Category Archives: Coding

WCAG2 will be squashed by the developer community

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 😉

Accessibility Coding Internet Life Politics Web Design 3 comments

MacZOT do it again…

There’s a BLOGZOT 2.0 on MacZOT.com for a great piece of software you might have heard of called SubEthaEdit from CodingMonkeys. If you want it for free, you’ll post about it on your blog too. If 600 people blog about this special in the 24 hour span this sale is on for, MacZOT and TheCodingMonkeys will award $105,000 in Mac software, total to the community! W00t!

SubEthaEdit is basically multiplayer notepad – it allows you to collaborate with others across a network, all editing the same file in different places.

I don’t know if I’d use it personally, but hey, commercial software for free is not something I’d balk at 🙂

Coding Events Rant Software Comments are closed

WordPress Plugin: Mycroft Search Plugin Generator

I was at work, and an idea hit me: Firefox search plugins are just text files. They also contain a lot of stuff that WordPress stores in it’s database. Why not make WordPress generate a search plugin for itself? Why not make a plugin that will work on any WordPress 1.5+ install? So I spent the rest of the day making the Mycroft Search Plugin Generator plugin!

Try it at the bottom of the sidebar on this site, or in the Meta section of the sidebar on Webfroot!

Blogging Coding Internet Software WordPress Plugins 6 comments

The ESV Online Edition

Colour me impressed with the ESV Online Edition… I’m still geeking out about it… They have put a lot of effort into the web development of this site.

The site is valid XHTML, they provide various RSS interfaces, including Bible in One Year feeds and various other daily devotionals, a Web service (SOAP and REST/HTTP-GET) interface for doing verse fetches), favelets, A Firefox search plugin, integration with OpenSearch initiatives such as A9.com, Javascript syndication, and even search-by-email! Talk about spreading the Word of God!

I also really enjoyed reading the Technical Introduction to the ESV Online Edition, which included a report of a usability study of their own and other bible search engines, expected behaviour and implemented behaviour, caveats of search ambiguity, how their whole bible is in XML and is transformed into XHTML, what they did for older browsers, popular bible book query patterns, and strangely enough, MySQL database definitions and PHP source code for viewing (not borrowing) of how their search works. I learnt a lot.

Wow… It’s so geeky, it almost makes me proud to be a Christian 😀

Oh, and the translation itself is good too 😀 They even have the entire audio version available to listen to, and if you search on something, you can listen to the results too 😀

Christianity Coding Internet Reading Software 2 comments