What Did I Learn Today?

11/14/2008 - [ learntoday accessibility web design ] - posted by fansipans

There's a lot of cool stuff going on in the Web Accessibility world.

WCAG: Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. (See See WCAG 2.0 quick reference here.)

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines are a standard set of ways to better organize content for accessibility. Mainly just big fat checklists of dos & don'ts, easy to scan/peruse. Great for well-designed sites overall, not just for accessibility issues.

WAI-ARIA: Web Accessibility Initiative - Accessible Rich Internet Applications (Also see a simple ARIA primer here)

The WAI-ARIA project is trying to manage accessibility issues for the rapidly expanding landscape of Rich Internet Applications. Modern web applications often take advantage of or bastardize every possible feature of modern browsers to implement functionality for which screen readers and users with accessibility issues have no way to use. Preliminary support for the WAI-ARIA specification already exists in major screen readers and recent browsers (Firefox 3, IE8).

Web Accessibility is growing by leaps and bounds, and stands to be a major motive force in making current internet applications suck less. Designing for accessibility reinforces good user interface, user experience, and usability. Any pressure to focus on user experience and usability can often lead to better applications overall, as it can expose and express or better address confusing business logic and requirements.

The Future

11/05/2008 - [ web design html css html5 css3 interface ] - posted by fansipans

For warm fuzzies, read through the following documents:

The Working Specification of HTML5: New and better tags, client-side databases, native video and multimedia (goodbye flash!), canvas for drawing and rendering, input type "date", native tags for tree, list, and tabular data, a "command" tag (goodbye href="#" and href="javascript:void(0)" !)

CSS3, Current CSS Initiatives: A bonanza of syntax, attributes, and features to style HTML content in radically more ways than before. The wealth here is in the hundreds of little new features and attributes like: curved border corners with border-radius, an "opacity" property (opacity examples), color specification by hue, saturation, value, and optionally, alpha, and many, many, more.

Voronoi Diagrams

03/10/2008 - [ math software modeling diagram graph algorithm design interface data analysis ] - posted by fansipans

I ran across an interesting article today, about a simple solution to a seemingly complex problem.

The question is: how do you subdivide a plane containing multiple points into cells containing each point, enclosing all the points in the plane closest to that point?

One of the ways of constructing these 'Voronoi Diagrams', as they're called, is Fortune's algorithm, which is based around intersecting parabolas.

See the article here: Voronoi Diagrams and a Day at the Beach

And a java simulator of Fortune's algorithm here: Fortune's Algorithm Simulator

What I find fascinating about these types of diagrams are the ways in which they can be used to aid data analysis through visualization and geometric representation (see also this blog post.)

There are so many secondary characteristics of these diagrams: cell area, adjacent cells, border length, distance to border, border segment count... it makes me want to throw all sorts of different data sets in there and see what unobvious connections and patterns become plain as day.

CSS Typography - woowoo!

02/04/2008 - [ blueprint css webdesign web html interface design ] - posted by fansipans

I stumbled across a site I'd previously bookmarked many months ago, the Blueprint CSS Framework. It's a very simple and straighforward css library for layout, and I'm very impressed at how simple and how easy to use it seems to be.

From the site:

Blueprint is a CSS framework, which aims to cut down on your CSS development time. It gives you a solid CSS foundation to build your project on top of, with an easy-to-use grid, sensible typography, and even a stylesheet for printing.

See a sample website built with BP, or a demonstration of the grid or a demonstration of the typography. The quick tutorial is also a good place to start. Blueprint is a <strong>CSS framework</strong>, which aims to cut down on your CSS development time. It gives you a solid CSS foundation to build your project on top of, with an easy-to-use grid, sensible typography, and even a stylesheet for printing.

See a sample website built with BP, or a demonstration of the grid or a demonstration of the typography. The quick tutorial is also a good place to start.