Wood and Wire

I’ve just heard that Australians at Work, a site we built for Film Australia, is a finalist in the Best Learning category of the 12th Annual AIMIA Awards. We’re thrilled because it’s a site we’re particularly proud of — especially from a technical point of view.

For a site that is based around video, Australians at Work exhibits an unusually high level of web-standards compliance. We used content negotiation techniques to dynamically serve 2 levels of standards-compliant code. Where browsers send an http accept header that indicates they are fully XHTML compatible, the pages are served as XHTML 1.0 Strict, using the “application/xhtml+xml” mime type in accordance with W3C recommendations. When accessed by older browsers, the page is converted to HTML 4.01 Strict and served as “text/html”. In both cases all pages have been validated using the W3C validator tool. This ensures they are 100% syntactically correct.

This level of standards compliance (ie. serving valid XHTML with the correct mime type) is still quite rare. I would imagine that this is the only public-sector site in Australia that offers this level of web-standards compliance.

We also put a lot of effort into making the video content as accessible as possible. We used Flash for the video and designed for maximum accessibility by attaching accessible text to all essential controls and by implementing keyboard shortcuts for those controls. By using “.swf” files for video rather than the more common “.flv” format, we were able to extend compatibility to users with version 6 of the Flash player, whereas most sites using Flash video require version 7.

Anyway, we’re up against some stiff competition in the final round, and most of the competing sites are certainly more flamboyant and graphically rich. Having been an AIMIA awards judge myself, I know that immediate visual appeal and ‘wow factor’ usually counts for more than what’s under the bonnet – but here’s hoping!

Something I’m enjoying reading at the moment: 24 ways to impress your friends is a sort of geek’s advent calendar. Each day there’s a new tip covering some of the latest techniques in standards-based (mostly!) web design.

All of them are well thought out and well written.

This one is really quite simple — if you’ve built a site that uses Javascript, and you care about reaching any sort of audience, you need to do the following:

• Find a browser that will let you disable Javascript (most do).
• Disable Javascript (I bet you saw that coming)
• Try using your site

If your site is well designed, you’ll still be able to access all the content without Javascript. It might not look as pretty, and some of the dancing baloney will be gone. But at least you can read everything, see the images, and move from page to page. (more…)

It’s a long time since I’ve used Internet Explorer for anything other than browser-compatibility testing, so I’ve never bothered to change its default home page setting to something more useful than http://msn.com. In any case, it’s kind of interesting to see that parallel Micro$oft universe flash by while I’m on my way to wherever it is that I actually want to go today. Well, I had a bit of a chuckle a while back when I fired up IE to do some of the aforesaid testing and was greeted with a message that told me “If you are using Internet Explorer for Mac, we recommend that you use another browser to have an optimal experience of MSN.” (more…)

I’ve been playing with the final release of Firefox 1.5 for a few days now, and I’m really quite impressed — although it’s fair to say that most of the improvements won’t even be noticed by the average user.

Of course there are speed improvements and subtle interface tweaks, but the really important developments are Firefox’s support for emerging web standards such as CSS3, SVG and XSLT. (more…)

In my day job I often have to write accessibility / usability reports on web sites (both professionally produced and student projects). I see a lot of very well written and pretty-to-look-at sites, but I’m constantly amazed to see web developers (even the professionals) making the same usability design mistakes over and over. This the first of a series of my tips on how to avoid those mistakes. (more…)

There are some really cool free-or-almost-free web stats tools emerging at the moment: Measure Map, Mint, and Google Analytics, and probably some others I don’t know about yet.

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Of all the great presentations at WE05, the one that had the most impact on me was one of the ones I didn’t actually see (more…)

Alex Robinson has written In search of the One True Layout — a really comprehensive wrap-up of the challenges involved in building sophisticated pure-css layouts.

Recommended reading for those of us who work all the hours god sends getting css layouts to work in the browser that Bill sends.

At this year’s WE05 conference it was not surprising that most of the delegates arrived with laptops. The surprising thing was that nearly all of those laptops were macs. I would have expected web developers to have a somewhat higher percentage of mac usage than the general internet user, but looking around the room I would have estimated the mac:win ratio at soemthing like 10:1! More than anything else I heard or saw at the conference, this filled me with hope.