Web Standards, Accessibility and Other Stuff

Here are some great tips for doing a presentation. This is a summary from an excellent WSG Meeting Podcast from last year , Presentation Mind Control by Paul Fenwick (29-June-2006).

• Use pictures.
• Better yet, use multimedia–audio, video, animation, etc.
• Make it emotional.
• Use anticipation–provide a challenge, a few proposals, then lastly a solution.
• Move around; don’t stand still.
• Perform live examples–beware of technical mishaps.
• Practice your presentation.
• Time your presentation (to stay within your limit).
• Do a Q & A–admit it if you don’t know answer–ask the audience.

Yes, I’m a web programmer/coder, but I also have a keen eye for punctuation, grammar and spelling. I don’t expect the general public to have Harvard-like writing skills, but come on, there’s got to be some kind of level of acceptance! These are the things that get me the most. (By the way, my degree is actually in communications, and I’ve done some professional tech writing also, so I can say these things…)

In case you’re not sure, the points below include mistakes on purpose; I’m feeling twisted.

1. Why don’t people put question marks at the end of sentences. I hate that!
2. People say and type the hyphen instead of a dash-very naive. Didn’t anyone take typing in High School? If you are unable to create the proper dash symbol (—), then just use two hyphens. Remember, a hyphen is used either to join words together, or to indicate a word division at the end of a line.
3. Commonly mispelled misspelled words:
   1. calendar — programmers especially need to learn this!
   2. their/they’re/there — Possessive is “their”, and the contraction of “they are” is “they’re.” Everywhere else, it is “there.”
   3. its/it’s — The apostrophe marks a contraction of “it is.” Something that belongs to it is “its.”
   4. separate — Note that the Es surround the As.
4. Apostrophes. Its bad when I remember that in the 80’s, all of my fellow student’s paper’s were wrong.
   1. Indicating letters missing. The apostrophe replaces the text. So, “cannot” is “can’t”, therefore “remember the 70’s” should be “remember the ’70s”.
   2. Indicating possession:
      1. This is the boy’s glove. [One boy owns this glove.]
      2. This is the boys’ glove. [More than one boy owns this glove.]
      3. These are the boys’ gloves. [More than one boy owns more than one glove.]
5. AND OF COURSE, WRITING IN ALL CAPS IN REALLY OBNOXIOUS.

Good comic from Blaugh.com. Gotta love the internet/Star Wars combination…

Here are some Acronyms and Quotes that definitely worth reading!

On future of Ajax:

“Ajax is the frames of web 2.0″

How true; Ajax is overused and many times not used correctly.

Jeremy Keith in Hijax presentation:

“Plan for Ajax from the start; Implement Ajax at the end”

Great advice. Go read his book, Bulletproof Ajax.

D.R.Y.

“Don’t Repeat Yourself”

Meaning don’t rewrite and duplicate code. Great idea, especially for larger sites.

il8h

“Internationalization”

Cute, isn’t it?

X.H.R

“xmlHttpRequest”

P.O.S.H.

“Plain Old Semantic HTML”

My favorite!

A quote about friendly web development:

“Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others.”

Be responsible with your code.

A quote about using Macs:

“Once you go Mac, you never go back.”

Is that not P.C.? Ha ha.

A.H.A.H.

“Asynchronous HTML and HTTP”

Becoming a much more relevant term; there are other often-used alternatives to the X in Ajax (XML).

So Ross Johnson and I recently did another big interview for the Web Axe podcast. We spoke with Andrew Kirkpatrick, a leader at Adobe in product development and accessibility. And a nice guy.

Podcast #53: Interview with Andrew Kirkpatrick

We used Skype to record the podcast, again, and it sure makes it easy when folks are separately geographically–I’m in the Bay area, Ross is in Ann Arbor, and Andrew is in the Boston area. Scheduling is a bit tricky because of the time zone differences and everyone’s busy schedule, but that went fine since I planned a few weeks out. It’s still a bit difficult to get the audio levels right, though, and unfortunately we experienced this problem a bit on this podcast…check it out and let me know what you think…