I gave way back in 2005 to the New Mexico Macromedia Users Group, which was a prequel to Webuquerque. The 2005 version of Dreamweaver lacked many of the new accessibility helps available in CS4, but the principles are still the same.

And, more importantly, the 2005 version of the talk lacked Emily, who has  a great deal to add the topic.

I’ll be bringing a copy of Adobe Dreamweaver CS4 Classroom in a Book to give away with the other schwag.

Hope to see you there.

Useful Links: White House Photos, @import, WCAG2.0

The White House makes another interesting tech move, the latest on @import, get your WCAG2.0 in small doses.

The White House is now on Flickr. Comments are open (we’ll see how that goes) but the images are untitled and untagged at the moment.  I like this example of The President and Secretary Clinton chatting at a picnic table. I personally would like to thank The White House for this and celebrate by thumbing my nose at the AP.

Don’t use @import from High Performance Web Sites explains why @import is as dead as Netscape 4 for adding styles to web sites.

One Guideline a Day. WCAG 2.0 made easy is a great blog. It’s like vitamins, take one a day and soon you’ll be full of vim, vigor and accessibility.

Summary of eHow articles for April

A list of the articles I published on eHow in April. How-to galore.

Spring Flowers

It’s spring. It’s beautiful. It’s renewal, life-affirming renewal. Get outside and take a walk.

Here’s a list of what I published on eHow in April.

Defining front end engineering

Video of Nate Koechle from Yahoo! about what front end developers actually do. The reason I’m hoping you’ll take the time to watch this video is because it so clearly states, from an industry perspective, why the WaSP InterAct curriculum project is so important and what it’s actually about.

Nate Koechle from Yahoo! talks about what front end engineers actually do. Don’t start it unless you have plenty of time to watch, it’s nearly an hour and a half long. But it’s worth it, especially if you are teaching HTML, CSS, JavaScript, web development, or any related class.

The reason I’m hoping you’ll take the time to watch this video is because it so clearly states, from an industry perspective, why the WaSP InterAct curriculum project is so important and what it’s actually about. Industry needs graduates who know what Nate is talking about when they are fresh out of school. InterAct means to help you achieve that goal in your own curriculum.

I found this at Yahoo! Video, where you can find links to other talks by Nate Koechley. Nate is an excellent lecturer, well organized, clear, with well presented material. A lesson can be learned  by educators just from watching how he moves through the long talk and keeps you with him. And, the talk is an outline of what curriculum needs to be.