kaioa.com

Zing!

This topic has bothered me for quite a while. There are really some people out there who believe that validators are something for standard lunatics; that passing the validation with flying colors is just another pointless bullet on someones nerdy checklist. That the sole reason for valid markup and styling are some kind of bragging rights.

That's not the big idea. It really isn't.

When you write other kinds of code, there usually is a compilation step involved. If something goes wrong, the compiler will tell you where it couldn't figure out what you meant. With that information at hand you can quickly take care of the issue.

Now, with CSS and (X)HTML things look differently. There won't be any kind of direct upfront feedback (unless you serve your documents as application/xhtml+xml). Things will either look as intended or they won't. If they look right is also a completely different story.

More accurate now

This is the updated extension for Inkscape which simulates 9 different types of vision. It's a color effect and therefore it can be found over at Effects->Color->Color Blindness after installation.

It still supports the same set of modes:

• normal trichromatic color vision
• protanopia red-green blindness (no red cones)
• deutanopia red-green blindness (no green cones)
• tritanopia blue-yellow blindness (no blue cones)
• typical achromatopsia (no cones; rod monochromat)
• protanomaly (anomalous red cones)
• deutanomaly (anomalous green cones)
• tritanomaly (anomalous blue cones)
• atypical achromatopsia (low cones; cone monochromat)

Interchangeable presentation

You know the drill

If you didn't ignore the web for the past few years, you've probably heard it a million times by now: separate your content and presentation, use CSS for presentation, and say yes to semantic markup. There is no doubt that it's the right thing to do, given the sheer amount of benefits.

In a nutshell: it makes your life easier by lumping those pieces together which belong next to each other. It's somewhat akin to the proximity usability rule. It also keeps the noise down; if you want to change parts of the presentation there are no content bits in the way and vice versa. There is also a lot less overhead since those style sheets can be cached on the client side. In extreme cases it can save as much as 200kb of utterly pointless bloat. Additionally, proper CSS usage also paves the way for the ultimate killer feature: interchangeable presentation.

9 kinds of vision

Update: There is a new version!

This is an extension for Inkscape which simulates 9 different types of vision. Again it's a color effect and therefore it can be found over at Effects->Color->Color Blindness after installation.

Supported modes:

• normal trichromatic color vision
• protanopia red-green blindness (no red cones)
• deutanopia red-green blindness (no green cones)
• tritanopia blue-yellow blindness (no blue cones)
• typical achromatopsia (no cones; rod monochromat)
• protanomaly (anomalous red cones)

I can't hear you

Motivation

A few weeks ago someone complained about screencasts being (ab)used as replacement for documentation. I think I saw it somewhere over at reddit or dzone. Well, that rant wasn't all that interesting, really. However, it did point out two real issues: they are useless to the deaf and you lose the advantages of text (searchable, quick scanning etc.). I can't agree more with those bits - it's something that bothered me for ages.

The former can be addressed with subtitles. The latter, however, is more complicated than that. Solving that problem would also solve the issue that screencasts don't really reveal much of their content to search engines. If you put countless hours of work into your screencasts it would be pretty sad if your audience is unable to find them.

Interestingly subtitles are also the solution to this problem. Once they are written (or copy/pasted from the script) you have a complete transcript together with the timing information. With those two pieces (text and time) you can create a transcript where each line can be clicked to seek over to that position.