Hollidazed

I know I’m a week (or so) late on this but a couple of new browser beta’s have arrived… firstly Firefox beta 2 is great while IE 7 beta 3 is possibly not should the many rumours of bugs and problems turn out to be true. I have tested Beta 3 on the same laptop I’ve been running IE7 beta 2 on and must confess that I have had no problems but I’ve heard a few things to suggest it is a bit of a step backwards from beta 2, suggesting the final release date may be further away than we first thought.

On a brighter note Firefox beta 1 is great. I must confess I am a big firefox fan so the new features in this just make a good thing better. I love the idea of the inbuilt spell check for form fields while improved RSS support should also be a bonus as I currently have to rely on the sage plugin to meet my needs. The ability to rescue tabs when you accidently delete them is also great while I’m most pleased that Open Search has been added to match the feature that Microsoft added into IE 7. As I posted earlier in this blog I really hoped open search would arrive for Firefox sooner rather than later and the only improvement that might be nice is the auto-detection highlight that is implemented in ie.. maybe something for the beta 2 version?

I’ve got to admit that the Beta 2 version of IE7 I’ve been testing at work is impressing me and I was further sold after attending Chris Wilson‘s talk about IE7 at @media 2006. It was at this session I first came across the the term open search and I really like the idea.. although it must be said that it’s not actually a Microsoft idea at all (it’s actually an open format under a Creative Commons license) …in implementing open search Microsoft for once seem ahead of the game and I’m sure Firefox amongst others will follow suit. The idea that the search element of a site will be solely handled by the browser in a universal way appeals to me and for what it’s worth I’ve put in a open search feed into the new Central Sussex College site which feeds into the course search facility. I’ll be really interested once IE7 is launched if the open search feature gets much use over the normal search box in the page. If your interested in the code used for the XML that makes up the open search I’ve used I’ve posted it in the code section of this site.

I’m pleased to say that I’ve just launched a new version of the Central Sussex College website. The new version is geared up for IE7 with virtually no css hacks and a general spring clean for good measure sorting out a few of the design and usability issues and taking out most (the rest to follow shortly) of the obtrusive inline javascript that sections of the site previously relied on. Feel free to post any comments and I’ll talk about it more in the future.

I’ve got to admit that I continue to be disappointed with the amount of FE college’s that simply don’t seem to care about web standards and accessibility. Although there are still some issues with the site I work on we are at least trying to work towards a completely inclusive experience for all our users by using the right technologies in CSS, (X)HTML and DOM scripting (Javascript). I was unfortunately not surprised by Robin Christopherson taking apart South Cheshire College‘s site at @media recently and there are many more I could (and maybe) should name… but I’ll save this for another day… maybe some further research/fact finding is in order!

Well my first web conference was most enjoyable… here is a brief round-up of my highlights…

Day 1

Eric Meyer‘s Keynote presentation was an enjoyable journey through the last ten years showing how CSS and standards have developed and as a relatively recent convert to CSS layout (20 months down and counting) it was good to get a history lesson to kick things off.

Jeremy Keith‘s session on using DOM Scripting was one of the things I was most looking forward to. I have found the Dom Scripting book really useful this year and this session didn’t disappoint. As I had hoped Jeremy took some of the ideas in the book a bit further looking at how to plug the holes in CSS using the DOM.

Although I was a little disapointed to have to miss Dave Shea’s web typography session (looking forward to the podcast)… I felt I owed it to my employers who had paid for this conference trip to find out what I could about the new release of IE and the launch date. Chris Wilson pretty much said what I was expecting (having now test driven the beta 2 release). He pretty much confirmed that ie7 would be arriving by the end of the year although he seemed to me to suggest the next 2/3 months. One interesting thing he also mentioned was the IE7 ReadinessToolkit.

I was originally going to go to the WCAG 2.0 debate at this point in proceedings but having read much commentary (and the now infamous Joe Clark article) concerning the new guidelines I decided to avoid this… based on how much useful information I have recently got out of reading Andy Budd‘s Web Mastery book I thought his session would be more useful in the short term.

I’ve got to be honest and say that Jeffrey Veen – ‘Designing the Next Generation of Web App’s was not a session I was that bothered about when I first saw the programme but it turned out to be rather good and Jeffrey was an excellent speaker looking at the changing face of the web.

Day 2

Dan Cederholm’s Bulletproof Web Design was was a good way to start the day but it was Robin Christopherson’s session, ‘Beyond a Code Audit’, that turned out to be my highlight. Although suffering from the WiFi problem I was really impressed with his content and it really helped me to actually see a visually impaired user working with the web first hand. As I work as an in-house designer for an FE college I was particuarly interested to watch him take apart the South Cheshire College website.

I unfortuately missed the first half of Cameron Moll’s – Mobile session but I did pick up a few interesting ideas from what I did catch and can now say I’ve finally installed Opera Mini on my Motorola V3.

The Strategic CSS Management panel was fairly useful but didn’t blow me away while Tantek Celik‘s – ‘Microformats: Evolving the Web’ was also excellent and I expect to be using microformats much more in my work this year.

Finally, the Hot Topics panel was very entertaining and finished off a good conference.

Looking forward to next year.

Links to presentation notes

• Good Design vs Great Design Panel
• Jeremy Keith – Using DOM Scripting to Plug the Holes in CSS
• Andy Budd – Bug Hunting
• Jeffrey Veen – Designing the Next Generation of Web Apps
• Nate Koechley – Yahoo! vs. Yahoo!