OWEA - Open Web Education Alliance

The new W3C incubator group, The Open Web Education Alliance (OWEA), is expected to have a significant positive impact promoting web standards and best practices to the realm of web education. OWEA's mission of OWEA is to bring together companies, schools, and organizations involved in shaping the education of Web professionals to explore the issues around the topic of Web development education and create solutions for improvement.

Web Design Best Practices Checklist

Smashing Magazine included a link to the Web Design Best Practices Checklist in Cameron Chapman's May 14, 2008 article, Non Profit Website Design: Examples and Best Practices.

WolframAlpha — Beyond Search Engines

Check out WolframAlpha (http://wolframalpha.com) — a computational knowlege engine.

The rather lofty goal of WolframAlpha's developers is to "make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone"! They're collecting objective data, implementing models, methods, and algorithms, with the final aim to "build on the achievements of science and other systematizations of knowledge to provide a single source that can be relied on by everyone for definitive answers to factual queries."

A video overview is available at
http://www75.wolframalpha.com/screencast/introducingwolframalpha.html

Zeldman Explains "What are web standards and why are they important?

Jeffrey Zeldman, one of the founders of The Web Standards Project, discusses how the movement for web standards began, why it succeeded, his thoughts on design, accessibility, validation, and more...

My fav quote is Zeldman's take on design, "..design, like everything in life is about understanding what the problems are, solving those problems, and there's always trade offs."

WCAG 2.0 Resources

Check out Patrick Lauke's presentation, "What you need to know about WCAG 2.0" for an overview of how WCAG 2.0 differs from WCAG 1.0 and, well, what you need to know about WCAG 2.0. :) The ATRC Web Accessibility Checker is now available — it's an online testing tool that checks for WCAG 2.0 compliance. The tool conducts a number of automated tests and also notes areas that must be checked manually.

Microsoft Expression SuperPreview

Wouldn't you like a convenient way to test your web pages in multiple versions of Internet Explorer on the same machine?  Try Microsoft Expression Web SuperPreview  — beta version available for free download. This stand-alone application provides a way for you to test your pages and easily compare the rendering of the various flavors of IE — a productivity boon for web developers everywhere. Of course, we wouldn't need this tool if Microsoft could have just followed web standards to begin with!  

Web Standards Project InterAct Curriculum Framework

The Web Standards Project (WaSP) recently announced a new web design curriculum framework, InterAct, intended to be a living curriculum to help schools, colleges and universities bridge the gap between educators and industry best practices. There is a wealth of course materials that educators can adapt or adopt as best meets their needs — including assignments, projects, exam questions, resource links, and even learning modules.

It was a great experience to work with my fellow WaSP Education Task Force members during 2008 and 2009 as the curriculum framework took shape. Web Development & Design Foundations is one of the recommended reference books for the Web Design 1 course. Also check out the Accessibility course — I spent many hours developing this course and organizing materials for it. A shout-out of thanks goes to course reviewers Glenda Sims, John F. Croston III, Virgina DeBolt, Mark DuBois, and Jon Gunderson.