thanks to my feedreader, I saw mention of SXSW from both Juicy Studio and Garrett Dimon’s feeds. It got me thinking about all the folks I met in Austin back at Access U, and how they talked up the creative and technical magic that is South by SouthWest Interactive. I hadn’t even had time to check out the site and all the possible panelists, however, when I received an internal email at work. Two of my coworkers are aso proposing panels for submission!

Mark A. Scholl, our resident search guru (who I’ve mentioned before in my thinking about SEO versus Accessibility) is looking to present Am I A Geek
Kris Schultz, Application Architect and resident Flash/Flex Fanatic is inviting the worthy to a Hackfight.

The hackfight one is really interesting: I am actually involved in my first ever Hackfight right now. From our company newsletter in July 2006: “Built without the constraints of client requirements, this internal team competition forces us to think quickly, to embrace theory as well as concept, and to draw meaningful and insightful conclusions—all in under 40 hours. The results tell us what we need to know in order to impact speed-to-market decision-making and to ultimately frame how we innovate and how we approach client work.”

Naturally, I knew I had to go check out the prospective panelists, and was shocked and amazed to find there were over 700.. I registered and sifted through them — and found that there were far too many fascinating topics to even pick. As I waded through them I felt that I really need to try to get out there. Especially if Mark and Kris get out there, but even if not..

Wow — Eric Meyer in a box - I’m intrigued.

CSS Sculptor appears to be yet another “web development in a box” solution, but this one is standards compliant and (obviously) CSS-based. I listened to one of the tutorials for only a few moments, but it mentioned something about “if you click in the wrong area [the program] will remind you…”. I suppose that is how they can ensure the standards-compliance.

When I first started working in CSS, I used top-style to learn what styles or attributes could be applied to which elements. I suppose this program simply provides a stricter framework.

I would be interested to find out how robust the program is, if a user would have the ability to really get at the code and muck about, or if they are limited to working within the established framework. I notice there is mention of faux columns — does that mean there are CSS “modules” or techniques that are included and/or can be imported at will? I’m afraid I don’t entirely understand how this dreamweaver extension works — could it itself be extended upon? Does it clean up code that a user inputs manually?

Lastly, I would be very interested in seeing what the generated code would look like in terms of optimization. I don’t suppose there would really be any hope for true cascades?

I don’t see myself spending the $99 for the software (although I would have downloaded a free trial ), but I will be interested to see what sort of review/response there is to this product..

On our way to chipotle the other day for lunch, a coworker mentioned some recent legislation being passed in New York “requiring restaurants with standard portions that make caloric information publicly available also post the information on menus, where consumers can see it when they order.” A possible response is that companies will stop presenting this sort of information publicly. According to the article, Wendy’s “still offers nutritional information online, with a note to New Yorkers. … ‘We have served notice to New Yorkers that the information isn’t for them,’ Lynch said.

We recoiled at the idea of ‘locale-sniffing’ to prevent New Yorkers from accessing specific online content, saddened at the possible ramifications of this legislation. Potentially, now no one will have access to this information.

I initially assumed this was an ADA issue, similar to the target lawsuit wherein users with disabilities are not able to access the same information. It could also be related to socio-economic status and the ability to access the Internet, although my coworker argued that the ability to access a library would likely not be any more difficult than accessing the fast food restaurant in question.

The article, however, seems to promote this for another reason. They want users to have access to the information as they order. I had already wondered if the Subway napkins would suffice, but since you would have already received your meal by the time you saw a napkin, I suppose not.

(Can you tell there was a long line at chipotle?)

We then started questioning the logistics of the request. So what comprises a “menu”? Was it a list of items, with prices? If there were no prices, would it still be a menu? What if the user had to pick and choose and individualize their meal? This lead me to think about “suggestions” for meals — again, like Subway. You select items to put on your sandwich, but are a list of ingredients really a menu? What if a company gave out ’suggestion cards’ of popular combinations (ah, the marketing, you could collect them!) — if there was a single item per card, that’s not really a menu, is it? [Note, I did see in the article that this legislation applies to restaurants with standard portions, so "build your own" places may actually be exempt due to a lack of standarization]
And then the part of the brain that makes us coders kicked in.. What if rather than a list (<ul>), you represented all of the options to the user at once, like a tag cloud? You could size the options according to their individually popularity, but not restrict users to standard offerings.

For the record, I don’t believe that Chipotle themselves advertise their nutritional information, but you can find it at chipotlefan.com. My regular fare weighs in at a hefty 1020 calories, but even that knowledge doesn’t stop me from indulging now and then…

Chipotle Nutrition Facts Serving Size: 1 Burrito Amount Per Serving Calories 1020 Calories from Fat 370 % DV* Total Fat 41g Saturated Fat 11.5g Cholesterol 30mg Sodium 3125mg Total Carbohydrate 134g Dietary Fiber 15.5g Sugars 5g Protein 33g Vitamin A 59% Vitamin C 54% Calcium 46% Iron 30%

Another case in which I feel I am returning to the days as a contract site designer. I have been working on some email templates, something I haven’t done in years. Ah, developing in tables again! I have done some reading on what various email clients support, and the purist in me wanted to code to a specific version of HTML. I started to look at adding attributes directly to the body tag (remember ALINK and VLINK), only to see they had been deprecated back for HTML4. I started to look back at references for HTML3.2, only to make an interesting discovery.

Once upon a time, back in the dark ages of HTML3.2, DOCTYPES weren’t fully qualified.

On A List Apart, Jeffrey Zeldman had noted that:

Scattered throughout W3C’s site are DOCTYPEs with missing URIs, and DOCTYPEs with relative URIs that point to documents on W3C’s own site. Once removed from W3C’s site and used on your web pages, these URIs point to non–existent documents, thus fouling up your best efforts and the browser’s.

…and I found this to be the case even with the HTML3.2 recommendation itself (whether or not you believe me, follow the link to marvel at the old school background image!). I thought I simply had to do some more research online to find what I was looking for. But lo and behold, I ended my search at the W3C QA Recommended list of DTDs to use in your web document.

I have been working in the field for quite awhile, but it amazes me sometimes what I take for granted. I recognize the importance of using a DOCTYPE, but now I wonder if I truly understand it. Is the URI not needed because the parser knows the definition for HTML3.2?

Yesterday I had a meeting with some graphic and interaction designers, and we were discussing how best to code something up. There was a suggestion to place text onto the background image itself. I hedged. “Yeah, we can do that..where I’m from I don’t really like images, but it looks like we’ll be using them anyway..”

The designer’s jaw dropped. “You don’t like IMAGES??” Perhaps images to him are akin to puppies or babies. How can someone not like such a thing?

I back-pedaled.. “well, from an accessibility standpoint, it’s not indexable or selectable…but in this case, yeah, we can do it. It’s just not something I’m used to”.

I still think I frightened him. And I felt bad for saying it. After all, this is an agency. The whole look and feel is what MAKES our products. It is just a departure from what I’ve been doing for years.

I thought about it all last night — and it was actually a useful exercise to see where those thoughts come from.

Background: I started coding using the geocities home page editor: all code, no images. Then I got photoshop and every headline was custom made. Which meant with every redesign, every headline was REmade. I was hired at Maxim, and text was all displayed as text. Contract work was a mix.

I spent four years at LexisNexis. We have huge web applications in multiple languages. We serve government agencies and accessibility is a true concern. There is a huge amount of rapidly changing content. It needs to be served up in different languages and formats.

We used resource bundles to serve up our content in different languages. When I left we were still using images for buttons, but there had been much research done into CSS-styled buttons (I was actually involved in several drafts of the UX Recommendation in this regard) What was interesting was that the benefits to using CSS were the same as the drawbacks. Users could resize the font on the buttons — a benefit for some, but there were possible implications on the overall layout of the page. (Granted, this was related to international content in general, not solely buttons.)

Ultimately it came down to an issue of control: using sliced up images and absolute positioning provides the designer control, not the user. It also necessitates the designer having strict control over the content.

Now, you know I’ll say it… web2.0 is about user-created and manipulated content. If we are overly rigid in our designs, can we support a user with a login name of 50 characters? Does it fit within our vision? The site should be for the user, so if they need to disable images, or maginify their screen 4 or 5 times, are we still meeting their needs?

Perhaps some of the sites we build can afford to be more rigid: we are defining the users brand and presenting it. Therefore, we should ensure that it is properly presented to site visitors. That being said, I still see the web as an inherently fluid medium and I would love to see some development using ems and fluid positioning, to provide a more flexible and robust solution.

Ultimately, I think I need to move out of my “web application” mindset. The sites we build are informative and engaging, but they are not terribly content-heavy. We can constrain the data to fit within the framework we design, and modify the design at will. To some extent, it reminds me of my contract work, when a site would be launched with a certain design which would then have to be modified to accommodate new features.

However, when we are talking about brand and identity, perhaps we need to re-evaluate the design when we add new features, to ensure integrity. There may be a conscious desire or even need to revisit the overall design, rather than simply push content out..