Archive for the ‘Web Design’ Category

WCAG2 will be squashed by the developer community

Wednesday, May 24th, 2006

Joe Clark, respected Web Accessibility guru, author of Building Accessible Websites, is criticising the draft version of the new Web Content Accessibility Guidelines which has been under development for over 5 years now.

Clark doesn’t just criticise the content of the new guidelines, but the manner in which they have been delivered to the world and how valuable stakeholders haven’t been listened to or even consulted.

What does this mean? A lot of the work of WCAG1 — the things that actually work — seems to be being undone and losing a lot of it’s punch. And instead, most of what WCAG2 is proposing Joe claims to be unachievable — and he’d know.

I could start explaining, but you’re better off reading what Joe Clark had to say his A List Apart article.

The WAI committee didn’t give much time for interested parties to provide comments — only until 31st May 2006. You better read this now and provide your feedback to the group while you still can.

UPDATE: Corrected some mistakes — thanks Joe Clark for dropping by and correcting me ;)

Get Naked!

Monday, April 3rd, 2006

In the interests of educating about web standards, I’m joining in with the First Annual CSS Naked Day, which is April 5th. It should be good. If you can’t wait till Naked Day, you can view any page on this site by tacking ?gonaked=1 on the end of any inner.geek.nz url, or view this page naked.

Loose Ends

Monday, September 26th, 2005

So, before I head off to Sydney two nights from now, I figured I’d post about a few loose ends I haven’t posted much detail about.

I’m working part time at 3months.com now, and tomorrow is my last day at the DRC. I love working at 3months: the attitude of the workplace is relaxed but focused; everyone is enjoying their work. I start full time this Monday (3rd Oct). They’ve already got me working on a fun but rushed PHP project. I was working three days a week at DRC, and Wednesday and Thursday at 3months.

I’m so glad I’m not working two part time daytime jobs any more — three Mondays a week is lethal to your mind. I personally believe in sticking your focus to one a project a week at work, using the natural downtime on the fringes of the weekend: use Friday to ‘swap to disk’ for the weekend, and Monday to load the week’s project back into memory. The brain isn’t too good at swapping.

3months also issued me a laptop as my main work computer. This is awesome because I’ll be able to blog from the conference, and maybe even tap into the subconciousness of the lecture attendees, AKA the conference IRC room. Oh, and maybe do some work… :)

My mum is off to Brisbane to live with her new squeeze. She’s flying out of Palmerston North on the 15th, so I’ll be up there to see her off. She is saving up for my brother Stuart and I to visit her for Christmas. Sydney will my first overseas experience, so I’m looking forward to following it up quickly with a visit to Brisbane.

Speaking of holidays, I’m off to see the Guru, the wonderful Guru of Bob, erm, GuruBob down in Mosgiel (near Dunedin) for New Years: Bob has offered for me to crash at his place for a few days. I’ve never been more south than Christchurch, so seeing some of Otago with a born-and-bred Dunedinite’s point of view sounds like fun :) Maybe even see Bob fly his new RC Plane…

So yeah, my next post will probably be in Sydney! I’m taking my camera, and will be trying to find buildings from The Matrix on Saturday… w00ta! (is that Australian for “w00t”…? ;) )

I got a Golden Ticket!

Monday, September 26th, 2005

No, not one of those banal “go see how chocolate is made” tickets, rather one that grants me access to the new beta WordPress.com! WordPress.com is to WordPress what TypePad.com is to MovableType — a hosted blogging service. But wordpress.com is invite-only, and I guess, free.

So I got my invite, signed up and ended up with glutnix.wordpress.com — yay! The app is totally based on WordPress, but it looks slightly different, and has some improvements, like a not-so-rich-text editor (over editing HTML), collapsible sections in the edit page, including an AJAX categories selector which lets you add new categories to your blog without leaving the page, even suggesting existing categories that other bloggers on wordpress.com are using, forming a type of folksonomy.

No plugins though.

Will I use it? Nah. But it’s good to see what progress is being made on the newest version of WordPress :)

And incidently, I have a golden ticket to give away to someone who wants it real bad. First person to ask me for it will receive it…

When I was Nineteen…

Saturday, July 2nd, 2005

Don’t you hate it when you find one of your old websites that you abandoned over 4 years ago…, just before I started Webfroot? LOL, Scary scary stuff… But I guess I could claim that I was blogging 5 years ago, back before it was even called blogging. Or not. Cos you know blogs have been the new “personal homepages” for about 3 years now… ;)