Archive for the 'Standards' Category
September 15, 2008
6 million reasons to pay attention to accessibility
A nearly three year old lawsuit has resulted in a $6 million settlement over accessibility problems at Target.com.
Target has settled a class action lawsuit with the National Federation of the Blind over accessibility complaints with Target.com. Despite the law being unclear as to whether the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) applies to websites, the company will pay a substantial fee and update its web site to make it accessible to the blind.
Another case study in how building accessible, standards compliant, web sites is not only the right thing to do but can save you millions. Plus, doing the right thing in this regard is easier to do than ever before with improved browsers, web application frameworks and agreed upon standards.
A complicating factor for some organizations can be that they are using systems for their sites that have been developed and added to since the early days of the web when accessibility wasn’t even an afterthought. However, committing to upgrading your system before the lawsuits were filed would have allowed Target to invest a portion of that $6 million in improving their site rather than paying a fine.
(Spotted via Gadgetopia.)
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June 2, 2008
Building Credibility Even When You Can’t Say Anything
Great example from the Direct2Dell blog of listening to the online conversation about their future products, summarizing the discussion, and simply stating what they can share about it right now (not much):
Dell’s Secret Mini Laptop: Speaking of D6, a Gizmodo post about a forthcoming Dell mini notebook sparked hundreds of reactions in the blogosphere. Anne B. Camden reacted and shared a few more pictures in her post on Your Blog. Reaction was pretty positive. Seems like a lot of folks are interested in a small notebook at an affordable price. Still, others in the blogosphere want a sub-notebook that doesn’t skimp on performance (take a look at the comment threads from Gizmodo and Engadget to see what I mean). When we can share more details on this product, we’ll blog about it.
(Emphasis added by me.)
This is a great way to acknowledge a topic while being truthful about not being prepared to share anything. This kind of post builds credibility with their most dedicated followers (pro or con). Staying silent would miss an opportunity to build trust, at best, or actually harm their reputation.
I’ll be discussing Dell’s customer idea generation web site, which uses Salesforce.com’s Ideas application, in the next issue of my newsletter. Be sure to sign up this week for David Gammel’s Web Strategy Report to get the next issue. You can read the first issue If you missed it last month via the same page.
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February 20, 2008
Wiki Markup: What You See is Hard to Do
James Robertson has point out the obvious weakness of wiki tools: Wiki markup has no future:
The lack of WYSIWYG editing is a big barrier to adoption within organisations, and on the wider web. There are only a limited number of users that have the time, skills and inclination to learn wiki markup. It’s a fundamental usability problem, and the spread of wikis will always be niche as long as wiki markup remains.
This is a rather heretical point of view among wiki aficionados, however it is right on the money. If the outcome of using a wiki is to make content creation easy for a distributed group, wiki markup gets in the way of achieving that outcome. Most people can use a WYSIWYG editor if they have used a word processor in the past. This covers most Web users, especially in a corporate environment. Using obscure text code is an unnecessary and anachronistic hurdle to put wiki users through.
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August 28, 2007
Vista/IE7 Support Lagging in Content Management Systems
The good folks over at CMSWatch report that many content management systems still do not fully support authoring on Vista/IE7.
As they point out in the post, this will be a growing problem for telecommuters as new PCs with Vista are purchased. Most corporations are sticking with XP for now (with good reason) but the home market is another story.
If your staff work on web content from home, you should do some testing with your system on Vista so that you can anticipate any problems and lean on your vendor to get a fix into place if needed.
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August 27, 2007
Web Analytics Definitions or A Page View by Any Other Name Is Not Allowed!
The Web Analytics Associations has released an expanded set of 26 standard definitions for measuring web traffic and usage (PDF). This is a useful document for providing consensus definitions of common terms used in the web industry.
However, I find it rather ironic that they released this document only as a PDF. Come on folks! You should know better, being an association of web professionals.
(Via Shawn Zehnder Lea.)
Update: What would I recommend in addition to a PDF? A sub-site on the WAA site for the definitions, providing an index and a separate web page for each definition. Having a page for each definition would allow people to link to them directly as references. This would improve the usability of the content and enhance search engine results for those definitions (ahem).
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June 20, 2007
Marc Andreeson on Facebook’s API
Marc Andreeson, founder of the original Netscape, has posted his thoughts on Facebook’s new API, which has created quite the storm of attention since it launched. This observation is quite interesting:
Analyzing the Facebook Platform, three weeks in
The implication is, in my view, quite clear — the Facebook Platform is primarily for use by either big companies, or venture-backed startups with the funding and capability to handle the slightly insane scale requirements. Individual developers are going to have a very hard time taking advantage of it in useful ways.
In short, creating a Facebook application with the API requires that you provide your own server resources to power the application. Facebook’s super-viral distribution of popular apps leads to crushing load on your web servers in a very short amount of time if you are (un)lucky enough to create a popular application.
The capacity to rapidly scale up server capacity is probably beyond even some large corporation’s ability unless they have specifically prepared themselves to do so. Your web application needs to be designed for scaling up the number of servers as well.
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May 25, 2007
Draft Standard from ASAE Data Standards Committee
If you need some reading for beach this weekend, have I got a draft standards document for you!
Seriously, the draft standard described in the announcement below is the first step in an overall effort to improve the ability of association systems to integrate more effectively and efficiently. If you are an association IT exec or a technology vendor serving this market, please take the time to review and comment upon the draft.
The ASAE Data Standards Task Force is pleased to announce the release of
a draft standard for expressing constituent records in XML. This
standard will serve as a core for expanding into other data
representations. Therefore, it is especially critical to gather feedback
on the draft standard from the association technology community.Please go to this page on the ASAE web site in order to download the
standards documents: http://www.asaecenter.org/datastandardsreview.Please review the draft standard and consider how well it serves your
needs as an association or those of your customers if you are a
technology vendor. Once you have reviewed the standard, please provide
your comments.You will need to register with the site in order to submit a comment,
but you do not have to be a member of ASAE. Go to the same page from
which you downloaded the documents
(http://www.asaecenter.org/datastandardsreview) and follow the
instructions on providing comments.Non-IE browser (Firefox, Safari) users: Before logging in, you will
receive an error message “Website Certified by an Unknown Authority”.
Accept the certificate permanently and you’ll be able to continue.Please share this message with your database experts on staff or with
supporting vendor companies. Their input as experts in implementing your
technology is highly valuable to the standards development process.We thank you in advance for your critical review of the draft standard
and the feedback you provide.
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March 30, 2007
New Web Site Design for High Context Consulting
I launched a new design for my web site earlier this week. I wanted to freshen up the look and make some structural changes to the content and design. The cobbler finally has some new shoes of his own. :)
The design is fully standards compliant, thus practicing what I preach to my clients. The entire site is managed with WordPress, making use of it’s ability to publish standard pages as well as blog posts.
Many thanks to Steve Smith of Ordered List for his work on creating and deploying the design.
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March 8, 2007
Only at Freedom to Connect
I was at the Freedom to Connect conference earlier this week at the AFI Theater in Silver Spring, MD. The conference covered internet and telecom policy issues for hard core tech/policy geeks and had a who’s who of wonks, scientists, lobbyists and gurus in attendance. Even a member of Congress.
The time was ripe for one of the most surreal DC moments of my life to happen at this meeting:
FCC Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein jamming on stage with Howard Levy, a world-renowned harmonica musician, while Scooter Libby’s conviction was reported in a chat channel projected 20 feet tall on the screen behind them. Woo!
I’ll post some of my notes and comments about the conference over the next couple of days.
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December 20, 2006
Google Deprecates SOAP Search API
Google has deprecated their SOAP Search API. This means that people who already have keys to use the system can continue to do so but no new ones will be issued. Ongoing support of the SOAP API is questionable as well. Google suggests that people now use their AJAX Search API. Here is a good discussion (read comments and follow links) of concerns about how the AJAX API is not a complete replacement for everything that was available in the SOAP API.
Update: Here is another interesting post, Beginning of the end of for open web APIs?, that is worth checking out on this issue.
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