Web Standards, Accessibility & More

Last week, I attended the Web 2.0 Expo conference at the Moscone Center in downtown San Francisco. The sponsors included O’Reilly Media, Adobe, Microsoft, and eBay. Overall, it was a pretty good conference, with lots of discussion about mobile and geo-location, “Cloud Computing”, and of course, Twitter and Facebook. Here are some tidbits I picked up:

• Mobile web usage doubled in 2008.
• Nokia is the world’s largest digital camera producer (as they are the biggest mobile phone manufacturer).
• App written by Google in HTML5 for iPhone and Android is sweet.
• Mobilize Don’t Miniaturize
• Need to read up on the W3C Geolocation API
• Since 2003, web page file size has tripled!
• Only 1% of iPhone Apps are used long-term.
• For usability testing, research only what is necessary.
• Don’t put branding ahead of users.

The day before the conference, I took and vacation day and brought my wife and kids up from Cupertino to “the city” for a mini-vacation. We stayed at a very nice hotel for which we got a great rate through HotWire.com. Here’s a Flickr album of the family portion of the trip.

Computer nerd area

Exhibit Hall

Dennis at Golden Gate bridge

I attended the An Event Apart conference in San Francisco (AEASF08) this week, a pretty well known conference “for people who make web sites”, mostly designers and developers. I had the pleasure of speaking to Eric Myer and Derek Featherstone which was way cool. I took the Caltrain from Sunnyvale on the first day and drove all the way up from Cupertino on the second day (found early-bird parking for only $10!). There’s a nice Flickr AEASF08 album which has pictures of people, venue (The Palace Hotel), and the delicious food.

Here are some tidbits from the conference:

• Empathy for the user is what a designer needs most.
• The average headings sizes from nine CSS frameworks from H1 to H6 were (in em): 2.33, 1.8, 1.45, 1.25 1.11, 1.05
• Use visual weight (through size, color, texture, etc) to create a hierarchy of elements on a web page which creates meaning for the user.
• Modern web design (like jazz music) is about creating frameworks where users (musicians) can improvise and participate.
• Pixel/em value make more sense when using the 62.5% method (body font size).
• “Progressive disclosure” is a new term which refers to progressive enhancement used with hiding/showing content.
• Eric Myer discusses debugging in CSS and his CSS reset file.
• Web accessibility checklists are only a starting point.
• Google was lazy in not making Google Map controls keyboard accessible.
• “Math is easy; design is hard.”

So at my day job at Yodlee, Inc., we’re hiring professionals for a variety of open job positions. If you or someone you know wants a good job at a solid company, please take a serious look. Basically, the company develops an online personal finance application, and it’s very cool to work in Silicon Valley, between San Francisco and San Jose (California, USA, of course). Anyone interested please use my name as a reference or contact me directly at “dlembree at NOSPAM yodlee dot NOSPAM com”.

• Senior Helpdesk Administrator
• Product Manager- Personal Finance
• Accounts Payable and GL Generalist
• Product Marketing Manager
• Professional Services Sales Manager

I was fortunate enough to recently attend the An Event Apart, San Francisco (you can view a collection of ALA SF photos on Flickr). The first thing to mention is, to my pleasant surprise, how funny Jared Spool and Jeffrey Zeldman were! In addition to the sessions, the atmosphere was electric, a made a few good professional contacts, and the food was excellent I also had the opportunity to personally speak (even though briefly) with Eric Meyer, Jeffrey Zeldman, and Joe Clark.

It would be great if every web designer and developer in the world could attend this conference as it promotes the right way to do web development–namely web standards and accessibility. There were also a couple excellent sessions on web design.

Eric Meyer, the infamous CSS guru, presented twice. He showcased his data table-to-bar chart CSS, which was really impressive. The second session focused on CSS and IE7, mostly about CSS selector techniques. Jeffrey Zeldman also presented twice–on Writing the User Interface and Selling Design. Other notable presenters include Jason Santa Maria of Happy Cog, Jared Spool of User Interface Engineering, and Kimberly Blessing of PayPal.

A few good quotes used in the presentations were:

• I’d have written it shorter if I had more time.
• Design helps people read less.
• An interface is worth a thousand pictures.

Last week I attended The Ajax Experience 2007 3-day conference in downtown San Francisco. There sure were some big guys speaking including Brendan Eich, CTO Mozilla; Douglas Crawford, Senior Architect, Yahoo!; and Kevin Lynch, Chief Software Architect at Adobe.

The sessions varied from Ajax security, to Javascript frameworks, to advanced techniques with forms. Fortunately, there was even a session on Ajax and accessibility, given by Orbitz. I also was happy to meet Aaron Gustafson, and attend his session relating to progressive enhancement. There was definitely a concentrate of topics around Javascript frameworks (a.k.a. libraries, toolkits) such as jQuery, Dojo, Prototype, and more.

On a personal note, I decided to make a family vacation out of the event, so I booked a hotel a few blocks from the conference, and brought the wife and kids. Yes, it was tough dragging around two boys–who are barely toddlers–but nonetheless it was worth it.

Union Square in downtown San Francisco:

So I’ve been in the Bay area (south of San Francisco, California, a.k.a. Silicon Valley) for almost two weeks now. It’s pretty awesome, and I’m discovering some interesting things about the difference between living here and in the midwest–some bad, some good.

• Motorcycles can legally ride between lanes/cars in California. Personally, I think this is pretty stupid.
• To rent a house in this area, move fast! Use Craig’s List. And be ready to get a cashier’s check. And it’s very expensive of course.
• Garbage/recycling pickup is treated as an extra utility, you pay monthly to the city. This is pretty silly; it should just be included with property taxes like other places.
• Wireless internet at Starbucks in Mountain View is free–because wireless internet is free in the whole city! Thanks to Google.
• The cost of living is obviously higher here than most American cities, but gasoline prices are relatively not too bad.
• The weather’s real nice as expected. Temperatures are not too hot in the day; pretty cool at night. But the sun is much stronger than I thought. I’ll have to get my car windows tinted, man.
• There’s no White Castle!
• Cruising along the coast is as fun and beautiful as I’d hoped. Santa Cruz is especially cool.