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June 9, 2008 - Comments Off on Forum on Participation and Politics

Forum on Participation and Politics

A forum presented by OneWebDay, ISOC-NY and the Information Law Institute at NYU during Internet Week New York as part of the build up to a politically-minded OneWebDay on 22 September 2008. It brought together a variety of renowned scholars, thinkers and activists to provide their perspectives on political engagement on the Net

Jeffrey Barke is senior developer and information architect at theMechanism, a multimedia firm with offices in New York, London and Durban, South Africa.

Published by: jeffreybarke in Government
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June 6, 2008 - 2 comments

Dzone Snippets and Webmonkey.com

After benefiting from the site multiple times, I decided to start contributing to DZone Snippets, a source for useful source code snippets. There's not much there yet, but you can follow my snippets at http://snippets.dzone.com/user/jeffreybarke.

Also Webmonkey.com is having a re-launch party next Wednesday, 11 June, from 6 pm through 8 pm at Sweet & Vicious in Manhattan. There will be music, beverages and good cheer, and theMechanism will be attending.

Jeffrey Barke is senior developer and information architect at theMechanism, a multimedia firm with offices in New York, London and Durban, South Africa.

Published by: jeffreybarke in The Programming Mechanism

June 3, 2008 - Comments Off on Robots.txt and the Sitemaps protocol

Robots.txt and the Sitemaps protocol

At Google I/O, I discovered you can add a line to your robots.txt file so that search bots can autodiscover your sitemaps built to the Sitemaps protocol. The format:

Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml

Jeffrey Barke is senior developer and information architect at theMechanism, a multimedia firm with offices in New York, London and Durban, South Africa.

Published by: jeffreybarke in The Programming Mechanism
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June 3, 2008 - 12 comments

When will IE 6 die?

As a recent Mac and Safari convert (I only use Firefox for development now), I just read with enthusiasm that Safari currently has a 6.25% market share. While welcome news, unfortunately it reiterates how important it remains to make sure our sites work in Internet Explorer.

After hearing about Safari's growth, I became curious about IE7's penetration. How close is IE6 to death?

Unfortunately, not close enough. According to http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=0 (the same site that reports Safari has 6.25% market share), IE has 73.75% market share. The site does not differentiate between IE 6 and 7. thecounter.com reports that between 1 Feb 2008 and 31 May 2008, IE7 was used 40% of the time and IE6 still has a 37% market share!

Jeffrey Barke is senior developer and information architect at theMechanism, a multimedia firm with offices in New York, London and Durban, South Africa.

Published by: jeffreybarke in The Programming Mechanism
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May 29, 2008 - Comments Off on Google I/O

Google I/O

Google I/O 2008 Sorry, would love to write more, but completely beat after four hours of sleep and an intense day learning about the latest Google projects. Until I'm able to write a wrap up, check out my photos and audio from the keynote and some of the sessions. (Note—the audio quality might be poor. These are unedited recordings made from the audience using an .mp3 recorder)

Can We Get There From Here? by Alex Russell

Part 1:
[audio:GoogleIO-1.mp3]

Part 2:
[audio:GoogleIO-2.mp3]

Secure Collaboration—How Web Applications can Share and Still Be Paranoid by Mike Samuel

[audio:GoogleIO-3.mp3]

Improving Browsers in New Ways: Gears++ by Chris Prince

Part 1:
[audio:GoogleIO-4.mp3]

Part 2:
[audio:GoogleIO-5.mp3]

Jeffrey Barke is senior developer and information architect at theMechanism, a multimedia firm with offices in New York, London and Durban, South Africa.

Published by: jeffreybarke in The Programming Mechanism
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May 23, 2008 - Comments Off on Introduction to microformats

Introduction to microformats

Introduction to microformats at the New York Web Standards Meetup Group 22 May 2008 Notes and links from last night's discussion of microformats at the New York Web Standards Meetup Group. Thanks to everyone who made it!

Listen to this event

[audio:BarKode-Episode6-IntroductionMicroformats.mp3]

During the meetup, someone asked if there was a microformats validator. I replied that I wasn't sure, but I believed there was a validator in Operator. It turns out the answer isn't so simple.

From All in the <head> by Drew McLellan:

With microformats, however, we're embedding a dialect inside HTML. Whilst it's easy to spot items that are part of that dialect, it doesn't hold true that anything not recognisable as being of that dialect is an error. To take an example for hCard, I might have an image with a class name of photograph as part of an hCard block. The official class name from hCard is photo, but that doesn't mean that a value of photograph is an error—it's just not something we're looking for.

Operator does not contain a full microformats validator, however it does have a debug mode:

Debug mode provides a number of different options for people developing microformats as well as RDFa and eRDF. A new action is added called "Debug." For microformat developers, this action provides access to the internal representation of the microformat, the HTML source that created the microformats, and for hCards and hCalendars, the vCard/iCalendar representation from both Operator and Brian Suda's X2V. For RDF developers, the debug action provides a representation of the RDF triplets. RDF developers can also access the model when in debug mode.

Another feature of debug mode is that invalid microformats are displayed in the menus. When they are clicked on, they display the same information as standard debug, but provide an additional pane that gives the reason that the microformat was invalid.

Drew McLellan has written a microformats lint tool: rel-lint is a bookmarklet that checks the value assigned to the rel attribute of links.

Our next meetup is 26 June 2008. It will feature Adam Detrick (TheStreet.com) presenting "IE Root," a technique using conditional comments to target IE without making extra calls to the server or using CSS hacks, and Jeffrey Barke (theMechanism) discussing what the WAI-ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications Suite) is and how to use it. RSVP

Jeffrey Barke is senior developer and information architect at theMechanism, a multimedia firm with offices in New York, London and Durban, South Africa.

Published by: jeffreybarke in The Programming Mechanism

May 22, 2008 - 4 comments

Microformats at the New York Web Standards Meetup tonight

The New York Web Standards Meetup Group will be meeting at theMechanism on 22 May 2008 (tonight!) at 7:00 pm to discuss microformats, a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards.

Attend the meetup to learn what microformats are, why they were created, and how to use this simple technology to make data on webpages more easily indexed, searched, and cross-referenced

22 May 2008 . 7:00 pm
theMechanism
440 9th Avenue 11th Floor
New York, NY 10001 [map]

Please contact us if you’d like to present at the July or August meetup.

Jeffrey Barke is senior developer and information architect at theMechanism, a multimedia firm with offices in New York, London and Durban, South Africa.

Published by: jeffreybarke in The Programming Mechanism

April 30, 2008 - Comments Off on New event compatibility tables at QuirksMode.org

New event compatibility tables at QuirksMode.org

Peter-Paul Koch has released a new version of his browser event compatibility tables (the last major version dates to 2005) at QuirksMode.org. He has data on IE 5.5, 6, 7, and 8 beta 1; Firefox 2 and 3 beta 5; Safari 3.0 and 3.1 on Windows; Opera 9.26 and 9.5 beta; and Konqueror 3.5.7

Jeffrey Barke is senior developer and information architect at theMechanism, a multimedia firm with offices in New York, London and Durban, South Africa.

Published by: jeffreybarke in The Programming Mechanism

April 30, 2008 - 4 comments

Q&A from the NY Web Standards Meetup—WCAG Samurai Errata

During last week's New York Web Standards meetup on the WCAG Samurai errata, the group generated a few questions that no one could answer. Joe Clark, who led the WCAG Samurai, was kind enough to help out.

All of the WCAG Samurai errata we had questions about are listed below, in <blockquote>. They are organized by WCAG guidelines in bold.

You can download the PowerPoint presentation and listen to the event at this post: NY Web Standards Meetup—WCAG Samurai Errata for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 1.0, published on 25 April 2008.

Guideline 6.
Ensure that pages featuring new technologies transform gracefully

A page that uses digital-rights management or copy protection of any kind cannot be claimed to comply with WCAG+Samurai, as its compatibility with adaptive technology and future technologies cannot be independently proven.

While this seems straightforward, none of us could think of an example. Joe Clark suggested an eBook.

Guideline 10.
Use interim solutions

Do not cause pop-ups or other windows to appear and do not change the current window without informing the user.

Does not apply to JavaScript modal windows created in an unobtrusive way (obviously, no <a href="#" onclick="javascript"></a>). Check out WAI-ARIA for ways to make JavaScript applications more accessible.

Do not add non-link, printable characters (surrounded by spaces or not) between adjacent links unless the semantics of the document naturally would include such characters.

Navigation schemes marked up like this are a no-no:

<ul>
<li><a href=""></a> Link 1 |</li>
<li><a href=""></a> Link 2 |</li>
<li><a href=""></a> Link 3</li>
</ul>

Use the CSS pseudo-element :after, background images, or borders.

Guideline 12.
Provide context and orientation information

Do not use frames. (You may use iframes.)

I was curious why iframes were allowed and wondered how assistive technologies handle them. Joe let me know that assistive technologies handle them "quite well. … Everything inside the <iframe> and </iframe> is the alternative content, plus it's inline or block so you can do whatever you want with it."

Do not place distinguishing information at the beginning of headings, paragraphs, lists, etc. unless it is significantly harder to understand the document without it. (We do not define "significantly harder.")

We weren't sure what the WCAG meant by "distinguishing information." According to Joe, the WCAG wanted us to front-load everything (headings, paragraphs), so people wouldn't have to read more than a few words to understand what the meaning.

Hidden structural information (e.g., heading elements positioned offscreen) is permitted when document semantics warrant it.

None of us were familiar with this technique or could think of a reason to hide structural information. Joe suggested Googling "offscreen positioning" accessibility:

"In cases where we need to hide content from a visitor but still make it available to the screenreader, we position it offscreen."
Accessibility Tips. "Positioning content offscreen."
"The advantage of offscreen display for iTV captions it that the captions can be much larger and easier to read. The minor disadvantage is that they will be unfamiliar to most viewers for the first few minutes."
Joe Clark. "Captioning and iTV."

Jeffrey Barke is senior developer and information architect at theMechanism, a multimedia firm in New York City and London.

Published by: jeffreybarke in The Programming Mechanism