Archive for the 'Web standards' Category

Bare-naked Flash at Highland Fling

Published on April 3, 2008 in Community, Conferences, Web '08 and Web standards. 6 Comments

I presented a new session, Bare-naked Flash: Dispelling myths and building bridges, to a roomful of Scottish web designers and developers in Edinburgh today at the Highland Fling conference.

I love this city; the architecture, the vibe. It's my second time in Edinburgh and I wish Stephanie and I could stay a few more days but Singularity beckons.

Alan White, Highland Fling creator and Very Cool Person™, has been taking wonderful care of us and a lovely time was had by all at the conference today. Paul Boag did an admirable job as master of ceremonies and the conference format worked wonderfully (each session was followed by a 10-15 minute relaxed interview and Q&A).

We're flying back to Brighton tomorrow evening and then it's back to work on Singularity for me. I have quite a few Singularity-related announcements to make this month and things are really kicking off!

The times they are a-changin’

Published on August 13, 2007 in Accessibility, Community, Flash and Web standards. 6 Comments

Someone called Mike attempts his five seconds of Internet fame by claiming that Flash Sucks and Web Standards and accessibility guru Mike Davies counters with a post titled Growing momentum behind accessible Flash.

This follows Drew McLellan's post on the WASP blog on Obstacles to Accessible Flash which highlights current accessibility issues that Flash is affected by due to browser limitations and other reasons, both Adobe-related and non-Adobe-related.

There is today more communication and understanding between the Flash and Web Standards communities than ever before. I've been trying to do my tiny little bit by actively encouraging this communication whenever possible and I've been very fortunate to have had the invaluable support of my friends Andy Budd, Jeremy Keith, Mike Davies, Christian Heilmann, Drew McLellan, Tom Croucher, Steve Webster, Pete Barr-Watson, Heather Ford, Lawrence Lessig, John Davey and many others in both the Flash and Web Standards communities.

I feel that it's essential that we keep this communication going and one way to do this is to get Flash people to speak at non-Flash events like d.construct and have Web Standards people speak at Flash events (Jeremy Keith at last year's Flash on the Beach and, this week, at Flash Brighton).

It feels like we've come a long way in the last two or three years in dispelling myths and misinformation about Flash and in getting Flash developers exposed to web standards and concepts such as progressive enhancement. There's also a lot more we can do and it's essential that we keep this momentum going.

Posts like Mike's belong in the annals of history. Stating, as Mike does, that Flash "is the bane of the Internet, and it needs to go away" is in no way constructive. In fact, it runs contrary to all the positive work that we've been trying to do in both the Flash and Web Standards communities in the last few years.

Flash is not going away. In fact, the Flash platform has more legitimacy today than it ever has ever had. And it's wonderful to see the Web Standards community engaging with us and working with us. Together, we can help educate developers on how to create standards-compliant Flash and work to improve the accessibility of Flash. And that's a very Good Thing for us all! :)

Flashing at BarCampLondon

Published on September 4, 2006 in Accessibility, BarCampLondon, Best Practices, Community, Design Patterns, Development Process, Flash Platform, Flex 2, Usability Design, Usability Testing, Web standards and eXtreme Programming (XP). 2 Comments

Aral Balkan's Agile Development and Usability presenation at BarCampLondon.

BarCampLondon was a blast! Over the course of a weekend, I got to meet some amazing people, catch up with friends, learn some great stuff (including a new game called Werewolf) and get inspired. Big thank-yous to Ben Metcalf, Ian Forrester, Murray Rowan, and Paul Hammond for organizing the event and for your tireless omnipresence throughout the weekend. Similarly, thank-yous to Yahoo! UK, eBay, BBC Backstage, TechChrunch, Chinwag, and Belkin for sponsoring the event with food, drinks and network cables! And, of course, thank-you to everyone who attended for making the event what it was, for sharing and for lynching me so early in the game -- I wasn't a werewolf dammit! :)

My first session was titled Agile Development and Usability. It was a one-slide presentation in which I talked about the three big problems I see our field faced with today. Namely, a lack of understanding of development process, of the importance of the user and of application architecture. I followed this up with a high-level overview of solutions to these problems, including the use of Agile Development (with examples from eXtreme Programming/XP), User-Centered Development and usability patterns and pattern-based architecture. I ended the half-hour session with a brief glimpse into how these solutions can be implemented in projects for the Flash Platform using Flex 2, Arp and open source tools.

After my first session, I got a couple of requests for more information on Flex 2 and decided to hold a separate talk on just that subject on the second day. In that talk, I gave an overview of the Flash Platform, Flex 2 SDK and Flex Builder 2, using my Flex 2 Quick Starts for the examples.

In addition to presenting, I also got to attend quite a few presentations by other people. You can find notes from those sessions in the BarCampLondon category. Without fail, the sessions I attended were all highly engaging and informative. I can only surmise that the quality of the attendees and the BarCamp format had a great role to play in this.

You can find links to other media from the event on the BarCampLondon What Happened wiki page.

So, when are we going to have the next one? :)

BarCampLondon: Jeremy Keith on Hijax

Published on September 2, 2006 in Accessibility, BarCampLondon, Javascript, Usability Design and Web standards. 1 Comment

I'm sitting in Jeremy's session, hearing about his Hijax system for "progressive enhancement". Progressive enhancement takes a new look at what we used to call "graceful degradation". Basically, it's starting with the content/symantic layer and layering on additional functionality on top of that.

He's currently talking about how best to implement JavaScript behavior into your HTML application and the method he's showing me is so close (in intent and implementation) to the code behind method I advocate in Flex and Flash development.

The Hijax approach:

  • Begin using traditional page refreshes
  • Data sent to server via links and form submissions
  • Intercept (hijack) those links and forms using unobtrusive javascript
  • Send that to XMLHTTPRequest
  • Server returns just the information that's required

Server side requirements:

  • Back-end architecture must be modular
  • Web pages must be modular (components/APIs)

The paradox:

  • Plan for Ajax from the start
  • Implement Ajax at the end

When to use Ajax:

A page includes a form. When the form is submitted, the same page is returned with just part of the page updated (eg. blog comments.)

Clicking on a link returns the same page but with a different view on the data (on thing has changed.) Product ratings, filtered product set, etc.

Jeremy's method uses the XMLHttpRequest as a dumb waiter. Client-side processing is kept to a minimum.

The Web Standards Project is wrong on SWFObject

Published on August 17, 2006 in Accessibility, Flash, Open Source Flash and Web standards. 5 Comments

The web standards project has a terribly elitist post by Ben Henick that is an unfair and uninformed dismissal of SWFObject. In the post Ben states:

As for SWFObject, it serves a purpose that I might have someday in the face of a tight deadline, relaxed project requirements, or a requirement for the most recent version of Flash. However, I’ve been through every line of SWFObject’s code and can state with confidence that while it obeys the letter of the W3C Recommendations, it totally disregards their spirit.

I must always be faced with tight deadlines and relaxed project requirements because I use SWFObject quite often.

So if we shouldn't use SWFObject, what is Ben's recommendation? Apparently, according to The Web Standards Project, we are supposed to use methods that embed SWF files using only the Object tag. If you feel that there's a distinct disconnect between this recommendation and your own experience of reality as a Flash developer, join the club! I'm not going to go into detail about why this is such a bad idea here as Geoff Stearns has already done a great job of responding on his blog post. I believe that the following quote from his post summarizes it best:

Using only the object tag to embed your plugin content (especially Flash content) is fucking stupid.

I highly recommend that you read Geoff's post and I have to say that I agree wholeheartedly with it both in letter and in spirit.

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