The Great Silent Grandmother Gathering

The Great Silent Grandmother GatheringDori Smith contacted me recently about appearing in a panel she is putting together for the SXSW Interactive Conference in March, 2006. The panel topic is about the issue of the comparative invisibility of women in the web design field.

If it didn’t take 15 minutes to read aloud, I’d like to read The Great Silent Grandmother Gathering to the people attending the panel. Not because the book has anything at all to do with web design. It doesn’t. Because the book has a lot to do with the way women think and accomplish things. In this children’s story, a couple of grandmothers standing silently in a park say they are saving the world. Soon other women are standing silently in parks to save the world. Their silence creates change that leads to hope and a better world.

I think a lot of women who run web design companies, write web design books, and host helpful web sites are like these silent grandmothers. They are doing what they are doing without any ado or noise, but the result is change for the better.

Alas, I won’t be reading it aloud at SXSW. But I urge you to check it out anyway and see what it has to say about women’s ways of doing.

Accessibility Tutorial on Wise-Women

I mentioned this article of mine earlier as a presentation I made to a Macromedia users group. Now it has been reprinted at Wise-Women: Tutorial: Achieve Accessibility with Dreamweaver It is the same information (minus some hands-on examples in Dreamweaver I was able to do in a presentation) so if you read it earlier you don’t need to repeat the effort.

How to boost a site’s credibility

The Web Credibility Project – Stanford University: “As
part of the Persuasive Technology Lab, we are investigating such questions as:

  • What
    causes people to believe (or not believe) what they find on the Web?
  • What
    strategies do users employ in evaluating the credibility of online sources?
  • What
    contextual and design factors influence these assessments and strategies?
  • How
    and why are credibility evaluation processes on the Web different from those
    made in face-to-face human interaction, or in other offline contexts?”

In addition to the research results, an email newsletter and credibility teaching materials are available. Qualified academics receive a free two-week credibiity training course outline and materials that go for $1500 commercially.

Personal Reflections

I don’t get no respect, to quote a well-known comedian. Have I made a difference in spite of that?

I’ve been reflecting on the success of my book, which I hoped some colleges would use as an instructional text in basic HTML classes. I’m running with some very big name competition in my effort to gain a foothold in this field. There are highly successful people writing about the same thing I’m writing about–Liz Castro’s HTML book has been a best-seller for years, Eric Meyer has published umpteen books so valuable that he has reached deity status in the area of CSS, Molly Holzschlag has written 30 books on this topic, Lynda Weinman is a whole industry unto herself with books, movies, and CDs that top the charts.

All that makes me one little no-name author with a single book, not so much about a technology, but about how that technology should be taught. As a writer, it feels like being in a bike race with Lance Armstrong.

And yet…and yet.

I see changes in the publications coming out in this field now. New books are moving the chapters teaching the deprecated HTML to the back of the book, instead of teaching it first. New books, in addition to mine, are appearing with both HTML and CSS in the title. Molly released one recently. The CSS Hands on Training book from lynda.com is being written by Eric Meyer. Hopefully, that means no more gawd-awful table structures, font tags mingled with inappropriate CSS, and other "Code View" horrors that were the hallmarks of the Dreamweaver Hands of Training books for quite a while. Liz Castro’s last book, a two chapter masterpiece in Peachpit’s Visual QuickProject series, taught HTML and CSS simultaneously.

Does anyone besides me remember that I was a voice in the wilderness saying that’s the way it ought to be done for a long time before things finally began to change? I don’t think so. I think people have decided that it is so obviously the right way to do things that everyone is doing it now because it is obviously right. Okay, I can accept that. I can live with the idea that I don’t get no respect. It is enough to hold on to the knowledge as a secret satisfaction that I made a small measure of difference in the pedagogy of teaching HTML and CSS. When you are as introverted as I am, secret satisfactions do just fine.

Open source WYSIWYG editor

Here’s an interesting open source tool: Nvu – The Complete Web Authoring System for Linux, Macintosh and Windows Nvu allows page editing using tools based on the Mozilla composer and FTP. It claims to work on any platform and looks promising, although I have not downloaded and tried it myself.

While we’re talking open source, let me not forget Plone, which is an open source content management system with plenty of support and help. Plone works on any platform and is based on Zope, but you don’t have to know Zope to use it.

ADDENDUM May 12, 2011: The developers of Nvu have released a new open source WYSIWYG editor called BlueGriffon that you should look at if you’re looking for free software for web design.