Simple and easy to use. Symbols are a great solution when there are only a few keys to differentiate.

For more information on colorblind design and applications, read my previous entry here.

The days of the <select> tag are numbered. The most recent example is GMail’s “More actions” drop-down.

It’s gone from this

to this

I completely understand why. Unavailable CSS styling and <select> bugs in IE have always been frustrating, but the real motivation to move away from the tag has been its lack of features.

With a JavaScript/DHTML solution you can simply do so much more. In December 2004 when Google released “Google Suggest” (which is an auto-complete-like drop-down of the search field) many developers started to consider abandoning <select> tags. Add to that the flexibility of cross-browser styling, adding images to drop-downs and dramatic visual effects… The end is near.

However, I’m not suggesting the end of the tag’s use. Using a <select> tag gives the browser the responsibility to make the form accessible to vision and mobility-impaired people which is often overlooked in a small project or web-based application.

Do you see anything wrong with the picture below?

Can you distinguish in-stock vs. out-of-stock? Perhaps most people reading this can because not everyone is colorblind. But for those of us who are this image is completely undecipherable.

The image comes from Apple’s iPhone stock checker website. I completely appreciate the fact they took the initiative to create the website but I’d expect better of Apple.

The W3C’s Techniques for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0, Guideline #2 is:

Don’t rely on color alone.

It’s just that simple! When it comes to a boolean column, something as simple as a “checkmark/x”, or the text “yes/no”, or text formatted with a “strikethrough/normal” sufficiently differentiates each option. I personally think the “checkmark/x” combination is the most distinguishable to a global audience.

Design becomes more complicated when you need to distinguish between multiple sets of data. Consider the following map:

The map needs to do better job distinguishing the colors to even be remotely useful but that isn’t the full story. What would be best would be a hovering “tooltip” window that lets you know what color and section your mouse is pointing at. This isn’t necessarily easy and would take time to create, but the people who spend the time perfecting things like that usually end up being the best resource in town. And isn’t that what we all want in our web applications?

While I can’t change the fact that someone in the US decided it was a good idea to use red and green stoplights, I can hopefully shed some light on webdesign in the future. Thanks for your time!

For more reading on color blindness and design, I suggest the following links:

• Wikipedia - Color blindness
• Causes of color blindness walkthrough
• Color blind test
• Color blind labratory comparison tool
• Another color comparison tool
• Web safe color blind charts

A mother signs up for facebook, searches for her daughter’s name, and slowly begins to befriend all of her friends. Mother states:

“Shockingly, quite a few of them - the friends, not the daughter - accepted my invitation and gave me access to their Profiles, including their interests, hobbies, school affiliations and in some cases, physical whereabouts.”

Daughter finds out, states:

“unfriend paige right now. im serious. i dont care if they request you. say no. i will be soo mad if you dont unfriend paige right now.”

As social applications become more and more popular, you’ll cross that generational bridge. Privacy which was once there due to ignorance will suddenly be violated, leaving everything you chose to make public seen and archived.

Consider the Wayback Machine. When I was 12, I never would have considered or even comprehended the idea that my first website might be cached forever. Were you thinking that way? Most of us didn’t, yet at some point we began to.

Or take another example: Instant messaging. I’m always on. Will my kids, too? Will they filter their away messages or profiles, knowing I might possibly view the information they are making publicly available?

I have a feeling this learning and yearning for privacy will begin to show in more and more web applications, where we’ll not only continue to see “parental controls” but we’ll begin seeing options to filter and control each generations access to the other.

But with almost any advertising, there’s a movement to circumvent it.

.. TV vs DVR, time shifting, fast-forward.
.. FM radio vs Satellite radio, paid subscriptions, commercial free.

Remember the first years of pop-up advertising on websites? ISPs started offering “Pop-up Blocker” software free to their members. It was such a demand that most browsers now implement pop-up blocking as a standard feature.

Advertising is a balancing act. Google has been hugely successful with their text/banner-style AdWords - I believe because they’re not aggressive with their impact. Until this evening, I tolerated, sometimes enjoyed, viewing advertising. I felt like it educated me. A good advertisement might teach me of a new product I hadn’t heard of, a service I might use or recommend. Those AT&T commercials where two people are talking on mobile phones, and one is dropped… hilarious!

Until tonight, when I went to read this article on Wired.com.

Covering 50% of the first few paragraphs is an AT&T advertising overlay. I gave the ad 3 minutes to go away. I tried every key combo, tried following the link of the ad… nothing. The article is unreadable in Firefox. Same result in IE.

The Irony is: the article is about Safari 3 and how “Safari sucks.” Care to guess how the page looks in Safari? flawless. No content-blocking AT&T advertisement.

UPDATE: Wired apologizes for the ad.

There’s a lot of discussion lately of “Web 2.0.”

You see it in web application reviews: “The web 2.0 of bookmarking” or “a web 2.0 redesign.”

Web 2.0 means different things depending on context. Some argue that the term’s definition is so vague/complex that it’s unusable.

It’s the technology of websites. It’s the latest-greatest use of client-side scripting, CSS, and the Document Object Model. It’s meant to be a version of the world wide web. The collective current version. The reinvention of the web as it was known some 6+ years ago.

In a blog article that got me started on this subject (Why there’s no such thing as Web 2.0) the author argues that Web 2.0 is not a “space” or a category that a site/company falls into.

I agree with that. I would never use the term “Web 2.0″ in a pitch. Web 2.0 technology doesn’t make you special. Its expected — its whats current.

I think it will be easier to understand Web 2.0 when there’s Web 3.0, but please, lets not jump on the buzzword bandwagon.

It reminds me though of how important off-site backups are. If you have a software business, a fire could be disastrous if you don’t have your data backed up in multiple locations.

As a business owner, I want someone to LOVE working for me. I’d give (do give) my employees every benefit possible. Making that extra $200 or $2000 dollars just so my employee is miserable is no way to go. So that said, I’d completely respect someone taking time to pursue something they felt is worthwhile, so long as they don’t leave the company at a major loss. There’s simply a balance to be made — one that larger companies without a startup mentality might never come to see.

But that luxury comes at a price. You have to be respectful of the company you work for. Time away isn’t simply time you aren’t being productive on whatever project it was you were working on. Even if it’s unpaid, you’re still receiving health, dental, vision, 401k, and other benefits. That’s when things start becoming a little less fair to your employer, so be mindful and respectful of the costs of simply having an employee — we’re not just paying your salary.

The crazy thing about the pages that used to take a while to load was I always assumed it was the computer slowing things down due to a large amount of text to be rendered, not the size. I simply never paid attention! How silly.

I understand there are some issues with HTTP compression and older browsers that don’t support it properly, however I think this is a very unlikely scenario for 99.9% of our viewer-ship.

For more information on mod_deflate you can check out the Apache Documentation.

I personally used the simplest configuration possible, opting to do the following:

    Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
    AllowOverride All
    SetOutputFilter Deflate

I came across an article today on “The Penny Gap” which I thought was worth a mention: It talks about consumer based web applications and the difference in free vs paid-subscription revenue models.

The article talks about the negative trend of price vs adoption… the more you charge, the fewer subscriptions you receive. That seems logical: fewer consumers can afford your service the more expensive it is. But I wonder: Is there a price point that might increase your adoption? Will more consumers subscribe to something priced higher because they perceive it as higher quality? Or are higher quality things just more expensive?