Last night the CWSA presented “Standards Demystified” at the May NEOUPA meeting.

The panel was made up of:

• Brad Colbow - Colbow Design
• Julie Cousins - American Greetings
• Brendan Cullen - Aztek Creative
• Beth Dean - Progressive Insurance
• Brad Dielman - Moskal Gross Orchosky
• Bridget Stewart - Voices for Ohio’s Children

After Beth & Bridget rattled through the slides, highlighting the origin and need for web standards, the panel opened themselves to a good Q&A session. Topics covered included microformats, the business case for adoption, and browser compatibility issues. I think they answered all the questions well for both the technical and non-technical members assembled there.

Kudos to Progressive for hosting these events and NEOUPA for lining up the speakers and supplying the pizza. I hope this is the first of many collaborations between web-focused organizations in and around Cleveland.

Technorati tags: cwsa, neoupa, web standards, presentation

Tags: cwsa, neoupa, webstandards, presentation

I’m attending CollabTech’08 - a conference being held at CASE about collaborative technologies on campus. It promises to have talks about things such as; OpenID, 2D Codes, Wikis & blogs.

All this in our own backyard.

So if you’re going, be sure to say “Hi”. If you can’t make it I’ll be twittering (#collabtech08) and perhaps sharing stuff on Evernote, WiFi permitting.

Tags: CASE, technology, conference, collaboration, cleveland

Last night’s meeting of the CWSA was probably one of the best so far.

Not because there was a stunning speaker, no offence Joe ;-), or cutting edge techniques presented - It was the group deciding what goals we are trying to achieve in 2008. The assembled 30 odd attendees bounced around ideas such as:

• developing a business case for standards
• reach out to non-web organizations in Cleveland
• attending conferences such as An Event Apart or putting on something like BarCamp

It was also heartening to see a good mix of freelancers, educators and professionals from companies such as TenthFloor, Brulant and Optiem (not including myself) coming together and voicing the same opinions.

Heare’s to Cleveland becoming one of the go-to places for standards-based web design in 2008.

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Tags: cwsa, standards, cleveland, 2008

In 2007 I met some great people right here thanks to the Cleveland Web Standards Association, met some of my favorite internet personalities at SXSW and more and more at work I’m seeing our clients reap the benefits of using web standards.

So imagine my glee when I got an email from Mike DeAloia (ex Tech Czar) asking people to rally around a really cool Cleveland tech company and vote for them on Ideablob.  Especially since the company, Bizooki, is a web services company.

Call me a sad geek, but the first instinct I have is to delve into the source code and validate.  I restrained myself this time, but the restraint didn’t last long.

I wasn’t blown away by the design, but beauty is in the eye etc., so I decided to check out the portfolio section.  As the first example I clicked on loaded I noticed that “tell-tale  images loading in a table” look.  Oh yeah, they’re all here:

• tables for layout
• incomplete doctype
• 75 errors on validation
• no headings <h1>
• no alt text on images (all 83 of them)

Giving the benefit (site was copyrighted 2005) of the doubt I went back and looked at Bizooki’s home page:

• 186 errors on validation
• drop-down navigation doesn’t work without JavaScript
• a mixture of external and internal CSS, divitis, classitis, tables
• no alt text for main navigation images

Now I’ve never met Andy Tabar and I wish him and his company all the best but seeing as he’s based out of Nashville (according to Ideablob) and one of his goals, if he wins the $10,000, is to Hire my established team in India to dedicate 4 months to executing these tasks I can’t say he’s getting my vote.

C’mon guys.  Building with web standards is easy, really!  It doesn’t matter if your in Westlake or Bangalore.  Let’s really get behind this in 2008 and promote great, standards-based web development, putting Cleveland developers up there with the best of them.

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Tags: cleveland, web-standards, bizooki, 2008

Looks like the last guy in city government with a clue about technology just left the building. Listen to Tech Czar Michael DeAloia when he met the bloggers last week, as he gives you an inside view it’s like trying to get tech companies into Cleveland.

It’s about time someone said (and confirmed) what many of us have been thinking.

[found via Eric G. Wiley's blog]

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