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.

WCAG 2.0

A new day has dawned for web accessibility -- the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) Web Content Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 (WCAG 2.0) has finally reached W3C Recommendation status it's now an official web standard. The WCAG 2.0 Guidelines are organized around the following four principles (use the acronym POUR to remember them):

1. Content must be Perceivable
   
2. Interface components in the content must be Operable
   
3. Content and controls must be Understandable
   
4. Content should be Robust enough to work with current and future user agents (including assistive technologies)

Check out the WCAG 2.0 Quick Reference and Understanding WCAG 2.0 to learn more about these guidelines.

Web Teacher Review

Check out Web Teacher's review of Web Development & Design Foundations with XHTML. Here's an excerpt:

"This book is 100% courseware, a complete curriculum with project files, test and discussion questions, careful planning of objectives and learning activities, and resources for students at the Addison Wesley site for the book. ... Very complete. It deals with code, design, ethics, accessibility, best practices and every aspect of design and development. A student who mastered everything in this book would have a good grasp of both past and present web development knowledge."

Google Celebrates 10th Birthday!

Was it only ten years ago that the Web was without Google? If you'd like to know more about Google's origins (including a photo of their start-up garage), have fun exploring Google's Tenth Birthday page and Interactive Timeline.

OneWebDay - 9/22

Press release: On the third annual “Earth Day for the Internet”, communities across the country are holding events to learn about and advocate for that marvel of modern infrastructure, the Internet. It happens in the United States and around the world on OneWebDay, Monday, September 22, 2008.

Which Browser Will Gain the Most Market Share?

See PC World for a an overview of the new browser wars -- between Chrome, IE8, and Firefox 3.1. Find out how they compare in areas of security, speed, reliability, etc. According to PC World, Google's Chrome browser is poised to take more market share away from Firefox than from IE8. Only time will tell.....

Google's new browser -- Chrome

Google is due to release a beta today of its new browser named Google Chrome. See http://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/ for a comic book intro to Chrome. Download Google Chrome. View Chrome FAQs.

Target's Lack of Web Accessibility == SIX Million Dollars

Look for more organizations to increase their focus on web accessibility — Target and NFB just reached a $6 million dollar settlement. See http://webaim.org/blog/target-lawsuit-settled/ for an overview.

One Trillion Pages....

Google's Official Blog recently reported, "even our search engineers stopped in awe about just how big the web is these days -- when our systems that process links on the web to find new content hit a milestone: 1 trillion (as in 1,000,000,000,000) unique URLs on the web at once!" The article also has a high-level overview of how Google keeps up with the Web. :-)

Web Standards Project Curriculum Framework

The Web Standards Project (WaSP) just announced the WaSP Curriculum Framework. The framework's goal is to identify the skill sets and competencies that aspiring Web professionals need to acquire to prepare them for their chosen careers. Outlines for a set of foundation courses that can be readily adapted into an existing program at a college, school, or university will be released in March 2009. This curriculum framework is intended to be a "living" curriculum with contributions from web educators and web professionals.

The WC3 Question & Answer blog post on the proposed framework states, "After years of hearing people lament that we would not get a better web until we get better ways of teaching the Web to the professionals (of today and tomorrow), is very exciting to see the recent crop of community driven efforts to provide material and guidance for the teaching of Web technologies."

New Google Knol

Google has launched a beta of Knol — kind of like Wikipedia with a twist. Google defines a knol as "a unit of knowledge" and explains that a knol is an "authoritative article about a specific topic".
Just like Wikipedia, anyone can post an article. See Web Design Best Practices for an example. :-)

Alexa : More than Search Results

Alexa lives up to its tagline: A Web Information Company — providing more than search results. You can use Alexa to find out more about a web site: with displays of an overview (including a screen capture and contact information), traffic statistics (when available), sites linking in, and a direct link to the Web Archive to view how the site looked in the past.

Do You Grok Grokker?

Grokker offers both an outline view and a visual view of search results. This provides a way to easily drill down into topics of interest in an organized manner and search within the results. Grokker searches your choice of Yahoo!, Wikipedia, and Amazon Books for information. An interesting twist is that Grokker can be licensed by businesses as an enterprise search management tool to mine their databases for information.

TouchGraph: Visually Show Connections Between Web Sites

TouchGraph's Java applet will visually display connections between websites related to the search term you enter. There are three flavors of TouchGraph:

• TouchGraph Google offers an intriguing method to explore a topic when brainstorming.
• TouchGraph Amazon visually displays books related to a topic.
• TouchGraph Facebook provides an new way to explore your friends and connections.

KartOO: A Mind Map of the Web

Continuing this week's topic of search engines — you may want to explore your favorite topic using KartOO. This visual search engine builds a mind map of websites related to your search terms. Somehow, exploring a cloud of websites is more fun than looking at page after page of text-based search engine results. :-)

New Search Engine - Searchme!

Searchme is a visual search engine that begins to show you results while you are typing your keyword or phrase. In addition to the expected search engine results page (SERP), Searchme displays the home pages of the web pages in a "deck" across the upper part of the page. A handy tool for those who think visually!