Xavier Defrang

A few months ago, two major belgian newspapers launched an "accessible" version of their respective websites. In their own words : the site has been rewritten according to rigorous accessibility guidelines. Great... now maybe they will - at last - figure out that they paid twice for an awful job since :

1. The full blown ("unaccessible") version of their site is pure tagsoup with frames for one and an applet for the other...
2. The "accessible" version is incredibly ugly and just ghettoize people with disabilities in a scaled down web experience. The people responsible for this obviously have no clue about the accessibility benefits of web standards. Not to mention that the "accessible" mark-up is far from perfect... access keys, anyone?

I wonder who are the "accessibility" experts they hired to produce such a nonsense... do they ever heard about the "one markup fits all" paradigm? Why the hell maintaining two versions when a single, carefully designed site can be both accessible and good-looking?

When you point your browser to ichat.com you reach an Apple page asking you whether you were looking for the company formerly known as ichat Software. If so, they propose a link to their (ugly) website... The problem is that they forgot to link to their actual very own iChat instant messaging client!

Flow is a positive, highly enjoyable state of consciousness that occurs when our perceived skills match the perceived challenges we are undertaking. When our goals are clear, our skills are up to the challenge, and feedback is immediate, we become involved in the activity.

This article talks about flow in web design.

Jakob Nielsen : Corporate homepages are the most valuable real estate in the world. Space on a big company's homepage is worth about 1,300 times as much as land in the business districts of Tokyo.

How is this valuable real estate allocated? Very inefficiently. Most pixels go to waste.

Information Architecture : Every link makes a promise.

There are lots of excellent web design and usability related material at saila.com! Check it out if you're looking for some CSS tricks as well. Really neat and clever stuff!

I think that Jeffrey Zeldman and Mark Pilgrim's bashing of the redesigned microsoft.com is a bit unfair. Why complaining at Microsoft when the homepages of other industry mammoths such as IBM, Netscape Communications or Sun Microsystem do not stick to standards and don't care about accessibility issues? Netscape's DevEdge is certainly the only site of the Netscape Network to be built with web standards and to use pure CSS layout. Just like Zeldman reminded that Microsoft was employing web standard guru, such as Tantek Celic, I'd like to suggest Eric Meyer to start evangelizing his colleagues at Netscape-TW-AOL. I suppose that this kind of usual Microsoft bashing can be blamed on the fact that a city on the top of the hill can't be hidden (a rasta proverb by the way) but the people at WaSP should definetly push big IT business to switch to standard compliant mark-up. The most difficult thing about that is probably to find skilled people in large web agencies as none of them seems to have heard about W3C...

For months now, I've been looking for a usable XML authoring application suitable for end users. The dozen of software I tested, always burdened the user with terminology such as DTD, XSD and other kinds of concepts that non-geeks should never be worried about.

Lots of editors have nice features like XPath queries resolvers, built-in XSL transformation or FO rendering engines but what's the point when you need to be an XML guru just to create or update a document?

The lack of freely available editors has really slowed down the adoption of XML in the business I work into. So please, let me know if you ever found any good authoring software which supports DTD or schema-based validation and a user-friendly editing environment.

Yesterday, I've been stunned by the brilliant design of the Cornetto Soft ice cream machine. It's a pure marvel of simple but really clever engineering. By the way,thank you Diane for the free ice cream and the free demonstration! ;)

Scientists have created the ultimate foolproof flat-pack, a furniture kit with microchips that talks to you.

I wish MS would use this algorithm to sort file lists in Explorer.