Tips, web design book reviews, resources and observations for teaching and learning web development.
Here’s a comprehensive post on keyword research that would be good to share with students.
I’m always fascinated by stories about what women in the gaming and animation industry do. (My 16 year old grandchild wants to have a career in the field.) Here’s an interview with Brave Shading Art Director Tia Kratter.
Nick Disabato talks about how he works to achieve gender diversity in his industry.
I haven’t had time to writing anything for Web Teacher today because I’ve written two posts for BlogHer.
The first is What I Remember about the 2013 Oscar Show. I figure if Dori can write about the Oscars at Backup Brain, I can too.
The other post is Moms Join Facebook to Creep on Kids. Oh, REALLY, Mashable? This one is about an unrealistic infographic that Mashable published.
Please check them both out.
Derek Featherstone discusses the best way to markup the first instance of an acronym in this Web Standards Sherpa Q&A.
I may finally have to play a game on Facebook. Look at this Half the Sky game which lets you do real good. The NYTimes explains,
The players can then make equivalent real-world donations to seven nonprofit organizations woven into the game.
Ten dollars, for example, will help buy a goat for Heifer International; $20 will help support United Nations Foundation immunization efforts.
One of my students asked me the other day about why she should bother to make an accessible web site if blind people weren’t her audience. I answered her question adequately, but I wish I’d had this nice list of reasons at the time. How does accessible web design benefit all web users?
Latest test results on screen reader support for HTML5 sectioning elements can be found at tink. Almost there in JAWS, but spotty in others.
Here’s a nice infographic that clears up some misunderstandings and misconceptions about the cloud and what it is.
Infographic from a BlogHer Women & Consumer Electronics Study in 2012.
I don’t think I participated in this study, but if I had, I would have come out in philosophical outlook with the Gen X early adopters, which is further proof of how out of line I am with my generation, a generation that is too old to even be called a boomer.
If you have a Posterous blog you are probably concerned about losing your content now that Posterous is closing down. Posterous has systems in place that will allow you to back up your content or export it to another blog.
You can move it all to a wordpress.com blog in a few easy steps.
Opera is moving to WebKit. This means Opera, Safari, and Chrome will all use WebKit. Firefox stays it’s sticking Mozilla’s rendering engine.
In announcing the news, Opera said,
“The WebKit engine is already very good, and we aim to take part in making it even better. It supports the standards we care about, and it has the performance we need,” says CTO of Opera Software, Håkon Wium Lie. “It makes more sense to have our experts working with the open source communities to further improve WebKit and Chromium, rather than developing our own rendering engine further. Opera will contribute to the WebKit and Chromium projects, and we have already submitted our first set of patches: to improve multi-column layout.”
Sometimes having a monopoly on something, even a browser rendering engine, is a bad thing. In this situation, where we are dealing with an open source tool, I think it helps make keeping up with changes easier for everyone. I’m not saying competition isn’t good for innovation, but with open source you eliminate some of that concern for a loss of innovation.
With devices sizes all over the place, and responsive design/responsive images best practices scrambling to keep up, having major browsers all on the same page could be a good thing. Plus, browser prefixes be damned!