I read a really intriguing post over at Berea St. on browser testing (which links to a discussion by super-hero Andy Clarke). Johanson presents his order for testing–its interesting to see how many browsers a professional looks at. I feel mighty inferior, since I test only in 1) Safari MAC, 2) Firefox MAC, 3) Firefox PC, 4) IE 6.0 PC. I really want to start testing in IE 7.0, but don’t have access to it (yet, I’m figuring Purdue will upgrade this summer).
I also read an interesting article by Mike Davidson promoting a new flash replacement technology. He prohesizes that the standards community will probably roar–and as someone on the fringe of that community, I’m not sure how loud I want to yell. I am committed to creating low bandwidth webpages, because I firmly believe that broadband will become a limited resource–there’s too many articles out there concerning its future limited availability. Brief list:
- Google want ‘dark fiber’
- When Being a Verb is Not Enough
- How Would You Deal With A Global Bandwidth Shortage
If the internet is going to survive, then users need to be responsible in how much bandwidth they use. This for me is part of the ethical agenda underlying what I consider to be web2.0–not just a corporate philosophy or marketing strategy, but a dispersed responsibility to every member of the internet community to behave ethically, else the system crashes (distribution of responsibility from a centralized power to individual users requires users to accept this responsibility.
On the other hand, I’m not sure how large these flash files are. Typically, the background-image replacement techniques I use don’t take up much bandwidth since I keep my .gif sizes relatively small (always under 100kb). So, I won’t begin to complain about this new technology until I have had more time to play with it.
Personally, I have been composing like crazy. I am currently working on an introduction to XHTML and CSS. Basically, I am transforming all of my demonstrations from my multimedia writing class into a collection of hypertext tutorials that could easily be adapted to a print publication. When finished, it should have six “sessions”:
- Intro XHTML
- Intro CSS
- Intermediate XHTML
- Intermedieate CSS
- Advanced XHTML
- Advanced CSS
My vision is that it could be used in a professional writing class or a multimedia writing class. The project reverse engineer’s the creation of a “professional web presence,” integrating the howto (tech knowledge) with the “why would you” (rhetorical / design choices). Since I am working on about 8 projects at once right now, I don’t have any finished product to share yet. But lots will be coming soon! (I’ve also committed to finishing my prospectus before spring break, so perhaps “soon” won’t be all that “too soon”)
