Monday, March 12, 2007
Being a good web citizen
Ten years ago I had a long email conversation with someone who was blind. He had bought one of my books and was using one of the example programs to write a better screen scraper for web sites than the one he was currently using. This made me realize how important it is to test our web sites so that everyone has access to them. I periodically use the text only web browser Lynx to test my sites. BTW, if you are in a hurry looking for real information on the web, you might try Lynx: sometimes plain text is better and faster, if sites are well designed: keyboard-only web browsing :-)
Spend a little time getting used to Lynx, and you may like it as a fast alternative for web browsing.
Ideally, XHTML or HTML is used for web content, with visual styles added with CSS. Javascript should be optional. It is very cool that using good web writing style also helps make sites more accessible for people with impaired vision. By the way, note that Blogger.com does a very good job of generating HTML that is easily viewed and navigated with a text only browser like Lynx. Try visiting this blog using Lynx.
Spend a little time getting used to Lynx, and you may like it as a fast alternative for web browsing.
Ideally, XHTML or HTML is used for web content, with visual styles added with CSS. Javascript should be optional. It is very cool that using good web writing style also helps make sites more accessible for people with impaired vision. By the way, note that Blogger.com does a very good job of generating HTML that is easily viewed and navigated with a text only browser like Lynx. Try visiting this blog using Lynx.
Friday, February 09, 2007
Semantic Web: through the back door with HTML and CSS
Wednesday, February 07, 2007
Heavy weight Javascript + AJAX vs. very light weight CSS + DHTML
Although I spend most of my time working on artificial intelligence (AI) projects, I have spent a lot of personal time in the last year working on basic web application skills. I have been prototyping a system using the Dojo Javascript library - great stuff, but definitely heavy weight. However, by loading up all required Dojo library and application specific Javascript at once, and then using AJAX does provide a responsive user experience - after the initial load up time.
After dinner last night, I re-wrote the web UI for my current commercial development project using minimal CSS, HTML, and a small amount of Javascript - although switching work contexts now requires fetching more resources from the server, the amount of data transfer is minimal and the web app is still very responsive, even factoring in slower network connections.
I have looked at Open Lazlo and other heavy weight client frameworks - they look great, but for someone like me whose primary work does not involve building web applications, I like reducing my own learning curve by choosing technologies that cover all of my requirements and simply using them unless some far more compelling comes along.
After dinner last night, I re-wrote the web UI for my current commercial development project using minimal CSS, HTML, and a small amount of Javascript - although switching work contexts now requires fetching more resources from the server, the amount of data transfer is minimal and the web app is still very responsive, even factoring in slower network connections.
I have looked at Open Lazlo and other heavy weight client frameworks - they look great, but for someone like me whose primary work does not involve building web applications, I like reducing my own learning curve by choosing technologies that cover all of my requirements and simply using them unless some far more compelling comes along.
Labels: AJAX, CSS, Javascript
Monday, March 27, 2006
We *really* need semantic attributes on web links
Scoble complains about the lack of a 'do not follow' link attribute on Tailrank: link to an article that you are complaining about and the linked article gets a (slightly) higher search rank, and more people read it.
Sure, this is a problem, but the real solution is setting a standard (could be grass roots) for adding optional attributes to HTML links (I wrote about this More on link types and the Semantic Web a few months ago).
Jon Udel has a great idea for combining CSS style ids with semantic information. The microformats people have good ideas for using the rel attribute to specify a relationship to a link (license, help, type-of, friend, etc.)
What I am most interested in is having enough usable information on the web to enable me to write software tools that can automatically extract information on trust relationships between information sources on the web. However, the range of applications is just about infinite - given more metadata.
Sure, this is a problem, but the real solution is setting a standard (could be grass roots) for adding optional attributes to HTML links (I wrote about this More on link types and the Semantic Web a few months ago).
Jon Udel has a great idea for combining CSS style ids with semantic information. The microformats people have good ideas for using the rel attribute to specify a relationship to a link (license, help, type-of, friend, etc.)
What I am most interested in is having enough usable information on the web to enable me to write software tools that can automatically extract information on trust relationships between information sources on the web. However, the range of applications is just about infinite - given more metadata.
Labels: CSS, knowledge management
Tuesday, January 17, 2006
Rich clients and web applications
I (mostly) earn my living designing and developing interactive web applications and web services. Putting up with different implementations of CSS and JavaScript in FireFox, Safari, IE, etc. seems like a small price to pay in order to enable anyone to use a web application with a browser.
That said, I love it when web portals open up their systems with public APIs. Flickr's API is especially nice since they support REST, XML-RPC, and SOAP. For Mac OS X 10.4 users, there are two great Flickr rich ("fat") clients that I think are very cool: Flickr Export for iPhoto and tickr for Flickr which allows you to search on Flickr tags and see a scrolling list of matched thumbnail pictures that scroll up the right side of your desktop.
The important thing here is that Flickr did not have to write these fat clients - they just had to make a public web services API available.
That said, I love it when web portals open up their systems with public APIs. Flickr's API is especially nice since they support REST, XML-RPC, and SOAP. For Mac OS X 10.4 users, there are two great Flickr rich ("fat") clients that I think are very cool: Flickr Export for iPhoto and tickr for Flickr which allows you to search on Flickr tags and see a scrolling list of matched thumbnail pictures that scroll up the right side of your desktop.
The important thing here is that Flickr did not have to write these fat clients - they just had to make a public web services API available.
Labels: CSS, Javascript
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