October 2004 Archives

Watch Your Language

After banging on about internationalisation, cultural bias yada yada yada, I thought it might be interesting to share a few cultural biases of my own, in the form of words and phrases that I don't find offensive or unacceptable, but others clearly do.

While I have been known to use mild swear words on the Dog Blog, which is a much more personal area of HTML Dog, I have tried to steer away from offensive language throughout the rest of the site. However, I have still received a few complaints.

One example was from a person who disliked the phrase "...without a document declaration ... your web pages can look like they were put together by a short-sighted, one-eyed infant gibbon with learning difficulties." I think this complaint was actually quite justifiable and I've been attempting to think up an adequate replacement.

What has surprised me most is the amount of criticism I've received for using the word "Hell". What? "Hell"? Now that's something that I don't remember ever being offensive in my part of the world during my lifetime. Which is the point. But...

I was also recently asked to take out the words "asexual" and "hermaphrodite" from a page on the website. Eh? What's wrong with "asexual" and "hermaphrodite"??? Sponges are asexual. Slugs are hermaphrodites. It's quite bloody natural!

Thursday 21 October, 2004 ( 3:17 PM GMT) | Comments (33) / Permanent Link

I am not American!

National bias is a difficult habit to break out of when thinking about content destined for an international audience.

I hate spam anyway (who doesn't?), but I get especially annoyed when I receive (as I do a number of times every bloody day) a notification of my "m0rtg agE approval" detailed in dollars. On the off-chance I'd be stupid enough to get a mortgage from a unsolicited no-face spambot, I'm certainly not going to get a mortgage in the USA when I live in the UK!

There's a similar (although much less anger-inducing) tendency on the web to be nation (particularly American) centric. Adverts, for example. I ain't gonna buy no book from no amazon.com. I might buy a book from amazon.co.uk, but I'm certainly not going to buy from a shop that wants dollars, costs more to ship and takes longer to arrive.

The American audience will be, in most cases, by far the biggest market for an internationally relevant product or service, particularly in the West. But no one really wants to exclude anyone and, surely, the more specifically you can target something to any individual user, the greater the chance will be that they will respond to it. You can quite accurately tell what country a user is from by their IP address, for example, and I've noticed UK-targeted adverts on sites such as Dictionary.com and IMDb.

Obviously, spammers just don't care who they bombard with their crap - it's expected from such reprobates. But when it comes to web sites, users can expect more and web site owners can reap the benefits of giving them more.

I guess my ~~rant~~ point is that not only should you consider your own cultural biases when producing content, but also that you could (for the benefit of the user, and, ultimately, you) offer content (such as, but not exclusively, advertising) that is more relevant to each user's world.

Tuesday 19 October, 2004 ( 5:15 PM GMT) | Comments (24) / Permanent Link

Visited Links and Updates

It is a common "good practice" to style visited links in a different way than links that have not been visited so that, to aid navigation, a user has a clue where they have already been.

The BBC News website is one of the few sites that I visit not only daily, but a number of times a day. I think it's a great site in terms of content, design and ease of use and I regularly pick up on the cues of their lighter-coloured visited links to quickly associate a headline with an article I have already read and therefore don't want to read again.

There's a slight flaw to this, however. It is clearly a policy of the BBC News site not to have a new page for every update on the same story, but to alter an existing page, which makes perfect sense. The trouble with this is that their "helpful cue" becomes increasingly less helpful with every update. The lighter links tell me I've already been to a certain page, as in one with the same file name, but I haven't actually been to that latest story, or update of that story.

A case in point is the story concerning the future of the British Grand Prix at Silverstone, which I followed with interest. Over recent weeks the same page has been updated numerous times and the story has swung from Silverstone being taken off the calendar to a consortium coming in to save it to Silverstone actually having a provisional place on the calendar (without the help of the consortium, in the end). So the latest "updated" page is actually radically different to the original page.

How many changes can you make to a web page before it is no longer helpful to use differently styled visited links?

Friday 15 October, 2004 ( 2:35 PM GMT) | Comments (6) / Permanent Link

When Comments Go Bad

I thought things had gone a bit quiet on the Dog Blog recently...

In a terrific stroke of anti-genius, it seems that a few days ago I managed to block every IP address from adding comments. Clever.

So, if you've tried to add any comments over the past few days, sorry. All is well now.

Thursday 14 October, 2004 ( 8:10 PM GMT) | Comments (1) / Permanent Link

Web Standards: A Business Perspective

Web Standards: A Business Perspective is a new article written by your humble host.

I make no bones about it - this was written to encourage visitors to theVivabit website to take up our services. But there are no lies, I don't think I even exaggerated any of the points. It's a genuine belief of mine that web standards are not only a genuine option, but an option that will result in a higher return on investment than a non-web standard approach to web development.

There's nothing groundbreaking in the article, it is aimed at web managers and it is purposefully non-technical, but I thought it might be something of interest.

Thursday 14 October, 2004 ( 3:21 PM GMT) | Comments (1) / Permanent Link

HTML Dog: The Company

Vivabit Well, it's not really HTML Dog: The Company, it's Vivabit.

Viva-whu?

VivaBIT! Sing it with me now!

It's not a design agency type thing - there are already more of them than there are planktonic organisms in the sea. Although site design and development services are on offer, the emphasis here is on front-end web standards development - the technical nitty-gritty. We'll be doing it, helping with it and teaching it. It's all conveniently summed up in the tagline - "Web Standards & Accessibility Training, Consulting and Design". If it was in a tin, it'd do exactly what it says on it.

The Commercial Viability of Web Standards

Can a commercial case be made for a specifically web standards company? I certainly think so - this is a serious business venture that I am dedicating a lot of time, effort and money to - I'm not doing it as some crazy, light-hearted experiment. It's a risk, sure, undertaking any business is, but I'm confident that there is demand for this specialist technical knowledge, the practical application of it and the ability to clearly communicate that knowledge to others.

It's Elastic!

The web site's as light as a baby shrew and typically sparse to optimise usability - just the way I like to do things.

There's a little colophon page with a few technical details (most of which will be pretty "so what?" to those web standards aficionados amongst you). The most interesting point, in my opinion, is that the whole thing's elastic. Ems a gogo. Try bumping up the text size and the whole thing will expand like a puffer fish, only less poisonous.

Tuesday 5 October, 2004 (11:09 AM GMT) | Comments (7) / Permanent Link

Web Standards Conferences

By all accounts, it sounds like the Web Essentials conference in Sydney was quite phenomenal.

With over 200 people attending and now talking about it all over the place with completely justified smugness, presentations from web standards supergurus such as Zen Man, Captain Accessibility and Dr. Stop (just take a look at the amazing detail in these slides!) seem to have made for an exciting and informative couple of days that have really highlighted the increasing appetite for, and awareness of the importance of, web standards and accessibility issues.

Web standards are taking over the world. Wouldn't it be great if there were a web standards conference for those of us on the other side of the planet...

There will be a web standards conference in the UK

Here's a teaser for you...

Next year there will be a web standards and accessibility conference in the UK. I know that a lot of organising has gone into the event already and I think you can expect to hear more about it the New Year when the conference is "officially" announced and open for registration. Can't say much more until then...

Monday 4 October, 2004 ( 9:57 AM GMT) | Comments (5) / Permanent Link