Liudvikas Bukys

From Dylan Greene dot com - Blog Comments - XML button created via CSS, with one small addition:

<a title=”RSS 2.0″ href=”rss.xml” style=”text-decoration:none”><span style=”border:1px solid; border-color:#ffc8a4 #7d3302 #3f1a01 #ff9a57; padding:0px 3px 0px 3px; font:bold 10px verdana,sans-serif; color:#FFFFFF; background-color:#ff6600; text-decoration:none; margin:0px;”>XML</span></a>

The ‘ style=”text-decoration:none” ’ inside the ‘a’ element is needed to prevent Mozilla 1.0.1 (Linux) from underlining the text.

e i g h t - c u b e d . c o m - RSS 2.0 comment links This is in support of aggregators that can use these links to post comments back to a site without leaving the aggregator.

Don Park: Workflow business evaporating? “IBM announced that it will bundle BPWS4J, a BPEL4WS-based web service workflow engine, with Websphere. If workflow becomes just another weapon in the application server feature war, what will happen to the workflow business?”

Jakob Nielsen: 10 Best Intranets of 2002: Notable points:

• “In terms of management structure, the only trend we found was that there was no clear picture of who winning intranet teams report to within the organizations. The two most common organizational homes for the intranet teams were information technology departments and human resources (HR) departments, but we also found good intranet teams reporting to the corporate secretary and the corporate communications department.”
• “Much of the value of an intranet comes from making it a communications tool that all employees check every day. This can be a challenge, especially if the old intranet was universally hated for being clumsy and impossible to work with, as was the case in some of the companies.”
• “The one-stop shopping approach extended to the security features for most of the winning intranets. Single sign-on is finally becoming a reality on many good intranets, following years of persistent user requests.”
• “The winning intranets had all made great strides toward consistency and were typically successful at overcoming internal politics by the sheer quality of the central design, as opposed to the dubious designs usually produced by individual departments. Wal-Mart has a particularly fruitful strategy for managing its intranet for consistency: Users own the content and the central team owns the design.”

and you can buy a 158-page report on the annual competition, including 104 screenshots of the 10 winners.

Schoon, Rees, Jezierski (Microsoft): Designing Application-Managed Authorization

Jakob Nielsen: Top Ten Web-Design Mistakes of 2002 ” Every year brings new mistakes. In 2002, several of the worst mistakes in Web design related to poor email integration. The number one mistake, however, was lack of pricing information, followed by overly literal search engines. “

Google’s new toys: “Google labs just released for your pleasure, some new toys to play with. The first is Google’s Viewer, just type a few words to see a fully working preview of the web site. Another new idea: Google’s Webquotes, View search results with quotes about them from other sites, and the last one is Google’s Froogle, which aims to be the world’s largest catalog.” [Slashdot]

OS News: An Overview of the Boa Web Server: Boa is a single-tasking HTTP server. Boa does not fork a copy of itself or spawn a thread to handle each incoming connection, but rather internally multiplexes the connections. Boa only forks for CGI programs, automatic directory generation, and automatic file gunzipping, each of which must be a separate process.

Web Hosting News: Comodo Declares SSL Price Freeze. Web Host Directory Nov 13 2002 8:38AM ET [Moreover - Computer security news]

Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox, August 19, 2002:: Let Users Control Font Size:

Sometimes technological progress backfires, and the “better” technology turns out to be worse for users. The Web is no stranger to this problem, and has experienced many innovations that would have been best avoided. Examples include frames, changing the color of browser scrollbars, and scrolling text.

Another example of harmful Web technology comes with the increasing use of style sheets , which let web designers specify the exact size of text down to the pixel. Unfortunately, many designers are using this ability, leading to reduced readability of an increasing number of websites.

…

We can’t wait for Microsoft to ship a good browser, though that has to be the ultimate solution to the font size problem. For now, websites can increase readability by following these guidelines:

• Do not use absolute font sizes in your style sheets. Code font sizes in relative terms, typically using percentages such as 120% for big text and 90% for small text.
• Make your default font size reasonably big (at least 10 point) so that very few users have to resort to manual overrides.
• If your site targets senior citizens, use bigger default font sizes (at least 12 point).
• If possible, avoid text that’s embedded within a graphic , since style sheets and font size buttons don’t have any effect on graphics. If you must use pictures of text, make sure the font size is especially large (at least 12 point) and that you use high-contrast colors.
• Consider adding a button that loads an alternate style sheet with really big font sizes if most of your site’s visitors are senior citizens or low-vision users. Few users know how to find or use the built-in font size feature in current browsers, and adding such a button within your pages will help users easily increase text size. However, because every extra feature takes away from the rest of the page, I don’t recommend such a button for mainstream websites.
• Maximize the color contrast between the text and the background (and do not use busy or watermarked background patterns). Despite the fact that low-contrast text further reduces readability, the Web is plagued by gray text these days.