Diggnation: Exclusive Video

Posted by Andrew at 5:16am, November 18th, 2009

Here's some video I shot from the front of the stage at last night's Live Diggnation. Jon and I will post our thoughts later.

FOWD: Conference Recap

Posted by Jon and Andrew at 12:03am, November 18th, 2009

Today was the conference part of FOWD, where many of the speakers from the workshops along with a few others got up to do short presentations on the "future of web design," and giving tips about how to stay on top of the ever-changing web world. Here's our thoughts:

Jon: I found it very interesting how much these speakers discussed CSS3 and the idea of pushing the boundaries and coming up with an experience for the user that may be different based on their browser. They mentioned how it's not a big deal to have an extra little nice feature added by CSS3 to a site that may only be seen by a small percentage of users, because other users won't know what they're missing out on. Another big idea brought up by each of the speakers was to take risks, as Mike Kus noted "Progress and innovation in design requires exploration. In exploration there is risk." I find it's very important to try to keep my designs from getting old and boring and too much the same, and that it takes risks to come up with something new and innovative. I really feel like they were trying to push everyone in that direction to continue to innovate and change the web and how users interact with it. 

Andrew: As I mentioned on Twitter, the overarching theme of the presentations today was progressive enhancement. So what does that mean? Basically, we need to reward users whom are using better browsers. This can be accomplished by using CSS3 properties such as box-shadow and border-radius, and Safari-only animations like rotate and zoom. As designers, it's our responsibility to use these things, and push boundaries, so we don't let the web flounder in it's current state. Most of the speakers pushed "moving forward" with these new technologies, and some even went as far as to suggest giving IE6 text-only stylesheets to accomplish this. As Jon mentioned, other speakers that weren't getting into the technical side of things presented general design tips, and pushed taking big risks with your designs "just to see what happens." I came out of the conference feeling empowered and confident in the decision to provide enhancements to better browsers while serving graceful degradation to older (or less powerful) browsers.

Overall, we had a fantastic FOWD experience. Keep your eye on this site for more detailed posts about some of the speaker presentations.

FOWD: Real World Accessibility for Web Designers

Posted by Andrew at 11:58pm, November 16th, 2009

Derek Featherstone (@feather on Twitter) is an internationally-known authority on accessibility and web development, and listening to him speak you really get the feeling that there aren't many people who know this field as well as he does.

An engaging speaker, he opened up the eyes of his audience to the many considerations that must be taken when creating a truly accessible website. One thing that hit home immediately is Derek's abhorrence of the common CSS reset style: "a { outline-style: none; }". Many of us designers use this CSS rule to eliminate the ugly borders around clicked images in Firefox, without realizing that it greatly hampers accessibility. Users who must use keyboards to navigate sites can no longer tell where focus is, and therefore the site becomes immediately and completely unusable to them. Other important things I took away from Derek's presentation:

Think of Ajax like a dumb waiter: You know those things they have in old houses that send food up and down from the kitchen? Well, you wouldn't serve a banquet through one of those, right? This is a great way to think of Ajax. Need to make a request for a small percentage of changes to the site? Ajax is your answer. Changing a large portion? A page reload might not hurt.

Make the mental model match the process: This one is important, but also hard to explain in a blog post. Basically what it boils down to is exactly what it says. Make your app behave as in the same way you think. If a path through your app has to be re-ordered in order to match the mental model, so be it.

Iconography should be on the content level: Iconography is part of content, not style, and therefore should be in the content level of your site, not a css background image.

Pay attention to source order: The order your elements are in the source is the order a screen reader will read them out in. Make sure this is the order you want.

Retain focus: Retain keyboard focus when using ajax to retrieve things, or put the focus where it should be, like inside the lightbox you just opened.

Tabindex is important: Assign tabindexes to the elements in your form. Let the source order determine the tab index for your forms, but assign a -1 tabindex to something that you want to give keyboard focus to programmatically.

Test correction paths: Don't just test validation failing and succeeding, test correction paths as well. Sometimes these paths are the most important, and yet most often overlooked.

Derek's final point was that accessibility should be thought of throughout your entire project's workflow, and not just a rubber stamp at the end of the project. This is especially important when Flash apps are introduced to the mix, as it's almost impossible to make a Flash app fully accessible once it's already been developed.

Overall, Derek made a fantastic and eye opening presentation. I'll see if I can get his permission to re-publish his slides here, as there is an abundance of points that I can't touch on in a singular blog post.

FOWD: Open Web Standards for the Rich Web

Posted by Jon at 7:56pm, November 16th, 2009

Molly Holzschlag is an experienced web developer and open web standards evangelist, a member of the W3C and has most recently been working for Opera software. Her session was meant to help us all understand more about open web standards, where they have come from, where they are going, and all the challenges along the way.

So we'll start it off with some of the basics. The web is meant to be as open, accessible and universal as possible in order to reach as many users as possible in the quickest and most effective amount of time. Molly touched on the different web philosophies, such as it being:

• Accessible (available to all people)
• Universal (universal across modalities)
• User Agent Agnostic (available to any browser)
• Platform Agnostic (available to any platform)
• Global/Local (available to a range of languages and cultures)

• Encourage practical, accessible and meaningful interactivity
• Encourage a "write once, play anywhere" philosophy (CSS, Javascript)
• Provide proven standards-related technical and management benefits
• Embrace backward compatibility and progressive enhancement

Probably the most common challenge now a days is designing and developing for Internet Explorer 6. We discussed the reason why it isn't necessarily going to be going away anytime soon because it is tied so heavily into the Windows OS that making big changes to it takes many years and lots of testing to make sure it works in all versions of Windows. As well, many users and companies still rely heavily on certain technologies integrated into IE6 that they can't work without. This makes it very challenging to support IE6, as we don't want to restrict our web sites from reaching their full potential in order to support outdated browsers.

Now to the future - there is some very interesting and exciting stuff coming down the pipe in terms of new web based technologies such as HTML5 and CSS3. HTML5 is going to help to bring a whole new experience to the web, one where even more of the functionality of a web page is going to be in the structure of the page instead of just in the behaviours of the page. The canvas tag, and being able to embed video straight onto a web page are just a couple of the exciting features coming from HTML5. And the best part? All major browsers are committed and ready to go full on with it!

CSS3 is also very exciting and has a lot of new ideas and functionality that has never been seen in CSS before. Features such as multiple backgrounds, opacity, media queries (which I thought was really neat), and font-embedding. 

There is definitely a lot more to learn about when it comes to web standards and where it's still evolving and moving towards, I will be sure to try and stay on top of it and continue to learn more about how the web works and how we can bring it all together to the end user.

Exploring NYC: The Apple Store, Lincoln Center

Posted by Andrew at 9:23pm, November 15th, 2009

We got into the city this evening at around 6:30pm and immediately headed to the Apple Store. Yea, we know, we're geeks. On the way back to the hotel we stopped by the Lincoln Center for a few photos and grabbed a bite to eat at a funky little restaurant called P.J. Clarke's. Here's a couple shot's from NYC so far:

Check our flickr pool for more photos, or take a peek at them in the sidebar on this page.

Photo: Waiting at the Airport

Posted by Andrew at 2:12pm, November 15th, 2009

From time to time we'll be posting photos directly to the blog. Most of them will also appear in our Flickr feed. Right now, we're bored and in the airport so here's a picture of the tarmac:

Launching "Two Geeks In NYC"

Posted by Andrew at 7:51pm, November 13th, 2009

Welcome to "Two Geeks In NYC", ResIM's new microsite for our trip to New York city. We're going to be at the Future of Web Design conference Monday, November 16th and Tuesday, November 17th, and attend a live taping of Diggnation on Tuesday night. Jon and I couldn't be more excited to be bringing you guys live updates from New York, so bookmark this page and check back often. We have some good content lined up for you to check out.