After having a non-blogpost-worthy summer, I attended Fronteers 2008 Thursday and Friday last. Some people might have known about that, but I didn’t announce that on this weblog. In this blogpost, I’ll mention the things I liked about Fronteers 2008.

Fronteers 2008 was held in Pakhuis de Zwijger, Amsterdam (actually a few hundred meters away from the place where the whole Fronteers idea was initiated last year). As I did some volunteering during the conference, I did not see every session.

Friendly URLs

During a session about The Dutch Web Guidelines, Koen Willems told us about friendly URLs. Now I think everyone knows the general benefits of friendly URLs. Luckily, Koen came up with something new: a technique to handle search requests with friendly URLs. So instead of example.com/search.php?q=awesomekeyword you’d have example.com/search/awesomekeyword.

The key is to redirect the first one to the second one on the server, that is just a few lines of code. With some unobtrusive JavaScript you could add a feature to do the redirection on the client side. In my opinion, it is a bit overdone to rewrite this kind of URLs, mainly because a search result page for a perticular keyword is not part of the hierarchy of the website.

Maintainable CSS

Stephen Hay talked about maintainable CSS. He bundled the oh-i-know-that-but-i-don’t-do-that parts of writing CSS in a nice presentation. Main point is setting up a good structure in your document: layout, color and type, eventually in seperate CSS files. Also setting up a good structure in you HTML will make maintaining your code a lot easier.

Actually I don’t really like the idea of separating the layout, color and type parts of your design. I think I will need to click more through tabs in my editor. “How do you write CSS?”, you might ask. After setting up a good structure in my HTML, I build the CSS in the same order. So header parts at the top, footer parts at the bottom. I indent the selectors for elements inside the parts of my layout. Your file becomes quite large if you do it this way, but combined with a good text editor it works like a charm for me.

CSS selectors madness

After partying on the boat Lizboa, I walked towards the train station with Bert Bos and some other people. Bert told us how CSS was initiated, and what the difficulties were in the beginning. He mentioned the idea of selectors, before the cascade was developed. It would be like this mad: If you have an element, and two selectors actually select that element, you will get an average of the properties that apply to those selectors. For example, if you have p {color:red} and body p {color:blue}, your paragraphs would be… purple.

Maintainable JavaScript

Christian Heilmann picked maintaining JavaScript as topic for his presentation. Luckily he didn’t introduce much new things to me. He told about separating parts in your application in functions, and then make some of the general functions available outside the application, and some specific parts not. So if you have a small function to convert seconds to minutes and seconds, you can write it in your application as one function. Then call it every time you need it. You then reveal the re-usable parts out of the script’s scope, because some other script on your website might use it as well.

Another good thing to use, is a configuration object at the top of your application, instead of using class names and ID values inside the functional part of your JavaScript. What I missed a bit over there, is that some configuration might be depending on the page your JavaScript is loaded. You could simply use attributes of elements inside your webpage, and read them out via JavaScript. An example is using a meta tags in your head, with some strings for messages you display. You can translate an HTML page (eventually in your CMS), and use the same JavaScript file over and over again. You can also use the HTML5 data attributes. (However, you’ll get an “invalid” HTML webpage. The validator at W3.org cannot handle custom DTDs). I will write an in-detail instruction on how to do all this in the near future.

Absolute positioning to the rescue

Several front-end people sometimes ask me: why do you use absolute positioning for this…? My answer always is: I do not want to change the logical order of the content in my HTML. This is exactly what Andy Clarke presented about. First, he defined all kinds of positioning in CSS. Then he gave some (beautiful looking) examples of general occurring cases where absolute positioning is better than floating elements all around.

Conclusion

Fronteers 2008 was a really amazing experience, if I may say so as someone who helped organizing it a bit. If you’re interested in the other sessions, you might want to take a look at the page where all slides are collected. If you have any questions about the conference or the topics I mentioned above, feel free to drop a comment below.

So, for those who missed it, I attended @media this year. I really enjoyed the great speakers, learned some more things about design and usability and met quite a lot people for the first time. But what did I like the most? Here some things I actually learned and liked.

The first presentation was by Jeffrey Veen, about how to design with and organize data in a clear way. It is a bit impossible to reproduce the key things in one sentence. In my opinion it is a good thing to give the user a bit control of the way the data is resented. That could be done by a table with the data, and also displaying a graphic representation. (To make it accessible, you could use a table, and turn that with JavaScript and canvas into a graph. Something I discussed a bit with Robert Jan later.)

Another presentation I liked very much, was about Mental Models. Indi Young did a really great job giving us an introduction into that. Basically it is about asking people what they feel about something (a website, a hotel, anything), and the things they expect of it. By grouping all those things, and combining that with parts of the subject that support those feelings, you can quite easily see what kinds of things need to be changed to achieve a better experience for the clients or users. She has also written a book about it, and I put that one on my wishlist.

Andy Clark did a design presentation, wherein he explained in a very good way how he got inspiration from comic books for his designs. I think it was a good topic and it can be applied to other creative things, too. The essence is to understand really good what the original creator wanted you to feel or do. If you want to achieve the same with your website, it is a matter of applying the method used.

For me the presentation by Dan Rubin was very educative. As a developer, primarily, I don’t really have much experience in adding details to the designs I create. He pointed at a lot of things I really wouldn’t come with by myself.

Although I didn’t really learn much from the presentation Steve Faulkner gave on WAI-ARIA, it was good to be part of the audience. He introduced ARIA, the way to make applications accessible by applying some attributes to input elements. He clearly demonstrated what the benefits are, by using JAWS to demonstrate some simple applications that use ARIA. (A good point to start with ARIA, is the documentation at Mozilla.)

A great speaker was Richard Ishida, who demonstrated Unicode as a tool for creating an international website. He didn’t tell anything new to me, made very clear for everyone in the audience why and how to think good about i18n before you start to build the website. It was really a pity he couldn’t present a part of his presentation (not enough time).

So, that were the most interesting parts for me. I hope to attend @media next year again, I’d really love to see more presentations like these.

There are a lot cool meetings and conferences I’ll attend the next few months. I hope to meet people I only know via the internet, and I’m sure I’ll learn new, exciting things.

But I’d like to start with a meeting in the past. Thanks to Kilian, I could enjoy Nokia Trends Lab in Amsterdam last Thursday. The trends lab itself was not very amazing, but it was fun though. Nokia didn’t show many things, only two models that are just updates of existing ones. The event was planned until 2pm, so I had to leave much earlier because I had to catch a train. The band Moke was very entertaining.

Next Friday I hope to learn some things on the design side of creating web sites. In Delft the Internetcreatieven Kennisdag takes place. I’m not a real designer, but I really like to expand my knowledge on this subject.

Early in April, Adobe will held a cool one-day conference on their new product: AIR. Adobe AIR is a way to use web applications on your desktop. With JavaScript, Flash or Flex (you guess what technique I use) it is possible to create so called AIR-applications, which can easily communicate with APIs from web services. At the conference several Adobe employees will talk about it, and there is time for discussion and other things.

A week later, pfcongrez is held. I’m looking forward to learn about PHP frameworks, and it is very cool Marktplaats.nl will share some bits about how their web site works.

Last, but absolutely not least: I will attend @media this year! Two days of meeting amazing people, listening to well-known speakers and exploring London. The full schedule is not known at the moment of writing, but I’m sure there will be many intersting presentations. Last year I couldn’t make it, but at this moment all lights are green. I’m looking forward to take my plane just a few hours after making my mathematics exam (oh, you didn’t know I haven’t finished secondary education yet?).

So, are you planning to go to any of the mentioned meetings or conferences? I’d love to hear, we possibly can get to know each other. Just leave a comment over here :)

29 November next I’ll speak in Groningen at a Fronteers meeting. I’ll talk a bit about Fronteers itself: what is it, why, who et cetera. Also, I will tell something interesting about classes and ids: how to optimize the usage of these attributes.

The meeting will take place in ABN AMRO Business Corner of the Euroborg, and is organized by Wisdom/Ordina. Two other people will tell something interesting. Stefan Wobben is going to talk about usability. The way Wisdom/Ordina handles front-end web developing, will be presented by Alexander Kroon.

The meeting will kick off at 18 o’clock, and it is (of course) possible to meet colleague front-end developers. Hope to do that, and see you next Thursday!

Update: the slides can be viewed at SlideShare.

At the last Fronteers meeting we (about 35 front-end developers) e-discussed with Eric Velleman (Accessibility.nl) about the Government Web Accessibility Guidelines. Are the guidelines realistic? I said e-discussed, since by a communication error Eric was on a holiday in France (we don’t exactly know what went wrong). However, using a web cam and an internet connection we were able to discuss the guidelines.

One thing we discussed were (large) menu structures. Should the menu in the markup be placed before of after the content? Screen reader users seem to expect the menu be before the content. If the content is placed before the menu, they are distracted and don’t understand what is going on. It is an habituation you can’t control, so putting a menu at the bottom of your mark-up looks like an unreasonable option (to me).

It also seems to be a myth that frames are bad for accessibility for screen readers. With a keyboard shortcut they can switch between frames, so a menu and the content are separated quite well. Some blind people prefer framed web sites over ‘normal’ web sites. This may sound like an recommendation of frames by me, but it isn’t. By the way, the iframe element will probably be back in HTML5.

The guidelines state that large menus must have an option to skip the menu and go straight to the content. These skip links are put on top (and sometimes also at the bottom) of an web page, and hidden via CSS for visual browsers. Some more about skip links can be found at Juicy Studio.

I thought it would be better to always use skip links. If more and more people use them, screen reader users may get used to them. Also, if you want the menu at the bottom then, it will be no problem to do that. Since the user gets the skip link first, they can decide to go to the content or the navigation. If you use more than one skip link, it is important to always put the skip links in the order the content and menu appear in the markup.

From now on I’ll provide skip links in the web sites I build, how about you?