I was excited when I heard that CNN was working on a redesign of their Web site and had posted a beta.
What really disappoints me is that they’re still using HTML tables for presentation. Who does that any more?
Plus they have 60 validation errors.
It is just plain unprofessional to not use standards-based design. Come on CNN get your act together.
Have you read my blog and felt a little lost when I talk about Web accessibility? Are you familiar with the concepts of Web accessibility but never seen a screen reader in action?
Victor Tsaran, an accessibility engineer at Yahoo!, has done a great video where he talks about Web accessibility and gives a really good overview of screen readers. I think every Web developer should watch this video.
(thanks Accessify)
Update: WordPress.com won’t let me embed a Yahoo! Video in my blog. That sucks. Click on the link and check out the video.
Well in addition to her speaking at the RNIB yesterday, this week Shawn Lawton Henry will doing one of the sessions at the Web developers conference @media in London, England. Her talk is entitled “Advancing Web Accessibility“, where she’ll look at WCAG 2.0 and how some of its techniques can be used right now.
@media in London also gets to hear from the one and only Joe Clark. His talk is entitled, “When Web Accessibility Is Not Your Problem.” Joe is going to talk about the role and responsibility of the authoring tool in user agent developers/vendors in the Web Accessibility process.
They both should be great talks.
Are any of you going to be live blogging the talks? I unfortunately can’t be in London to attend.
W3C Web Accessibility Initiative Director Judy Brewer recently issued another Call for Review of the Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA) Roles document as well as the States and Properties document.
Continue reading Call for Review: WAI-ARIA Suite updated Working Drafts
First off, this post is not here to diminish the brilliance of Guy Kawasaki and the important role he played in computer history. I found one of his latest blog posts interesting. He gives a quick overview about what he did and things he learned while launching the site Truemors.
I just wonder if one of those lessons learned is the importance of having a compelling idea and being able to execute it well.
Truemors is as he describes it on the site “a web site that enables you to ‘tell the world’—within the bounds of good taste and the law anyway. You can post your rumors, news, and sightings, and anyone with web access can read and rate them within minutes. ”
When I first go to the Truemors Web site, I ask the same question I ask of any Web site that I go to the first time, “What is this and Why do I care?” With Truemors, it is not immediately apparent what the site does and why the user should care. I wonder if this is the reason why it looks that user involvement is underwhelming.
So the moral of the story is: It’s not good enough to have an idea. It has to be compelling for your users and it has to be well executed.
I know I’m a few days late on talking about this. For those of you who haven’t heard, Sweden has launched a virtual embassy in the virtual worlds metaverse Second Life. I walked around their island the other day. It’s very well done.
While it at the time was largely uninhabited, it sounds like they plan on holding a host of events there. This is smart. Second Life is a very event and community-driven culture
If you wanna follow the development of Sweden’s Second Life presence, check out the blog “(building the) Second House of Sweden.”
If you haven’t seen yet, Facebook has just posted the Mark Zuckerberg’s Keynote video from their F8 Facebook Platform launch event.
I’m impressed. He’s a pretty good speaker.
Some of the Web metrics that Mark announced are pretty unbelievable. It’s great they’ve been getting so much success.
I’m excited about the idea of using Facebook as a platform. I think a lot of existing applications will benefit from knowing who my friends are.
It does make me nervous to think that so much of my information will be stored in one place.
Michael Arrington and Dave Winer are requesting that Facebook add more options to their “How I know you” feature, where you indicate the type of relationship you have with another person and how you met. I want the feature to incorporate the XFN Microformat.
XFN is a way in HTML, using the rel attribute, to denote the type of relationship that you have with someone. Some examples of possible attributes are friend, co-worker, neighbor, crush, muse, parent, child, and many others.
In Facebook, if someone chooses they know eachother because they work together, whenever the two user’s friendship is represented in HTML it should use the rel=”co-worker” attribute.
Somehow then I’d be able to programatically take the relationships I have from Facebook and mash them up with my non-Facebook XFN marked-up relationships or bring my non-Facebook XFN marked-up relationships into Facebook.
Jason, Jackson, and I have decided to kick off planning for BarCampWashingtonDC. I had so much fun organizing and attending BarCampRochester. I’m excited to help bring the unconference to the Washington DC metro area.
For those of you unfamiliar with BarCamp, it is a gathering of Web developers, programmers, marketers, managers, designers, social media, and new media professionals to exchange their ideas and thoughts about the projects that they are working on.
Its not like the normal conference. It is the unconference. Everyone who attends participates. It’s not structured.
Are you interested in participating, organizing, sponsoring, or hosting the event?
Sign up on the BarCampWashingtonDC wiki.
The blogosphere is a little bit of a buzz with Kevin Rose’s announcement that Digg.com will expand into areas such as images and restaurants. This is great news but has the blogosphere forgotten the last announcement that Digg made but hasn’t followed through on?Back in February, Kevin Rose announced at Future of Web Apps in London that Digg was going to be supporting the decentralized single sign on technology OpenID. I understand that Kevin said OpenID support wasn’t going to be launched next day but it has been four months. FOUR MONTHS!
Having Digg FINALLY launch its OpenID support could help to keep the OpenID momentum going.
We need to start holding companies accountable when they make claims on features that will be forth coming.
Update: With my track record, Digg will launch OpenID support on Monday.
Oatmeal Stout - Justin Thorp's blog 