Quotes to live by when building any web application

I've talked before about the importance of a vision or guiding principles to any major web initiative. Adding to that here is a Dilbert comic and some some great quotes by:

"Good Design at Apple comes from saying No to 1,000 things to make sure we don’t get on the wrong track or try to do too much"
Steve Jobs, CEO, Apple

"Simple things should be simple, and complex things should be possible"
Alan Kay, Disney Fellow and VP of R&D, The Walt Disney
Company

"Great Design, It's that ineffable quality that certain incredibly successful products have that makes people fall in love with them despite their flaws."
Joel Spolsky, Great Design

"Launch early and often, but not too early (the first time)"
Carl Sjogreen, Product Manager, Google

I hope you find these useful on your next web project! :)

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/

Agile isn't an excuse for sloppy project management or development

Those who have read 37Signals book: "Getting Real" should be well versed in what Agile Development is all about. Basically the theory you can do more with less is the easiest description I have of what Agile Development boils down to. I am warming up to the idea of a development process that is less linear, and more pliable to the demands of a fast paced on demand "Web 2.0" world.

That being said in a recent Dr Dobb's newsletter I read this article on the disciplines of development using Agile methodology.

Web Technologys Explained

I just read the following article title "Advanced Web Design: A Primer" over at Sitepoint, its offers a pretty comprehensive breakdown and explanation of all the current web technologys including:

• Clients and Servers
• Client-side Technologies: JavaScript, VBScript
• Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) & Dynamic HTML (DHTML)
• Java
• Server-side Technologies
• Common Gateway Interface (CGI)
• Server-Side Scripting Languages
• Perl, PHP, ASP
• Cold Fusion, Server-Side Java (Servlets, JavaServer Pages, etc.)
• Database Servers, MySQL

Interestingly Flash, Silverlight, .NET and Ruby on Rails where left out of the list, but apart from that its a good overview and read. So if you need to brush up on the state of web development technologies out there I suggest reading it. If you want to learn even more about building web applications check out 37Signals online book.