Simply, the specification for custom data attributes states that any attribute that starts with “data-” will be treated as a storage area for private data (private in the sense that the end user can’t see it - it doesn’t affect layout or presentation).

So, you could have:

<div data-firstname="Deane" data-lastname="Barker>

Of course, you can do this now. You’ll just validate in HTML 5.

On August 15th, 2008 we will begin phasing out support for Internet Explorer 6 across all 37signals products. In order to continue using the products without any hiccups, Internet Explorer 6 users should upgrade to a newer browser:

Back in 2003, Bill Gates himself tried to download Windows Movie Maker. He got so frustrated, he sent an email to a bunch of people at Microsoft. This is comedy gold.

I am quite disappointed at how Windows Usability has been going backwards and the program management groups don’t drive usability issues.

Let me give you my experience from yesterday. […]

The next 1,000 or so words is a full-blown riot as Bill recounts the horror of the Microsoft.com download section. He ends with this.

So after more than an hour of craziness and making my programs list garbage and being scared and seeing that Microsoft.com is a terrible website I haven’t run Moviemaker and I haven’t got the plus package.

The lack of attention to usability represented by these experiences blows my mind. I thought we had reached a low with Windows Network places or the messages I get when I try to use 802.11. (don’t you just love that root certificate message?)

1. Site Existence
   At the risk of being absurdly basic, this is the question of whether or not to have a Web site at all. Is the theme and gist of your site necessary? Realistic? Is your Web site solving a problem or addressing a need?

2. Site Content
   So, you’ve decided to have a site, great. Now, what goes in it? This is the decision of what content you publish. If you’re creating a support site for your product, do you post the product manual? Do you have an “About Us” page? A “Contact Us” page?

3. Information Architecture
   So, you have a site and you’re posting your product manual. Awesome. Can anyone find it? Information architecture is how your information or organized throughout your site. Is your stuff in places where people expect it to be, or do they have to hunt for it? Do you’re site move the user from content to content naturally, or laden with frustration?

4. Page Layout
   Fantastic, so we have a site, with good content, and it’s organized well. How does your actual page look? A Web site being a collection of individual, discrete pages, how is each of them organized in the browser? Does your header take up half the screen? Is the menu where people expect to find it? Do you have contact information in the footer of every page?

5. Individual Page Elements
   Finally, we get down to individual page elements. We have a site with good content, organization, and layout. But are your hyperlinks the same color as the surrounding text? Is your font size too small? Your date pickers, do they suck? Do your headings have the same amount of whitespace above them as below them?

Starting from the outer ring — the question of whether to have a Web site at all — it becomes a narrowing process, which each ring getting a little more specific. Getting them all lined up together is the trick.

I had a class with this rule:

a.SomeClass
{
  background-color: transparent;
}

Below that, I had another rule:

ul#SomeId li.SomeClass a.SomeClass
{
  background-color: [some specific color];
}

This is a much more specific rule, obviously, and on IE6 and Firefox, it override the prior background color of “transparent,” as expected.

But on IE7 it wouldn’t. I have no idea why, but IE7 would not override the “transparent” background color. Weird thing was, if I changed the first rule to this…

a.SomeClass
{
  background-color: [some other specific color];
}

…then it would override it. So IE7’s CSS implementation refused to override “transparent,” but it would override any specific color.

Why would this be? And why only IE7, of all browsers? It worked correctly in IE6, which is always something of a miracle. I’m mystified.

Like Microsoft itself, MSWeb is insanely huge and distributed. Let’s use some numbers to paint a picture of the situation. MSWeb contains:

• 3,100,000 pages
• Content created by and for over 50,000 employees who work in 74 countries
• 8,000 separate intranet sites

That’s a lot of information, and the way it was organized is fascinating. Thrilling, even. I had to stop to catch my breath a couple times while I was reading it.

It didn’t affect me like this when I read it in the last edition. But I’ve been a serious student of information architecture over the last year, and this entire chapter puts the capstone on how my thinking has changed for intranet organization.

I used to be solidly in the “centralize” camp — get them all on the same CMS, using the same page design, etc. My change of heart started when I read “Laughing at the CIO,” which is a superb book by Bob Boiko (who also wrote the 1,100-page “Content Management Bible,” both editions of which I conquered over time).

Boiko helped me understand that the key to information success in the enterprise is not to control all the information, but to provide the easiest access to it, wherever it might reside.

This means letting a thousand flowers bloom, and letting information reside where it’s created. Your job, as information architect, is to catalog it, make sure it’s searchable, and make sure the high points — the most referenced information — is easy to find. Your job is to refine search, build glossaries and common points of reference, and categorize selected resources amid the fray.

The idea of riding herd over all that information and trying to surf the avalanche of data as it spills out of the collective heads of a company that big — I get light-headed just thinking about it.

Someday, when Blend is a teenager, I’d love a long-term consulting job at some big company struggling with their intranet. Someday.

In the vast majority of website projects that I have managed during my ten years in the industry, content is often the last thing to be considered (and almost always the last thing to be delivered). We’ll spend hours, weeks, even months, doing user scenarios, site maps, wireframes, designs, schemas, and specifications—but content? It’s a disrespected line item in a schedule: “final content delivered.”

Four years ago, I said this:

Are you ready? Here it is: the big secret to a great Web site is…

Find people who like to write. And can write well.

Too many times I see Web sites being put together with no thought for the content that’s going to go in them. At the initial meeting, there are designers and programmers and project managers, but rarely do you find a writer. We’re so concerned with building the swimming pool that we often forget the water.

This experiment yielded no evidence that zebra striping consistently improves the accuracy or speed of tasks.

It does, however, make the tables look nicer to most people. Maybe that’s reason enough?

Aligning a navigation menu with the right margin might look cool, but the resulting ragged left margin severely reduces the speed with which users can scan the menu and select their preferred options.

The other two problems are (1) designers using all CAPS, and (2) lack of contrast between the background and letters.

What makes this interesting is that the University of Michigan read his Alertbox and realized they were guilty of all three problems, so they fixed their menu the same day, which caused Nielsen to update this column.

An examination of both screencaps is below the fold, and it’s interesting to look at — I tend to agree that the changed menu is remarkably more readable. And this is not only when actually reading it, but it just beckons to be read more. The “before” menu is something I probably would just gloss over without reading it, where I’d be much more likely to read the “after” menu.

The default (you can switch) presentation is via something called SpicyNodes.

SpicyNodes is a zesty way to explore information on the Web. We’ve taken sophisticated radial mapping technology and made it easy to use – for both you and your visitors.

Hey, it’s pre-beta.

The Revolution themes are widget-ready, customizable themes that provide ideal solutions for online magazines, online newspapers, and other websites that wish to use WordPress as a content management system.

There’s a real estate site, a news paper site, a general business site, etc. Really nicely done, and it’s stuff like this that really pushes WordPress forward.

About $80 each for a single use.

(Note: the audio for this post is here.

We have a client building a large, static site. The files in the site right now — in the middle of development — are named for their page ID on the content manifest:

A657.aspx
J864.aspx
etc.

We’re going through now and assigning them more usable, “plain english” URLs:

/products/industrial/portable
/products/residential/cleaning
etc.

This is going to be a tedious process, and I got to wondering why we do it. So I figure I’d write down all the reasons why the plain-english URLs are a good idea.

1. They are easier to remember and communicate
   The plain-english URLs are more memorable to the customer, and they impart some meaning. When picking URLs, we envison someone at the client’s firm reading the URL to someone over the phone. How easy is it going to be?

2. Users can use them as a navigation device
   The plain-english URLs impart some meaning to where the user is in the Web site. The URL becomes another crumbtrail.

3. They have branding value
   The URL becomes another way to position your product or information in the marketing space. It becomes another label to describe your product.

4. They have SEO value
   We’ve debated this before, but an unscientific study apparently proves there’s some value to it.

5. You hide the file extension
   I think this is a critical point (though I don’t always follow it). File extensions are bad form in general, because they bind you somewhat to the underlying platform.

6. You can use the URL in code to determine context
   By referring the URL in code, you can determine where the user is in the Web site. In this client’s case, we’re going to drive their navigation off the URL — based on what URL was accessed, we will decide what secondary nav to load in the sidebar.

7. The URL becomes an abstraction layer to content
   The long URLs don’t have to point to actual files. By using URL re-writing, you can point those wherever you want. Of course, you could do this with the short ones too, but “/products/industrial/” has universal value which you could always point to specific content. What universal abstract value does “A657.aspx” have?

8. They open up new analytics
   In particular, Google Analytics has “content drilldown,” where you can roll up traffic views based on URL pattern. You can see how many people visited the “portable” section, then how many visited the “industrial” section. This can tell you things like what the most popular section in “industrial products” was, etc.

That’s a quick list. If you have others, let me know in the comments.

(And yes, I know Gadgetopia’s URLs are somewhat lame in this regard. There are reasons why I did it, but changing it now would probably not be worth the value. But if I had to do it over…)

Formatting web content: that’s the new CONTENTED course I’m working on at present. And it struck me that every WYSIWYG editor has good buttons and bad buttons.

Bad, bad: Bold, italic, colour text, font size, centre text and right align text.

Good buttons: bullet list, numbered list, blockquote, insert link and insert image.

Excellent buttons: Heading 1, Heading 2, Paragraph styles etc.

The bad buttons are OK if you don’t mind your content looking naff. In other words, use them if you are doing your own thing, rattling on about your shopping. Steer clear of them if you want to create a professional impression.

We’re discussing lumping in some writing and text formatting classes with every Web project we do — it’s that important.

Look super in all major browsers […] Optimized for search engines […] Accessibly ready for everyone […]

They have a little slider on their site that you can adjust between number of page designs and number days. One page in seven days is $249; in one day it’s $499.

I know this isn’t new, but it’s interesting in its focus. At what point does HTML/CSS become a commodity? At what point in the maturation of you as a developer does it not pay to wrestle with basic HTML issues anymore and instead concentrate on larger =, more strategic development issues?

I actually enjoy HTML/CSS quite a bit, so I’m not ready to be a customer anytime soon, but I know there’s a lot of shops that could benefit from this.

Why do so many Web sites have illegible text? Didn’t anybody read the text while designing the site?

The unfortunate answer is “no.” It’s quite common for Web sites to be designed without real content. Instead the designer fills the pages with dummy text…

He makes a good point. Do we actually test the typography of our text for legibility when we design a site? Or do we just fill it with Lipsum and gloss over it, assuming people can read it fine?

Our guideline: If you don’t have the final content available while designing a Web site, at least insert representative text from the current site instead of nonsense text.