Usability 101
Jakob Nielsen has published a primer on usability. It could be useful for introducing concepts of the field to the uninitiated. [Via guuui.]
Archive | August, 2003
Standards vs. Structure
Zeldman: “Recently thoughtful web designers have been making or responding to the point that technologies like XHTML and CSS (colloquially, “web standards”) and appropriate document structure (ponderously, “semantics”) are not the same thing: you can have one without the other, although it is best to aim for both.”
An explanation of the sobig.f virus
A lot of people (myself included) have been getting clobbered with sobig.f emails in their inbox. Here is an explanation of the virus, what it does, and some techniques to combat it. (Via Dave Winer.)
Macosxhints.com has instructions for filter rules you can use with your email client to avoid the sobig.f emails. It’s written for the Mac OS X Mail.app, but you should be able to modify it to suit your particular application.
W3C issues Web Ontology Language candidate for recommendation
InfoWorld reports that the W3C has released the Web Ontology Language candidate for recommendation. This is a big step towards a more semantic web, and will prove to be tremendously useful to IAs working in large projects.
What is an ontology? According to Jim Hendler, co-chairman of the W3C Web Ontology Working Group, it is “the definition of a set of terms and how they relate to each other for a particular domain and that can be used on the Web in a number of different ways.”
"My Father, The Genius"
There’s an extraordinary documentary called “My Father, The Genius” playing on the Sundance Channel ( ” title=”Showing times for the documentary on the Sundance Channel”>schedule).
Synopsis from the movie’s site:
When long-estranged father, dreamer and visionary architect, Glen Small bequeaths his daughter the task of writing his biography, she answers instead with an irreverent film about his unstable career and rocky private life – while he is still alive.
Although Glen comes across as a jerk in most of the movie, I could not help but feel sympathy for him. After all, like many of my colleagues, I also left architecture school with my overcharged ego ready to CHANGE THE WORLD!!!
After some hard knocks I (fortunately) came to see this attitude as na?ve and immature, and decided to play nice with the rest of mankind. Glen didn’t (was he too smart? passionate? nuts?), and at 61 years of age—when the movie is shot—is financially ruined and professionally unfulfilled. The movie prompts the question: “must you really sacrifice your integrity in order to achieve great things in the world?”
This documentary should be compulsory viewing for all architecture students before graduation. It is the nonfiction version of Ayn Rand’s Fountainhead, one with a very different ending.
Here’s Glen’s site, in case you’re curious about his work. (Note that most of it dates from the 1970s and remains unbuilt.)
