This is another one of these lab-notebook, thinking-out-loud entries.
So it’s been a while since I had a rant about Web standards. I think this is for a few reasons:
- It looked to me that we standardistas had won and this obsession of mine was getting boring. For a while , new things weren’t happening fast enough in the field to keep my interest.
- I was getting demoralized with my webmaster business. For all kinds of stupid and not so stupid reasons, it wasn’t making me money. I lost over 40,000 dollars over the last seven years trying to learn how to work for myself.
- Since October 2006, I’ve been mostly focused on my new part-time job with NGT. I’ve been very busy as of late.
Anyway, my attention waned and wandered from this area of endeavor. But things never stand still. Tonight I’ve learned of Microsoft’s decision to kill FrontPage and start again with Expression. That’s old news to people hipper than me but, I’ve just learned of it because I wasn’t paying attention. Also I’ve learned about some new WYSIWYM, inline, web-form-based, editors that show promise to me. That being inadequately explained, here are the links:
- Forget WYSIWYG editors – use WYSIWYM instead: This mostly focuses on the problem of web-based CMS tools trying to get naive users to generate valid markup.
- WYMeditor: Is one of these inline editors that might address the problem discussed in the first bullet.
- Visually Editing Semantics – What You See Is What You Mean: Discusses WYMeditor.
- WMD: Yet another inline editor. I’ve yet to decide which is better WMD or WYMeditor.
- Microsoft Expression Preview Release: WaSP reviews a beta of Expression.
- Microsoft Expression Web Final Release: Vitamin (Some web designer ‘zine site I don’t think I’ve ever linked to before.) reviews the final release of Expression–there’s good and bad.
- Accessible Web 2.0 Applications with WAI-ARIA: Interesting (To me) examination of IBM’s proposals and extensions to the WAI.
- Where Our Standards Went Wrong: No, the war really isn’t over. There are issues to be settled between standards pragmatists, standards fanatics (Like myself.) and the rest of the world who really doesn’t care.
- You Are Not a Robot: Actually, since I believe in the strong premise of AI and AL, I think we are but, this guy’s point is that there are certain aspects of web design and implementation that can’t easily be automated. I agree.
- Client-side blog editors for Linux still continue to suck. But at least Performancing has a better name now.