A few years back I wanted to attend Media Design School. I know a fair few people who have attended the school. They tend to produce some pretty good talent. It’s good to know that these sorts of establishments are starting to teach some proper web technologies. The introduction of Webstandards and CSS development is an awesome step in the right direction - and I believe that they’re going to be introducing a little more emphasis on accessiblity and general best practise…

I know this because I’m going to be guest lecturing at Media Design School this week. I’ll be focusing on advanced CSS and accessibility techniques. If all goes well it could turn into a regular affair.

Needless to say, I’m very bloody excited! I love sharing what knowledge I have with as many people as I can. Teaching the future web developers of NZ will be an honour and a treat. I can only hope that some of my passion for the web will rub off on them!

Yay for the web and the future! :)

I’ve had an article published over at Practical eCommerce Magazine about accessibility on the web.

It’s a non-technical article giving an overview of what accessibility is and how you can get involved by making small changes to your own sites.

So head over to the article: Accessibility - The Wheelchair Ramp to Your Website for a read. Don’t forget to forward it to your bosses, managers, colleagues, etc.

You, too, can make a difference!

Apology

This post is way overdue. Sorry.

Introduction

As I mentioned in the first post in this series I’m going to be talking about the beauty that is Semantic Markup.

Lean, poignant and sexy!

Who remembers the days of spacer gifs, tabled based layouts and tag overload?
Unfortunately you don’t have to look back too far to see this all happening. Many, many, many websites are still built this way. In my opinion it’s total laziness on the part of the web designer.

All it takes is a few days of practice and a bit research and you too could be writing the leanest, sexiest semantic markup.
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Day one started out with Kelly Goto’s keynote on lifestyle design. She covered some interesting topics, the main theme being the way in which we’re trying to make technology more ‘human’. She showed us a few examples of the turning effect - probably the most popular one being the Subservient Chicken.
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Disclaimer

What follows is a mind dump. I’m fully into my job. In fact, it’s more than just a job. The web is a way of life for me. I love, love, love it! Tight markup makes me feel good down there and CSS makes me shout ‘w00t!’ several times a day. So before you read this just know that most of what follows is passion driven. If some facts are incorrect please let me know and I’ll endeavor to correct them.

This is going to be a multi-part post as there is simply too much to chuck out in one go so keep an eye on your RSS reader for updates.

Introduction

The next few posts will be dedicated to what web standards mean to me. I’ll be covering five main topics:

• validating code
• accessible and semantic code
• user centered design
• web applications and apis
• the new paradigm (aka conclusion)

The phrase Web Standards is a bit of a broad one…well at least it’s becoming that way.

About two or three years ago Web Standards were simply a set of guidelines (or standards) that browser vendors would use to help build a more standardized browser. They were also a set of guidelines that web site authors would use to to build more standardised code that would ultimately work in these standardised browsers. It’s wasn’t always this way…

The good ole days?

Back in the early days - the days of Netscape 3, 4 and Internet Explorer 3, 4 - browser vendors would make up their own tags willy nilly. Some of these tags you know only too well: <center>, <blink>, etc…Some others have moved into non-proprietary standards, like <div> and <span>. That in itself wasn’t a problem…the problem was what each of these browsers did with the rendering of these tags…Some browsers wouldn’t show blinking text (and good on ‘em for that!), some browsers wouldn’t know what a div tag was…there had to be some sort of governing body to get some standards in place.

So along came the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium).

“Wait wait!” I hear you say, “the W3C has been around for AAAAAGES!”
“Yes,” you’ll hear me say in response, “but who the hell even knew what it was back then?!”
I’ll tell you - TBL. (I’ve got confused with all this first person/third person thing so I’ll just keep it simple from now on.)

Slowly the voice of the standardites grew louder. More and more people started to realise that standards in this fast growing fledgling industry was a must! Not only for browser vendors but for us HTMLers. Collectively people got fed up with the silly browser wars. It seemed way simpler and smarter to build to a global standard, not a browser vendors standard.

The validating revolution

If you haven’t heard of this revolution then it’s about bloody time you VALIDATE YOUR CODE! Probably the most important part of Web Standards is the physical act of writing code that complies to the standards provided by the W3C.

The first step to writing standards compliant code is to choose a standard to build to. I cant tell you how many web pages I’ve seen that don’t contain a Document Type Definition (DTD). This is step one! These wonderful things tell the browser what markup language you’re writing in. There are several options here, all of which have their pros and cons. I’m not going to get into those - that’s an entirely different blog post.

One should also validate your CSS. This is a sightly different kettle of fish…A vast majority of CSS out there wont validate. The reason for this is because of the CSS hacks people use to get non-compliant browsers to behave. Most of these take advantage of browsers lack of compliance, most of the time that means using some wack combo of comments, made up properties and weird characters.

Valid code makes it so much easier to debug down the line. Most rendering mishaps occur due bad markup. Validating your markup will easily help find those unclosed tags, those incorrect nesting issues and incorrect attributes.

In the next episode…

The next post in the series I’ll be talking a little more about markup and the beauty thereof. In particular I’ll be going over semantic markup, accessibility concerns and source ordering your markup.

Please remember to leave your comments. Tell me what web standards mean to you!

So here I am back in Auckland, trying to get my shit together. The past week has been such a high but now I’m finding it quite a challenge to get all my thoughts in check…

I’ll briefly go over what I enjoyed on day two of the conference. I wont cover all the speakers, just the ones that I was enthused enough to take notes about. As you may remember day one ended at a restaurant with 13 hardcore geeks. Needless to say getting up the next day was a bit of a struggle (thanks to the kingfisher!) but there was a lot of coffee and redbull to keep up going.

• Russell Brown (one of the few NZ speakers) opened up day two with an excellent talk on content and community. Russell Brown has been in the ‘content’ industry for ages, working as a journalist, radio personality and founding Public Address. He started his speech with an audio clip of David Lange’s 1985 Oxford Union debate speech and ended with an excellent video of a Starwars/LoTR mashup. In between he spoke about how content creation is slowly moving away from the mass media and how there’s been a huge turn towards citizen journalism. All in all, a very good talk with a lot of excellent references!
• Russ Weakley who is the founder of the Web Standards Group was next up with a funny and passionate talk entitled: Let go and allow users to control their own experience. For me this was one of the best talks of the conference. Not only is Russ quick-witted and dry, but he really knows his shit. His whole speech was based around this hypothetical situation: “Image you were in control of a large website with inconsistent and unwieldy structure. What if you had total freedom to redevelop the website from the ground up? What would you do?” Russ covered a lot of really interesting and out-there ideas that challenge the way we structure website content. He gave us a whole new paradigm to web design and information architecture. Throw out hierarchy; tag everything (images, text, audio); have users search for the content they’re after and return all the tagged media that related to that search term; allow users to control what they see; allow user submitted content (wikis, comments, tags). A really great way of looking at IA…a little Utopian, but fucken rad, none-the-less.
• Dori Smith - author of several books, magazine contributor, speaker and leader of the Web Standards Organisation’s DOM Scripting task force - a geek extraordinaire gave a brief introduction to unobtrusive javascript. This was a good (albeit entry-level) talk on progressive enhancement and how it pertains to javascript. She showed us how easy it is to convert nasty looking attribute event handlers to beautiful, unobtrusive javascript. The only bad thing about this talk was the fact that there were idiot ego-centric geeks who felt it necessary to point out minor unimportant errors in markup and semantics. FFS!!! Those dicks should have their hands chopped off. Dori, if you happen to read this. I thought your talk was excellent and I look forward to any others you may give in the future!
• Donna Maurer - an amazing speaker from Australia who gave a captivating presentation on usability for rich Internet applications. There are a few basic guidelines that any application should adhere to (including RIA’s.) These are: it should be efficient, effective, satisfying, easy to learn, have good error management and good feedback. Donna went through several screencasts of popular ‘web2.0′ applications and discussed several positive and negative things about them. It was really informative to see these things pointed out. Some thing were as basic as making sure buttons look 3D - this is something computer users learnt years and years ago and keeping these common design/usability trends going really makes for a far superior user experience!
• The rest of the day went in quick a blur…Tony Chor from the IE7 team gave us a demo of IE7 and talked through some of the new features. The thing that struck me about this presentation was the passion and sense of humour Tony exuded. The final presentation was by Kathy Sierra entitled Now Go Change The World. This was an awesome show. She really had the audience in the palm of her hands. At the end of it I was more inspired and psyched about web design than I’ve been in bloody ages. It was great to end on such a high note as it made for an awesome start to an evening of drinking, dancing and schmoozing. Give the geeks some beer and they’ll dance the night away!

An amazing experience! The organisers did such an amazing job. Big big-ups to Mike Brown and the team for pulling off such an awesome event! I cant wait for next year!

technorati tag: webstock

Yeah so I’ve totally dropped the ball on the live blogging thing. There are no power points at our tables so I decided to leave the laptop at home yesterday. Today (on day two) I’m going to give it another go. Hopefully my laptop battery will last…(i doubt it, as I’ve just booted and it’s only got 1h45m left. DAMN!)

Anyway yesterday was fucken awesome! I took a lot of notes so I’ll be turning them into blog posts when I’m attached to the electricity grid. Some highlights:

• Joel on Software is the funniest dude ever!
• Kelly Goto is a lovely, lovely lady - so friendly and such a nerd! (Nerd Core!!! ;) )
• Doug Bowman spoke about common structures (and not just markup, but microformats and semantic id/class thingies)
• Darren Fittler. A visually impaired lawer you showed us how JAWS works. A total eye opener. My new focus is going to be on Accessibility…(will need to get a ver. of JAWS)
• 13 of us - including Doug from Stopdesign, Maxine from Westciv, Peter from wasabi cube, Mike from design.sneak, Justine from User Faction, etc. - all went out for a curry. Check out Manda’s flickr

So far this is the coolest thing I’ve ever attended! I’m SO HOT FOR IT!

technorati tag: webstock

This is what gets me down about the webdev community in New Zealand. Why-o-why would anyone build a web site in these modern times that only works in Internet Exploder?

Cokefridge.co.nz is supposed to be New Zealands answer to the iTunes Store. It fails very very badly. So badly infact that it’s made me unable to write properly. I’m fucking fuming!

I think paying for MP3’s is a really good idea. Dave was just saying he has so many albums of shit music…well so do I. Usually an album has only one or two good tracks and the rest are simply there to make the consumer feel like they’ve spent their money wisely. This is why there is so much music piracy these days. If there was a service (that worked) where I could download and pay for MP3’s I’d use it. I dont mind paying for music thats good. I do mind paying $26 for an album that contains mainly bad music.

Coke - I’m talking to you now: you’ve really, really dropped the ball on this one. I hope all the advertising you’ve paid for makes you bankrupt. I hope your server gets hacked.

I’m embarrassed to be a web developer in New Zealand.

[Here ends the rant.]