kuniform

Jeremy Sydik, a colleague from RailsConf 2006 and a bona fide accessibility guru of the University of Nebraska, is writing the Accessible Web, which looks to be a comprehensive look at web accessibility and full of practical examples. It should be released in late 2007, but is available as a beta book now. You can buy it, ask questions, and help drive its development. How cool is that?

It’s cool.

How do I know about this fascinating book, you ask? Because Jeremy asked me to be a technical reviewer of his manifesto. And I agreed, having nothing but total disregard for my pet projects and their timelines. If I don’t launch, they can’t be criticized, unless you can see inside my brain. You don’t want to look there, it is dark, dank, and inaccessible in there, unlike Mr. Sydik’s book. The book is bright and shiny and contains many useful and practical insights into the concerns of the disabled and practical approaches to addressing those concerns.

Kudos, Jeremy! I don’t know what kudos are, and I’m too lazy to google it. You should have truckloads of them, though, for having the talent, persistence and foresight to write this book and get it published. Huzza!

Enough Monty Burns talk. On with your day! Nothing to see here, please move along.

Yup, I pulled down the ‘kuniform is dead’ page even though the new version is not up yet. I had to! It was time to announce the launch of kuneshdesign.com, the presence of my new consulting gig.

I’ll be posting here again shortly to talk about some of the decision-making and technology that went into creating kuneshdesign.com, including some thoughts about why I’m launching a contracting business, plans for the biz, and a bit of the technical tricks behind the portfolio section.

Yow! I love using Bloglines as my RSS feed reader. First off, another great find by Ajaxian, cssdocs.org. Basically, it’s an autocomplete interface to the entire w3c’s CSS spec. A nifty example of how Web2.0, in part a presentation layer upheaval fueled by AJAX, can work at its best.
Today’s Sunspots at 37signals has a bunch of great links on shopping, death, getting the most out of high potential people at work, and what I take as the begining of the end of the Web2.0 hype curve. And on that note, here’s post from a few weeks ago by Bill Thompson pissing in the wind of the Web2.0 “revolution”. In it he argues that AJAX and Web2.0 is a presentation layer-only fad in which the true promise of distributed systems is being ignored in favor of fads. He’s right, but only to the extent that the means matters more than the ends.

In other words, if you are enabling networked social software, does it really matter what’s on the backend or which backend is being used? Joel Splosky gets all Frederick Brooks about this point, making it clear it is not the means—i.e.—tools or methods, but understanding the requirements that matter:

I believe the hard part of building software to be the specification, design, and testing of this conceptual construct, not the labor of representing it and testing the fidelity of the representation.... If this is true, building software will always be hard. There is inherently no silver bullet.

Dion Almaer at Ajaxian.com posted a nice find: a series of video-recorded Douglas Crockford (inventor of JSON) presentations regarding Advanced Javascript implementation. These are presentations Crockford did at Ajax Experience and teaching internally at Yahoo!