Web Design World 2007 - San Francisco

RSS and the Atom Project

• RSS has been finished and still has some problems. Atom feeds are an improved RSS.
• The Atom Project is working on a standard way for people to take their content from any app and any device and “blog” it to any blog or Web software.
• The Web is UGLY and there is a huge opportunity to change this. Designers need to learn how to develop and developers need to learn how to design.

Ajax and Yahoo!

• Ajax is the future of Web applications. (I think Flash is too, but that wasn’t talked about.)
• Yahoo! was one of the first major sites to use a lot of Ajax. Because Ajax doesn’t require a lot of page loads, Yahoo!’s #1 page load rank was taken by MySpace.
• Yahoo! also has to do a lot of optimization. Because of the sheer number of visitors, even the slightest increase in server requests on a page can equal a lot of extra server load and bandwidth. Many, many small tweaks to the site help keep the bandwidth down.
• With their recent redesign, Yahoo! completely recoded the main Yahoo! page and the My Yahoo! area from the ground up. Yahoo! Mail was the most complicated because it had to retain old functionality and it contained the most DHTML. It actually only works in Internet Explorer and uses an emulator when running in Firefox.
• Yahoo! has a graded approach to browser support (except for yahoo! Mail) and support does not mean “same.”:
• A-Grade (Advanced support 96%) - These are modern browsers that get 100% functionality. These include IE, Firefox, Opera and Safari.
• C-Grade (Core support 2%) - These are old, non-standards browsers and a text only version of Yahoo! All content is available, it just doesn’t have all the functionality of A-Grade.
• X-Grade (X-Factor 2%) - These are the browsers that are in beta and have yet to be released. All functionality is given, but it may not work.
• Yahoo! has a developer’s blog where you can read more about this topic.

CSS Mastery

Andy Budd went over the basics of CSS and how to use it with some neat tips.

• The Pixy Method involves using 1 image for rollovers instead of several. You do this by putting all of your rollover states in one image. Then use the image as the background. Instead of swapping out the image on the hover, you just change the coordinates of the background image. Yahoo! uses this method a lot to reduce the amount of server requests and to speed up downloading.
• The clearfix trick is used by a lot of designers to get their layouts to behave. I learned that it works better to apply this style to a br tag, instead of a p tag. It takes up less space.
• Using the word “hack” is a little harsh when talking about browser bugs. A hack is usually a way to do something quick and dirty until you can go back and fix it later. With browser bugs, most “hacks” are the only way you can get it to work. A better term would be “patch” or “filter.”
• Most CSS problems aren’t from browser bugs. Usually, problems are from the designer not understanding how CSS works or their document is overly complicated and the cascade is hard to manage.

Ruby on Rails

This was really hyped, but until Mizzou IT installs it, I can’t do anything with it.

Deconstructing You!

This was where a group of presenters reviewed sites submitted by attendees and critiqued them. Missouri.edu was one that was critiqued.

Cons: (mostly stuff we can’t change)

• Didn’t know what Mizzou was
• Departmental sites were ugly and broken and didn’t look like the main site
• Thought the site needed more PR/student recruitment content
• Didn’t like the A-Z index
• Could be wider or use a flexible width

Pros:

• Impressed with the Strict Doctype
• Looked really good
• Liked the A-Z index (?)

Improvements:

• Create a template for all campus sites for a more cohesive look and experience for the user.

They ripped on it harder than the other (crummy) sites, but overall they had a very positive opinion of it.

San Francisco was nice, but I’m glad to be home

It was a full trip that left me exhausted, but I had to save some energy. The day after I came back my fiancé and I had a date at the courthouse to get married. After that, I was able to rest.