Web Standards, Accessibility and Other Stuff

The Detroit Lions football team unfortunately plays like the Michigan State football team; they always find a way to lose. The Lions lost to the mediocre Minnesota Vikings yesterday by blowing a 17-3 lead in the fourth quarter. They and the MSU football team both have a terrible history of underachieving and losing leads. If you recall a couple weeks ago, MSU blew a 17-point lead to Notre Dame and lost 40-37.

I am proud to say that I went to the University of Michigan. U of M clobbered Notre Dame in South Bend this year and beat MSU last Saturday at the Big House. Maybe the Lions should draft some more Wolverines.

I am gradually getting my relatively new vanity web page (www.DennisLembree.com) up to par. First, I got some solid XHTML Strict content going and some basic CSS complete. I half-jokingly added quite the web 2.0-looking “logo” of my name at the top of the page. I then added the open/close effect the Profile section (using the DOM of course), and added my updated resume.

Today I’ve added some de.licio.us and Flickr content from my accounts. It was basically a matter of using each site’s tools and modifying it a bit.

Sometime in the future as time permits, I will add more visual appeal to the page.

Ross Johnson and I interviewed Christian Heilmann this morning for the Web Axe podcast (will be posted soon). Chris is a leading expert on DOM scripting and has published many articles and just published a book. The interview begain at 8am sharp, 1pm his time in the UK. We had a bit of a scheduling problem because of the 5-hour time difference and the fact that his laptop got stolen. We used Skype, which worked great, except Ross was cut off just after the interview was over, thankfully because Ross was the one recording it. It was a pleasure speaking to Chris, who’s a very valuable part of the web community, and a nice guy as well.

Note: the Chris Heilmann interview podcast is now live.

Spam really sucks. It’s bad enough that email spammers hog up our Internet bandwidth and our mailboxes with spam email, but now they’ve been after web forms. I maintain numerous web sites, with many containing contact forms and the like, so now I have a load of work to do to increase the security level on them. I’ve already added security using a free CAPTCHA service, which works fairly well, but downloads a little slowly. Does anyone suggest any others, or have a good PHP resolution to this issue?