Category: Professional

Molly calls everybody up front, I shout that we have power, and zeldman’s voice is very ragnarok-like on the mike.

zeldman!

started selfishly, no particular understanding of the real benefits of standards. were rebellious 14-year-olds because they had no hope. so to speak.

funny story about being anonymous. WaSP: “oh, Glen’s thing.” but now there’s the perception that it’s his thing, but it isn’t and wasn’t really. by being helpful, offering suggestions for improvement instead of ranting.

mmmm…webmonkey….

published all on the same day (bunch of different sites/lists) when they announced the WaSP.

John Allsop (?), people doing things idealistically is the herding cats thing. Z recruited him. a lot of people fought a lot of battles, and Z was the general. looking back on 1997-1998…which is where I got started.

MS gets a round of applause. (?)

lesson that we learned, and are now having to learn them over again. CSS Samurai.

man, my wrists are killing me today.

his claim to fame: introducing Z & Eric Meyer.

“good luck to the next lot”

steve champeon. funny story much like zeldman’s.

andy clarke. silly (fictional?) story. history of the wasp site. (ah, I remember that turn of the century orange look….)

pulled out of room by phone call, came in to unveiling of new design. very sexy.

kim…wouldn’t be where she is today w/out Duran Duran, Molly, and something else that I missed. AOL gave her the free time. 😛 very oscar-like speech.

new site has comments. (keep sharp objects away from Steve Champeon.)

“in these times a conversation has to happen for things to get done”

a new era!

WaSP roll call. oh, hey, that’s photomatt. I should go tell him thank you.

most frequest comments: how can I get involved? you should have a task force for $i.

what about handheld/mobile? kelly goto has contacted them about coordination of a renewed TF.

represents french-speaking people, has been translating wasp stuff into french. how can they mimic what wasp is doing? want to have more internationalized presence!

government, policy makers, etc. Justin Stockton. go find him later.

addition: Europe needs a lot of work.

workflow problems. project mgmt applied to web site design/development. xhtml wireframing, christina wodke. yeah, I saw her present on that at webvisions, that was cool.

boeing in getting to standards took a year to work with their CMS.

it’s 5 after, and I need to go….

A really good lunch with Ralph. The kind of excellent friend conversation one would hope for, and which is too nice to be blogged. (the Taco Shack is tasty & cheep)
Kimberley Blessing, is she the ETF person?

I think Molly is rad.

Drew on the history on the WaSP, browsers supporting standards. must be more specific now, everything on the web is more specialized.
“not one person can do every job on the team” heh. I still need to write that article idea.

the task forces break into those new specialties.

ATF had a sit-down meeting here. (Matt May) Andy Clarke, Derek F., Jim Thatcher(?), Matt & Molly.

did a bit of name surfing. when I started paying attention again, Matt is talking about helping create knowledge around accessibility for designers/developers, spread the knowledge around. also want to work with software developers, all the tools. being involved with WAI.

Molly on ACID2. came from Opera, has flaws that need to be address, to test any kind of rendering/user agent. absolutely an agenda. and the test is not an accurate measure of what they really wanted? does something, what that means is up to you.

a time to review Acid2: what’s the next steps? no clue or consensus yet. collaboration?!

Dori Smith. co-leader with Jeremy Keith. JS: don’t call it little! because of the origins, people either think of the language as not-real or themselves as not-programmers. enough browsers support “good enough” JS that it’s time for good practices. now it’s DOM scripting! they aren’t about lobbying the browser makers, not now. digression re: XMLHTTPRequest (or whatever). longer term will be server-side developers, and they aren’t ready yet. plan on articles, members working on books. if you’re writing, let them know and they’ll point. if you have a good article & nowhere to post, let them know.

best practices…unobtrusive scripting. Dori’s having a hard time talking. not either/or js vs. access! graceful degredation. usability. separating behavior from content :: css does sep presentation from content.

DW task force. project manager for dw! many of original goals (as of 2001) were met with MX release, a good first step. a rallying point within the company. some progress, room to improve. “genius of the obvious”: standards & accessibility matter. in DW8 default is for alt on insert to be on, and they get feedback: do more for accessibility!

but we can’t save users from themselves. no kidding. they learn from us out here on the ground. in the combined company, they have lots of tools that author stuff to the web, and want to bring the whole company to the task force. (she looks really familiar, like that Jen who was in my college spanish class.)

yep, Kim’s the ETF gal. a wide audience. indeed. two objectives: teaching standards, promote creation of standards within academic sites. (we rawk…table-free since 2001!) came prepared to announce 9 members of ETF: Mark Trammell (I need to find him!!!! UFlorida!) & four other higher ed people.

edu-tfpp — proliferation project. anyone (like me!) can join. many students have joined: “I’m being failed because I’m using standards!” instructors learning to change how they teach. 70+ people on the list. IRC channel. (I wonder if I should try that.)

participate in events for higher ed webbies: HighEdWebDev. looking to expand their role there. fsck. I wish I could go.

W3C QA group is interested in investigating a standardized curriculum, and will be working with ETF. sexy.

what’s missing is the applications that students have to use: online registration, grades, calendaring, application, etc., etc. the big vendors.

recoginzing for good or for ill, supporting people in need of help. questionnaires about programs that are in their area, to get data and investigate.

MsftTF head has been with MS IE since mid-90s after working on Mosiac. but has also been an open standards guy from the beginning, career focal point. challenging position at microsoft. TF has helped by giving web developers a voice w/in MS.

not just about IE. .Net, etc.

his participation in WaSP was covert before, he wanted them to be good at guiding MS. he came back to IE to drive standards forward. his problem with Acid2: people take it as an expression that MS doesn’t care about standards. he mentioned the 3-pixel-jog, my personal nemesis. no, actually, the disappearing text bug is my true nemesis. it hurts, hurts, hurts.

he said some stuff, but I was im-ing with C.

time for questions, open annual meeting will be at 5pm.

q: have big company employees felt that you were putting your careers at risk by being standards advocates? Jen from DW: absolutely not. it’s been bringing the customer’s viewpoint into the company. MS guy: hasn’t put job at risk…he started with standards as a goal. his boss wanted to put NS-style frames in, and he advocated for including CSS instead. (back in IE3 days.)

q: when will IE7 be released? trying to think of how specific he’s supposed to be…. the intent is to release with Vista. might ship anyway in 2nd half of 2006 if Vista ain’t done.
q: what do you wish there were time & resources for? Molly sez they want to hear about that in the open meeting. CSS & mobile are the ones she has at the top of her mind.

came in late, brain still buzzing from digital preservation panel.

a lot of the best practices for various web disciplines overlap. best thing copywriters can do is write something that’s worth linking to.

bottom line: don’t use “click here”

alt text…used to be just a place to reiterate the keyword, and now they’re using them more thoroughly.

for SEO, h1 should be for the title of the page’s info, not the name of the site. (I think I’m doing that with the core at work, definitely not here!) but don’t lose sleep about it.

if you follow accesibility standards, then you’re following SEO best practices.

so says hagans. can I post that on a big-ass sign somewhere?

most important stuff:

1. descriptive page titles
2. good link text
3. good navigation

anything on top is gravy, and doesn’t particularly overlap as much with SEO. according to that guy.

site maps? I was looking up something else & missed the answer.

microformats? potential but not a whole lot of practical payoff. oh, yeah, hReview. I’d sorta like to do that with oddreview. meyer would like to see the microformats used as indexing source.

clients don’t care about the bandwidth bennies of standards, but definitely like SEO effects. use it as a weapon.

so you have no objection to billing them twice?

I’ve heard this one before: it’s cheaper if you do it from the beginning. (SEO this time)

people are trickling out….

but first, some mathmatics:

long skirt + bike + strong gusty winds = a bad scene

a bad scene + a nice pedestrian = skirt distentangled from rear brakes

cycling + fruit + iced mocha + 11 hrs sleep = cheerful and intellectually engaged Elaine
greenberg is writing a history of vcr’s & video stores! trip on that.

carrie b. tells a story about paper archives. malcolm x papers that were saved from firebombing, stored in florida, put up for online auction by storage owner. paper wins, because it’s durable. (relatively speaking.) blogs as collections of personal papers. it’s almost too late to capture early blogging. (I think I may have lost my own earliest (pre-Blogger) blogging.)

wells: project to preserve a group of blogs, decided to focus on 2004 politics. even by fall 2005 a lot of material was gone, then thinking about Katrina blogs, but too close to the events, couldn’t identify which blogs were significant and/or long-lasting. instead went for current snapshot approach. broad/arbitrary categories: personal, professional, political, journalism/media, arts/entertainment, definers of the genre. each person in class identified a few from each category that were “significant.” famous vs. obscure? ended up with list of 75-100. 2-3 from each category studied, then presented.

locks? lox? I missed that bit. blogs that would be easy to capture technically, ended up with a total of 15, and then 5.5:

huffingtonpost, kottke, textism, bluishorange, al franken (the half), and I missed one. okay, that’s why Alison Headley is here.

q from carrie to allison: does writing for posterity change things? have always written that with the intention that it was going to stay out there. things that she’s wanted to take back, but doesn’t. once I publish it’s been published. “I don’t think that there are takebacks. I may be in the minority there….”

q from carrie to josh: defining the archival unit, what is the most salient feature of a blog/series of blogs, and how do we preserve? feels bad for speaking for the historian. depends on what individual is trying to research. we don’t know what questions people will be asking in 50 years, when there’s enough critical distance. the idealistic answer: come back to early 2006, etc. and really understand what it was to create and read in the environment. for him…general lived experience. interested in ads. frank conrad, early radio broadcaster, first radio ad, but nobody knows what it was for. design is fascinating. (why I keep screenshots!) the emergence of geography/maps; historians will want to see that, but it’ll be really difficult. the environment in addition to the actual content.

carrie refs history of slavery, the use of advertising as a research medium in that context.

carrie to linksvayer: copyright as a barrier to preservation (of cultural legacy)? technology is the main barrier, seems to be. quick explanation of creative commons.

spaced out for a bit. (alison makes jewelry! I wonder if she brought any with.)

carrie to alison: are we too late? depends: what is the scope of blogging? if it’s going to be big for a long time, then we’re still at the beginning. if it’s going to end, then maybe so. better now than never, she can think of some that she used to love (2000/2001) that are gone. about 30% of audience has the same experience.

carrie talking about losing the visuals of her early blog. same deal here. it feels weird to look at things I wrote in early 2001 but in the visual “clothes” of 2006.
to josh: what’s the thing? the post is a historical document. moving to a new template radically changes the historical context. one hands it’s a conceptual problem, and for libraries, categorization, difficult. (I lost his train of thought.) again, depends on the question being asked. and is it too late? keeps coming back to the history of radio…20 years between first use and first “broadcast” and again 20 years before NBC broadcast. here (sxsw) we keep thinking that so much has past, but relatively we are still way at the beginning.

to linksvayer: cultural environmentalism? term designed for lawyers, but take the analogy further to see how digital preservation fits, learning lessons from the environmental movement. the cultural/digital habitat?!

carrie: broaden to preservation issues in general:

shit. c sent me a gtalk msg (about sending back BSG disc 3) so I missed that last bit.

okay…the question of tracking authenticity, changes. definitely a challenge! (history paging Dave Winer.)

josh: historians are used to working with “stuff” this digital thing is tricky. project re: 9/11. w/in a few weeks, they put up a survey & collection mechanism, trying to get stuff quickly. wound up with archive of hundreds of thousands of digital items, very heterogenerous. making sure it’s around 100 years from now: not so easy. test bed for library of congress: what the hell do you do with all this stuff? January issue of d-lib.

carrie: usually librarians aren’t in on the original collecting of archive items. example of weirdo who liked tobacco stuff, turned it over to a library; people with passions, when they die stuff goes to a library. not likely to happen with digital stuff. educate people about taking care of stuff. zeldman story about music in old format…terrified of losing jpgs/tiffs of early photos of childhood…and she knows what she’s doing!

what can we help people do to preserve their own digital legacies?

linksvayer: people do like backing up, so anything to make that easier is a good idea.

josh: metadata about it. one nice thing about a lot of blogs is that they tend to be pretty structured.

carrie & josh in conversation: if you think your intellectual output is going to be worth something, having your records in blog format may be a good thing. (I’ve almost tossed out my boxes of old paper journals a few times. they’re fscking hard to move.) then there’s the scattering problem…email, flickr, social bookmarking, etc.

wells: standards, open standards, structuring, relying on people to organize their lives in some meaningful way! (oy, the boxes of grandma n’s photos.)

audience q: attempt to find inadvertant archives? project in hopkins in ’97, cd for prospective students, also a snapshot of campus.

carrie: bbc doomsday in the 80s. laser disc. because it was proprietary, became obsolete, 2 colleges created an emulator, took YEARS to get to the content. figuring out about how much cost is in emulation.

alison: blogs in general as inadvertant archives. wasn’t her intent to write for posterity. doesn’t think most people w/LJs etc are thinking of history. (I must be the lone weirdo that way.)

wells: value is in items in collection as a whole, becomes the cultural significance.

josh: were asked to do something similar to 9/11 project with last yr’s hurricanes. one thing avail. now have social photos & bookmarks, tags. look at stuff tagged: katrina. (I have a delicious tag katrina-rita) then ask people with those items if they have other stuff. but all this focus crowds out the non-digerati, the people w/out computers. like the illiterate of years past: making sure that we get those voices.

carrie: now archivists get a mix of print & digital. relating physical to digital objects will be a problem for a while.

audience q: how do you archive w/out changing how people do stuff? (carrie: prime directive.) carrie relates to book publishing, move to acid-free paper. josh: plea to archive the ephemera. when feds archive, they have to notify, and then the next blog item: “dude, I’m in the library of congress!” carrie mentions the scrapbookers, and they know about the preservation issues.

audience q: how do you plan on archiving the look? browsercam, social bookmarking cache? carrie: flipside of separating content from presentation! she thinks about creating gallery of screenshots, but then the author is also the curator.

alison: will find posts about redesigning, but that design isn’t there. as a writer, would prioritze the content, but the look is also important. she has an archive of design iterations, but she does editorialize, which “messes with” the history of it.

josh: flattening of time. (dude I said that earlier.) lazyweb idea for WP plugin: every time the design changed, creates a cvs or something. figure out the right template for the time period. (I was just having that same idea!) loss of historical aura.

lyceum guy: stores screenshots? (assuming that browsers won’t be able to render the exact same thing, later.) carrie: no, grabs via http all stuff. render formats? if you stick to well-documented formats/standards, will be easier for librarians of the future to render with good emulators. josh: standards keep you out of the dustbin of history.

note of broader concern from audience: the scope, daunting! DoD sent historians to Iraq, but they didn’t have enough hard drives! what’s the hope?!

big shrug-like experience from the whole panel. wells: most pressing issue facing profession as a whole.

josh: one promising thing: the direction the web is going, more and more people can be packrats.

my comment: if grandma had had flickr, we would’ve known what the hell that storage unit of photos was about. josh notes info from cameras, exif, maybe gps.
q: savemyblog.com — legal aspects? waybackmachine does this all the time, why did it take so long to get their project to get permission? all humans doing this. linksvayer: waybackmachine seems to get away with it because they slurp up everything. plug for cc licenses.

josh: talking about archiving the rendered version. two kinds of archiving for digital objects: the final project or the pieces + the system. think about archiving both tools and content. the database, the actual program. provenance of all the different elements.

best panel.

shawn henry. saw her keynote at highedweb. her grey streaks are so cute.

van voor(?). was an accessibility guy at BofA.

derek featherstone.

faruk ates. isn’t he on the WaSP ETF mailing list? very boyish.

show of hands for various things.

acronymage, ending with wtf?

undue burden on developers, according to shawn. content == stuff. developers work through authoring tools. (like this one!) and not just dreamweaver/frontpage. users consume content, through user agents (browsers, etc.), sometimes + assistive tech. and now the line between developer and author is more blurry.

the more the tools can work together, the less burden on content creators.

wcag 1 vs. 2. goals: easier to understand, tech-independent, testable. (hrm.) easy to understand given up for the other two. comparison in the color contrast issue.

“don’t read wcag 2.0″…but she says not to take it out of context. now there’s an “understanding wcag 2.0” — sounds like my idea for a summation of the webadmin guidelines, and that’s intended for the average developer.

sounds like they wrote a lawyer version and a normal person version. aha! has to be testable because of laws. and I can totally see that…we’ll need to “upgrade” the webadmin guidelines.

(if derek & joe clark are both canadians, what is their connection, if any? of course, canada’s a darn big country…)

derek asked shawn about other delivery techniques, flash & acrobat particularly, and sounds like AdoMacroBeMedia is working with WAI.

added: js on/off isn’t really an accessibility issue, but an interoperability issue.

craig (moderator) quotes devil’s dictionary def of web 2.0. asks panelists, who don’t seem to know a whole hell of a lot about it.

derek: “when we use basecamp…when we try to use basecamp” — ouch. (with a blind coworker) with a regular upload form, it’d take him 30 seconds, but trying to upload a word file took 5 minutes in bc. (are the signals guys here?!)

shawn: cover the basics and then work on the hard stuff.

brought back the “tech as utility” metaphor from this morning.

what’s wrong? (nice photo of a moldy orange!)

derek: biggest need is testing.

shawn adds, go test with users! I need to do more of that…keep meaning to hunt down Bjorn. (or maybe I’ll go out to Puyallup and talk to Patrick. I like Puyallup.)

what can we do to fix it?

derek: keeping it simple, getting back to basics. “pristine” html. again with the testing. some things actually work better in flash vs. ajax, because AdoMacroBeMedia has been putting a lot of effort into flash accessibility, at least in the tool, assuming its being used. not so much in the js libraries. faruk adds that most flash people don’t know about it, esp. in europe.

isn’t learning these things hard? (I’ll say that accessible PDFs are a PITA.)

shawn talking about attitude as a factor, the fun of problem-solving vs. making the lawyers happy.

spacing out….

error message or requirement as part of the label, and emphasized. spiffy. if you re-focus on a label on a reload then then it reads the updated bit. (I think.)

…I was really hoping that this would give me something new or something useful. but it didn’t. grumble grumble grumble.

I’m sitting the back of the overflow room (because that’s where the plug is), and there’s not anything note-taking-worthy, but it’s an enjoyable conversation.

she has a lovely light southern accent, btw.

I’m just going to sit back and enjoy the chat and hopefully not fall asleep.

or whatever the actual title is….

the break this time was mind-blowing. met Eric Meyer and Molly H. ran into Denise. met George Kelley and a women whose name I don’t remember, but who had streaks of blue in her hair and was described as an obsessive documenter.

this is the one that should’ve had Shelley. 🙁

the moderator doesn’t appear to be able to use the mike.

how has visibility played out in their experience?

kabili: talks about the weblogs inc network, and I get the impression that her motto is similar to what I always say about computers in general. (ie: the secret is to not be afraid and to just do something.)

henry: (mmmm…purple hair!) anything to do with technology to make us more visible is good. barrier to visible was being unfocused, writing about everything in one blog. and how do you search for, say, women bloggers in Latin America?

debolt: was the little grey-haired lady in the back row who just came & listen. by listening, became a convert (css, accessibility, etc.) if I ever worship a male god again his name will be Eric. 🙂 couldn’t find any books that taught the way it ought to be done. (know that feeling!)

sort of out of it catching up with other stuff….

“everyone will be famous to 15 people” (my favorite line about the internets ever.)

comment from the audience: just keep on going. the “kicking our own butts”.

another: never worked somewhere where the smart people all get promoted and the dumb ones get fired.

the holistic life flipsides. if I write about my personal life, do I lose other readers.

“maybe that 23-year-old guy needs to hear about that experience”
sit down, lady in the WP shirt. let somebody else get in.

y’know, this reminds me of round & round conversations I was in back in college. I think I’m going to bail. honestly, would rather sit & have a good chat with Liz & Virginia (and Meri down in the front row) than do this panel thing.

do you change what you write to get readership?

yeah, I’m outta here.