.comment-link {margin-left:.6em;}

Taking liberties since 1978

31.5.06

Flexible standards with Flex

Not written much lately as a change of jobs tends to throw everything up in the air. But I spent most of the day reading around Adobe's Flex 2 and so I thought I'd put a few of my thoughts down for posterity's sake, if only so I can come back and laugh at how wrong I was.

I spent sometime looking around and how you "skin" Flex applications, as it will be essential to keep them in line with the company branding. I also looked at the accessibility of Flex to see how it compares against Flash and XHTML.

The first thing that struck me with Flex, is that by default accessibility is turned off. This seems to be because of the performance hit that is taken when it is switched on. The saving grace is that it seems you can "turn on" accessibility from including it as part of the URL, which is great as it puts the user in control; as long as the application has been built with accessibility in mind and that there is an accessible way of switching it on, such as a hidden link at the top of the XHTML page it's embedded in - if that's possible.

The other concern was that while the built in components have been built to be accessible - with some flaws, that building your own components and making them accessible is A LOT of work... In the words of Adobe:
"Because the effort involved in creating accessible components is significant, we recommend that developers use the components provided when accessible applications are required"
While there are 23 components provided, this still sets obvious limitations.

Next I looked into how to change the look and feel of Flex, mostly concentrating in the CSS sides of things, since this is very familiar territory.
As far as I could tell you can use CSS for basic changes like changing the font, but the layout is all controlled in the MXML. The thing that struck me most was when I looked at Adobe Consulting's Style Explorer which nicely demonstrates the flexibility of the UI (excuse the pun) but when I looked at the CSS being produced I was a in for a nasty surprise. It's not so much CSS as it's evil twin. Don't get me wrong it does some great stuff I've always wished CSS would do that easily. But it totally chucks W3C standards out the door, and really shouldn't call itself CSS at all. There's no layout controls, but it does some cool stuff like drop shadows and gradients, which I keep hoping CSS 3 will offer.

Any way a real mixed response today, some good stuff, some bad. The most interesting thing for me is that it allows designers and developers to work on the same code. As someone who often walks a fine line between both it'll be interesting to see if this really can bridge that gap.

17.5.06

Google Analytics

Hooray at last I have received my Google Analytics invite.
I know it's wrong that I'm excited about it - but I can't help it.

Ok so I've only had it five minutes and my little website is hardly the central hub of the internet, so stats wise there isn't a great deal to look at yet.

But there's a cool map to show where your visitors are from as well as graphs and stats that offer marketing info.

It's nicely packaged, useful and it's free.

Thanks Google.

3.5.06

Community Fads

Currently there is a lot of emphasis on creating communities on the web. Part of the Web 2.0 agenda is for the user to "add value", so the more users the better and more useful the website.

Community sites often involve a more personal or emotional relationship, but this is often a double edged sword. While the emotional involvement often offers a certain degree of loyalty, it also means that things can rapidly decend into social politics and infighting or cliques developing, so there has to be an easy way to manage this.

Also like anything it is subject to to the fickle trends of fashion, and while it might gather momentum from being new and interesting, in order to circumvent this is has to offer something really useful and be adaptable enough to change and adapt to the market.

When I think about the websites I visited before I went to university, in about 1996, I don't visit any of the same websites at all. In fact my longest regularly visited website is Hotmail which (used since my first year at uni) I've held even longer than I've been using Google.

There are a vast number of community web sites I've had involvement in over the decade but few have held my attention for long, some have been rewarding and others not, but even at best the commitment lasts little over a year or two. So community based sites might work but you need fresh blood to keep them going, ensuring that might just offer you some level of success.