After following this tutorial you will have a basic understanding of how sIFR works and will be able to expand into more advanced areas.
sIFR can be a tricky technology to put in place, this guide will help you make sense of it.
This week, Digital Web contributor Mike Padilla returns with an extremely thought-provoking article about information architecture, Ajax, filtering, user experience and more, in User Interface Implementations of Faceted Browsing. Dense sites have interaction rules all their own, and knowing how visitors navigate and filter your content is of paramount importance. Keeping an eye on searching and browsing strategies can help a great deal. Give Mike’s article a read and add faceted browsing to your appreciation of IA.
Digital Web’s Editor in Chief, Matthew Pennell, today asked an intriguing question on his personal blog, “Is it time to re-introduce sound to the web?” Web interfaces—and web apps in particular—now achieve a degree of interactivity previously reserved for desktop apps. But while desktop apps use lots of sound effects for passive information, the web remains largely silent (except for the .mp3s automatically blasting from MySpace page). Is there a new degree of human engagement to be gained from subtle, interaction-oriented sound effects in websites? Given bandwidth, is the time ripe? Discuss!
About a year and a half ago I mentioned Nikita the Spider: a bulk validation and link checking tool as a useful quality assurance tool. Well, Nikita the Spider has received a lot of fixes since then and has recently been taken out of beta. It is no longer completely free, but the first 125 pages it crawls will cost you nothing.
But what may be more interesting is what Nikita finds when it crawls a site. Philip Semanchuk, Nikita's author, has analysed the statistics Nikita collected during March 2008 and walks you through the results in By The Numbers – March 2008. A few highlights:
alt attribute for img elementsOf course these statistics are only representative of a very small sample of the pages that exist on the web. In addition to that, those pages live on sites that somebody has actually asked Nikita to crawl, so it is likely that they are more aware of web standards than the average website owner/author/developer.
It's still interesting reading though.
Add 456 Berea Street to your Technorati favorites.
Posted in (X)HTML, Web Standards.
Twistori is a fun little site created by Amy Hoy and Thomas Fuchs. As you would expect, design is a key part of the application, and the Prototype / Script.aculo.us combo pull off the work.
The site pulls in live data on various topics (love, hate, think, believe, feel, wish) via the real-time twitter search tool summize.
In related Twitter news, I created a Greasemonkey script Twitter Translate that auto-translates foreign text to your language inside Twitter.
For more Ajax news, you can follow me @dalmaer or our new @ajaxian account.