Fake’s Tank

Long time indifference

Yahoo! is not a place I like to hang around. I guess it has all to do with how they handled the presentation of their search results back in the day. I never was a fan of categorized results — at least wasn’t ready to try harder to use them at that time.

So, for years I’ve been using AltaVista, then Google instead of Yahoo! search; Hotmail, then GMail instead of Yahoo! mail. Since I don’t like to be overrun with data, I don’t even read the news on their portal. The NY Times‘ and Radio-Canada’s RSS feeds suit me better.

In other words, I am not part of the gazillions of people that help make Yahoo! the most important website on the Internet at the moment, according to Alexa. I didn’t have much of an opinion on Yahoo! until they go so useful for the web developer I am.

YUI

Yahoo! Developer Network is a priceless resource for information on popular web technologies. What I’m more interested in however is the YUI section — the Yahoo! User Interface Libary.

Javascript

YUI seems to be built around Yahoo!’s own Javascript library. Similar to jQuery and Prototype, the YUI library helps writing Javascript code that is more efficient more quickly. Yahoo!’s library has proven to work faster than its competitors when working on the DOM. It is structured in a manner that seems closer to more classic programming languages.

Notably, you can create namespaces for your scripts as well fire as custom events. Obviously, you can create visual effects of custom controls for your interface using objects the community is developing. Broken down in many files, you can import only the libraries you need in your application from Yahoo!’s servers. No hassle in storing multiple version of the files.

Templates

The section supplies a collection of pre designed templates for anyone to use. Wether you need a 3 column fixed layout, or fluid 100% wide 5 columns templates, you will find the XHTML and CSS files in the YUI section completely free. Free as in no charge, but also free as in open source.

Cross-platform

Most importantly, the library is guaranteed to be working the same on any Grade A browser. Other libraries don’t always live up to that mention as the script gets more complicated.

Standard Pipes

While the tools themselves are incredibly useful and time saving, it’s not the best thing about the YUI. Through guidelines, tutorials and free files, Yahoo! is lowering the pain of doing web design for people who don’t know about standards or who just don’t care. If an important company like Yahoo! continues providing resources and using their influence in the developer’s community and the software makers building the browser, the Internet can standardize fairly quickly.

Yahoo! seems to be pushing towards a better Internet and the same cannot be said of everyone in the top most influential website.

Well, looks like I still have the urge to doodle even years after I stopped carrying around my sketch book. Though I’d upload it since I’m likely to lose the image sooner or later.

The point of the drawing was to test the Pressure Pen option in Photoshop’s brushes panel. I’ve started from a blank image and not from a pen drawing.

Jeff Croft, not afraid of being lynched by the new wave of accessibility-aware Web 2.0 designers, has posted a new article asking if accessibilty has been taken too far.
While I’m guessing his opinion may have been toned down on the way from his head to his hands, I do believe he has a point. To paraphrase and sum his opinion: “Accessibilty is cool and all because it’s bad to ignore people with dissabilities, but you can’t expect a company to spend all their web design budget for 0.5% of their customers. Therefore, some site aren’t 100% accessible on purpose.”

And it’s true. In real life, my employer gives me, say, 4 days to finish a website. It’s good enough if I can be satisfied with the sementics of things in that period of time. Odds are I won’t have any time left to make seperate style sheets with high-contrast colors, one with big text, etc.

All can agree that it’s a good thing that there’s a not more awareness around the accessibility of online content at the moment. However, just like in any trend, it’s all too easy to laugh at those who don’t follow it, making up reasons for those not following it revolving around their stupidity and insolence and start running circles your little trendy group.

Once more I stumble on the flowers of the carpet. It was necessary to build a Flash application that would make the process of drawing my maps a visual process. That idea worked pretty well, especially because Flash supplies competent User Interface objects I wouldn�t have to make myself.

A problem came up however. I needed to loop through a specified local Folder recursively in order to load the *.gifs, *.pngs� and whatnot in the local file structure. Flash 8 has added� file management support with the FileReference class. It’s neat browse() function mimics HTML�s file input to pop the file browsing dialog. There were two problems with this class:

• � I couldn�t select a directory;
• �I couldn�t select multiple files.
  

Screwed aren�t we? I�ve also learned you could browse through local files using an ActiveX valid only for IE which is completely useless. All other solutions involve fetching the files using��server-side scripting like PHP or ASP which no one have installed on their desktop anyway (if you do have one of these installed, then you are official a nerd).

So, desperate but not without motivation, I�ve downloaded Mac�s software development package in hopes of building it on that platform. We�ll see how it goes. �

A lot of people at the moment are doing websites that follow the Strict XHTML 1.1 guidelines but don’t even know why they do so or why they should do so. Juicy Studio published an article on the history of accessibility because knowing we’re you’ve been can tell you a lot on were you’re going.

I found this very promicing technique. I can only imagine all the effects you can get once everyone supports transparent pngs.

how he does it;
more exemples.

It�s really surprising to notice how HTML form elements haven�t changed since HTML 4. A ton of better features can be developed to aid the end user and the programmer. To me, it is quite bizarre simple things as the label attribute isn�t included in the
tag by default.

Sure, you can use

and

to achieve a certain degree of editing for display, or you can build your form like this:




Name

�But it just feels like a line too many. Another issue is the focusing of a control upon a page�s load event using JavaScript. If you can specify the tabular index of a control, you should be able to force initial focus on a control using HTML. Keeping in mind the way attributes work in HTML, it could easily be specified the same way you use the selected attribute of a tag

From the little information available on the W3C, I think Xforms will help a lot, giving a programming feel to building XHTML forms. However, HTML tags should have been reorganized much sooner. As an e-commerce software developer, almost every page I build is actually a big form. There is way too much use of JavaScript to accomplish simple control behavior. Experience with ASP controls showed me they offer a lot more control on the display of web forms. Microsoft was inspired a lot from the way Windows Forms are built. I would also assume JSP can offer the same liberty.

The thing is, I don�t feel it�s a server-side programming language�s job to deal with what seems like the first level options for HTML controls. Everyone is putting high hopes in financial success on the Internet nowadays. E-commerce is still expected to become a big fraction of company sales in the near future. User input under these conditions need to be improved. It�s just too bad everyone is going crazy on the arrival of XHTML, but none waited for Xforms to be ready for a joint release.