Archive for July, 2006

Two interesting pieces of XHTML news this week. Yesterday the Working Draft for the XHTML Role Attribute was released, and today the eighth public Working Draft of XHTML 2.0 was released.

XHTML 2.0 is clearly important, but I’m especially interested in the Role Attribute because this first public working draft comes out of the excellent Accessible DHTML work contributed to the W3C by IMB, and already functional in Firefix > 1.5.x. Here are the blurbs for each:

XHTML 2.0: Working Draft

2006-07-26: The HTML Working Group has released the eighth public Working Draft of XHTML™ 2.0. A general purpose markup language without presentation elements, XHTML 2 is designed for representing documents for a wide range of purposes across the Web. See the introduction for the differences between XHTML versions 1 and 2. Much of XHTML 2 works in existing browsers. The draft includes an implementation in RELAX NG with DTD and XML Schema implementations to follow. Visit the HTML home page. (Permalink)

XHTML Role Attribute Module: Working Draft

2006-07-25: The HTML Working Group has released the First Public Working Draft of the XHTML Role Attribute Module to provide the ability to integrate the role attribute into any markup language based on XHTML Modularization 1.1. Developed in conjunction with the accessibility community and other groups, the document is the first of a series of XHTML modules designed to help extend the scope of XHTML-family markup languages into new environments. Visit the HTML home page. (Permalink)

I was just catching up on some blog reading, and came cross this sentence on Christina Wodtke’s blog: “When several smart people email you and say ‘watch this’ you watch that: Hans Rosling on TED Talks“. She’s right, it puts complex and often-oversimplified issues in a new and illustrative light. It’s good stuff to have seen as you think about the development of our world, and what progress might really mean. Here’s the blurb from the site:

Hans Rosling is professor of international health at Sweden’s world-renowned Karolinska Institute, and founder of Gapminder, a non-profit that brings vital global data to life. With the drama and urgency of a sportscaster, he debunks a few myths about the “developing” world. (Recorded February, 2006 in Monterey, CA.)

The Technology Entertainment Design Conference, or TED, is where this was shot, and is a annual conference in Monterey, CA, self described as “a global community of remarkable people and remarkable ideas”.

Erik Bruchez on the XForms Everywhere blog walks through the steps necessary to make pdf files open in your dedicated pdf viewer instead of in Firefox. He also does a nice job summarizing why you’d want to do this:

• The Adobe Acrobat Reader plugin, like any Adobe application, takes ages to start. While it is starting, your browser is frozen and you can’t do anything else.

• When it doesn’t work, it crashes your entire browser, or just freezes it (the case with Adobe Acrobat 6.0 and Firefox).

• When it works, usual browser shortcuts don’t work, including those to close your window or tab, navigate between tabs, go back and forward, etc.

• To make things worse, there is really no reliable warning when you follow a hyperlink that you are going to open a PDF file. So you hang, crash or freeze without any courtesy notice.

Last month I had the privilege of addressing the audience at the prestigious @media 2006 conference in London. It was quite an honor to contribute to such an outstanding event, accurately dubbed “Europe’s foremost professional web design conference”. Many thanks are due to the organizers, to my fellow presenters and all the attendees, to everybody who attended my session, and especially to those who wrote about it in the blogosphere both before and after. It is a ongoing joy to be part of such a vibrant and open community.

My talk, Yahoo! vs. Yahoo!, used case studies to examine how and when development decisions change in response to a project’s location on what I’m calling The Page-to-Application Spectrum. I used three case studies: the new Yahoo! home page beta, the new Yahoo! Photos beta, and the Yahoo! Mail beta.

While slides don’t capture all the material of the talk, I’m pleased to share them today:

• atmedia2006.ppt (.ppt, 4.2mb)
• atmedia2006.pdf (.pdf, 2.1mb)

Detailed notes taken during my presentation are available thanks to Stuart at Muffin Research. Also, if you have questions or comments, please send me a note or leave a comment.

On a final note, public speaking these days is especially rewarding because of the immediate feedback blogging makes possible. If you will please indulge me, I would like to point to some of the coverage of my session:

PPK of Quirksmode.org, in Did we just win the web standards battle? (@media impressions - part 3)

“Nate Koechley’s presentation was a case study in knowledge sharing, with him giving away quite a few juicy technical bits for free. In short, Yahoo is firmly committed to openness and to discussing stuff with the international technical community.”

PPK of Quirksmode.org in @media impressions - part 2

“…my favourite one, because it’s the only one that taught me some new geeky stuff.”

IT Bytes in @Media 2006

“Rating, 8/10″

Marko Samastur in @media 2006 is over

“[@media] was great and I specially enjoyed presentations given by Nate Koechley and Andy Clarke. Those two alone made going worthwhile and if you have a chance to see any of them, don’t miss the opportunity.”

“Nate Koechley’s talk was a revelation. An incredible amount of good information and it’s been eye opening for me to learn about Yahoo’s experience.”

David Storey of Slightly ajar in @Media 2006 London

“Nate Koechley of Yahoo! is one such Open the Web hero that has done more than many to promote open standards and get web sites working in as many browsers as possible.”

Martin Kliehm of Learning the World in My @media 2006 Day Two

“I went to this presentation because Nate Koechley recently published his smart concept paper about graded browser support, which we immediately adopted. What I didn’t expect was a most impressive roller coaster trip through browser performance!”

Thanks again, and I hope to see you all again very soon.