The Daily Texan reported yesterday that the University of Texas' Gutenberg Bible had been digitized. Using an $80,000 scanner, HRC staff and researchers scanned and corrected 1,282 pages over the course of a year. The Gutenberg Bible has been available online since last Monday, July 14th 2003, thus continuing the Bible's legacy of making print accessible to the masses.
I don't usually promote the work of someone I've never met or even talked to, but I've decided to make an exception for an exceptional web developer.
Radu Darvas first came to my attention with his entry into the WThRemix contest. Not only was his entry my favorite of the entries, he also received the Grand prize for the contest. More recently I noticed his entry, Zunflower, on the CSS Zen Garden site; another fantastic piece of work deserving of much praise. His work embodies the visual allure of a graphic designer but also maintains the code integrity of a detail-oriented developer; this is not a common combination. Nice work, Radu. I salute you.
I noticed one thing about his website though. On his résumé, Radu lists his strengths a well as his weaknesses. There's something strange about his bug list, though. Am I reading it the wrong way?
<bugs tobacco="true" wife="true" />
I just noticed an old post today by Dave Shea, creator of the CSS Zen Garden project. It appears he also had an entry in the Hackbot redesign contest and ran into the same problems I had. I didn't mention them (publicly) before, but it's quite satisfying to see I wasn't the only one. I especially enjoyed this little allegory.
When you invite people over to your home for dinner, it's considered rude for them to speak up about your cleaning habits. However, when you invite someone into your home, you usually spend a few minutes frantically cleaning to make it presentable.
Dave Shea
AOL fired all its Mozilla developers today. Eric Meyer, author of several Cascading Style Sheets books and a Netscape employee, confirmed some of the rumors.
The layoffs: true. The logo removal: true. Netscape dead: very likely true, since the people who weren't let go are being "redeployed" and Netscape products are being moved to "maintenance mode." Mozilla team cut: hard to tell, since the Mozilla Foundation may be taking what was left of the salaried Mozilla staff with it, and any Netscape engineers working on Mozilla are likely either gone or being "redeployed." But it's hard to be sure.
Eric Meyer
Of course it's open-source, so Mozilla will continue
, but the development process will suffer now that many of the full time program developers will have to find other full-time work. Many of them have committed to continued development, though part-time volunteer development most likely will not be as productive as commercial direction.
Jakob Nielsen deklared the letter 'C' unusable earlier this month.
Obviously if we phase out the 'C' entirely everything becomes either a 'K' or an 'S', therefore the .com web extension will become the .kom extension. Simple really.
Nielsen goes on to address the "CH" issue, "Once we deprecate 'X' to no longer include the 'Z' sound property, it will be a prime candidate to take the 'C' place in the 'CH' sound. The learnability for 'XH' might be a little high, but our studies show that its memorability factor more than makes up for the inconvenience of having a trouble maker like 'C' in the mix.
That's a joke of kourse... but it's a xhoice one at that. ;)
Bob Regan, head of the Macromedia Flash accessibility division, recently built a product rollover in Flash (see part one and part two) demonstrating the accesibility capabilities of Flash MX.
Macromedia's work on Flash MX has provided fantastic progress on improving Flash accesibility and Mr. Regan's writings are an invaluable resource for remaining abreast of those achievements. However, the main drawback that has always and continues to plague Flash accessibility is the inability to "tab out" of a Flash movie — that is, once a Flash movie aquires keyboard focus, getting it to relinquish that focus is nearly impossible without the use of a mouse. While this is not technically the fault of the Flash plug-in, it still remains a huge accessibility/usability concern for web content authors.
Using Mr. Regan's rollover idea, I developed my version using only standards-compliant HTML and CSS combined with animated GIFs. Although there are some differences noted in the experiment, I wanted to demonstrate that the same visual effect could be achieved without the use of Flash or JavaScript and would therefore generate a more accessible final product. Pros/cons and other differences between the versions are listed in the experiment documentation. I welcome your comments.
Update: Patrick Curry suggested I give more explanation of development methods so I've now added a how it was done section to the experiment page.
I'm flying to Washington D.C. on Sunday for a business conference next week. I'll be there through Wednesday afternoon so do any of you have suggestions for things to see/do?
I've been to Washington a few times before, so I've seen the Smithsonian, the White House, the Capitol, memorials, monuments, etc. I would love to visit the Smithsonian again, but I will be in the conference during the day when it's open. I have the evenings free and I may get part of the Wednesday afternoon free before I leave. If so, I'll probably try to visit the Holocaust Museum. I doubt I'll have enough time though. Any suggestions for nightlife or other attractions open late?
Antoine Quint's article on XML.com discusses Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) and the latest version of Adobe's SVG Viewer browser plug-in. Version 3.0 gives you the option to use the browser's JavaScript implementation or the plug-in's own standardized, rock-solid
ECMAScript engine which provides standard access regardless of the browser.
The rock-solid
quote almost makes it sound like Mr. Quint is on the Adobe payroll, but the idea is still fabulous. Many DHTML developers migrated to Flash because they were sick of writing multiple versions of code specific to each and every browser. While the W3C and WaSP's push for web standards has alleviated some of the problems, browser implementations still vary. Flash developers enjoy a sense of security that their Flash movies and ActionScripts will work on any platform — provided that Macromedia has developed the plug-in for it. Similarly, Adobe's embedded ECMAScript engine can assure interactive SVG applications will be accessed the same way on multiple platforms — also provided that Adobe has developed the plug-in for it.
The added benefit is that Adobe's version stores all data in the plain-text web standard XML format, SVG. It can therefore take advantage of all the benefits XML data storage has to offer, including using an XSL transformation layer to translate that data into another form such as a SWF file. Sweet! Theoretically, SVG data could be the source for all your Flash movies as well as its own presentation format.
Now, I don't imagine interactive SVG will replace Flash market share anytime soon, but there are so many things about it that just seem smarter. Particularly the interface to a user-agent's native scripting language instead of fscommand() and wacky proprietary interfaces like LiveConnect.
Sorry folks. Blogger made some updates to their site a few days ago and I didn't realize that the extra long post IDs were breaking the comment functionality on cookiecrook. Anyway, I'm now using a String instead of an Integer which was being translated into scientific notation.
Long story short: the comments are working again. Now go back and make some guesses on the identity of the high school thespian...
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