Version control can save your life and make you happy.
If you use large sites like Google, Yahoo!, or Microsoft, you’re using microformats. If you use twitter or WordPress, you’re using microformats. So there is a lot of life to the use of microformats. Even past the death of a site that uses microformats: the use of microformats helps that information be archived elsewhere.
Does this matter? If this product/site went away, would you care? Would your users care? Keep yourself interesting by experimenting without boundaries while planning your commitment.
Sharing secrets: hiding things in plain sight generates a special connection between the site and its audience generates delight and generates a desire to share the secret.
When you should get design involved? At the beginning along with everything else. You can’t compartmentalize anymore (marketing, business, design, tech; design: interaction, information, visual, info architecture). You can teach in compartments, but you can’t work in compartments. Education has to start out compartmentalized but with a goal to aggregate (inter-disciplinary capstone projects planned from the very first freshman class). You get people to swing back and forth from being the expert to being the smart guy in the room.
Continue reading “everything you know about web design is wrong”
this is my third sxsw. i’m a veteran. i’ve tried thinking about what i am here to do. yes, it’s always been a place where i refresh my professional side. i learn all the things that i should be focusing on for the next year. that’s still going to happen. but this year seems different. i’ve started down a road with some peers in little rock that i think will be quite innovative and successful. those people are here with me at sxsw, and i’ll be learning from them as much as i’ll be learning from the panelists.
i’m here for ideas. i’m here to really connect with my peers and professional counterparts. i’m here to make the most of it.
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.
I have to give major props to Macon Phillips, the new media director at the White House. Nothing makes me feel more confident in our new government than the fact that they put someone who “gets it” in the most important position of this new century: the web guy.
Godspeed, Macon. Godspeed.
I met some pretty awesome people the day after my birthday. They came home with me and I think it might be one of those forever moments.
First I saw Rhys, since he was out in front. And he has continued to be the first in line.
Peering at me from the back of the cage was Owen. Cautious and quiet, but fully capable of standing up to his brother and even leading the way when it is important.
You can’t break up two brothers like this, so they both came home. It’s the best decision of my life, and the best birthday present I’ve ever received.
… we don’t know what the next President’s gonna face. And if we choose someone with vision, someone with guts, someone with gravitas, who’s connected to other people’s lives, and cares about making them better… if we choose someone to inspire us, then we’ll be able to face what comes our way and achieve things… we can’t imagine yet. Instead of telling people who’s the most qualified, instead of telling people who’s got the better ideas, let’s make it obvious.
The West Wing
Episode 2, Season 4 “20 Hours in America (Part 2)”
