An Event Apart Austin. Monday 6 November 2006. The Alamo Drafthouse Cinema Downtown. Austin, Texas, USA. Design and code. Macs and mics. Was it good for you, too?
(Photo pool.)
[tags]aneventapart, austin, design, conferences, events[/tags]
Category: Accessibility
Make it work!
- Berners-Lee: reinventing HTML
-
Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the web and founder of the W3C, announces reforms:
It is really important to have real developers on the ground involved with the development of HTML. It is also really important to have browser makers intimately involved and committed. And also all the other stakeholders….
Some things are clearer with hindsight of several years. It is necessary to evolve HTML incrementally. The attempt to get the world to switch to XML, including quotes around attribute values and slashes in empty tags and namespaces all at once didn’t work.
- 9 to 5 = average
- To be great in design takes passion and work.
- Sending XHTML as text/html Considered Harmful to Feelings
- I love this.
- Web Directions North
- Our Australian friends set up camp in Vancouver, for what looks like a great two-day conference on standards-based design and development (Vancouver Canada, February 6-8 2007). Speakers include Kelly Goto (Gotomobile), Andy Clarke (malarkey), Adrian Holovaty (Chicago Crime, Washington Post), Douglas Bowman (Google Visual Design Lead), Dan Cederholm (SimpleBits), Joe Clark (joeclark.org), Dave Shea (CSS Zen Garden), Cameron Moll (Authentic Boredom), Molly Holzschlag (Molly.com), Veerle Pieters (Veerle’s Blog, Duoh!), Kaitlin Sherwood (Google Maps US Census mashup), Tantek Çelik (Technorati).
- Web Accessibility: Web Standards and Regulatory Compliance
- By Andrew Kirkpatrick, Richard Rutter, Christian Heilmann, Jim Thatcher, Cynthia Waddell, et al. Don’t let the unsexy title fool you. Vast and practically all-encompassing, this newly updated classic belongs on every web designer’s shelf. (Better still, open it and read.)
- I Cannot Possibly Buy Girl Scout Cookies From Your Daughter at This Time
- By Charlie Nadler in McSweeney’s.
- Gemini Girl
- New women’s blog elegantly designed by Ray McKenzie.
- eMusic: 33 Folkways LPs
- Thirty-three important Folkways Recordings for download. Louis Bonfa, Mighty Sparrow, Woodie Guthrie, Henry Cowell and more.
- On having layout – the concept of hasLayout in IE/Win
- Technical but reasonably easy to follow discussion of why Internet Explorer’s rendering of your design may
suckdiffer from your expectations - “Apple’s Backup App is Shit”
- God bless SuperDuper.
[tags]W3C, webdirections, accessibility, haslayout, browsers, mcsweeney’s, folkways[/tags]
In fall-hued Issue 225 of A List Apart, For People Who Make Websites, Maurizio Boscarol argues that a greater emphasis on user testing is needed to make accessibility guidelines and practices work better (Working With Others: Acessibility and User Research). And in part two of a series for beginning web designers, Erin Lynch and the ALA staff list a slew of useful third-party sites, and encourage you to add your favorites (The ALA Primer Part Two: Resources For Beginners). All this plus the illustrational genius of Mr Kevin Cornell.
[tags]alistapart, accessibility, design[/tags]
A guide for the first-timer. A new trick for the size-conscious designer. And a bit of a giggle. Three pleasures await you in triple-thick Issue 223 of A List Apart, for people who make websites:
- The ALA Primer: A Guide for New Readers
-
by Erin Lynch
New to A List Apart? Welcome! ALA’s own Erin Lynch has picked out a selection of articles that you may want to start with.
- Text-Resize Detection
-
by Lawrence Carvalho and Christian Heilmann
It’s still hard to create page layouts that don’t break if the user increases the type size by more than a few settings. Chris Heilmann and Lawrence Carvalho serve up a way to detect your visitor’s font size settings using JavaScript.
- A Standardista’s Alphabet
-
by Jack Pickard
“A is for Aaron, who fell down the stairs. K is for Kevin, menaced by bears.” No wait, those are just the notes from our last staff meeting. Jack Pickard offers a lighter look at the world of web standards.
[tags]design, a list apart, alistapart, textsize[/tags]
Categories
An angry fix
Some of the best minds working in web standards have been quietly or loudly abandoning the W3C. Björn Hörmann is the latest. His reasons for leaving the W3C QA Group make compelling reading (hat tip: Terje Bless). I believe in W3C standards, particularly the ones you and I use every day, but I worry about the direction in which the W3C is headed.
Beholden to its corporate paymasters who alone can afford membership, the W3C seems increasingly detached from ordinary designers and developers. Truth be told, we and our practical concerns never drove the organization. But after ordinary designers and developers spent nearly a decade selling web standards to browser makers and developing best practices around accessibility and semantics, one hoped the W3C might realize that there was value in occasionally consulting its user base.
Alas, the organization appears unconcerned with our needs and uninterested in tapping our experience and insights. It remains a closed, a one-way system. Like old-fashioned pre-cable TV advertising. Not like the web.
To be fair, the W3C solicits community feedback before finalizing its recommendations. But asking people to comment on something that is nearly finished is not the same as finding out what they need and soliciting their collaboration from the start.
We require coherent specifications based on our and our users’ actual needs. Upcoming accessibility and markup specifications fail on both counts. We require validation tools that work and are kept up to date. Instead, tools are still broken years after problems are reported.
Two things could happen. Either the W3C will make a course correction, or the standards-based design community will look elsewhere.
[tags]web standards, w3c, wcag, xhtml, web design, microformats[/tags]
A detailed schedule of An Event Apart NYC has been posted at aneventapart.com and reproduced below for your convenience. Join Tantek Çelik, Ze Frank, Aaron Gustafson, Jason Santa Maria, Khoi Vinh, Eric Meyer, and Jeffrey Zeldman for two days of design and code in the heart of New York City:
9am – 5pm, Monday 10 July & Tuesday 11 July
Scandinavia House
Victor Borge Hall — Level A
58 Park Avenue, New York City, NY 10016
Map | Hotel info
Victor Borge Hall is located on Level A, one floor below ground. Enter at the front door on Park Avenue and take the elevator located at the rear of the entrance hall, across from the ground-floor Gift Shop. Wheelchair-friendly restrooms are located on Level B, accessible via the elevator.
Seating is lecture-style, in a comfortable and exquisitely designed theater space, and doors open at 8:00 am. There is no Wi-Fi at this venue, but we will provide downloadable files the night before the show for those who wish to follow along on their laptops.
Schedule
An Event Apart NYC runs from 9:00 am – 5:00 pm. We have a lot to cover, so the event will start promptly. Arrive early to get a good seat! Doors open at 8:00 am; for best results, plan to show up between 8:00 am and 8:30 am. Here is what you can expect over the two days of this conference:
DAY I – DESIGN DAY
- 9:00 am Welcome and Housekeeping [Zeldman]
- 9:05 am Textism (Writing User Experience) [Zeldman]
- Better design and better usability through word choice. Editing for designers.
- 10:05 am BREAK!
- 10:15 am Solving (Re)Design Problems [Jason Santa Maria]
- Visually repositioning a beloved brand (namely, A List Apart). Design as problem solving. Knowing which problems to solve.
- 11:00 am Bringing A List Apart Together [Eric Meyer]
- How someone like Eric Meyer takes a design and turns it into a living, breathing web page.
- 12:00 pm Lunch
- 1:00 pm Sponsor Giveaways
- Adobe, Media Temple, New Riders and AIGA Press will hand out valuable software, services, and books for free.
- 1:15 pm A Day in the Life of a Design Director [Khoi Vinh]
- From sun-up until the stroke of midnight, Khoi Vinh will take us through a typical day inside the NYTimes.com design group.
- 2:15 pm What’s the Story? [Zeldman]
- Finding brand narratives that set your site apart from others like it. Seizing inspiration from limited budgets.
- 2:50 pm BREAK!
- 3:00 pm Web 0.2 [Ze Frank]
- A personal, down-in-the-trenches view of how the technology revolution impacts the way we communicate with a mass audience.
- 4:00 pm DESIGN CRITIQUES [Jason Santa Maria, Khoi Vinh, Ze Frank, Zeldman]
- A rip-snortin’ romp through the design and architecture of sites created by some of the smartest people in the world (namely, the attendees of An Event Apart NYC).
DAY II – CODE DAY
- 9:00 am Welcome and Housekeeping [Eric Meyer]
- 9:10 am Hard-Core CSS [Eric Meyer]
- An in-depth exploration of what makes CSS work, how it works the way it does, and how you can make it work harder for you.
- 10:10 am BREAK!
- (You’ll need it)
- 10:30 am Microformats [Tantek Çelik]
- What are microformats, and how can they transform the web? Tantek Çelik, co-founder of the microformats movement, tells us what’s already happening and what comes next.
- 11:30 am “One True Layout” overview [Eric Meyer]
- Incredible stroke of genius or gross hack to be shunned? Eric analyzes this new CSS layout technique and examines the pros and cons, both immediately and into the future.
- 12:30 pm Lunch
- 1:30 pm Sponsor Giveaways
- 1:45 pm So you want to be a DOM Star [Aaron Gustafson]
- What does it take to be a great front-end developer in today’s marketplace? Aaron Gustafson lays it all on the line.
- 2:40 pm BREAK!
- 3:00 pm Web Standards Second Edition [Zeldman]
- What a long, strange trip it’s been.
- 4:00 pm Code critiques [Eric Meyer, Aaron Gustafson, Tantek Çelik]
- A fast-paced, rough-and-tumble review of markup, style, and scripting on a select group of sites created and submitted by attendees.
Food
Catering is by Restaurant Aquavit, the country’s premier Scandinavian restaurant, and includes vegetarian choices.
Lunch
- July 10: Gravlax Club, Grilled Scandinavian Shrimp, and Roasted Mushroom sandwiches. Salad and potato salad.
- July 11: Smoked Salmon, Spice Roasted Pork Loin, and Roasted Mushroom sandwiches. Salad and pasta salad.
All Day Long
Freshly Brewed Coffee, Decaffeinated Coffee, Selection of Teas, Assorted Soft Drinks and Sparkling Water.
Afternoon Pick-Me Up
- July 10: Assorted Cookies
- July 11: Basket of Fruit
Details
It’s a non-smoking event. Sorry, smokers! Still photography is permitted, but audio and video recording are forbidden, except by our official videographer, Mister Ian Corey. Sorry, recordists and videographers! As always, please be considerate when taking pictures. And speaking of pictures…
Flickr Group
We’ve established a Flickr group for those of you who want to share your photos with the world: flickr.com/groups/aeanyc2006.
Disclaimer
This schedule is subject to change. We’ll do our best to make the experience live up to what we’ve mentioned here, but cannot guarantee a perfect 1:1 correspondence. We thank you in advance for understanding any changes we may be forced to make due to events, people, and other stuff beyond our control.
New York 2006 news
- Zefrank in, Greenfield out
- NY Sneak Preview
- NYC, Chicago Hotels
- Tantek Çelik Joins An Event Apart NYC Roster
- New York opens, Chicago sells out
- An Event Apart NYC – Two Days of Design & Code
An Event Apart RSS feed
Subscribe and keep track of all the comings and goings of An Event Apart.
[tags]an event apart, aneventapart, design, code, conference, web design, webdesign[/tags]
In a triple issue of A List Apart, for people who make websites:
- Prettier Accessible Forms
-
by Nick Rigby
Forms are a pain. Either you can make them pretty, make them accessible, or go a little crazy trying to achieve both. Nick Rigby offers a happy solution.
- Behavioral Separation
-
by Jeremy Keith
Breaking up is hard to do. But in web design, separation can be a good thing. As Jeremy Keith explains, structure, presentation, and behavior all deserve their own space.
- How to Plan Manpower on a Web Team
-
Just how many people does it take to properly manage a website? It depends on the website. Author Shane Diffilly offers some suggestions on determining your site’s manpower needs.
[tags]a list apart, alistapart, web design, webdesign[/tags]
An Event Apart Chicago has wrapped. It felt like the best one yet. Everything clicked.
There were as many designers as coders in attendance, as many Chicagoans as out-of-towners, as many agency people and freelancers as in-house folks, and nearly as many women as men. They engaged at “good morning” and stayed involved all day, asking shrewdly penetrating questions and sharing their own insights and experiences. Energy flowed not only between the floor and the seats but also from one seat to another. It felt like community.
This was the third time out for Eric, Jason, and me. Our talks were sharper and shorter — looser and more relaxed, yet also more focused than before. The rhythm was better. The balance between technical and aesthetic subjects, how much time was alloted to each, the way one theme flowed into another — the music of the day — felt tighter and truer than at events past.
Thanks to our sponsors at Adobe, AIGA, New Riders, and Media Temple, we were able to give away thousands of dollars worth of software, books, and services. (We’ll be doing the same at An Event Apart NYC next month.)
Guest speaker Jim Coudal‘s leisurely stories were like little grenades of inspiration. He tossed them out casually; moments later, they detonated.
The day formally ended with lively critiques of sites submitted by attendees. We tried this once before, at An Event Apart Philadelphia, with mixed results. This time it felt like it really worked. The day informally ended at Timothy O’Toole’s pub, with a mixer sponsored by Jewelboxing.
Time, and the blog posts of those who attended, will tell if the event was as good for you as it was for us. Sincere thanks to all who attended. Thanks also to Dawson, John Gruber, Amy Redell, Michael Nolan, and Orrin Fink.
And a reminder: the Early Bird Rate for An Event Apart NYC ends June 9th. That’s a week from today! On June 10th, the price will increase by $100. So if you’re thinking of attending An Event Apart NYC — two days of design and code — please register soon.
I have always wanted A List Apart to connect web designers with web design jobs and never gotten around to making it happen. Now, thanks to 37signals, it’s on.
Starting today, the sidebar of A List Apart displays one random job from the 37signals Job Board — a new job on every page. It’s a great match for ALA readers seeking work and web-smart businesses with jobs to offer.
Companies including The New York Times, CNET, Facebook, Adobe, and American Express already use the Job Board to find today’s brightest web minds. Now they will find more of them. The best designers, developers, and information architects in the world read A List Apart, to the tune of 14 million page views a month.
14 million a month! I don’t know of another web publication that reaches so many clued-in professionals. ALA readers are uniquely concerned with accessibility, web standards, and crafting exceptional user experience through deeply considered design, writing, and structure.
Over the years, ALA readers have written to tell us that they owed their careers to skills our magazine helped them hone, and concepts our magazine laid before them. Adding the 37signals Job Board to our sidebar is a logical next step.
I am delighted to think that one day soon, we’ll get email from readers who found great jobs through A List Apart. And I’m even more thrilled to think about all those web standards fans taking their accessibility concerns and user experience chops to great companies like Crate and Barrel, TBWA, and American Express.
Today, the 37signals Job Board comes to A List Apart. Tomorrow, standardistas go to work at leading companies. The revolution will be salaried.
This week’s A List Apart leads with accessibility expert Joe Clark’s detailed critique of the proposed WCAG 2 guidelines.
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 1.0 is an international standard for making sites accessible to people with disabilities. Many nations adhere to WCAG 1.0 as law.
That’s great, except that WCAG 1.0 is seven years old, and parts of it are murkily conceived. The W3C’s Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) committee has toiled for years to offer a second-generation spec that is clearer and more up-to-date. WCAG 2.0 is the result. It was presented to the web community for comment a few weeks ago and achieves “Candidate Recommendation” status at the end of this month.
Although WCAG 2 has its supporters, and although good people have worked hard on it, Joe Clark believes “the fundamentals of WCAG 2 are nearly impossible for a working standards-compliant developer to understand,” with untestable success criteria and strange new definitions that don’t map to concepts like “page,” “site,” or “valid.”
Because WCAG 1.0 forms the basis of international law and because the standard’s goal is to serve the disabled, the success or failure of WCAG 2 matters to all who use, own, or make websites. Whether you end up agreeing or disagreeing with Joe Clark’s assessment, time is short and the stakes are incredibly high. I urge every web designer to read this article.
Also in this triple issue of A List Apart (and only overshadowed here because the clock on WCAG 2 is ticking) are two other exceptionally fine articles:
- World Grows Small: Open Standards for the Global Web
-
Molly Holzschlag explains how the practices you already use to create standards-based, accessible websites can serve you in the growing field of internationalization.
- Community Creators, Secure Your Code! Part II
-
In part two of his two-part series on protecting your community site from malicious cross-site scripting attacks, Niklas Bivald rolls up his trousers and wades into the JavaScript.
In a big triple issue of A List Apart, for people who make websites:
- A More Accessible Map
- Nifty web maps powered by Google and Yahoo! APIs are all the rage. And rage is what a visually impaired user may feel when trying to use them. Is there a way to make beautiful web maps accessible? In a word, yes. Techy designers, you won’t want to miss this step-by-step guide.
- Community Creators, Secure Your Code!
- Don’t be like MySpace. Well, okay, be like MySpace in attracting millions of users. But don’t be like them in exposing your site and your users to virtual vandals. Protect your community site from malicious cross-site scripting attacks. Part one of a two-part series.
- Everyware: Always Crashing in the Same Car
- Ubiquitous computing is coming. In some ways, it’s already here. Shouldn’t we think about what we want it to be? In our last issue, we published the introduction to Adam Greenfield’s Everyware. In this issue, we run the book’s conclusion.
It’s spring in this part of the world, and this issue’s color scheme by art director Jason Santa Maria reflects that pleasing circumstance. (ALA’s color scheme changes every issue, but you knew that.) Production editor Aaron Gustafson contributed significantly to the issue’s editorial content. Watercolor illustration by Kevin Cornell. Editorial assistance by Erin Lynch. Behind-the-scenes system improvements by Dan Benjamin. Erin Kissane edits the magazine. Published by Happy Cog.
Announcing An Event Apart Chicago. Join Eric Meyer, Jason Santa Maria, Jim Coudal and Zeldman in the windy city for a mind-blowing day of insights into design, development, and how to stay happy running a creative business. Register now to reserve your seat and save $50 off the admission price.
Friday, June 2nd, 2006
9:00 – 5:00
The Gleacher Center
450 North Cityfront Plaza Drive
Chicago, IL 60611-4316
(Map)
The Speakers
An Event Apart offers the opportunity to meet and learn from creative and technical stars who influence the direction of our industry:
- Jim Coudal runs Coudal Partners, a design firm in Chicago. They work for companies and they build companies, like Jewelboxing, The Show, and The Deck. Before making websites, films, and real-world products, Jim Coudal was an ad creative director. His insights into conceiving and selling great ideas are not to be missed.
- Jason Santa Maria has been recognized for designing stylistic and imaginative (yet also usable and effective) web interfaces. He recently won acclaim for the A List Apart redesign, whose secrets he’ll share with attendees.
- Eric Meyer has conducted complex standards-based makeovers and led intensive multi-day training sessions for such clients as Apple Computer, America On-Line, Yahoo!, Macromedia, Wells Fargo Bank, Cornell University, and others. No one has a deeper or more practical grasp of CSS; no one can teach it like Eric.
- Founder of A List Apart and Happy Cog, former leader of The Web Standards Project, and author of Designing With Web Standards, Jeffrey Zeldman helped bring standards to browsers and the design community. He serves clients from Ad Age and Amnesty International USA to Lexico (Dictionary.com) and the United Nations Womens Development Fund.
The Space
The Gleacher Center is 50,000 square feet of high-tech conference space, smack in the heart of Chicago’s business district, blocks from the Loop and steps from Magnificent Mile shopping, restaurants, and hotels. An Event Apart will unfold in one of its spacious, uncrowded lecture halls, where every seat has plenty of room and every view is a good one.
Gourmet lunch and other catering throughout the day will include vegetarian options. Spectacular river and lake views in the separate dining lounge will make you forget how good the food is.
The Sponsors
Lunch is courtesy of Media Temple (“set your sites on us”), web host to the stars. We thank them for their continued support. AIGA Press and New Riders (“Voices That Matter”) will also be on hand to make sure attendees have reading materials to stay mentally stimulated after the event.
And speaking of mental stimulation, new sponsor Jewelboxing will throw a post-event Happy Hour And A Half at a Chicago pub. Schmooze, hobnob, network, or beg for a job while enjoying free cocktails. Further details will come soon.
A good time will be had!
The Deal
Our Philadelphia and Atlanta events sold out fast and we were unable to accommodate many who wished to attend. Chicago, given its size and the depth of its design and user experience communities, will sell out even faster. Seating is limited and availability is on a first-come, first-served basis.
Register during our Early Bird special to save your seat and shave $50 off the price of admission. The full day, including tasty catered lunch and goodies, costs $549. But if you register by May 1st, you can attend for $499. See you in Chicago!
- Sophia Marie Dominey
- A very healthy eight pounds, eleven ounces.
- Dissecting The Process
- or: How an A List Apart Illustration Comes Together, by the illustrator himself, Kevin Cornell.
- simplifier lab
- Phoebe Espiritu’s fine blog on the quest for simplicity and minimalism in design.
- Rogue Librarian: SXSWi Takeaways
- Carrie Bickner Zeldman’s writeup of her SXSW Interactive panel on Digital Preservation and Blogs. See also:
- Digital Preservation Panel at SXSWi
- Librarian Avengers’s notes on the same panel. See also:
- Digital Preservation: What and Whom Are We Saving?
- Bill Anderson’s notes on the same panel.
- Vantan.org
- Personal site of Vanessa Tan, devoted Netizen and musician, blogging from Singapore.
- Aspen Design Summit
- AIGA-sponsored retreat.
- This is Powazek
- Beauteous and well-written site of cofounder of JPG Magazine (and creator of bunches of other fab web content, none of which I need to tell you, ’cause you know)
- Behind the WaSP Redesign
- Designer Clarke discusses creative process. See also:
- WaSP Annual General Meeting
- Transcribed by Muffin Research Labs.
- Does Your Blog Have a Business?
- SXSW Interactive panel transcribed by Auscillate.com.
- CSS Floatutorial
- In CSS layout, float is all. Maxdesign’s step-by-step guide shows how to float elements such as images, drop caps, and next and back buttons to create image galleries, inline lists and multi-column layouts.
- CSS Tweak
- Now with in-page Help! Andy Peatling’s free web-based tool optimizes your CSS files. “It will take any CSS file and optimize the syntax, grouping your style declarations into shorthand where possible. It can also remove comments, and strip whitespace for maximum compression.”
- A brief history of the “clenched fist” image
- Like it says.
- GrayBit v0.5 Beta
- “GrayBit is an online accessibility testing tool designed to visually convert a full-color web page into a grayscale rendition for the purpose of visually testing the page’s perceived contrast.”
- Interior Desecrations
- Horrible home design from the classic halls of Lileks.
- George Bush: I Don’t Know Much About Designing Rugs
- In Design Observer.
- Accessible Web Developers
- A public group at ma.gnolia. Creating accessible (and mobile-friendly) sites.
- Brit Pack
- Proud members.
- More Ma.gnolia Marks
- See all 345 (and counting) of Apartness’s bookmarks.
- O say, can you see? If not, can you sue?
- Designing With Web Standards made the point that an inaccessible site could get its owner in trouble. Now a blind student is suing Target, claiming that its inaccessible site violates the Americans With Disabilities Act and various U.S. state laws:
-
- The Web Standards Project 9 February
- The Web Standards Project 10 February
- Philly Standards Writeup
- News.com
- San Francisco Chronicle
- Unitless and Somewhat Slightly Dazed
- Although the W3C validator claims that A List Apart’s CSS is flawed, our CSS is actually fine; the validator has a known bug that causes it to incorrectly flag unitless line-heights as errors. So why write unitless line-heights? Eric Meyer, who created A List Apart’s CSS, explains. His post is not only the best primer I’ve ever seen on the subject, it is the only primer I’ve ever seen on the subject—and the only one you need.
Messieurs Eric Meyer and Jeffrey Zeldman are pleased to announce An Event Apart Atlanta:
On 3 April 2006, America’s favorite pastime (designing with web standards) will come to the 755 Club at Turner Field, as the famed ballpark’s spectacularly furnished club hosts An Event Apart Atlanta.
An Event Apart is a concentrated, one-day learning session on modern web design. Check the Event Apart Philadelphia page to get a sense of how the first event, held in the Franklin Institute, went down. Transpose from Philly to Atlanta, think ballpark instead of museum, and you get an inkling of what to expect.
Online registration starts soon; seating will be limited. Subscribe to An Event Apart’s RSS feed to stay ahead of the curve. Can’t make Atlanta? Event Apart seminars in Seattle, Chicago, and Los Angeles are up next.