Standards
Web standards for design and communication.
- ALA 256: map rolling & data viz
In Issue No. 256 of A List Apart, for people who make websites: Wilson Miner shares three techniques for incorporating data visualization into standards-based web navigation patterns, and Paul Smith shows how to replicate Google Maps’ functionality with open source software to produce high-quality mapping applications tailored to your design goals.
- Books of Luke and Aarron
In Issue No. 255 of A List Apart, for people who make websites: Sign Up Forms Must Die – Luke Wroblewski, Senior Principal of Product Ideation and Design at Yahoo! and author of Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks (Rosenfeld Media, 2008), calls for the abolition of sign-up forms where web services are concerned. Via “gradual engagement,” says Luke, we can get people using and caring about our web services instead of frustrating them with forms. And in Findability, Orphan of the Web Design Industry, Aarron Walter, author of Building Findable Websites: Web Standards, SEO, and Beyond (New Riders, 2008), provides an overview of this essential web discipline, explains how it is like SEO but different, and tells how every member of your team can contribute to your site’s content’s findability. You can see Luke and Aarron live at upcoming An Event Apart design conferences in Boston and New Orleans. Plus: they’re changing guards at Buckingham Palace (and staff at ALA). I’m verklempt!
- Zeldman on Talk Radio Today
Live today from 3:00 to 4:00 pm Eastern Time, I’m this week’s guest on “Design Matters with Debbie Millman,” the leading internet talk radio show on the “challenging and compelling canvas of today’s design world.”
- Podcast news
The first video podcasts from SXSW.
- Microsoft reverses version targeting default
IE8’s version targeting will now work the same way other browsers work, i.e. advanced standards support will be on by default. Some people will say Microsoft caved; others, that they listened to public opinion; some may even buy the company’s own explanation, which is that, given a company-wide reorientation away from proprietary winner-take-all competitiveness and toward interoperability, “web standards by default” takes precedence over “supporting all those badly made websites that were created specifically to work in IE.”
- Monday links
Chopsticks by Segura. A greener LA via Boston. Stealing patterns, making models. Samurai errata and SXSW bowling.
- Version targeting, take two
In Issue No. 253 of A List Apart, for people who make websites: Jeremy Keith says version targeting in IE8 is all right but its default is all wrong. I argue that the default seems wrong but is actually right and necessary. Read, discuss, decide.
- Happy fourth birthday, real world semantics
Four years ago today, Tantek Çelik and Kevin Marks gave a presentation on real-world semantics. Working backwards from HTML extensions like XFN (created by Tantek, Matt Mullenweg, and Eric Meyer), the paper showed how designers and developers could add semantics to today’s web rather than starting from scratch or waiting for a “purer” markup language.
- ALA 252: New library, long hallway
Keep your markup clean with DOM scripting and learn to play nice in the long hallway.
- In defense of version targeting
We knew when we published this issue of A List Apart that it would light a match to the gaseous underbelly of standards-based web design, but we thought more than a handful of readers would respect the parties involved enough to consider the proposal on its merits. Alas, the ingrained dislike of Microsoft is too strong, and the desire to see every site built with web standards is too ardently felt, for the proposal to get a fair viewing.