One woman's slightly skewed views
A recent conversation with a widely known and respected web designer friend in the U.S.A. raised the oft-asked question, “Where are the women in web design?”
My friend found herself in a situation where she was asked to fix the work of a relatively prominent male in the area of web standards.
How exciting! I got tagged! Have I finally made it into the stratosphere? Do I actually have a friend now? 😉
Thanks(?!) Lisa. Here are my “four things”.
Happy New Year to all!
I thought I’d start off the New Year by upgrading to the new version of WordPress, my blogging software. I’d read some less-than-enthusiastic reviews and so didn’t do it immediately on its release. But over the New Year weekend, I didn’t want to actually work so I placated myself by doing something work-related instead. 🙂
I’ve been a busy little bee!
Mostly, I’ve been occupied with visitors from Germany. After a couple of years chatting, we finally got to meet a very special couple, and did the touristy, sight-seeing thing with them while they were here. We all got on amazingly well and it was very, very sad when they returned to Germany.
In my ongoing search for the elusive “perfect browser”, I have been back and forth a bit lately. I’ve gone from Safari 2.0 (a very fast and elegant browser), to Firefox (for the zillionth time), to Flock, back to Firefox, over to Camino and am now back with Safari. Here’s why:
For those that didn’t catch the heads-up on 456 Berea St, what a magnificent article by Chris at Wait till I come!. Chris notes how difficult it actually was, in the early days of the web, to build and maintain table-based websites that worked across browsers — and how (contrary to what some of the old-school diehards would have us believe) building websites using Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) layouts is not any more difficult, once you accept CSS for what it is.
He makes the very pertinent point that the design should fit around the content, not the content be made to fit into our designs.
I’m not fond of Microsoft but the new Windows Live Beta, which is a Web 2.0 application, looks like it will be good when there’s full browser support.Tim O’Reilly says:Windows Live is described as Internet-based personal services, centered on the individual, focused on communication, information, and protection.In general, I like the way Web 2.0 is heading.
I’m a bit concerned, after some recent comments on some of the email lists to which I subscribe, about the attitude of some web standards advocates towards others.
My journey to a career in web development and design was quite a gradual one. I drifted into it one day when I was bored. I made a horrific attempt (of which I was extraordinarily pleased and proud at the time) at a home page at GeoCities. Thankfully, that site from way back in 1998 is long since dead and buried! I remember well my pain…
The reason I moved away from Feedburner was because I thought it was difficult to exit the service and was afraid of my feed subscribers getting stuck. However, last night I had a really great chat to Rick Klaus from Feedburner, and he explained a lot of things that now make sense. I see I was quite wrong in my fear that there was no easy way to exit.
I was totally delighted to see the different approach Derek Featherstone has taken when putting his presentation from the Web Essentials 05 conference online.
Rather than just upload his prepared slides, Derek has created a new website, Simply Accessible.
