arkitrave :: log

This day ended with a lengthy bowling party at UT Austin, and it’s really freaking late. I got to bowl on a team with Mike Davidson of Newsvine, Bryan Veloso of Facebook, Jenni Verduzco, Steve Smith of Notre Dame, and Mark Boulton of the BBC. Despite all this immense talent on one team, we didn’t make it past the first round. But it was the best after-hours event of SXSW so far.

The panels were great too, but I’m not going to go into too much detail, as it’s very late.

Web Standards and SEO

This was mostly confirmation of what I already know: write good semantic markup, geared toward users, and you will (mostly) be rewarded by search engines. Designing for accessibility parallels good SEO practices, so you get to do the right thing for disabled users and be rewarded by good search engine results at the same time. This parallel nature is not directly proportional, however.

Don’t hide content from search engines. Don’t practice black hat SEO.

The front page is important; make sure you have high-quality links. Also, if you have control over what people use when they link to you, try to ensure that the text within the <a> element is descriptive. “Click here” is terrible link text; search engines use that text to determine what the targeted page is about and give it relevance.

Microformats

Best. Panel. Ever.

This is a great subject. It’s something that gets me really excited about the web. Check out the Microformats site for information about microformats.

The power of microformats, combined with an API and search capabilities, is stunning.

• Principles keep things micro
• Process keeps things real
• Community minimizes duplicates

Process for developing a microformat:

1. Pick a specific problem and define it
2. Research and document current web publishing behavior
3. Document existing formats in the problem area
4. Brainstorm with implied schema
5. Iterate within the community

An example to highlight the amazing possibilities of microformats: the page was created by taking the published schedule of SXSW evening events, placing them into a microformat, mashing it with Google Maps, and placing it all on one page. Also, using iCal’s API, these events can be downloaded to your desktop calendar.

All this is done through using standardized markup adding semantics to standard HTML elements through the use of class names.

Now, the Flock browser has built-in support for microformats, and can aggregate information from all the sites you visit and organize it.

Great stuff.

Content Distribution to the Mobile Web

Not much of interest here. Basically an excuse for a couple of mobile providers to hawk their company’s wares.

The only point of interest is that European companies are doing much better at letting go, and allowing third-party content to come into their sites. This is user-centered. Much of what American companies do is to try to keep people on their site, and keep them using proprietary systems. Well, people are just going to leave the site anyway if it sucks (even if you don’t have any outbound links) and people will just stop using the propietary system and start using flickr (for example).

WaSP

Accessibility is about empowering people.

Acid2 test - according to Molly, it was developed by Opera to shame Microsoft into supporting standards in IE. Using a vendor to make this kind of test is probably a mistake, and the next test will be developed by a cross-vendor panel.

JavaScript should be unobtrusive.

None of this is revolutionary, as I already follow the web standards movement and know what they’re up to. Still, it was interesting to see all these people in the same room.

Chris Wilson from Microsoft talked about IE7 a bit; they really have done a much better job than in the past, and I’m looking forward to seeing what the browser ends up looking like. I’m not holding my breath, but development should be a lot easier even if we don’t see the basic CSS2 features that really should be in the browser by now.

Design Eye for the List Guy

A panel of amazingly talented guys redesigned craigslist. It looks good. They talked about their process. The new craigslist home page and new listings page…clean, well-organized, really sort of a, well, a realignment. Check it out.

That’s all for now. Over and out.