Eric Meyer has released a simple standards-based slide show system, or S5 for short. This is a very slick way to create a slide show in HTML. I may give it a shot for the next presentation that I do. What I find very exciting about it is that it should be pretty easy to adapt a bunch of existing tools in order to author S5 presentations. In fact, someone has already created a City Desk template that does so.
Category Archives: Standards
Nice Use of Standards on Maryland State Elections Web Site
The Maryland State Board of Elections web site has made excellent use of CSS and HTML to create a lightweight web design that is completely accessible. The total page weight for the home page is just over 7 kb and the stylesheet is a tad over 4 kb. That should serve them well during the election as their traffic spikes over the next day or so. Having such a small file size for the pages allows them to serve more people more quickly while conserving bandwidth.
I think the content of the site is pretty well designed as well, since it answered my question (what time do the polls open) very prominently on the home page.
What controversy?
Jeffrey Zeldman revisits web standards evangelism after some time off the rubber chicken circuit. I guess I’m not reading in the right places but I’ve never had a sense that there were huge rifts in the standards social club (other than RSS of course). I never felt turned off towards adopting standards once I learned about the benefits from reading folks such as Zeldman and Meyer. Maybe the controversy rings loudest to those in the middle of it?
Calendar Standards
Lisa Dusseault has posted about how the CalDAV standard that she proposed is picking up a bit of steam:
This is all great news. Calendaring interoperability has languished except for that burst of productivity back in 1998. People are locked into one calendar application depending on what server technology they have available, since there’s no common calendar access standard. Invitations work, kinda, but in practice the problems with recurrances mean that people must follow up the machine-readable text with human-readable text in case a mistake was made between two different vendors’ software.
Good news, but nowhere near done yet — this is just the beginning. Now we need volunteers. We need people to write specification text, review text, and manage the issues. We need people simply to pay attention to the work being done and provide their experience, or simply opinions, to bring issues to resolution.
I’m excited to hear about this effort. Effective calendar sharing is probably one of the major failings of most personal information management systems, open or commercial. Of course, the OSAF group that Lisa works with is trying to change all that.
Association Data Standards Consortium
The data standards group I have been active in forming now has a web page: Association Data Standards Consortium:
The Association Data Standards Consortium is a forum for identifying and communicating the process, information, and technology standards that facilitate seamless, efficient electronic business integration for associations and the for-profit businesses that serve them. ADSC is working through the X12 organization to develop standards.
The Association Data Standards Consortium uses the term “association” broadly, to include any non-profit member-centric organization or donor-based charity or foundation. Examples include but are not limited to: trade associations, professional societies, public foundations, philanthropic organizations, chambers of commerce, unions, fraternal organizations, and similar organizations.
I serve as the humble Communications Chair for ADSC, which means I approve requests to subscribe to the mailing list and help keep the web page up to date. The hard work of developing the initial standards is being done by the working groups.
These data standards should eventually help eliminate some of the pain that associations experience in integrating various systems with their association management system (CRM for membership organizations).
C. David Gammel, CAE 