SxSW podcasts!

Posted August 15, 2006 at 8:24 AM | Tagged as: Podcasts, SxSW, Web Standards | Comments Off

Sure, this comes a little late, but better late than never, right?

The good folks at the SxSW Festival have finally posted the podcasts for the panels that I was a part of. The following links will take you straight to the MP3s:

• WTF: WaSP Task Force Panel - Getting the Job Done Right, in which I talk about the activities of the Education Task Force.
• WaSP Annual Meeting, during which we launched the new WaSP Web site (sort of).
• How to Convince Your Company to Embrace Standards, in which my old friends from AOL and I tell you how a grass roots effort can create change! You can also view the slides from our presentation, or read the transcript! (Thanks, Kevin and Steve!)

Job Postings

Posted August 14, 2006 at 8:04 AM | Tagged as: Web Standards, Work | Comments Off

Looking for Web standards work? There’s plenty of it out there, if you know where to look!

Steve Ganz has information about an expert-level JavaScript position at PayPal. Having heard the details of the job first hand, I’d call it a principal architecture job — pretty darn important, and requiring top-notch skills.

My good friends at mediabarn have several contract positions in the Washington, D.C. metro area for front-end developers skilled in semantic XHTML markup, CSS driven layout (including 3-column layouts), and advanced knowledge of the DOM. The project starts soon, so get in touch with them today!

The Buzz about WaSP

Posted March 15, 2006 at 1:36 PM | Tagged as: SxSW, Web Standards | Comments Off

There was lots of buzz about the Web Standards Project during SxSW Interactive, and for good reason! After a panel on WaSP Task Forces, an open meeting, and the (slightly troubled but finally debugged) redesign launch, it’s clear that people see WaSP as alive and well, and ready to start stinging again. Woo hoo!

I’ll toot my own horn a bit and admit to my role in the redesign, which was the porting of the design created by Andy Clarke to WordPress. A proud moment for me just yesterday was in describing how I accomplished some of the content presentation objectives to Matt Mullenweg; he told me that I’d figured out some pretty cool stuff (which I fully intend to write about in the future)! But projects like this aren’t accomplished single-handedly, so I have to give big virtual hugs to Chris Casciano for porting tons of content to WP, Chris Kaminski for doing the scripting, and Holly Marie Koltz for doing lots of QA and content tweaking.

Meanwhile, the response to the Education Task Force has been overwhelming. I’ve probably got 30+ business cards and notes in my suitcase from folks wanting to know how they can help in our mission, as well as wanting to know how they can help affect change in their schools. And the contacts and ideas keep coming in via e-mail too… now to get some plans together! You can be sure that you’ll be hearing more from the eduTF soon.

IEEE fails again!

Posted January 25, 2006 at 8:16 PM | Tagged as: Web Standards | 2 Comments

Fer cryin’ out loud!

The IEEE has failed again… this time it’s the newly redesigned IEEE Society on Social Implications of Technology Web site.

Clearly the IEEE’s on a mission to update all of their Web content. Assuming they’re using the same (lack of) standards for all of their projects, we’ll probably see more of these failed redesign posts in the future. Which, in my opinion, is really sad… I just can’t understand how a standards body could choose to ignore Web standards.

In the case of SSIT, it looks like Macromedia Dreamweaver was used to generate code (hello MM JavaScript functions!). However someone clearly updated the HTML 4.01 Transitional template by hand, to add the various META elements (all closed, à la XHTML) in the document header. (The IEEE site, on the other hand, appears to be entirely hand-coded and does use some CSS, yet still lacks semantic markup, uses nested tables for layout, and lacks a DOCTYPE.)

Why am I so upset by this? The IEEE is a technical society and standards body. Its members brand themselves as professionals, seeking to advance technology by fostering technological innovation. (Does this look like technology advancement or technological innovation to you?) The IEEE mission states:

The IEEE promotes the engineering process of creating, developing, integrating, sharing, and applying knowledge about electro and information technologies and sciences for the benefit of humanity and the profession.

These recent IEEE Web site redesign fail to live up to the IEEE mission. In light of this, how can any IEEE member be proud of their membership in such an organization? I’m sure as heck not… and that’s why I’m speaking up. Answers and code changes are what I want to see.

Oh the irony! IEEE site not standards-compliant

Posted January 23, 2006 at 4:43 PM | Tagged as: Industry Events, Web Standards | Just 1 Comment

Oh the irony — that a standards body should ignore standards in creating their new Web site!

As a member of the IEEE, I couldn’t help but laugh when I saw that the new IEEE Web site redesign was announced in an e-mail newsletter… along with another entry titled “Let’s Not Overlook Standards”. Since their previous site didn’t make use of Web standards, I had hopes that this one would… but on viewing source of the new site, those hopes were quickly dashed.

What does this say to users and to Web professionals when a technical standards body completely ignores Web standards? The term “unprofessional” doesn’t even seem to go far enough.

As a Web professional and as a member of the IEEE, I’m ashamed and I’m insulted. You should be too. Contact the IEEE and let them know how you feel.