Web designers have begun to pick up on a fun technique to update sections of a web page in real time. This update gets done without redrawing and reloading the whole page. See — XMLHttpRequest for The Masses” href=”http://allinthehead.com/retro/241/xmlhttprequest-for-the-masses”>XMLHttpRequest for The Masses for a discussion of what’s happening.
Pretty cool, but the question I have is whether or not this will work with screenreaders used by blind folks. If it doesn’t, then the use of XMLHttpRequest in this way may not meet the Section 508 accessability requirements which would mean it might be a no-no for U.S. Federal Goverment web sites. If the screen readers can’t recognize changed text embedded in a web page, then it might be difficult to use this technique in a valid way.
ckagy Other stuff
Okay, so I’ve been using “Spurl”:http://www.spurl.net and “del.icio.us”:http://del.icio.us for a few days now, and I’ve got to admit that I really like the sidebar they’ve got for “Firefox”:http://www.getfirefox.com. It’s more handy than the bookmark menu in the browser, and I’ve got access to the same set of stuff at work or home. So far, so good.
I’m not sure what the “social” aspect of this gets me, though. I can see of other people have bookmarked this same item. Okay, that’s fine. All it means is that it’s popular. Is it old or out of date? Popularity lists would seem to do little good, because once an item shows up on a list of “hot” items, chances are it will stay there because it has increased visibility.
Open my eyes! Help me see why this is such cool stuff after all.
ckagy Other stuff
On Saturday night I splurged a little and went to a jazz concert at the Kennedy Center. Peter Cincotti is one of the up and comming jazz pianists, and at 21 years old is pretty impressive. Listening to much of his concert I kept being reminded of early Billy Joel – that’s not a bad thing, but I was expecting more of a Harry Connick.
His stage presence was pretty good for such a young kid. He told a cute story about opening for Ray Charles.
According to the folks last night, Peter’s got two CDs out. I’m going to have to find one and see what he sounds like in the studio.
ckagy Other stuff
Tantek works for “Technorati”:http://technorati.com, and is an active blogger. He’s done work on the CSS standards and the MS browsers for the Apple platform.
Technorati is a service that follows the threads of conversations going on in the web. In “this post”:http://www.tantek.com/log/2004/11.html#d06t1400, Tantek reports on some questions thrown out at a recent converence regarding the relevant sorting and presentation of inforamation. Of course it is focused on blog info, but the questions are interesting in general, too.
ckagy Uncategorized
I’ve been playing around with a couple online bookmarking sites these past couple days. “Spurl.net”:http://www.spurl.net/ and “del.icio.us”:http://del.icio.us/ appear to be two of the more popular.
These sites basically let you move your browser favorites online so you can access them anywhere. You can also categorize things a bit, too. So far, so good. What I think is really cool, conceptually, is that your bookmarks can also be made available for others to “see”:http://del.icio.us/ckagy. They can also be cross-referenced with the “categories”:http://del.icio.us/tag/astronomy others have set up.
You end up with a nice dynamic web of information. From this you can extrapolate which topics or pages are getting a lot of “attention”:http://www.spurl.net/discover/hot.php, or see what other people have bookmarked in your same topic “area”:http://del.icio.us/tag/tutorials+photoshop.
Very cool, but it strikes me as a solution in search of a problem. What can I do with this other than move from computer to computer and still have all my bookmarks?
ckagy Other stuff