I was invited to present my Beyond Web Standards talk at J. Boye Philadelphia and, since I get bored with the same old slides, I redid the talk, yet again.
This latest version of the talk covered The Circle of Standards but, as a bonus, I also added on my notes about creating a style guide.
You can download the slides here. If you’d be interested in a podcast of the talk, please leave a comment!
With a flurry of new browsers hitting users’ computers and mobile devices this year, everyone involved with the Web has had to scramble to ensure that their sites are compatible with the latest and greatest. This has left many Web professionals and business teams wondering, “What browsers should my site support?†Kimberly Blessing helps you answer that question.
Read my article at Peachpit and let me know what you think! And stay tuned for my next article on optimization…
Since the practice of setting and managing standards is as much a management concern as it is a technical concern, I spend time reading a number of business blogs. The HBR Voices blog is full of important management insights.
A recent blog post, How Are You Defying “Best Practice”?, was particularly insightful. Although the article was referring to business and management best practices, it just as easily could have been about design and code best practices.
The only difference is that, while the business world has well-documented and well-established best practices (most commonly taught in MBA programs worldwide), the Web design and development world doesn’t yet have that common set of agreed-upon best practices. What one designer or developer considers a best practice may be contrary to what another one believes.
This leads me to the question of how do you define what is an industry best practice? And, how do you defy those best practices, if at all?
On Saturday, July 18, I gave a talk as part of the CSS Summit on CSS & Troubleshooting IE6. Many designers and developers are passionately anti-IE6, while I’m one of those folks who has a soft spot for the browser. So I laid out the case for continuing support for the browser and gave some tips on how best to do that. Most importantly, I tried to reinforce the idea of planning for and managing browser support, especially the phasing out of specific browsers. After all, if you don’t have a plan, you don’t know where you’re going.
You can download the presentation slides as well as read and comment on the use of IE6 hacks over at my personal site.
I’m often asked how one can convince their employer to adopt Web standards, and unfortunately there isn’t a short or simple answer. That, in part, is why I created the Circle of Standards (both the process and the Web site). I also give presentations on this very topic, including one I’ll be doing today at the online <head> global web conference.
My slides are available for download and if there are questions that don’t get addressed sufficiently in the session, you can post them here.
Maybe it’s the co-worker who sits next to you, or perhaps it’s your boss. It could be a new client. And, invariably, someone in your family qualifies. That’s right, they’re the not-so-tech-savvy you have to deal with. How do you get them to understand you so that you can communicate and work together effectively?
Web Worker Daily provides 10 tips for working with the computer-illiterate, ranging from the obvious (avoid jargon and be patient) to smart strategies you may not have figured out yet (introduce new technologies gradually, talk results instead of process).
Two things that aren’t mentioned in the article but deserve emphasis:
A methodology that enables the successful adoption and continued implementation of standards by addressing their management, related training and communication, and continual review. Learn more.
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Adapting to Web Standards: CSS and Ajax for Big Sites features an instructional chapter on the Circle of Standards. By Christopher Schmitt, Kimberly Blessing, et al.