almost daniel.

I arrived at this session and it was SRO and full. I got some final ideas (after making it inside with 15 minutes to go):

• When designers push their vision out to “version 10″, it can cause tension with developers who are usually starting from the other end (i.e., Agile). Developers want to start small (and efficient/elegant) and progressively build toward a design. Balance is key.
• The best possible thing a designer can do for a developer is to share the problem and challenges, not just ask for a composed feature. That way the designer is asking to partner on the solution with the developer. Happiness ensues.
• The best possible thing a developer can do for a designer is to communicate principles and needs to designers to create a more common ground. For example, talking to designers about considering both real-time interactivity and asynchronous actions.
• The best possible thing both can do is hang out with each other outside the office.
• Build trust.

For the rest of the notes, I depend on my trusty Michigan friend, daniel slaughter. He takes amazing notes.

These are notes from a session at sxsw interactive. My own take on topics are mixed in with what the presenters were actually saying, so do not assume all of this content is my own.

Forms suck. Creating a style guide for form design is difficult.

Presenters

Christopher Schmitt – Heat Vision

Eric Ellis – Bank of America

Kimberly Blessing – Comcast Interactive Media

Date

Sunday, March 15

Sites

web form elements research

jquery validation

moz monkey

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What are the most important qualities of a programming language when you are starting from scratch?

• how easy to get a prototype out?
• will it scale? or do i need to scale right now?
• what existing code libraries are out there and do they support my industry?
• what kind of talent is out there?
• do i already know the language?
• does the language encourage good developer habits?
• is the language well accepted by a large community/industry?

Date

Saturday, March 19

Sites

Ruby on Rails

These are notes from a session at sxsw interactive. My own take on topics are mixed in with what the presenters were actually saying, so do not assume all of this content is my own.

Let the W3C be with you. Woo! Cross-browser compatibility problems should end.

Presenters

Molly Holzschlag – Opera Software

David Baron – Mozilla

Hakon Wium Lie – Opera Software

Sylvain Galineau – Microsoft

Date

Sunday, March 15

Sites

david baron

molly holzschalg

Jonathan Snook

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Version control can save your life and make you happy.

Presenters

Matt Mullenweg – Automattic/WordPress

Karen Nguyen – Yahoo!

Zach Nies – Rally Software Development

Joe Pezzillo – joepezzillo.com, @metafy

Derek Scruggs – SurveyGizmo

Date

Sunday, March 15

Sites

phpadvent article

trac

cornerstone

versions

Beanstalk

mecurial

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At least, tables (can) kill accessibility in web portals.

Accessibility in a portal has always been a challenge. It has to do (initially) with boxes.

Many early portals used quite hideous tables to layout the screen. Hey, a portal is a set of boxes, right? Oracle Portal still enforces a level of table-as-layout. Tables aren’t evil, but as layout devices they make it difficult to control keyboard interaction on a screen. You have to really implement them right to keep them accessible.

But my main problem with tables as a way to arrange a set of boxes is that the boxes (portlets) on a page are not always neat, tabular data in common rows and columns. Tables are for arranging tabular data. That means there are common relationships among the data sets.

A portlet is too complex an interaction to always fit as “tabular data”. The ways I want to navigate a table of numeric data is usually different from the way I want to interact with a portlet or group of portlets. For example, do I have to tab through every portlet (and inside through the inner elements) on the screen in order to get to the one I want (with the keyboard)? Or can I jump through HTML headers like every other well-formed webpage I encounter?

The other problem with tables is styling. Think about how difficult it is to style your own profile at MySpace. Nested tables to the nth degree. Portals are susceptible to this trap as well. Taking a beautiful Photoshop design of a portal interface and then attempting to style unclassed table cells (when tables themselves tend to break certain CSS layout rules–or better yet, when there is inline CSS inside a table definition that you cannot override!) is an exercise in insanity. I mention this because the level of design control I have over my content is usually closely related to the level of accessibility I can ensure in a page.

So the first accessibility challenge for portals is having enough control over the page layout interface to display portlets on a page in a way that is semantic and easy to interact with via a keyboard. The second is having enough freedom to make it look great.

The second update for the beta of FormPress has been released. This version introduces a new “Required Fields” feature as well as many maintenance updates.

Yes, I know. Five+ years of development. An approach to open-source content management that is at the same time refreshing and inspired. One of the top blogging tools in the world.

And now, WordPress processes my forms for me.
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