Web Standards, Accessibility & More

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:

When I first used Gmail (Google’s free email service), it was a little awkward at first because the logic behind it is different than all other mail applications…and it’s brilliant. It’s based on email conversations. Email messages are groups into a conversation; this makes your email much better organized and much easier to scan. Seems simple, but it is quite unique, and it’s executed well. The AJAX is smooth and make tasks much easier. There are also a nice Contacts feature and a built in text-messenger (Google Talk).

Google’s other fine products and services makes it a fine choice for online tasks including Google Calendar, Documents and Spreadsheets, and Groups. I find Google’s web applications easier to use, faster, and just slicker than most other similar apps. Google Docs are really cool because not only can you edit docs and (simple) spreadsheets online, but you can collaborate with other people.

Yahoo! made a good effort in the new version of Yahoo! Mail, but falls short in load speed and overall performance.

And unless you pay, you get bombarded with advertising in Yahoo! Mail. MSN mail isn’t much better. And staying away from Microsoft applications is usually a good idea. Ads are much less bothersome in Gmail, in fact, I hardly notice it at all as they are subtle text ads, not big, blaring, graphical ads. The Google ads are also relevant to the content of the email, which can actually be helpful sometimes.