afongen

A couple fun things coming up soon:

First, my colleague Sara and I will be providing accessibility training to MnSCU webmasters across the state. This is part of a strong effort being undertaken to highlight the need for accessible web resources, especially important since MnSCU (my employer) is both a higher ed institution and a government agency. It’s also an opportunity for me to completely rewrite our accessibility guidelines, which are based on the just plain sad and often incorrect Minnesota State guidelines. Part of me would just like to point to the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative, but that won’t cut it.

Second, my colleague Matt and I will be presenting a session on XML at the upcoming MnSCU IT conference. Matt is the guy who proved to me that client-side XSLT is workable; until then I’d been myopically convinced that server-side XSLT was the only way to go. Our goal is to demonstrate that XML isn’t just an up-and-coming technology, but that it’s here and can be worked into web sites right now. Matt will show some of the cool ways that he’s been using XML in his site’s back end (as a data store, mostly) and maybe some of his client-side magic. For my part, I’ll show a bit of XML and SOAP at work. Oughta be a party.

I love it. Today I got spam with headers forged to look like it came from the webmaster at afongen.com. Uh, that’s me. I don’t think you’re fooling anyone.

Awww, CmdrTaco proposed today on Slashdot.

13th Parallel: Designing for Standards: Separating structure from style and behaviour.

Note to self: when on a conference call with people you don’t know well (if at all), restrict use of sarcasm. Otherwise you’ll come off sounding a nasty little sonofabitch.

I’ve received some great feedback on my XML – CMS essay. Thanks to all who have written. I’ll write back soon, and then will write a follow-up article later this week that incorporates the comments I’ve received so far.

The Minnesota State Legislature is considering this week (today?) whether to ratify the MAPE contract. This was the contract that was agreed to after a two-week strike last fall, but it’s not finalized until the Legislature ratifies it, and things do not look good. What’s the hold-up? Domestic partner benefits, something that’s par for the course in most major Minnesota companies but apparently causes some serious conniption fits in our legislators. Unbelievable.

Matt Sergeant, the Perl & XML genius who’s brought us wonderful things like AxKit and XML::SAX, has released AxPoint, a Perl module for generating PDF presentation-type documents from XML sources. This will be perfect for a couple presentations I’ve got coming up. (More on that later.)

A little essay I’ve written: XML, Network Design, and Content Management.

For some time now, I’ve been thinking about content management systems that we could use for our web sites at work. From the start, I looked at using XML. Initially this may have been because I was just learning about XML and was eager to put it to use. More than that, I knew that data stored as XML could be usefully transformed with things like XSLT into a variety of formats, which sounded like exactly what we needed.

Now that I’ve been actively working with XML for a couple years, I keep coming back to the idea of using it in a content management system. Why? Am I falling prey to the buzzwords and to the enticements of working with cool technologies? Does the XML hammer make everything look like a nail, or is XML honestly a critical part of a sensible solution?

More…

Hey, another SPAM hole in FormMail. There’s a surprise.