software.dev

I figured that to break in the new site (I hate the word blog), I should include a little bit about myself and what I do. Note: This site is not a site about what I ate this morning, or recounting every detail of my life. This site will focus specifically on software / web-development type stuff, and the issues surrounding it.
For starters, I work at a place on campus at UC Davis called Mediaworks. Mediaworks ( http://mediaworks.ucdavis.edu) does a variety of things — not just programming — for organizations on campus. Some of the services Mediaworks provides are custom animation / graphics, photography, consulting services, and programming, among other things. Of course, as Computer Science Engineering Science, I am part of the Programming Group.

Recently there’s been a big push to make sure all of the IET (the organization of which Mediaworks is one department) websites are HTML / 508 Compliant. Testing said websites and fixing the ones that are not compliant is not the most exciting thing, but it actually turned out to be extremely educational. If you’re like me and first learned HTML back in the Geocities / Angelfire days, chances are you’re in for a rude awakening. A lot of the stuff you used to do — using underline tags, using center tags, using tables for layout — are all either considered bad practices or are deprecated. For instance, I was pretty confused when the w3c validator was complaining about my &ltu&gt tags. Isn’t that the tag for underline? Sure it works, but the tag has been deprecated. Instead, you’re supposed to use the &ltins&gt tag, which, apparently, stands for ‘insert’ (as in, you inserted text; there is a related ‘del’ tag for strikethrough). In any case, there are a lot of little nuances like this that you never really learn until you have to build a site that requires compliance.

508 Compliance is another beast altogether, and has to do with making your site available to the masses, specifically disabled persons. I don’t know a whole lot about the details, but apparently sites that get government money are supposed to make sure that their sites are ‘508 Compliant’ which means that they meet certain requirements set by the ADA. There are things in 508 such as using ‘alt’ tags for images, not using blinking text / marquees (LOL, 1990) , etc… A lot of web developers don’t pay attention to such things, but it can become a pretty big deal.

I have lots of other stuff to talk about, in terms of what I do at Mediaworks but I’ll save that for tomorrow.