Archive for October, 2007
Accessibility, in the context of websites, refers to the degree to which the content you add to your web site can be accessed by your audience; all of them, not just the able bodied ones and those with 20/20 vision. Accessible websites offer good support for screen readers, cater for users who browse the web without viewing graphics and who wish to magnify the text on your pages to a level comfortable for their eyesight.
Dreamweaver has a number of features which enable web developers to ensure that content on their pages Is accessible. There are useful dialogs which appear automatically when content added to a page can be made accessible. Dreamweaver also allows web page creators to check their pages for any accessibility issues.
The main settings in Dreamweaver are located by choosing Edit - Preferences. On the left of the Preferences screen there are a series of categories. In the General category, you should ensure that the option to use CSS instead of HTML tags is activated. Also, in the Accessibility category, you should switch on all of the checkboxes for displaying a dialog of relevant accessibility attributes for form object, media (Flash, video etc.) and form elements.
So what is the result of switching on these various preferences? Well, firstly, Dreamweaver will use CSS tags whenever you format text or the background of the page. The CSS tags contain the formatting information and will be placed in the head area of the page away from the content which will be in the page body. The program will also display a dialog box with accessibility options each time you insert an image, form field or media element such as a Flash movie or video clip.
Thus, whenever you add an image to a page, a dialog will appear prompting you for alternate (alt) text. This attribute makes images more accessible by providing a description of the images to users accessing the web with a slow connection as they wait for the image to load or who have disabled the display of images. The alt text will also be spoken by the screen readers commonly used by web surfers with impaired vision.
In addition to the alt text, Dreamweaver also allows you to browse for or enter a path leading to a long description file. This option relates to HTML’s longdesc attribute which should be used for images whose content is too detailed or too important to be described in the short alt text.
When the accessibility options relating to forms are active, Dreamweaver will display a dialog of options every time a form or form element is added to the page. The first set of options relates to the addition of the LABEL tag which serves to associate descriptive text labels with the form control to which they relate. The dialog also allows you to specify the order in which elements will be accessed by pressing the Tab key on the keyboard.
Similarly, if you add a media element to a page, the accessibility dialog pops up and prompts you to enter up to three elements: a title, an access key and a tab index. The title should be a description of the media element and serves a similar function as the alt text which is used with images. The access key is an optional keyboard shortcut which can be used to make the media element active. The tab index is a number which indicates the position of the element in the tab order for that page. The tab order is the order in which elements are accessed when the user presses the Tab key.
Dreamweaver not only gives you help in making your page content accessible, it will also check your pages to see if they contain elements which are not accessible. To use the accessibility utility, click on the File menu then on Check Page and finally on Accessibility. The utility runs and then displays a list of elements on the page which are not accessible. If you double-click on any of the items in the list, the code representing it will be instantly highlighted allowing you to edit it.
The writer of this article is a trainer and developer with Macresource Computer Solutions, a UK IT training company offering Adobe Dreamweaver Classes in London and throughout the UK.
October 8th, 2007
Google and IBM today announced an initiative to promote new software development methods which will help students and researchers address the challenges of internet-scale applications in the future.Â
The goal of this initiative is to improve computer science students’ knowledge of highly parallel computing practices to better address the emerging paradigm of large-scale distributed computing. IBM and Google are teaming up to provide hardware, software and services to augment university curricula and expand research horizons. With their combined resources, the companies hope to lower the financial and logistical barriers for the academic community to explore this emerging model of computing.Â
The University of Washington was the first to join the initiative. A small number of universities will also pilot the program, including Carnegie-Mellon University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Maryland. In the future, the program will be expanded to include additional researchers, educators and scientists.
“Google is excited to partner with IBM to provide resources which will better equip students and researchers to address today’s developing computational challenges,” said Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google. “In order to most effectively serve the long-term interests of our users, it is imperative that students are adequately equipped to harness the potential of modern computing systems and for researchers to be able to innovate ways to address emerging problems.” Â
Fundamental changes in computer architecture and increases in network capacity are encouraging software developers to take new approaches to computer-science problem solving. For web software such as search, social networking and mobile commerce to run quickly, computational tasks often need to be broken into hundreds or thousands of smaller pieces to run across many servers simultaneously. Parallel programming techniques are also used for complex scientific analysis such as gene sequencing and climate modeling.
“This project combines IBM’s historic strengths in scientific, business and secure-transaction computing with Google’s complementary expertise in Web computing and massively scaled clusters,” said Samuel J. Palmisano, chairman, president and chief executive officer, IBM. “We’re aiming to train tomorrow’s programmers to write software that can support a tidal wave of global Web growth and trillions of secure transactions every day.”
For this project, the two companies have dedicated a large cluster of several hundred computers (a combination of Google machines and IBM BladeCenter and System x servers) that is planned to grow to more than 1,600 processors. Students will access the cluster via the Internet to test their parallel programming course projects. The servers will run open source software including the Linux operating system, XEN systems virtualization and Apache’s Hadoop project, an open source implementation of Google’s published computing infrastructure, specifically MapReduce and the Google File System (GFS).
At the University of Washington, students were able to harness the power of distributed computing to produce complicated programs such as software that scans voluminous Wikipedia edits to identify spam and organizes global news articles by geographic location.
“In 2006, when I helped Christophe Bisciglia, a former UW student now a senior engineer at Google, to develop the program, our goal was to understand the challenges that universities face in teaching important new concepts such as large scale computing and develop methods to address this issue,” said Ed Lazowska, Bill & Melinda Gates Chair of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington. “A year later, we’ve seen how our students have mastered many of the techniques that are critical for large scale-internet computing, benefiting our department and students.”
“Carnegie Mellon applauds Google and IBM for helping to provide the resources that will help professors better prepare our students for the challenges presented by highly parallel computing,” said Randal Bryant, Dean of the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. “We are quite pleased to be among the first universities participating in this program this fall.”
To simplify the development of massively parallel programs Google and IBM have created the following resources:
- A cluster of processors running an open source implementation of Google’s published computing infrastructure (MapReduce and GFS from Apache’s Hadoop project)
- A Creative Commons licensed university curriculum developed by Google and the University of Washington focusing on massively parallel computing techniques available at: http://code.google.com/edu/content/parallel.html
- Open source software designed by IBM to help students develop programs for clusters running Hadoop. The software works with Eclipse, an open source development platform. The plugin is currently available at: http://lucene.apache.org/hadoop/
- Management, monitoring and dynamic resource provisioning of the cluster by IBM using IBM Tivoli systems management software
- A website to encourage collaboration among universities in the program. This will be built on Web 2.0 technologies from IBM’s Innovation Factory.
October 8th, 2007
Yahoo!, eBay and PayPal today announced a collaborative effort to better protect consumers against fraudulent e-mails and the dangerous scams known as phishing attacks. Starting today, eBay and PayPal customers worldwide using Yahoo! Mail will have a safer e-mail experience - they will begin receiving fewer fake e-mails claiming to be sent by eBay and PayPal. Yahoo! Mail is the first Web mail service to block these types of malicious messages for eBay and PayPal through the use of DomainKeys e-mail authentication technology.
The technology upgrade will be rolled out globally over the next several weeks to all users of Yahoo! Mail.
“eBay and PayPal’s adoption of e-mail authentication technology and this aggressive move on the part of Yahoo! Mail are significant steps forward in the fight to protect consumers against e-mail-based crimes,” said Michael Barrett, chief information security officer at PayPal. “While there is clearly no silver bullet for solving the problems of phishing and identity theft, today’s announcement is great news for our customers who rely on Yahoo! Mail.”
DomainKeys technology provides a unique way to verify the authenticity of e-mail messages, allowing Internet service providers to determine if messages are real and should be delivered to a customer’s inbox. The collaborative effort between Yahoo!, eBay and PayPal will result in the blocking of unauthenticated e-mail, reducing the volume of fraudulent e-mail received by consumers and lowering their risk of falling for phishing attacks.
“By reducing the risk of phishing scams, Yahoo! Mail now offers a much safer Web mail service for eBay and PayPal users, and this protection will benefit the larger Yahoo! Mail community as well,” said John Kremer, vice president of Yahoo! Mail. “We look forward to helping to facilitate continued industry adoption of DomainKeys and the proposed standard DomainKeys Identified Mail, as we continue to increase our efforts to safeguard the inbox.”
“Today is a significant milestone for the added protection of millions of eBay and PayPal customers,” said Dave Cullinane, chief information security officer at eBay. “Through industry cooperation, we can collectively try to stamp out phishing and other e-mail scams. We welcome Yahoo!’s commitment to this endeavor, applaud its leadership role within the Internet service provider community, and encourage others join in the fight to keep consumers safe from phishing attacks.”
Yahoo!, eBay and PayPal are in the process of transitioning their systems from DomainKeys to the proposed standard DomainKeys Identified Mail. The implementation is expected to be complete in the coming months.
About DomainKeys and DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM)
Developed by Yahoo!, DomainKeys addresses the widespread issue of e-mail forgery, using cryptography to verify the domain of the sender. It allows e-mail providers to validate an e-mail’s originating domain, making use of blacklists and whitelists more effective. It also makes phishing attacks easier to detect by helping to identify abusive domains. In May 2007, the Internet Engineering Task Force approved DKIM as a proposed Internet standard — RFC 4871. More information is available at http://dkim.org/ and http://yodel.yahoo.com/2007/05/22/.
October 5th, 2007
Google has today teamed up with dozens of community action organizations around the world to coordinate an International Cleanup Weekend on October 13-14th. Originally started as an internal Google project to encourage Googlers to cleanup their local beaches, parks, and trails close to home and to share their progress using My Maps, the initiative is now being launched publicly in coordination with community action organizations in fifteen countries. In the United States, Google has partnered with Keep America Beautiful, Idealist.org, the Sierra Club, Americorps, and the Student Conservation Alliance in an effort to demonstrate how local cleanup efforts can collectively foster community awareness of the environment at large.
To coordinate and document this global initiative, participants are encouraged to create and submit maps of their intended cleanup areas in Google Maps. Instructions on how to get started are here: http://maps.google.com/help/maps/cleanup/. So far more than 100 cleanup maps have been created by Googlers chronicling the areas they intend to pick-up with friends and family.
For more information please see this post on the Google Blog at: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/10/international-cleanup-weekend-think.html
October 4th, 2007
Google today announced that Postini’s email security and compliance services have been added to Google Apps Premier Edition. Google acquired Postini last month to help companies realize the benefits of hosted applications while also addressing complex information security and compliance requirements.
“With Postini, we saw the potential to deliver a more complete hosted solution for businesses of all sizes,” said Dave Girouard, vice president and general manager of Google Enterprise. “We are quickly adding Postini’s market-leading security and compliance capabilities to Google Apps Premier Edition to give businesses more control over the administration and security of these applications.”
The new security, compliance, policy management, and message recovery services added to Google Apps Premier Edition give customers the ability to:
- Set configurable spam and virus filtering that are customized for the nature of the business, complementing the spam and virus filters already included in Google Apps.
- Centrally manage all outbound content policy, including adding footers to every message based on business policy rules, blocking messages with specific keywords or attachments, and preventing emails with sensitive company information from being sent.
- Create, manage, and report on policies that apply to user groups or individual users.
- Give administrators the option of visibility into all email within their organization for the purposes of compliance.
- Restore messages inadvertently deleted in the last 90 days.
Additional improvements to Google Apps Premier Edition include:
- A new email routing feature (also available in Google Apps Education Edition) that allows organizations to run Google Apps alongside another email solution. Using email routing, administrators can easily run a pilot program of Google Apps (without turning off the existing email system), migrate a subset of users to Google Apps, or segregate groups of users onto a separate email solution (such as the legal department, which may be subject to different policies).
- An immediate increase in storage to 25 GB per user (up from 10 GB).
As a bonus to Postini’s customers, Google is also now offering a free extended trial of Google Apps Premier Edition to all new and existing Postini customers. Customers who sign up for Postini services prior to Dec. 31, 2007 will be able to use Google Apps Premier Edition (including the award winning Gmail application with 25 GB of storage per user) at no cost until June 30, 2008. Postini customers will find information about this offer and setup instructions on the Postini customer portal.
Hosted services, like Google Apps and Postini solutions, provide organizations with high quality communication and collaboration tools without the expense and hassle of traditional on-premises solutions. Google Apps, which includes Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Talk, Google Docs, and the Start Page, has been adopted by hundreds of thousands of businesses and millions of users already. Postini information security and compliance products are used by more than 36,000 businesses and 11 million users. Google intends to continue offering and expanding Postini’s messaging security and compliance products on a stand-alone basis.
These Postini security and compliance capabilities are available immediately at no additional cost in the English-language version of Google Apps and will be available in the international version of Google Apps, available in 27 languages, next month. For more information, please visit http://www.google.com/a/enterprise/.
October 3rd, 2007
Yahoo! Search today announced Search Assist, the most advanced assistance technology available on the Web, and the integration of audio, video and photos directly into the search results to help make Web search effortless for consumers. The new Yahoo! Search was designed to better understand user intent and get consumers to the results they are looking for in one search.
Recent research conducted by Harris Interactive on behalf of Yahoo! on the state of the Web shows that consumers are suffering from “Web search fatigue.” The study revealed that while 99 percent of online adults use a search engine to find information on the Internet, a mere 15 percent of them find what they’re looking for with their first search, with most needing to conduct three to four searches.
“The new Yahoo! Search is focused on getting consumers the most relevant information as well as providing the best user experience. We know that consumers want a complete answer, not a bunch of links, and the changes we’ve made are focused on getting people to the best answer — whether it be a Web link, photo, video or music clip — in one search,” said Vish Makhijani, general manager and senior vice president of Yahoo! Search.
Only available from Yahoo!, Search Assist goes beyond basic search “suggestions” and gives consumers real-time query suggestions as well as related topics and concepts, which is especially valuable when a person is searching on an unfamiliar topic.
Yahoo! Search Assist is there for consumers when they need it and is out of their way when they don’t. Yahoo! Search Assist senses when a consumer needs help with their search and opens a drop down menu of suggestions and related concepts (see diagram 1) that enables further exploration around their search topic.
In addition to the new Search Assist feature, Yahoo! Search has also introduced multimedia integration including video, audio and photos (see diagram 2) directly into the search results, allowing consumers to get their answer — whether it’s a Web link, photo, video or music clip — without leaving the page.
As part of the new Yahoo! Search, consumers will also see new Yahoo! Search Shortcuts, with the most useful information found on the Web and contributed by other online users. The new shortcuts were designed to help consumers save time when searching for popular categories such as events, music, movies, travel, sports, health, shopping, businesses and restaurants (see diagram 3). Yahoo! Search Shortcuts integrate ratings and reviews, photos, official websites and other useful information, giving consumers a complete answer for their search.
The new Yahoo! Search features are available immediately at yahoo.com in the United States, and Yahoo! Search Assist will also be available in the near future in the United Kingdom.
October 2nd, 2007
Microsoft recently purchased a company called Jellyfish.com, based in Madison, Wisconsin. Jellyfish has done some really innovative work in comparative shopping engines. Microsoft also said, that they want to include the technology of Jellyfish’s shopping software as a key component of Live Search.
October 2nd, 2007
Telefonica and Yahoo! today announced a global agreement providing a framework for making oneSearch, Yahoo!’s industry leading mobile search product, the main search service on Telefonica’s mobile portals in 15 countries in Europe and Latin America, potentially reaching more than 100 million consumers worldwide.
Through the launch of Yahoo! oneSearch, Telefonica will make it easier for its customers to find relevant results on their mobile devices.
Yahoo! oneSearch is specifically designed for mobile devices, delivering results directly in the first screen and thereby removing the need for consumers to navigate through a sea of links to PC Web sites to find the information they want. Yahoo! oneSearch gives consumers access to news, financial information, weather conditions, Flickr photos, Web images, as well as Web and Mobile Web sites.
Together, Telefonica and Yahoo! are enhancing the search experience for consumers on mobile phones, while providing both companies with new revenue streams through mobile advertising.
Julio Linares, Telefonica’s general manager for Coordination Business Development and Synergies, said, “Partners are essential to our mobile strategy and these key relationships, like the one we are announcing today with Yahoo!, will continue to evolve and deliver state of the art Internet experiences to our customers at home or on the go.”
“Yahoo!’s new partnership with Telefonica furthers our leadership in mobile and demonstrates our commitment to working with partners to enhance the Internet experience for customers on their mobile phone,” said Marco Boerries, executive vice president of Yahoo!’s Connected Life Division. “Together we can grow usage of mobile Internet services and create new revenue streams through mobile advertising.”
Flickr
Telefonica customers will also enjoy the benefit of direct access to Flickr, one of the world’s leading online photo sharing communities. The inclusion of Flickr in Telefonica’s mobile services will allow customers to easily view and share their photos, view their friends’ pictures, view and create comments on photos and browse or search more than one billion images posted by the Flickr service, all from the mobile phones.
Yahoo! Mail
Additionally, Yahoo! Mail will be seamlessly integrated into Telefonica’s Mail Express service, providing Yahoo! Mail users with the ability to receive their Yahoo! Mail messages directly on their mobile phone via MMS messaging, enabling customers on the Telefonica network in Spain and Latin America to stay connected to their community even when they are away from their PC.
October 1st, 2007
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