Blog Standard Stuff

Now, as anyone reading this probably know, I’m very much in favour of equal opportunities and for everyone to be participating on a level playing field. If I didn’t believe that, well then I would never have started Accessify, a web site that promotes web accessibility, thus making it possible for people with various disabilities to enjoy web sites just as more able bodied (or minded) people do. So this posting might surprise some people …

I think the company that I work for has a great policy on equal opportunuities, but perhaps it’s a little too encompassing, I’m beginning to think. As I walked in to the building today I spotted that one of the security guards was wheelchair-bound. Well, not a problem, I thought - he’s not the only one on duty, so if he had to confront someone or stop someone gaining access he could probably call for backup. Who better to ask, then, than the next security guard I walked past? That’s to say the the security guard with 75% of the usual arm count (1 complete left arm, right arm stopping just above elbow joint).

As I was walking towards my office, I was mentally constructing a scene wherein someone tried to bust in to the office and managed to evade the wheelchair guy first then escape the clutches (or clutch) of the one-armed security guard. However, none of that would be necessary if this mythical gate-crasher instead chose to come in out-of-hours when the security guards working that shift seem to suffer from narcolepsy - or in other words you’ll find them face down at the desk leaving a trail of dribble.

I just don’t get it. What is it with some people and Flickr? Or rather, what is it with some people and their insistence on adding everybody they can possibly find to their contacts? Currently I have just over 50 contacts - that includes friends and family. That’s already more than I can easily keep up-to-date with, and I try to keep an eye on what everyone’s been uploading to their Flickr accounts every day, comment where appropriate and generally try to interact. But I must be missing things along the way - there are only so many hours in the day, after all.

So, what is it with these people who add me as a contact and who (as I discover when I check their profile before simply reciprocating and adding them as a contact) have apparantly nothing in common with me - no contacts on their profile page that I know, in fact … hang on a minute! All the contacts there seem to be a bunch of symbols - names beginning with ! … ./– and so on. What’s up with that? Well, it strikes me that people are doing the online alternative of the old Yellow Pages ‘A1 Aardvark Plumbing and Heating’ trick - just trying to get near the top of the list. So, I glance down the page of contacts and spot the number of contacts that this person who so ‘desperately’ wants to include me in their social group already has thousands of people marked as contacts.

Yeah right. I bet you know all these people …

Is it because they want to feel part of something that they keep adding contacts: "Look how many contacts I’ve got! Hey, I’m so popular!" The truth is, of course, that they can add as many people as they like but that has no bearing on their popularity; I don’t add them as a contact, therefore I’m never going to see their photos, nor am I ever going to engage in any kind of comment-based conversation with them about their photos. I certainly wouldn’t be inviting them to any realsocial gatherings. So, what do they get out of it? Are they really after social acceptance? Or is this just another incidence of spam? I’ve yet to see what the value of adding so many contacts is if it is the latter, other than the fact that if you add people to your 1000 contacts and 300 blindly reciprocate, and then if you start adding links underneath your meaningless photos that this might give you some kind of Google juice, but apart from that I can’t see the benefit at all.

"I’ve written a book about DOM scripting but if you can avoid using it, avoid using it."

So said Jeremy ‘DOM Scripting Task Force member, author of Dom Scripting‘ Keith during the AJAX workshop that he was fronting on Friday. There should have been a revolt on the back row, being as Molly and I, both WaSP members and therefore duty-bound to nag anyone within earshot about the importance of standards, were sat there taking it all in. But instead, we just laughed (and I made a note of the memorable quote on the inside cover of said book). The point Jeremey was making was that DOM scripting has its place, but when its mixed with AJAX-like technologies, sometimes making lots of finnickety changes with DOM script commands is overcomplicating things somewhat, particularly if all you are looking to do is update one specific part of a page, rather than several separate parts at once. In that instance, it might be better to use … wait for it, wait for it … the proprietaryinnerHTML property.

Ye gads! Did we really hear that? Use something that is not part of any recommendation but, rather unfortunately for all of us geeky standardistas, works rather well across all sorts of browsers? At this point, I’d like to repeat another quote from Jeremy:

"If you’re using innerHTML to update content you’re kinda just vomiting the content back on to the page."

Nice.

So, now I have Jeremy’s book to read but should I find any parts getting to complex or too onerous to take in because of all that DOM scripting malarky, I’ll just yak up and move swiftly along!

On a serious note, congrats to Jeremy and the Clear:left chaps on a useful 1-day session. I learnt some new techniques and for my money it made me think more about issues of backwards compatibility (or rather progressive enhancement) when using AJAX, when it is a good or bad idea to use AJAX and techniques for making it obvious to the user that AJAX is at play and that something has changed/is changing on the page. Now I’m really looking forward to seeing what James Craig has to say about accessibility in Web 2.0 apps.

Well, I haven’t posted anything on this site for a while. It’s effectively been moth-balled while other things take over. And by other things I mean my wedding to the lovely Manda. In all honesty, the last two years have been something of a hectic blur – one year for travelling and another year to get back and settle down. Settling down, in my case, turned out to mean this:

• Selling my house
• Selling Manda’s house
• Buying a new house together
• Writing a technical book for Sitepoint
• Decorating and furnishing new house in time for Christmas
• Planning for wedding (2 day’s worth of celebrations – one English, one Chinese)
• Having the wedding!

So, I basically gave up on writing anything for this site and likewise didn’t have much to say over at my VW bus site, but now that that’s all out of the way, I’m going to make an effort to update this site a bit more. Not quite sure what I’ll post on here, but basically it won’t be anything to do with Volkswagens or web accessibility (I’ll let my other blogs deal with that)

Anyway, for anyone who’s interested to see ‘em, I have some photos up now from the wedding. Not all of them, mind (heck, I have about 1,600 pics in iPhoto right now, none of them keyworded or labelled!) but enough to get a feel for things. There’s also a pool of photos contributed by various people who were there.

It’s good to be back!