Update on the Target and accessibility on Techcrunch

At the beginning of the month I weighed in on my feelings on the Target accessibility class action law suit. Now it seems others are doing the same in a heated way on comments in Techcrunch blog on the subject. This debate definitely is gathering momentum, ultimately I think the days of building websites that are inaccessible are over.

Amazon secures patent for SEO friendly URL's... What?

Wow this truly floored me. The US Patent Office (USPTO) has granted a patent for placing a "search string at the end of a URL without any special formatting.". See the diagram left that helped them seal the deal with the USPTO.

A popular technique known as URL aliasing and URL rewriting evolved which allowed developers to move away from non friendly URL's like this:

http://www.domain.com/index.aspx?id=63304&mode=wide

To friendly URL's like this:

http://www.domain.com/vacation packages wisconsin

URL Aliasing been around for many years, and was popularized by Google's search engine. Using this URL format is beneficial in two ways, it's ultra search engine friendly give the pages ranking a boost, and its more user friendly.

On doing some research on this the subject the USPTO is meant to granted patents for something that aren't obvious. Also unless you can prove you were using this technology prior to Amazon filing this patent in 2004 you could be in trouble. This is pure madness! It would seem that this technique utilized by hundreds of millions of data driven websites and blogs are now in breach of Amazon's patent?

Accessibility, Standards and Targets class action lawsuit

The other night I was talking at length to my brother in law Steve about his field of engineering and its various certifications and standards and comparing it to my field of web development. This isn't the first time i've thought about this issue, In a previous blog of mine I went hunting for professional organizations for web development.... there weren't many.

He argued that "no one is going to die if a website doesn't work in Firefox, however in my field if a wall collapses and kills someone we got a problem. Thus we have standards, rules and regulations to make sure that doesn't happen". I agree that no one is going to die if a website doesn't render right but as more mission critical services move online web standards become more important.

Steve is a member of an independent professional organization for engineers known as Ashrae which develops standards among other things for the field of engineering. In the web world we have the W3C which is independent and then corporations like Adobe, Google and Microsoft who play a part in helping to innovate and drive web standards. However nothing is really enforced unless your designing for government who demand section 508 compliance.

He said that engineering has been around for thousands of years, and web development is a new field of expertise and standards and enforcement of those will take time. So it was funny today when stumbled across two separate articles:

• http://ajaxian.com/archives/two-rulings-that-could-improve-web-accessibility


• http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20071003-lawsuit-over-website-accessibility-for-the-blind-becomes-class-action.html
  

Both talk about Targets class action lawsuit for not being 100% accessible to the blind? I shouldn't need to state it, but I will for clarification, Target is a corporation not a government body so no standards apply right? I guess not!

My point to my brother in law is that as more services move online, whether its shopping, banking, bill payment or yellow pages there need to be standards enforced to ensure everyone, young and old, 56k or broadband, iphone or pc can access your site. The lawsuit against Target could prove to be a big factor in enforcement of standards online..... Time will tell but this will be an interesting case to watch!

The website development process told by Lego :)

This article is both informational, and humorous! :)

http://www.pingmag.jp/2005/12/09/the-website-development-process/

Create collection of articles on "Planning, Managing Web Sites and Web Site Projects"

Today I was looking for some example document for a web content plan. I have a structured approach i've used for years, but I always want to keep abreast of things and see what others in the industry are doing. I didn't really find anything concrete howevers on my Google hunt I stumbled across the following page that had a great collection of articles on "Planning, Managing Web Sites and Web Site Projects". Definately worth a look if you need help.