The WebVisions conference was held May 20-22 in Portland, Oregon. Three days of “mind-melding on what’s new in the digital world.”
Speaker: Molly E. Holzschlag.
Molly is a Web Standards, Accessiblity, and CSS guru. She’s worked for Microsoft’s IE division and now works for Opera.com and has written a ton of great books on standards, CSS, etc.. Here’s an excerpt from the program:
“Put aside Web Standards, Accessibility and best practices. No, really, just for a moment! Let’s re-examine what our goals are as visionary designers and developers in an evolutionary technology. As the Web moves more and more toward applications, shared APIs and a myriad of open source and proprietary options, a re-evaluation of how we work, what words we use and what our real goals are with the Web is in order.”
I wasn’t sure what exactly I was getting into for this session. What I did know was Molly, as I have used some of her books in the past and have visited her site, molly.com. Molly was a quirky, energetic presenter, with a true passion for universal design. What is universal design? It’s having a design that is created with standards, accessibility, and best practices, but it happens naturally.
A good example is handicap parking. Just about every business has a space for those who are handicapped. Well for the most part, folks who are “handicapped” don’t want special treatment, and want to just blend in to the masses. Why not design a parking lot, where the stalls are a little wider, to account for wheel chair accessibility, folks on crutches, etc.. Make sure your parking lots don’t have curbs and utilizes ramps, but in a way that is natural and “everyone” can use it.
That’s what univeral design is. If you make design about everybody, and not outright call out “special”, that’s sexy. Molly gave these pointers:
- Build Standards, not to a web browser
- Tweak for specific browser as absolutely needed
- Use non proprietary solutions whenever possible
- Progressively enhance the web site
- Ensure backwards content compatibility
We can help by thinking univeral, following standards, opening the Web, and encouraging non-proprietary formats. It’s OK to break the rules as well, as long as you think universal first. Breaking the rules is pretty sexy.
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