scot hacker's foobar blog

Loose notes from SXSW 2006 session WaSP Task Force

“Whether it’s keeping Microsoft to their promised improvements to IE, educating developers about how to make DOM Scripting accessible and useful, addressing the ever-growing snake pit of accessibility issues, improving products such as Dreamweaver and Contribute, and continuing evangelical efforts for the adoption of Web standards, WaSP has been on the front lines since 1998. In this session, meet key Task Force members of WaSP, learn what it takes to solve standards issues in such a fast-paced world and offer your opinions and suggestions to the group, too.”

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Loose notes from SXSW 2006 session: Design Eye for the List Guy

Craigslist gets an extreme makeover. May as well show the results first:

“Join the Design Fab Five as they tackle their latest: one of the most well known, well loved and well used sites on the World Wide Web. Just as they did with Jakob Nielsen in the original Design Eye for the Usability Guy, and last year’s hit “Idea Guy”, they will do a soup to nuts strategic redesign of craigslist.org while handing out tips, techniques and some lessons learned.”
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Loose notes from SXSW 2006 session: CSS Problem Solving

Code-heavy, fast-moving session addressing some of the most common CSS problems listed by developers in a pre-conference survey.

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Loose notes from SXSW 2006 session: Standard Deviation

We’ve all been repeatedly hit upside the head with a big log over the past few years: Standards, standards, standards. People become fanatical about it, and sometimes jump through absurd hoops to meet the standards goals. But there are times when you need to give yourself permission to do things the “easy” or “old” way to get the job done or to best serve your users. This panel was a breath of fresh air – realists in the real world.
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Loose notes from SXSW 2006 session: “Tagging 2.0”

This was the more nuts & bolts session on tagging, being called “THE key element of Web 2.0”

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Loose notes from SXSW 2006 session “Standardzilla vs. Tablella”

Thought this would be a nuts/bolts session on table-based vs. CSS design, but turned out to be more of a review session, analyzing submitted sites for semantic correctness and accessibility.

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Loose notes from SXSW 2006 session “DIY Now More Than Ever”

“Do it yourself web production is rivaling even the biggest internet players. Zero budgets or even nascent skills are no longer a barrier to launching successful web projects. Teams of two or three can accomplish what used to take large groups to produce. Learn how these bootstrappers used their abilities to turn good ideas into huge accomplishments without going into life-long debt or making a deal with the devil.”

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Loose notes from SXSW 2006 session “Design and Social Responsibility”

Lots of accessibility talk at SXSW this year, which ties into the parallel heavy emphasis on web standards and the semantic web. Accessibility is not restricted to HTML pages – it can extend to rich media like Flash as well. But to get there, you need to change your / your client’s mindset, and make accessibility a fundamental part of the design process, not something that gets bolted on later “if you have time/resources” — that mindset will never get us there.

Technorati Tags: swintro

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The gentle maniacs at WordPress have released an open-source bulletin board system in alpha: bbPress.

bbPress is pretty new, but we’re certain of a few things:

1. Open Source, always and forever
2. Less (code) is more
3. Simplicity is a feature
4. Speed and security are the foundation of any good user experience
5. Put the user first

If bbPress can do to the phpBB culture over the next year what WordPress has done to Movable Type over the last, it’s going to become a force in online discussions.