It looks like I'll be heading off to the the Far East this November. One of my stops will be Japan so I've decided to learn as much Japanese as I can. Plus, it gives me an excuse to watch the entire Shogun series again. I've been fascinated with ancient oriental culture since I stumbled on the game Nobunaga's Ambition for the equally ancient Nintendo Entertainment System. I remember scouring (as in - vigorously searching, not as in - livestock diarrhea) the little Book Mobile that would pull up by our school, looking for any books on ninjas, samurai, or the Bushido code. That first love has never gone away. Recently I devoted a lot of time to the art of Bonsai. After killing everything I touched, I decided that the region I live in is clearly not hardy enough for my elite Bonsai skills. On this trip I hope to gain some design inspiration. The Japanese style of minimal clutter to deliver maximum impact really appeals to me. We'll see if any of it can rub off on me. At very least it will fulfill a life long dream. By the way, if you hear about a Japan wide die-off of Bonsia trees sometime in November...

Labels: Japan

Joe Clark at A List Apart has a good article on the proposed changes to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. Just a few highlights I picked out: You can still use tables for layout. [WCAG 2] imagined a parallel universe in which the vast majority of web content ceased to be plain-Jane HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. It envisioned a world in which lots and lots of Flash, PDF, and other, as-yet-uninvented formats were available and intended to be accessible. To accommodate this dreamworld, WCAG 2 was written and rewritten and rerewritten to apply to everything. Along the way, it lost the ability to apply to the real things real developers work on every day—plain-Jane HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. The article is detailed, but worth a read, if you're interested in the proposed standards.

Labels: Web Design