Web - Usability - Humor
Saturday, May 24, 2003[12:07:01 PM]
Met up with the traveling Doug/Tantek/Todd show Thursday evening. Some of the CSS conversation was drowned out by a bluegrass band, but the cafe itself was all right.
Tantek and Todd each had a copy of Zeldman's new book. All three of them are in the book, having each made significant contributions to standards and/or use of standards.
Topics touched upon included png transparency for ie, the Zen Garden website (a site where numerous designers have contributed stylesheets to show how thoroughly the stylesheets influence the appearance), styling form fields, whether multiple posts without permalinks constitute a weblog (mostly a joke), and vigilante drones.
Someone mentioned acronyms in passing, which was a hot topic several months ago. I never got around to writing about acronyms, but I have several suggestions.... 1) Authors could indicate acronyms with all caps (IBM). 2) The CMS can insert acronym tags. 3) Less is more in formatting acronyms -- better not to underline every occurence. 3) The CMS can make a glossary of acronyms used in a page. 4) Style acronyms that are all caps to be a smaller font size, maybe .85em. That's not as good as using a real small-caps font, but it's probably better than using full-sized caps. (Better in that full-sized caps strongly emphasize, which is typically inappropriate for acronyms.) 5) You could still display a tooltip of the expanded text of the acronym, even though not everyone would know to look for it. After all, most people will already know most acronyms, and they should be defined on first use anyway. 6) A good CMS would have a dictionary of acronyms and let you set rules for how and when to use the acronym tag -- you might not want to tooltip "HyperText Markup Language" for every use of HTML, for example.
Heather T. and I were the only ones to join them. Maybe next time they'll avoid the bluegrass and give a little more notice. If you're interested in CSS, web standards, and such, take advantage of the chance to hang out with these guys.
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Last update: 6/15/03; 7:38:02 PM.