Web Standards Group Meeting
Posted by Michael Dale on Fri, 17 Sep 2004 6:33 PMYesterday night the base10solutions team http://www.base10solutions.com (this is where I need a proper html name/title thing) went to the Web Standards Group http://webstandardsgroup.org/ meeting at the Australian Museum. We were lucky enough to hear two great talks about web standards and implementation.
The first talk was on semantically correct markup. Semantically correct markup uses html elements for their given purpose. Well structured HTML has semantic meaning for a wide range of user agents. This means that every element in your (x)html code relates to the content itself. This makes it much easier for screen readers to interpret the code/site and correctly express it to the visitor. Therefore Dale's Blog would mean that this is the title/heading for the website and the screen reader will pronounce it correctly. It is all about accessibility.
The next talk was about implementation of CSS and the redesign of the New Zealand Steel (http://www.nzsteel.co.nz/nz/) website. The move from tables to CSS greatly reduced code and bandwidth needs. Again CSS is proving to be a very important role in separating layout and content while increasing accessibility and reducing bandwidth requirements. It also means that sites that use pure CSS can be much better styled and changed if needed.
There was also some funky use of the alpha channel in gif files. A great way to make hover over colours!
Both talks were very interesting and very worth while. We also had fun paying out Netscape 4 and IE (come on, we were in a room full of web design geeks!).
All good stuff. It is always interesting to see real world examples. You best start using and for your s though ;)
Sounds like there was alot of fun involved. Interesting too.
I need to start a web design "meet-up," here in Chicago. I would love to talk with other industry professionals, instead of just by email, or comments.
Yay! You blogged it, so I don't have to! ;) /me is lacking motivation to blog at the minute
'twas very interesting indeed... especially that optgroup thing... how funky was that?:P Almost as cool as that technique Ben Bishop (the styles developer for the NZsteel.co.nz website) developed for those "rollovers" -- I'm now itching to use that somewhere!