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Published on December 05, 2008
Web Standards: Where the ROI is
Editor's Note: Web designers and developers seem to talk a lot about "Web Standards", but what about the people who sign the contracts and pay the bills? Are Web Standards just another tax that businesspeople are being asked to pay, or is there truly sustainable business value in adopting Web Standards? Why is Microsoft investing so heavily in improving Web Standards support in our line of products. We asked Molly to write this article to succinctly explain the business value of Web Standards to business decision makers.
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Published on December 05, 2008
Web Design from the Gut
Scour the Web searching for some permutation of the keywords "web", "design", "workflow", "process", "aneurism" - OK, not so much the last one - and, you'll probably find a plethora of literature that delves into five-phase processes that usually start and end with phases "Concept" and "Launch" respectively. Not that there's anything wrong them; in fact, they're generally quite accurate and most of those phases do, in fact, occur. But in my experience, it's far from linear; to the contrary, the process is usually pretty iterative, often random, and frequently characterized by all kinds of obstacles - from ridiculous deadlines to equally ridiculous stakeholders. In this article, we will reflect on the web design process - the real-world process - through the lens of the making of MIX Online. The goal is not to be prescriptive, but to attempt to extrapolate some practical lessons through this experience by explaining it in bold and honest detail.
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Published on October 21, 2008
Microformats: The Quiet Revolution
Imagine a browser that could automatically detect locations, addresses, people, or events; and allowed us to easily add them to our address books or calendars. This vision is quietly becoming a reality. By adopting microformats, not only do you get the practical benefits of a set of well developed conventions for marking up common data, but you'll be helping to fuel the next generation of browser and search engine innovation.
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Published on October 21, 2008
Designing with Microformats
What if there was a way to recognize information common among webpages as something specific (like an event or contact)? What could we *do* with this info? How could we take this data and make it useful and easy to work with? Enter microformats. With a keen eye toward UX, the MIX Online team created the Oomph: A Microformat Toolkit to help the creation, style, and consumption of common types of data found on the web.