Standardistas and accessibilitistas: This call to action via 456 Berea St concerns a disturbing direction the next HTML specification is heading in. Roger Johansson writes:

What is currently going on in the W3C HTML Working Group is very disappointing and something I never expected to see when I joined it. I was naive enough to think that everybody joining the HTML WG would be doing so out of a desire to improve the Web. Unfortunately, that does not seem to be the case […]

In Roger's opinion, if nothing is done, "the next version of HTML will do nothing to improve the Web," and conscientious designers will be "better off sticking to HTML 4.01 Strict."

So, if you have an interest in improving the accessibility of HTML, want more semantic and less presentational markup, and are good at arguing your case, apply for HTML Working Group membership by following the instructions for joining the HTML Working Group. Do it now.

so, day one of the stanley burroughs master cleanse has almost concluded, and we're surprised at how low morale is… hell, we haven't even started to seep yet…

jqln suffers with us—you can read her take on the cleanse here.

from Free Press:

Online music is in danger. A recent ruling by an obscure regulatory board threatens to put independent and public radio on the Internet out of business.

The "Copyright Royalty Board" is dramatically increasing the royalties "webcasters" must pay every time they stream a song online. Public Internet radio like NPR is especially at risk.

The rules could shut down nonprofit and smaller commercial Internet radio outlets and force larger webcasters to play the same cookie-cutter music as Clear Channel. So much for new online alternatives.

Rescue Internet Radio—Sign the Petition:
http://action.freepress.net/campaign/internetradio

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you'll find the notes to my recent presentation on AJAX and forms to the New York Web Standards Meetup Group as well as a Safari CSS hack that I made use of the other day.

via dorkbot:

Attention, boys and girls: fans of DIY hardware, physical computing, circuit bending, hacked gear and gaming machines, custom code and patching, independent hardware makers, mad scientists, and even the casual fan of the above who want to check out some cool projects—if you're anywhere near the NYC area, we want you next week.

Thursday March 22, we'll be having the first informal get-together for a regular series of events, and we'd love to have you there. [Note that I went with the music angle to keep things simple, but motion-y projects are equally welcome.]

Musicmakers @ Etsy
Hosted by MAKE and Create Digital Music
Thursday, 22 March 2007 . 7 pm–whenever
At Etsy Labs in downtown Brooklyn, near the Manhattan bridge
→ more info about this event
→ more about Etsy Labs

via Donna Genzmer:

all right, this is what the labs like to see—power to the people, public participation style, open source applications! gCensus was built by a Ph.D. student in computer science at Stanford University who was fed up with the slowly rendered, crappy display of the Census Bureau's online mapping interface. his question [our question]—why can't people have access to dynamic, high-resolution maps without paying the ginormous bucks for professional GIS software? his answer—gCensus

it's "an effort to make geographic data freely and easily accessible to the public, without the need for expensive GIS software packages. With Google's excellent free mapping program Google Earth, you can use this site to visualize a wide variety of data best displayed on a map. Currently, only the US Census 2000's Summary File 1 (displaying population characteristics such as race and age) is available for mapping."

right now, though, gCensus is more proof-of-concept than ready-to-release application. it needs to integrate more datasets and it would probably benefit from other eyes looking at the code. so, here's the flipside to radical democracy—with free software comes great responsibilities. "the student" is looking for development help and hardware and hosting donations. contact him at gcensus [at] gmail [dot] com and let's make this happen!

The New York Web Standards Meetup Group will be meeting at theMechanism on 22 March 2007 at 6:30 pm to discuss AJAX and form handling. We plan on giving a form submission demo utilizing mini AJAX and JSON.

22 March 2007 . 6:30 pm
theMechanism|eEmerge
440 9th Avenue 8th Floor
New York, NY 10001 [map]

The City of Milwaukee was mentioned in the latest issue of ArcNews [a quarterly publication of ESRI] for its use of GIS and GPS technologies as part of a remedial excavation project at a brownfields property located in Milwaukee.

→ read the article

from Dan Saffer's Newest Essay: "Research Is a Method, Not a Methodology":

Here are some research guidelines that I use for my projects. Only use design research when:

1. You don't know the subject area well. I'm not an expert in investment banking, so if I had to design a product for investment bankers, I'd need to learn about what they do and why they do it.

2. The project is based in a culture different to your own. Chinese culture isn't the same thing as the culture of the United States. Or India. Or Western Europe. Cultural differences can cause differences in behavior and expectations for a product.

3. You don't know who the users are. This should be self-explanatory, but amazingly enough, many companies don't know who uses their products or why. If you find that your view of the users is different from the stakeholders', you might want to establish a consensus around that—the type of clarity that only research can provide.

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are we greater or lesser standardistas? are you? we're not sure, but you can check it out and tell us…