The Web Standards Project has an editorial on the demise of the stand-alone Internet Explorer:
Forgive us for pointing out the obvious: Microsoft is and has always been a for-profit company. Expecting them to continue developing their browsers for free in an IT market as weak as a pink-slip party martini is optimism that would make a Wired editor blush. The demise of the free versions of Internet Explorer simply underscores the need for standards: browsers come and go, standards endure.
Great paper on intranet searching by a bevy of IBM researchers. The paper, given in May at the WWW conference explains the differences between internet and intranet searching, and analyzes a number of different algorithms and hueristics for returning relevant search results. Good stuff (even if it gets a tad math-heavy at times).
Steve Champeon, web standards advocate and founder of the WebDesign-L list, wrote an important article for Webmonkey entitled "Progressive Enhancement and the Future of Web Design." Based on a conference presentation (with Digital Web's Nick Fink), the article discusses a vision for creating semantically-correct markup that works in both new and old browsers. Well worth a read.
Builder.com has a introduction to taxonomies. Its a nice overview if you're not familiar with the concepts, or you're trying to explain taxonomies to others.
From the Palo Alto Weekly comes a story about lax security and student records.
Using a laptop with a wireless card outside the district's main office, the Weekly gained access to such data as grades, home phone numbers and addresses, emergency medical information complete with full-color photos of students and a psychological evaluation.
Yikes. Looks like a bunch of stuff happened, from unsecured wireless networks to poor file server/application security, coupled with a slow response from the district. Still, not the kind of press you want to be getting...
(via Wi-Fi Networking News)
The W3C has released a "working draft" of version 2 of its Web Content Accessibility Guidlelines.
Intel has an interesting article about teachers encouraging students to write using weblogs.
Anne Davis remembers how she reacted the first time she saw a weblog being used in the classroom. "I thought, 'This is all about possibilities,'" she recalls. "It's about listening, talking, collaborating, having a dialog. And it can work for any subject."
Measuring the success (or failure) of a project is key. James Robertson offers some insights in a column entitled Metrics for knowledge management and content management. I'm just now getting around to reading it, months after it was published. Ah, the joys of no longer having to do homework.
Digital Web is featuring an interview with standards advocate Mark Newhouse. Mark maintains Real World Style a nice, if small, site about using CSS layouts (and other tricks) on real sites. Check out both the site and the interview, if you haven't already done so.
Zeldman comments on the problems of making standards-compliant pages with Microsoft's .NET framework. Turns out that .NET's HTML controls (things like form elements, etc) pretty much blow away any hopes of writing standard code. D'oh! The work-around? Not using .NET might be an option...so is letting go of the standards. Long term, let's hope MS can fix the problems.
Interesting post by venture capitalist Naval Ravikant explaining the trends in the software developed by "innovative independent software vendors." Lots of Linux and Java floating out there. Windows stuff appears mostly on the client side. The web browser, despite Microsoft's best efforts, is still a viable development choice.
James Robertson did a quick survey of Australian CMS vendors regarding their spell check capabilities. Forty percent don't offer any sort of spell check functionality, while 42% offer it standard and the rest (18%) offer it as an option. I'd imagine these numbers are probably similar for the market as a whole (rather than just for Australian companies). Also, spell check is a frequent client request of ours, even in non-CMS projects. Unfortunately, its a pretty tough nut to crack, especially if you are using standard HTML forms.
Tim Bray's latest entry on search focuses on users:
What most people want is to have a nice simple field into which they will type on average 1.3 words and hit Enter, and have the result come back to them. So anyone who’s building search needs to focus almost all their energy on doing an as-good-as-possible job given those 1.3 words and no other inputs.
James Robertson has nice short article on conducting stakeholder interviews. This is essentially the same technique I used, to good effect, during the information audit I conducted at the ESD. As Robertson points out, this is a great way to help form an intranet strategy in the early stages of a project.
Mary Harrsch writes about RSS: The Next Killer App For Education. She gives a number of interesting hypothetical examples of RSS use in education, including:
Example 3. You are the superintendent of a school district with 49 schools. Each school maintains a Web site, but it is very time-consuming to visit each site periodically to review each school's news and events. The schools begin to post their news to a weblog that is incorporated into each school's Web site, much like Bryant Elementary School in Seattle, Washington. The weblog tool also produces an RSS news feed. You install a news reader and subscribe to each news feed. Now, each day you can quickly review all the news and events at each school in one place without having to visit all 49 Web sites.
A List Apart: Unlocking Hidden Navigation Access Keys.
WHO CAN USE YOUR WEBSITE? People with limited mobility may have a hard time controlling a mouse to click on links, and tabbing through menus can be slow going. The W3C introduced the accesskey attribute to enable users to select the appropriate key on their keyboards and navigate to a particular link.
The fallout from the announcements that Microsoft will stop releasing stand-alone versions of IE for both Windows and Mac continues.
First, links back to our previous entries (1 and 2). Next, a sampling of the reactions:
Rentzsch.com: "I can assure you everyone loses here." And he proceeds to provide a detailed list of who loses and why.
What do I know talks about the affect of both the Win and Mac product announcements.
More from Zeldman: "Only after AOL took the money did Microsoft quietly let slip the news that it intends to kill its Mac and Windows browsers."
Tantek (the man who wrote IE5/Mac's rendering engine): "Today, the end of life of a product which I had contributed more hours and late nights (and mornings) than I can count was announced."
Tim Bray looks be starting a series of articles on (full-text) search engines. The first is a bit of background on the history of search. Most useful insight: search is expensive (the Google/Inktomi/etc set) and a commodity.
Zeldman waxes poetic about the end of development of Internet Explorer 5 for the Mac. With this news, spreading around the net today, we learned that pretty much all stand-alone development of IE has stopped (future Windows versions will be integrated into the OS).
On one hand, the news doesn't bother me much. I've long since switched to a combination of Safari and Camino for my day to day browsing. The IE5/Mac icon doesn't even have a place on my dock anymore. It was a great browser in its day, but the aforementioned programs have passed it by.
On the other hand, I know that most people aren't going to seek out weird browsers like Safari, Camino, Firebird, or even Netscape 6. Heck, its hard enough getting some people to switch from the Netscape 4 that comes pre-installed with the computer. So, the dominate Mac browser--and web development runtime environment--will stagnate. This isn't really good news for those of us who build, and use, the web on Macs.
Two somewhat random notes, both from O'Reilly blog entries:
Python, one of my favorite languages, is on Microsoft's radar screen. Thanks to Kevin for pointing this out.
Amazon.com offers both SOAP and REST-style interfaces to its web services program. The REST interface is much more popular.
I'm not quite sure what I'd use it for, but it sounds cool: Reverend is a Bayesian classifier for python.
Microsoft FrontPage, the oft-mocked (by me) HTML editor, might be getting interesting. Gilbane reports that FrontPage is getting XML and XSLT capabilities in its next release. Hmm...
For all you windows users out there, keep an eye on FeedDemon. FeedDemon is an upcoming (beta by end of June) RSS reader from Nick Bradbuy, the guy behind Homesite and TopStyle.
The OSCOM Open Source CM conference just wrapped up. Coverage can be found at the OSCOM site. Also, there are a number of presentations online as well.
Digital Web's Jeff Lash has a nice article on "Designing for visitors who don’t enter through the home page." Its a useful, and little-discussed, issue.
D-Lib Magazine has published a very nice case study entitled "Developing a Content Management System-based Web Site." The authors describe the process of implementing a CMS in the UK's Joint Information Systems Committee, a higher education advisory body. Good stuff!
At yesterday's final Simple Steps event for the year, we spent some time brainstorming ideas for future events. Someone (I forget who) mentioned that it would be useful to share favorite resources. We all have sites that we turn to on a regular basis, and it would be useful to spread the word about these places.
As an example, Isaac Conver from Kent School District mentioned that he liked Blooberry.com's HTML reference. The site has a ton of info on each and every HTML element.
So, in that spirit, I thought I'd start a short list of the sites I value:
As you can see, my reading tends toward the "softer" side of web development (IA, usability, etc). At this point, I have a pretty decent grasp on most of the technical things I need to do. When I need a resource, its usually a specific resource, not something I need to look at frequently.
Got a site you like? Add a comment...
Seth McGrath mocks the concept of storing web content in relational databases. Note that he's not talking about using a CMS, just storing content in BLOBs.
Okay, so I'm guilty as charged on that one... For smaller (non-CMS) sites, I'd look at using XML + XSLT (or just plain XHTML) now. But back then...well...it seemed to make sense...
James Robertson answers this question in his nice introduction to CM. Its a great article to show to folks who haven't yet been introduced to the concept of content management. Bob Boiko's Content Management Bible is also very good, but start with Robertson's article, in that Bob's book is 900 pages long.
Two takes on using weblogs for project management: Phil Windley and Jonathan Peterson. From the latter:
Now when the CIO asks the "why" questions in the program review, the program manager can click back through a set of links to find the series of problems/questions/resolution for the problem in real time. What's more as a smart CIO, I wouldn't bother having my program office create my program review Powerpoint deck, I'd have them continually monitoring projects, and I would subscribe to THEIR RSS feeds. I'd similarly have my customers subscribe to the RSS feeds of the IT projects they are interested in.
CMSWatch's Tony Byrne has a great article in EContent: "Content Syndication: Ready for the Masses?" Byrne discusses the issues and possibilities existing in the world of syndication today.
The relative dearth of syndication might have its roots in companies' ongoing general content management struggles. If an organization is still mastering basic automation of its Web publishing processes, outbound syndication could remain a distant luxury. Bob Boiko, author of the Content Management Bible, argues that organizations "are not ready for the idea of syndication because they are still struggling with the idea of content reuse in general." He adds, "Whenever I actually suggest [syndication] to clients or audiences I get mostly blank looks."
Jakob Nielsen's latest Alertbox has a number of tips for doing Usability for $200. In his scenario, a small business plans on spending $2000 on a site, of which 10% will go to usability activities. Nielsen lays out a four-pronged plan of attack:
One hour to question customers about their information needs
One hour to review an early version of the design
One hour for a quick, in-store test of the design
One hour to enhance the site's search engine visibility
Since some of our projects end up in this range, and many of the schools/districts in our area have similarly small web publishing budgets, this article seems relevant.
Gerry McGovern makes the case for writing good metadata (even if he doesn't tell us how to write good metadata...):
Metadata is what scan readers want. Within a matter of seconds, people scan a page to see if it's right for them. Scan readers love metadata. It quickly gives them context for the page they are on. It helps them make the decision whether to read on or hit the Back button. If you don't have good metadata, lots more people will be hitting the Back button.
Zeldman weighs in on the recent revelations that Microsoft will stop releasing stand-alone versions of its IE browser. Among Zelmans many questions, he asks:
If AOL abandons Netscape, will Mozilla keep going? If so, will Windows users who do not upgrade to Longhorn switch to Mozilla (or Opera), or will they keep using the current version of IE6 for the foreseeable future? If they do that, will web development methods freeze? What happens to CSS3 and XHTML 2 if the bulk of web users (including AOL users) ?standardize? on a year 2000 browser for the next three to seven years?
I have a feeling that this is going to be quite important, for both people who build websites and people who use the web (ie, pretty much everybody). And, as Zeldman points out, the (mainstream) media is pretty much ignoring this issue. Every article I've read has been pretty clueless on this point, seeing this as nothing more than a financial transaction. When in reality, it hinges around the control of the code the internet runs on. Maybe "rich internet applications" (read: Flash) and "web services" (see: Apple's Sherlock and iTunes) are a way to do an end run around IE. The story isn't over yet.
Meanwhile, check out Mozilla Firebird.
Update: The story is making the rounds with the tech pundits: Joel on Software talks about IE and Firebird; Salon's Andrew Leonard calls the AOL-MS deal "unholy."