Not knowing if I was using resigned incorrectly, I had to look it up.  Merriam Webster and Dictionary.com demonstrate the disparity on the front page of Google. Pretty cool – I feel like I just won the word nerd lottery.

The Farmville Bug

No joke, Firefox pushed an update on a single bug. Last release they introduced this great feature that times out Flash applications if they take longer than 10 seconds to start up, thinking that anything that takes longer than that is probably crashing. Reasonable!

But Farmville often takes longer than 10 seconds to start up. Oh shoot. Flash developers that do run-time debugging destroy the 10 second limit. Double shoot!

Use Real Data!

It’s a cut-and-dry example of why you should use real data to make calls on design decisions. It’s a variation of the Lorem Ipsum Sucks argument. The “10 second” decision seems arbitrary, and kudos to Mozilla for doing the right thing and releasing a fix right away. It’s probably not the correct fix, as adding a friendly user prompt would be preferable to a low, fixed timeout. But hey, baby steps.

Presentation

I put together a quick presentation [PDF] of the stuff that stood out for me, and presented it at a “lunch and learn.”

My co-presenters and I expected 5 or 6 people … instead we got a full room of about 20.  Super happy! It was good practice for a talk I’ll be doing at Fusion 2010 about accessibility and internationalization (3:45pm on the Tuesday).  Doubt I’ll be able to share any information from that one, but just wanted to advertise :-)

Highlights

All content in there copyright of the respective presenters.  Highlights include:

• Adaptech’s study of social media usage amongst disabled students in Ontario produced a great list of which social media services are and are not accessible. Facebook good, Digg bad, surprisingly.
• It’s important to understand that students with disabilities generally don’t want to identify as “disabled” online.  Often clicking on “Accessible Version of this!” leads to  a simplified, crippled (forgive the allusion) web experience, rather than the rich experience they would expect from a website (and other students get).
• Content creation is further behind the times in terms of accessibility than the web frameworks / CMS’s are.  Partly this is because content creators come from a visual design background, and may not appreciate the content over the presentation. The key here is bridging the content to data gap using XML, and tools that support it such as Adobe InDesign.

Slide about quantifying desirability - Like whoa ...

His original presentation and blog article have links to the PDF, as well as a link to buying the presentation for $70 or so.  We watched the presentation at work and it’s … not great for a group audience. The slides read better than they are presented, but I can’t fault Christian for this .. just the sheer amount of good content is overwhelming.

User Experience Leader Christian Rohrer provides a framework for understanding and explaining different user research methods, delves into details on a few of the lesser-known methods, such as desirability and true intent studies, and discusses key insights to succeed in modern-day corporate environments.

PDF download

“Women in Gaza”, 2008 by Tanya Habjouqa

“The girls tell me that this is the only space they have to be creative publicly in an increasingly conservative and difficult Gaza.” No shit, eh.

Just felt like sharing.

Databases + Metadata = Unsolved Problem

Metadata in databases loses its context quickly.  Let’s say Jen uploads an image, titles it “My pet puppy.”  Jen’s friend Steve wants to use the image, selects it in the image library and wants to change the title to “Jen’s pet puppy.”  Where do you store that title now?  What happens when Jen renames her image?  What if you use a couple copies of the same image, with a different title?  It’s a bit of a mess, but usually the solution is store the metadata in context: keep the metadata with each use of the image, in that HTML page.  Problem is, images don’t have a title attribute.

The other issue is maintaining those goddamn references between the database, the HTML file, and the image file. Odds are you’ll be using some database file system of some kind so now you have to manage deletions, renames, and metadata edits in three different linked places.  Those links are fragile, so things fall out of sync. Especially if users have access to editing their HTML source code, offline editing, import/export, anything like that.  So make sure to keep one authoritative copy of that data.

Lastly is the issue of exporting/sharing this content.  The platform that I work on has a strict requirement for being exportable without ruining everything, in order to keep a very important ($$) industry certification.  So when we export that web page, we don’t want to lose all of that image metadata.  We will if it’s in the database, unless you do a lot of non-standard hackery.  And we’d want to avoid non-HTML shit just to pass data around (a standard solution).

Microformats: Metadata, Inline, Bam

Really, a good way to do this is just store metadata inline, in the HTML content.  The best solution we found for this setup is using microformats.  The ideas that you wrap your object (an image, an object, a text block, whatever) with span tags that represent each one of the pieces of metadata.  There’s a much more verbose explanation on the microformats.org site.  The hCalendar format is good place to look for examples of this concept embraced.

So for our image example above, the HTML would look something like this.

<span class="image">
<img src="puppies.png" width="500" height="169" />
<span class="imagetitle">The puppies are st00pid fly.</span>
<span class="author hidden">Jen</span>
</span>

It’s pretty ingenious. You have the semantic relationship between the image and the imagetitle, and you can easily extend to add other information like the author, and keep that specific item hidden, or whatever.

Best thing ever is that since it’s semantically sound, you can do some magic with the CSS and DOM manipulations.  You can make it look pretty, keep it accessible, hack it with JavaScript in a reliable way.  Anywho, sometimes, it’s better than putting things in a database.

The problem of sorting country names is particularly sensitive.  When you want to display China as 中国 to Chinese speakers, where should it be sorted compared to Canada or Kâmpŭchea (Cambodia)?

Here we have an example list of countries, in the order I looked them up online, heh.  For the sake of not messing with my blog, I avoided Right-to-Left country names for Egypt, Iran, or Israel.

• United States
• España
• 中国
• Deutschland
• Polska
• Россия
• भारत

If you had a “sort” feature in whatever software you’re using, hopefully it’s using the Unicode collation order to sort the names. You typically would get something like this as a result:

1. Deutschland
2. España
3. Polska
4. United States
5. Россия
6. भारत
7. 中国

Business Case Sort

Alpha sorting, Unicode or otherwise, may seem pretty arbitrary especially if 95% of your customers come from three or four countries.  One can always make the case for sorting country lists with the most popular countries dominating the “top 5″ or so of the list *. For many businesses this may mean a sort order of:

1. United States
2. 中国
3. Россия
4. Deutschland
5. España
6. Polska
7. भारत

That’s all good … if you want to confuse Indian and Polish visitors, don’t care about keyboard users, and want to take a big hit on your Russian branding.
* Instead of mucking with collation, a usable solution is to autodetect what country people are from and pre-selecting things in dropdown lists, or highlighting it as a choice outside of the sorted list.

ISO to the Rescue

In my research, I’ve found a pretty good general solution, irrespective of the business case, is to sort things according to the ISO 3166-1-2 code. I know, I know, it’s lame and old and under fire constantly .. but it’s a fairly standard coding that technical people understand, native speakers understand, keyboard access is alright, and it’s considered safe on the culture-war front (other than being based on the Latin alphabet).

Our example above would be:

1. 中国 (cn)
2. Deutschland (de)
3. España (es)
4. भारत (in)
5. Polska (pl)
6. Россия (ru)
7. United States (us)

Anywho, that’s just my suggestion for a starting point. Your business case may indeed support other sort orders for countries.  But this one is reproducible and defensible, so that makes it good for programmers and business analysts alike.

I asked an Egyptian co-worker what the URL was for the Egyptian Ministry of Communication .. I didn’t even know how to search for it. Here it is:

http://وزارة-الاتصالات.مصر/. Apparently the fonts I have butcher the script.

The URL looks good when I copy/paste, but it gets turned into Punycode: http://xn--4gbrim.xn----rmckbbajlc6dj7bxne2c.xn--wgbh1c, which magically still works. Anyone else have some insight into how this works?

The artist community on Vimeo is really strong, as are the corporate entities (such as The White House) that publish on that site.  About an hour into exploring, I’ve watched a half-dozen mini-documentaries and some really great visual stories.  The one below is my favourite today.

Look around from kokooma on Vimeo.

Uploading Puerto Rico

As far as uploading, I’ve read that the video quality/colour/sound  is much better for free Vimeo accounts than YouTube, even in 480p. Judge for yourself, I put up a hastily edited video from my Puerto Rico trip on YouTube, as well as Vimeo.  Take a look, we had a pretty sweet vacation.

In hopes of one day running WordPress and MediaWiki well on IIS, I’ve been collecting links.  First off, the simple recommendation is to just get the Microsoft Web Platform, which hopes to automate almost 100% of the process of PHP on IIS, including installing the FastCGI libraries that you’d probably want.

In case you’re trying to learn more about what’s actually going on, Bill S wrote up an extensive how-to for installing PHP on IIS.  From the folks behind PHP, the documentation on php.net is pretty detailed, especially if you’re working with an older set of servers (like Windows XP + IIS 5).  A detailed IIS 6 walkthrough can be found on the IIS Admin Blog.

Since this implementation uses CGI, and is still not as fast as the Apache+PHP stack, Ruslan has described how to make PHP faster on IIS using WinCache.  Performance seems to be a big concern, in general.

Somewhat unrelated, I found a place to get free IIS hosting for ASP (via this aspfree.com page).

Hopefully that helps someone!