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HTML Encoded Captchas (Slashdot)
rangeva writes to tell us about a twist he has developed on the common Captcha technique to discourage spam bots: HECs encode the Captcha image into HTML, thus presenting an unsolved challenge to the bots’ programmers. From the writeup: “The Captcha is no longer an image and therefore not a resource they can download and process. The owner of the site can change the properties of the Captcha’s …
Tutorial ‘O The Day: XHTML Semantics
Continuing this week s Tutorial o the Day theme of XHTML, today s focus is semantics. While good semantics aren t necessarily a feature of XHTML (they re important even in HTML) as long as you re re-coding you may as well start using semantically meaningful markup. Semantics refers to the meaning of an element and how that meaning describes the content it contains. Probably the easiest example is the HTML list tag. The following two snippets of code can be displayed identically in a browser:
list item
list item
While to the human eye these may look the same, the later actually conveys information about what it is through the markup i.e. it s a list. If you d like to see some bad semantic markup just view source on this page. Note how the post title is encoded: Tutorial ‘O The Day: XHTML Semantics
Because we can use visual clues like font size and typeface to help us, most humans can find the title fairly easily, but what if you re a silly robot, like a search engine spider? You d have no clue that this line of code is the title of the post. Why should you care? Do you like your pages to rank high in search engine indexes? Well, then you should care because robots rely on tags to tell them what is the main focus of the page. In the case of the Wired blog templates, our content is semantically no different than the ads being served with it. That, as my friend likes to say, = bad. So what should the post title be wrapped in? Well something like
would be one option. To get up to speed on the usefulness of semantically meaningful XHTML, check out the article, Semantics, HTML, XHTML, and Structure over at Brainstorms & Raves, which gives a thorough rundown of how, when and why to use various (X)HTML tags. Also a good read: Molly Holzschlag s tutorial on informit.com. And since we re talking about semantics let me clarify one point, while you can and should try to write semantically meaningful XHTML, XHTML is not technically a semantic language. Because it isn t a true semantic language, there s a lot of gray areas where several tags may both be legitimate choices. Web designer and author Dan Cederholm ran a series of articles a while back that attempt to parse out the gray, but as the the comments on his site demonstrate, some things will always be debatable.
Quantifiying experience - Rich Internet Applications are way better than HTML
Richard MacManus wrote about a research paper by Forrester which put Rich Internet Applications and HTML applications head to head. While the outcome is obvious (RIAs are better) its good vindication that experience matters. The article also makes the point that RIAs can easily fall into the trap of bad design. I see this as validation that designers are equally important in this new phase of application development. The paper groups Ajax in with Rich Internet Technology applications and goes on to compare four types of applications: hotel search and reservation engines, mapping tools, PC configurations, and product finders. They also compared and contrasted some “User experience principles” with the HTML experience and the RIA experience. This is a …