Standards

Introduction to HTML5, Microformats and CSS3

This screencast will give you insight into HTML5 and CSS3 to help ease the pain that comes with transitioning to a slightly different syntax.

Why People Still Use IE 6

Internet Explorer 6 is always a hot subject of debate. We’ve talked about it here many many times. The forums are full of folks trying to troubleshoot it. The CSS support is problematic and the JavaScript support is proprietary nonsense. The conversation is heating up a little hotter than usual lately, as major companies are starting to pull support for it. I thought I would start the conversation by covering the reasons I think people still use this browser.

Society for Technical Communications tries to define Technical Communicator and Fails

Maybe the confusion that surrounds the STC is its inability to define who it serves. Maybe the STC is trying to drum up support and be more inclusive.

Choosing the Right Style Guide

Style guides can improve the quality and presentation of documentation. They establish a layer of professionalism that may not have been there before. They also reduce arguments and ‘loose cannons’ within the department, as the style guide becomes the acknowledged reference. There are at least four points to consider when selecting a style guide.

Quality Manuals for Quality Products

Under the European law, the user manual is an integral part of the product. Faulty instructions or lacking safety information may lead to unforeseen liability claims. Several standards and directives give guidance on how to fulfill safety requirements, but also regulate design, use of language and information architecture of any high-quality manual.

CYBERcodeur

Weblog collaboratif portant sur les enjeux sociopolitiques, technologiques et stratégiques entourant la normalisation et l'accessibilisation du Web, mais aussi un million d'autres trucs tout aussi futiles qui nous passent par l'esprit...

Style Manuals: The Politics of Selection

Bette Frick and Betsy Frick discuss how a style manual can save time and money, how to select the proper style manual and get buy-in, and how to create a style guide to use in conjunction with a style manual.

Steve Smith on HTML5 and CSS3

Specifications are moving in the direction of how we have been using the web for the past five years or more, e.g. video, audio and user generated content. Developers have started to fall into habits (some good, some bad), and so the specs are trying to make those habits easier and more standardized. The structural tags, web forms, and advanced CSS are all letting us do the same things we’ve been doing for years, just in an easier, more standardized way.

HTML 5 Progresses Despite Challenges

Development of HTML 5, the highly touted upgrade to the language of the Web, is progressing but still faces obstacles, including lack of a standard video codec, said an official of the World Wide Web Consortium at a gathering on Tuesday.

What Does It All Mean?

This chapter will take an HTML page that has absolutely nothing wrong with it, and improve it. Parts of it will become shorter. Parts will become longer. All of it will become more semantic. It’ll be awesome.

The HTML Scope/Headers Debate

The HTML working group have decided not to include the headers attribute in the HTML 5.0 working draft, as they believe the scope attribute is sufficient for associating header cells with data cells. With simple and most complex tables, this is a reasonable assertion, but doesn't work with overlaid and irregular tables, where the associated headers aren't in the same column or row.

Forward Towards the Past

I'm reading worrying things about the discussions about the next version of HTML, known as HTML5. It looks to me as if things are going in the wrong direction. Oh, and in order not to disappoint long-time readers there'll be a little barb against XHTML pretenders at the end of the article.

DITA 1.2 Feature Description: Glossary and Terminology Specialization

In technical writing, synonyms and variants should be used judiciously and often avoided altogether. The use of one term consistently to express a given concept is preferred so that communication is clear and so that translation costs are minimized. For this reason, when synonyms and variants do exist in popular usage, it is common practice in commercial environments to choose one of the terms as the “preferred term.” This indicator of preferred usage needs to be documented in glossaries. Due to the limitations of markup languages for creating glossaries, usually the so-called preferred term is identified simply by making it the headword in a glossary entry and providing a definition in this glossary entry.

HTML 5 Differences from HTML 4

HTML 5 defines the fifth major revision of the core language of the World Wide Web, HTML. "HTML 5 differences from HTML 4" describes the differences between HTML 4 and HTML 5 and provides some of the rationale for the changes.

Dive Into HTML5

Dive Into HTML5 seeks to elaborate on a hand-picked Selection of features from the HTML5 specification and other fine Standards. I shall publish Drafts periodically, as time permits.

Detecting HTML5 Features

You may well ask: “How can I start using HTML5 if older browsers don’t support it?” But the question itself is misleading. HTML5 is not one big thing; it is a collection of individual features. So you can’t detect “HTML5 support,” because that doesn’t make any sense. But you can detect support for individual features, like canvas, video, or geolocation.

Get Ready for HTML 5

Ready or not, here it comes. Despite the confusion surrounding its evolution, real-world HTML 5 is right around the corner. Longtime ALA contributor J. David Eisenberg returns to get us all up to speed on the markup we’re about to be writing.

Validating a Custom DTD

In his article in this issue, Peter-Paul Koch proposes adding custom attributes to form elements to allow triggers for specialized behaviors. The W3C validator won’t validate a document with these attributes, as they aren’t part of the XHTML specification. This article will show you how to create a custom DTD that will add those custom attributes, and will show you how to validate documents that use those new attributes.

How to Read W3C Specs

If you’re working with the latest technology, there may not be any user reference material at all; the only documentation available is the specification. In such a case, learning to read the spec is a necessity, not a luxury.

Introduction to RDFa: Part 2

RDFa (“Resource Description Framework in attributes”) is having its five minutes of fame: Google is beginning to process RDFa and Microformats as it indexes websites, using the parsed data to enhance the display of search results with “rich snippets.”

Ten Ways To Make Your XHTML Site Accessible Using Web Standards

Let’s take a look at 10 ways to improve the accessibility of your XHTML website by making it standards-compliant. We’ll go the extra mile and include criteria that fall beyond the standards set by the W3C but which you should follow to make your website more accessible. Each section lists the criteria you need to meet, explains why you need to meet them and gives examples of what you should and shouldn’t do.

Why Apple is Betting on HTML 5: A Web History

To get an accurate picture of why HTML 5 matters and how its adoption will change the future of the web and software in general, you have to take a look at the squabbling drama of contention that HTML 5 is emerging from as industry rivals work to achieve a new level of consensus on how the web should work.

Video Introduction to HTML 5

Are you interested in HTML 5 and what's coming down the pipeline but haven't had time to read any articles yet? We've put together an educational Introduction to HTML 5 video that goes over many of the major aspects of this new standard. In the video we also crack open the HTML 5 YouTube Video prototype to show you some of the new HTML 5 tags, such as nav, article, etc.

School Standards That Support Technical Writing

The value of learning effective nonfiction nonnarrative writing ("technical writing") for middle- and high-school students has been cited repeatedly in official and unofficial academic standards starting in the early 1990s.

All Tools Suck

On top of the usual frustrations with poor, incomplete, and incorrect implementation of standards and typically buggy and poorly-supported programs, add my frustration with trying to integrate these tools with other similarly joyful tools and you can see that my job is a recipe for bitterness and pain.

Why is HTML Suddenly Interesting?

Today the HTML conversation is reborn. Standards development around HTML seems to actually have a chance of influencing user experience in the browser, and Microsoft itself is participating in the HTML 5 conversation despite still holding roughly two-thirds of the browser market. While Microsoft's market share is only slowly eroding, developer mindshare seems to have shifted decisively to the band of WHATWG upstarts, Microsoft's competitors.

A Whole Lotta HTML5 Love

With the flurry of HTML5 tweets this past month, I felt it was somewhat easier to park some of them in a blog post. Retweeting was adding to the confusion for a non-HTML5 person like me.

Misunderstanding Markup: XHTML 2/HTML 5 Comic Strip

Now that the development of XHTML 2 is discontinued, should we stick to XHTML 1.0 or move forward to HTML 5 or better prefer the old HTML 4? Let’s set things straight once and for all. In this post we are trying to clear up the confusion, explain what is what and describe what markup language you can use for your web-sites.

The McCulley/Cuppan Standards Development Process We Use with Our Clients

People use different terms to describe quality and if they actually use the same term, then it is highly unlikely that they will use the same definition for the term. So the first problem faced in the review process is the vocabulary used to describe quality attributes in a document.

International Standards for Usability Should Be More Widely Used

Despite the authoritative nature of international standards for usability, many of them are not widely used. This paper explains both the benefits and some of the potential problems in using usability standards in areas including user interface design, usability assurance, software quality, and usability process improvement.

Determining What Individual SUS Scores Mean: Adding an Adjective Rating Scale

The System Usability Scale (SUS) is an inexpensive, yet effective tool for assessing the usability of a product, including Web sites, cell phones, interactive voice response systems, TV applications, and more. It provides an easy-to-understand score from 0 (negative) to 100 (positive). While a 100-point scale is intuitive in many respects and allows for relative judgments, information describing how the numeric score translates into an absolute judgment of usability is not known. To help answer that question, a seven-point adjective-anchored Likert scale was added as an eleventh question to nearly 1,000 SUS surveys. Results show that the Likert scale scores correlate extremely well with the SUS scores (r=0.822). The addition of the adjective rating scale to the SUS may help practitioners interpret individual SUS scores and aid in explaining the results to non-human factors professionals.

Markers That Help Measure Communication Quality

In our consultancy, we have developed a set of terms that represent what we consider to be an effective set of descriptive markers. Markers that help to measure how well a document is communicating. We characterize our set of markers as “Document Standards” for all forms of technical and scientific writing.

How Do You Measure Communication Quality?

Most people involved with authoring and reviewing process do not have good markers to inform them of the overall communication quality of a document. So without good markers they are left to utilize really poor markers to help them measure document quality.

Defining Quality for Documentation Practices

Defining quality means developing expectations or standards of quality. Standards can be developed for inputs, processes, or outcomes; they can be clinical or administrative. Unfortunately when it comes to documentation, many companies only focus on the standards related to time and accuracy. Quality standards should be in place for all aspect of the documentation development pathway—moving from planning, to authoring, to reviewing.

HTML Five

This site is a project to learn, discuss and promote HTML 5.

Open Web Education Alliance Incubator Group Wiki

The mission of the Open Web Education Alliance Incubator Group is to help enhance and standardize the architecture of the World Wide Web by facilitating the highest quality standards and best practice based education for future generations of Web professionals through such activities as: fostering open communication channels for knowledge transfer, and curriculum sharing between corporate entities, educational institutions, Web professionals, and students.

XHTML Cheat Sheet

This XHTML cheat sheet is excellent for XHTML coders. Along with many basic attributes, this two-page grid includes references that even experienced web professionals would find useful. Three types of elements are defined in this cheat sheet: block, inline and table elements. The miscellaneous section includes 22 additional elements. Each row contains the name, description and attributes of each of the elements available for use.

CSS Cheat Sheet

This cheat sheet is designed to not only be a quick reference for CSS properties but also to give you a good feel for how each property should be used. It contains all of the properties in the CSS2 specification including a description of the syntax of each one.

Recommended List of DTDs You Can Use in Your Web Document

When authoring document is HTML or XHTML, it is important to Add a Doctype declaration. The declaration must be exact (both in spelling and in case) to have the desired effect, which makes it sometimes difficult. To ease the work, below is a list of recommended declarations that you can use in your Web documents.

Yes, You Can Use HTML 5 Today!

The blogosphere was jerked into excitement when Google gave a sneak preview of its new service, Google Wave. Only the select few have an account, but there’s an 80-minute video about it on YouTube for the rest of us. The service is an HTML 5 app, and so HTML 5 has gone from being too far away to care about to today’s hot topic.

HTML 5: Now or Never?

Here at SitePoint, we have started thinking about HTML 5, and whether or not the time is right to publish a book about it. To help us decide, we asked a number of web luminaries what they thought. Their answers were both varied and interesting. Take a look and decide for yourself: is it time you started learning about HTML 5?

HTML 5 Doctor

html5doctor is a collaboration between, Rich Clark, Bruce Lawson, Jack Osborne, Mike Robinson, Remy Sharp and Tom Leadbetter. The site came about following a HTML5 meetup after the Future of Web Design conference in London (2009). We decided that there wasn’t a resource that catered for the people who wished to find out more about implementing HTML5 and how to go about it, so we thought we’d better build one. We will publish articles relating to HTML5 and it’s semantics and how to use them, here and now.

Understanding 'aside'

HTML 5 offers a new element to mark additional information that can enhance an article but isn’t necessarily key to understanding it. However, in the interpretation of 'aside' there lies confusion as to how it can be used, and with that there is demand for the Doctor to step up and clear the air. In this article I will look at what 'aside' was created for, including sample uses and how not to use this useful, misunderstood element.

Adopting WCAG 2

It is six months since the release of WCAG 2.0 and I thought it might be interesting to see how extensively it has been adopted as a bench mark for determining web content accessibility. Over this time, I have felt that the rate of adoption has been relatively slow and the number of countries and other regulatory authorities now using WCAG 2 is lower than I expected.

Common Look and Feel Standards for the Internet, Part 2: Standard on the Accessibility, Interoperability and Usability of Web Sites

This standard is directed toward ensuring equitable access to all content on Government of Canada Web sites.

New Accessibility Guidelines A "Welcomed Update"

The World Wide Web Consortium recently approved new accessibility guidelines. Passed in December 2008, the new "Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0" is now the official recommendation for web accessibility for the disabled. This new WCAG 2.0 document, a welcomed update, replaces the WCAG 1.0 W3C recommendation of 1999. This article is part one in a series discussing the impact of WCAG 2.0 on your website.

New Accessibility Guidelines Part IV: Robustness

The fourth principle of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines requires new web documents to be “robust.” Robustness, future-proofing, user-agent independence, accessibility-supported: All are terms that suggest the same basic idea that your documents should follow standard, supported models for web document types. In many ways, this is the simplest and most testable requirement of the WCAG, but the details can be quite complicated.

Content, Standards, Learning and SCORM

Within content domains, the key themes of the information age are being adopted: Modularisation, specialisation, integration and interoperability. Our communication is changing in volume, purpose and channels. The emphasis is more on collaboration and less on expert-to-novice teaching. And there’s a stronger emphasis on openness.

Fifteen Surefire Ways to Break Your CSS

But as silly as it may seem, some of the biggest CSS blunders stem from the simplest of errors. Knowing what some of those errors are and remembering to look for them can save you hours of wasted labor. Here are fifteen ways I’ve found to break my CSS for sure — and fifteen things I always look for whenever I have a problem in my code.

When Good Browsers Go Bad -- And They All Do

Jeffrey Zeldman must have thought he'd never live to see the day. Ten years after he co-founded the Web Standards Project, all of the major browser vendors have shown renewed commitment to supporting World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards in the last few years -- and they're following through. Those who lived through the browser wars of the '90s might think that hell has frozen over, were it not for one, small problem: Users still experience plenty of problems on the Web.

The Road to XHTML 2.0: MIME Types

Here's a dirty little secret: browsers aren't actually treating your XHTML as XML. Your validated, correctly DOCTYPE'd, completely standards compliant XHTML markup is being treated as if it were still HTML with a few weird slashes in places they don't belong (like
and ). Why? The answer is MIME types.

Video Format Guide

When people talk about video formats, they're referring to something called a container format. The container format is a detailed description of what's inside a video file. It describes the structure of the file, as well as the kind of data that the file contains.

What Are Web Standards and Why Should I Use Them?

Standards have so much to offer that we at The Web Standards Project (WaSP) consider it necessary to help you learn more about them. This document is merely a starting point; it will give you a solid understanding of what standards exist, why they do, and why you should care about them. Every time we create a piece of the Web, we contribute to the common information space that is the Web. We can build it up, or we can add weight that will tear it apart. The choice belongs to us; the consequences belong to everyone.

Browser Problems with the XML Prolog

Some browsers have difficulty upon encountering the XML Prolog. In some cases, the browser will render all the markup as text. In other cases, when a browser has some XML support, it might attempt to render the document as an XML tree. To avoid these problems, many practicing web professionals prefer to leave the prolog off. This table will help you make that decision by showing you which browsers have known problems with the XML prolog.

Daddy? Where Do Schemas Come From? Some Facts of Life for Schema Users

The rules for finding schema components when validating a document using W3C's XML Schema 1.0 are widely misunderstood. This presentation will the rules for constructing a schema and describe the reasoning behind the design.

Lessons Learned: Development from Initial Planning to Successful Implementation

From initial data modeling, to technical XML Schema design and critical programmatic realization, we have an actionable, real-world set of comprehensive recommendations that can help you formulate a successful XML implementation.

When Can I Use...

Compatibility tables for features in HTML5, CSS3, SVG and other upcoming web technologies in the most popular web browsers.

Analysis of XML Schema Usage

XML schema analysis aims to extract quantitative and qualitative information from actual XML schemas. To this end, XML schemas are measured through systematic algorithms, on the basis of the intrinsic feature model of the XSD language. XML schema analysis is a derivative of software analysis (program analysis) and of software code metrics, in particular. The present article introduces essential concepts of XML schema analysis and applies them to the important problem of understanding XML schema usage in practice. Analyses for feature counts, idiosyncrasy counts, size metrics, complexity metrics, and XML schema styles are executed on a large corpus of real-world XML schemas.

Providing Job-Based Policies and Procedures that Support Compliance Requirements

Organizations develop policies and procedures to support industry certification and compliance requirements. Unfortunately, companies often develop P&P information that is not helpful to all employees who must use the information. In fact, one study found that 40 percent of U.S. companies failed ISO certification because of problems with unclear or missing P&P documentation, resulting in wasted time, money, and effort.

Auditing and Enforcing Compliance with Policies and Procedures: Who Is Responsible?

Auditing and enforcing compliance with P&P content should not be the responsibility of a P&P group or included in the job description of a P&P practitioner. However, the charter or job description may state that P&P practitioners are responsible for supporting compliance efforts.

On Language Creation

During the past twenty years, a huge number of custom languages - at least hundreds, perhaps a couple of thousand - have been attempted. Almost all have been miserable failures. That is to say, the vast majority have failed to achieve wide adoption, and those that were adopted have often failed to achieve their goals, whether of reducing costs, enriching applications, or both.

XML Document Formats

As world events and business opportunities collide, the requirements for interoperable document formats become increasingly evident. Mandating XML for systems is a first step, but real information can't be shared effectively without a common understanding on the semantics and usage of the markup. One solution is to use agreed-on custom schemas. Another is to cite well-standardized formats such as XHTML, or deploy more specific XML formats such as Microsoft Office XML or the OpenDocument Format. None of these latter formats were written with a particular semantic usage in mind. They are of more general applicability than custom-built schemas, can be used for human-readable documents, and can be built into specific tools.

Designing XML Formats: Versioning vs. Extensibilty

Designers of XML formats have to face the problem of how to design their formats to be extensible and yet be resilient to changes due revisions of the format. This presentation covers various techniques and considerations for versioning XML formats.

Syntax, Semantics and Standards: Model for a National Health Information Network

This presentation will describe the National Health Information Network activity and role of syntax and semantics in building an interoperable framework for healthcare information on a national level.

Five Ways to Instantly Write Better CSS

Sure, anyone can write CSS. Even programs are doing it for you now. But is the CSS any good? Here are five tips to start improving yours.

XML Overview

This presentation is a 90 minute session. It will cover many areas of XML and XML technologies. It has been constructed to provide the audience a broad understanding of XML and XML technologies in a short amount of time. The presentation is geared to ensure that new XML users can obtain the maximum benefit from other sessions presented at XML 2004. The attendees will gain an understanding of XML jargon and acronyms used in XML technologies, as well.

Document Model Selection: Off-the-Shelf, Altered-to-Fit, or Bespoke?

Document Model selection is a key success factor in XML. Approaches include: adopting an existing model, modifying a model to meet your needs, and creating one to meet your needs. Advantages and disadvantages of each are discussed.

Accommodating XML 1.1 in XML Schema 1.0

As published the W3C XML Schema specification references XML 1.0 explicitly, and incorporates by reference certain key definitions, in particular those of the 'Char', 'Name' and 'S' character classes. XML 1.1 changes the contents of these classes, so although nothing in the existing XML Schema specification specifically bars infosets produced by XML 1.1 conformant parsers, such infosets, if they exploit any of the relevant changes in XML 1.1, will not be accepted as valid by conformant XML Schema 1.0 processors.

Document Models and XML Vocabulary Building for Business Users

Our work presents an experiment with a modeling tool that captures domain knowledge in a fashion natural to business users while producing formal models for use in IT processes. We demonstrate the use of this tool for designing XML Schemas.

Model Driven Architecture: Feasibility or Fallacy?

The high integration costs which exist today mean that we must automate interface maintenance and integration tasks or go insane, or worse, out of business. Ongoing pressure to reduce software development costs while increasing the quality and completeness of the work provide an opportunity for the use of model driven computing. MDA (Model Driven Architecture) is a technique for model based platform independent software specification based on the MOF (Meta-Object Facility) and XMI (XML Meta-data Interchange) standards from the OMG (Object Management Group). There are a number of tool vendors using XMI (especially UML (Unified Modeling Language) drawing tools) but common use and value seem to be slow to show themselves.

DOM, SAX and Standards - Where Now?

It's been 7 years and three "levels" since the first W3C DOM activity. XML and the way it is used has changed vastly over that time. DOM itself has moved from an API to access and manipulate an in-memory tree with no concept of namespaces, to an end to end XML technology, where parsing, modification of the tree (with the ability to check for validity with a schema as you go) and serialization are all specified.

XTche

This paper describes the design of a new language to formally specify constraints over Topic Maps. This language allows to express contextual conditions on classes of Topic Maps and the corresponding processing syntem. With XTche, a topic map designer defines a set of restrictions that enables to verify if a particular topic map is semantically valid. As the manual checking of large topic maps (frequent in real cases) is impossible, it is mandatory to provide an automatic validator.

Critique: Collaborative Reviewing of XML Documents

Critique is the first example of a new approach to contextual collaboration: Documentspaces. Documentspaces are places within a document in which teams can meet and work, synchronously or asynchronously, to create, review, and publish content.

Ten Things You Should Know About WCAG 2.0

With the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines being made a Candidate Recommendation on 30th April 2008, many companies are starting to prepare for the arrival of the new Accessibility Guideline. What exactly is different though? User Vision's Mark Palmer takes you through some key things you should know about the document commonly known as WCAG 2.0.

Getting Standards to Emerge, or, How to Build a Recipe Book While Everyone's Busy Cooking

The UK Local e-Government Standards Body was established late in 2003, and tasked with compiling an XML based data standards catalogue for use by UK Local Authorities. This is to be achieved by mapping existing standards, identifying gaps to be filled, advising and supporting local Councils, their partners and suppliers on the interpretation and adoption of standards, and establishing processes for developing new standards as required. However, UK Local Authorities have been developing e-services for several years already, so this new effort has to take place in a context where many projects are already under way, using a variety of business models, and with diverse approaches to XML interoperability design. An additional factor is the traditional tension between central and local government, which has led to patchy and inconsistent adoption of the national UK e-Government Interoperability framework. This paper is an account of the methodology developed by CSW Group Ltd and the LeGSB to tackle this situation.

WCAG 2.0 Checklist

A simple checklist that presents the principles and techniques of WCAG 2.0 in a user-friendly, understandable format. The language has been significantly changed and simplified from the official WCAG 2.0 specification to make it more easily tested and verified for web pages.

Mark of Success

It is just seven years since specifications were developed to allow XML data to be exchanged over the internet. Simon Bisson looks at the development of the lingua franca of the connected world.

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 covers a wide range of recommendations for making Web content more accessible. Following these guidelines will make content accessible to a wider range of people with disabilities, including blindness and low vision, deafness and hearing loss, learning disabilities, cognitive limitations, limited movement, speech disabilities, photosensitivity and combinations of these. Following these guidelines will also often make your Web content more usable to users in general.

A Personal Reflection on the WCAG 2.0 Publication

Let's work together as a community to make WCAG 2.0 a unifying force for web accessibility. There are so many websites and exciting new web applications being created today with accessibility barriers that make it difficult or impossible for some people with disabilities to use them. Let's change that, with WCAG 2.0.

Standards Schmandards

Here you will find articles about web standards, accessibility and usability. Occasionally there will be articles where we digress from these topics. My hope for the future: web accessibility will not be around as a topic anymore. Noone will be able to make a living as an accessibility expert because all web sites will be accessible and accessibility will be an integral part of all development efforts. All authoring tools will comply with the ATAG recommendation and editors will only have a vague memory of how difficult it was to publish accessible information in the early 21st century.

Using Ajax for Creating Web Applications

In the past few years, developers could choose between two approaches when building a web application. The first approach was to create a screen-based system with very rich interactions using a sophisticated, powerful technology such as Java or Flash. The alternative approach was to create a page-based system using easier-to-learn core web standards like XHTML and CSS whose more basic capabilities force less-rich interactions. A new technological approach, dubbed Ajax, might just be the right mix between the two.

Information Mapping

Information Mapping is a proprietary method for the analysis, organisation, and presentation of information. It is based on the needs of the users and their purpose in using the documentation. Information Mapping has three parts: analysis, organisation, presentation.

Creating Bulletproof and Easy to Complete Web Forms

Effective form design is a great way to boost conversion rates. Jason Fried and Matthew Linderman share with us the secret of how to create attractive and functional forms.

UTF-8: The Secret of Character Encoding

Character encoding and character sets are not that difficult to understand, but so many people blithely stumble through the worlds of programming without knowing what to actually do about it, or say "Ah, it's a job for those internationalization experts." No, it is not! This document will walk you through determining the encoding of your system and how you should handle this information. It will stay away from excessive discussion on the internals of character encoding.

Creating Semantic Structure

Despite the nature of the Web and the vast change in its role from a structural medium to a visual media, it is still important that Web content be designed with proper structure. With better support for Cascading Style Sheets in recent versions of Web browsers, developers can change the appearance of structural elements to meet their design and visual preferences.

How to Meet WCAG 2.0

A customizable quick reference to Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 requirements (success criteria) and techniques.

About Web Standards

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), along with other groups and standards bodies, has established technologies for creating and interpreting web-based content. These technologies, which we call 'web standards', are carefully designed to deliver the greatest benefits to the greatest number of web users while ensuring the long-term viability of any document published on the Web. Designing and building with these standards simplifies and lowers the cost of production, while delivering sites that are accessible to more people and more types of Internet devices. Sites developed along these lines will continue to function correctly as traditional desktop browsers evolve, and as new Internet devices come to market.

Introduction to Device Independence, Part 1

In the past three to four years the number of different kinds of devices that can access the Web has increased significantly. And they have a wide variety of different capabilities: smart phones, mobile phones, voice response systems, PDAs, and even microwave ovens can access the Web. The mission of the Device Independence activity of the W3C is to avoid fragmentation of the Web into spaces that are accessible only from certain types of devices.

Web Standards Checklist

The term web standards can mean different things to different people. For some, it is 'table-free sites', for others it is 'using valid code'. However, web standards are much broader than that. A site built to web standards should adhere to standards (HTML, XHTML, XML, CSS, XSLT, DOM, MathML, SVG etc) and pursue best practices (valid code, accessible code, semantically correct code, user-friendly URLs etc). In other words, a site built to web standards should ideally be lean, clean, CSS-based, accessible, usable and search engine friendly.

Converting Your Team

I’d like to share some of the things I’ve done (and still do) to get the team I work with to start using web standards. Maybe it will help someone who is in the position I was a while back.

Developing With Web Standards

This document attempts to explain how and why using web standards will let you build websites in a way that saves time and money for developers and provides a better experience for visitors. Also discussed are other methods, guidelines and best practices that will help produce high-quality websites that are accessible and usable to as many people and browsing devices as possible.

The Beauty and Business of CSS

Building designs with CSS is no longer a fringe activity practiced by standards geeks and early-adopters. Creative pioneers and highly skilled designers are bringing CSS to the mainstream. The explosion in popularity is ushering in a new wave of possibilities for web design. CSS provides greater design control, allows more flexibility, and enables sites to become attractive, accessible, and faster-loading, all at the same time.

Pushing Your Limits (and Other Secrets of Designing with CSS)

What do you do when you feel like you’ve hit a brick wall? When it seems your creativity is limited by how much CSS you know how to beat into submission? How do you resist the temptation to give it all up and go back to tables? Why does it feel like the pros are constantly inventing new techniques each week, when you’re still struggling to keep up with the stuff you read about last year? Understanding how and where CSS fits into the design process is key to knowing how to push your own limits. Reviewing the principles of existing techniques — and learning why or how they came about — can extend your capabilities and help you gain confidence in solving future problems on your own.

The Effect of Web Standards on Users

The current crop of web standards (XTHML & CSS) have had a dramatic effect on the work of the web designers who have adopted them. Writers of the best kinds have trumpeted the benefits of these standards over the coding practices that had become second nature to most (image spacers, anyone?).

Who Cares How Pretty Web Sites Are?

A few weeks back, I wrote about why I think web standards are difficult to learn. I wrote that because I was spending 80% of my time getting my code into XHTML 1.0 and styling it with CSS so that it rendered consistently across 5 or 6 browsers. What was I doing the other 20% of the time? Creating content, of course. I was putting together what a huge percentage of my site visitors come for. When I thought about it in these terms (time spent), I felt like styling with CSS was a lot of work for comparatively little gain. After all, people will still be able to find the site, read the content, and click on the links, whether or not I’ve styled it.

Some Reasons Why Web Standards Are Difficult to Learn

It seems like the box model shouldn’t be difficult to learn, but it is. I’m not sure why, but I think it may have to do with complexity that arises when you have boxes within boxes. At that point, it becomes an exercise of adding margin here, taking away padding there, and setting margins and paddings to 0 over there. Combine that with floating and positioning: relative, absolute, fixed, and it gets hard to know where the spacing between objects comes from, even when you’re working in standards-supporting browser like Mozilla. On top of this you have the box model hack…which only complicates things further. Even browsers get the box model wrong.

Are Designers Focused Enough on User Needs?

I find that many designers give much more of their time to learning the latest standards trick than learning the latest “designing for users” trick. Here are a few reasons why this may be so.

The Sagacity in Validation

In one of my introductory articles I stated that I do not care much for validation, yet I use well-formed XHTML 1.0 Strict (no less) as my preferred standard and CSS for layout purposes. If so, why on earth would I claim not to care about, or ignore, validation?

Web Design Going in the Wrong Direction?

There’s way too much talk about CSS and XHTML and Standards and Accessibility and not enough talk about people. CSS and Standards Compliant Code are just tools — you have to know what to build with these tools.

Web Development Mistakes

When I visit a website, especially if it’s the site of a competitor or a prospective client, I like viewing source and take a look at what’s under the hood. It’s one of my not-so-secret obsessions. And I am way too often absolutely disgusted by what I see. The web is overflowing with sites that use horribly invalid, broken, and inaccessible markup.

Web Standards For Business

This article highlights the benefits of using Web standards for business sites (Internet, intranet and extranet sites). It is aimed at stakeholders from the marketing, communication and IT departments.

Les Standards Web Pour L'Entreprise

Les standards du Web apportent aussi leur lot d’avantages aux sites d’entreprise, Internet, intranet et extranet. Voyons comment les décideurs marketing, communication et informatique pourront tirer parti de l’utilisation des standards au sein de leur entreprise.

Why Standards Harmonization is Essential for Web Accessibility

This document introduces the concept of harmonization and causes of fragmentation in the area of Web accessibility standards, and examines the impact of harmonization and fragmentation on Web developers, tool developers, and organizations. It also suggests action steps for promoting Web accessibility standards harmonization.

WCAG and the Myth of Accessibility

Kevin Leitch explains why he feels that the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines have failed in their mission to ensure that web content is accessible to all.

sIFR 2.0: Rich Accessible Typography for the Masses

Over the last several months, a small group of web developers and designers have been hard at work perfecting a method to insert rich typography into web pages without sacrificing accessibility, search engine friendliness, or markup semantics. The method, dubbed sIFR (or Scalable Inman Flash Replacement), is the result of many hundreds of hours of designing, scripting, testing, and debugging.

Mobile Web Best Practices 1.0

This document specifies Best Practices for delivering Web content to mobile devices. The principal objective is to improve the user experience of the Web when accessed from such devices. It is primarily directed at creators, maintainers and operators of Web sites. Readers of this document are expected to be familiar with the creation of Web sites, and to have a general familiarity with the technologies involved, such as Web servers and HTTP. Readers are not expected to have a background in mobile-specific technologies.

Lessons from the Death of HD-DVD

Over the last few months, HD-DVD appeared to rapidly fall from its apparent position as promising new disc format–touted by supporters as being technically superior, significantly cheaper, and less restrictive–down to a harsh new reality of scheduled death. However, the fate of HD-DVD wasn’t nearly as unpredictable as some seemed to think. Here’s why HD-DVD’s end should not have been a surprise, what lessons can be learned from its death, and what its demise means for Microsoft.

Microsoft's Plot to Kill QuickTime

While almost completely invisible for years, Apple’s progress in media has resulted in overturning Microsoft’s domination of the entertainment industry, established a resistance to unchecked DRM, and has extinguished Microsoft’s efforts to establish new proprietary technologies as de facto industry standards.

IE Version Targeting: A Neutral Perspective

Recently, there has been a lot of buzz going around about Internet Explorer 8 and plans to include in it a feature called "version targeting." You can scour the net for blog posts and articles about version targeting, but you'll get a lot of debate and several different views on this topic, and it's difficult to pinpoint just the facts. What is version targeting? Version targeting is a way to tell Internet Explorer how it should render a page.

jQuery and JavaScript Coding: Examples and Best Practices

When used correctly, jQuery can help you make your website more interactive, interesting and exciting. This article will share some best practices and examples for using the popular JavaScript framework to create unobtrusive, accessible DOM scripting effects. The article will explore what constitutes best practices with regard to Javascript and, furthermore, why jQuery is a good choice of a framework to implement best practices.

Why You Should Care About the New ISO User Documentation Standard

Why should technical communicators be interested in ISO's user documentation standard? Hayhoe discusses the various advantages of this new systems and software engineering standard, and makes an argument for how the profession can gain by adhering to it.

Understanding Progressive Enhancement

Since 1994, the web development community has beaten graceful degradation’s drum. A carry-over from the engineering world, the concept was, at its core, about giving the latest and greatest browsers the full-course meal experience while tossing a few scraps to the sad folk unfortunate enough to be using Netscape 4. It worked, sure, but it didn’t really match Tim Berners-Lee’s original vision for a universally accessible web. At SXSW in 2003, Steve Champeon and Nick Finck gave a presentation titled “Inclusive Web Design For the Future.” There, they unveiled a blueprint for this new way of approaching web development. Steve also gave it a name: progressive enhancement.

Free Your Embedded Data With SearchMonkey

Arguing for web standards and semantically clean and rich websites is an uphill battle. For years we had to deal with browsers that needed us to mess around with HTML just to display a document in several columns and the visual outcome was much more important than the structure.

Web Video Compression

Nowadays, broadband connections are widespread amongst the internet. Finally, video can be effectively added to website. But which player and video codec to go for? And how to get your video out there? This article features some tips and tricks for compressing and delivering video to the web.

The Rise of Flash Video, Part 1

Nobody really expected the stranglehold that Apple, Microsoft and Real had on the web streaming market in 2003 to be broken. Yet by Spring 2005, just 18 months after that presentation, that is exactly what had happened. Those three web video delivery technologies practically vanished, replaced almost entirely by Flash Video. This is not to say QuickTime and Windows Media are dead technologies. They aren’t by a long shot, but when it comes to putting video on the web, the Flash Player has rapidly become the only game in town.

Accessible Context-Sensitive Help with Unobtrusive DOM Scripting

This article demonstrates two methods of calling context-sensitive help in a web form: the Field Help Method and Form Help Method, in which unobtrusive DOM/JavaScript is employed to achieve the desired result. It also serves to illustrate the separation of the Structure and Behavior layers of a web page. Graceful degradation is employed to make sure that the help information is accessible if JavaScript is disabled or not available in a user agent.

Creating Accessible Data Tables

This article demonstrates how to code accessible data tables in (X)HTML, enabling visually impaired users who employ assistive technologies to interpret the table data. Two views of a tabular data table are presented and discussed.

The Seven Rules of Unobtrusive JavaScript

I've found the following rules over the years developing, teaching and implementing JavaScript in an unobtrusive manner. They have specifically been the outline of a workshop on unobtrusive JavaScript for the Paris Web conference 2007 in Paris, France.I hope that they help you understand a bit why it is a good idea to plan and execute your JavaScript in this way. It has helped me deliver products faster, with much higher quality and a lot easier maintenance.

CSS 3 Attribute Selectors

CSS attribute selectors allow us to pinpoint the values of attributes of an element and to style that element accordingly. CSS3 introduces three new selectors that can match strings against an attribute value at the beginning, the end, or anywhere within the value.This provides powerful new ways to style elements automatically that match very specific criteria. In this article, I will put these new attribute selectors in action and create some clever CSS rules that attach icons to links based on the value of the href attribute.

Semantic HTML and Search Engine Optimization

So what is POSH? No, it's not just some new clothing fashion hype amongst web designers - POSH is the acronym for Plain Old Semantic HTML. The term Semantic HTML is used for a variety of things, but it has it's origin in one objective: creating (X)HTML documents using semantic elements and attributes, as opposed to using presentational HTML.

The Business Case for Web Standards

A wiki to facilitate the collation of arguments and counterarguments in favor of web standards, and to sort them into the different categories of who we want to persuade.

CSS 2.2

There are various reasons why CSS 3 is taking so long. Many of the issues are technical and can’t be avoided; problems when testing, issues with backwards compatibility and bugs with browser implementation. However there also seems to be a lot of politics involved.

Use Only Block-Level Elements in Blockquotes

The blockquote element is not allowed to have text or inline elements as direct descendants. Only block-level (and in HTML 4.01 Strict, script) elements are allowed unless you use a Transitional Doctype, in which case both block-level and inline elements are allowed. But there are plenty of sites that use a Strict Doctype and still have blockquote elements that contain inline elements.

Another Look at HTML 5

It has become evident to me that some of my previous comments about HTML 5 and what is going on in the HTML Working Group are the result of misunderstanding and overreacting on my part. I no longer think things are quite as bad.

Is HTML 5 a Slippery Slope?

Tommy Olsson comments on the possibility of backwards compatibility and standardised error handling being bad for overall code quality.

Help Keep Accessibility and Semantics in HTML

If you think accessibility and semantics are important and should be improved in the next version of HTML, you need to act.

Guidelines for Creating Better Markup

I’ve mentioned several times here that I feel writing markup (or any other code, for that matter) is a craft. I take pride in writing as lean and clean code as possible. From the looks of things there aren’t a whole lot of other Web professionals that feel that way, but we do exist.

The Language of Accessibility

Good markup is accessible by default. As long as you’re using HTML elements in a semantically meaningful way—which you should be doing anyway, without even thinking about accessibility—then your documents will be accessible to begin with.