Pro tip: communicate to the client that shadows are a bonus feature. Your designers may disagree, but the site will not suffer considerably when special effects like box shadows, text shadows, or rounded corners are regarded as enhancements for decent browsers. However, your client’s budget will suffer when they are determined to provide the same visual effects on outdated browsers such as IE6. That said, here is the well-known method in CSS3:

1. .wrapper {
2. background-color: #fff;
3. border: 1px solid #d30d01;
4. box-shadow: 4px 4px 4px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.2);
5. float: left;
6. height: 75px;
7. margin: 15px;
8. padding: 10px;
9. width: 75px;
10. -moz-box-shadow: 4px 4px 4px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.2);
11. -o-box-shadow: 4px 4px 4px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.2);
12. -webkit-box-shadow: 4px 4px 4px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.2);
13. }

1. <div class="wrapper">
2. <p>CSS box-shadow</p>
3. </div>

At the same time when we rolled out the website, Robert Nyman came to the conclusion that the proprietary Microsoft filter for Shadow looks much prettier than DropShadow, so I forgot about blogging myself as his solution doesn’t rely on unsemantic markup and is more elegant:

1. .wrapper {
2. /* For IE 8 */
3. -ms-filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Shadow( Strength=5, Direction=135, Color='#999999' );
4. /* For IE 5.5 – 7 */
5. filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Shadow( Strength=5, Direction=135, Color='#999999' );
6. }

Note that you get slightly better effects when you choose a dark gray instead of black as shadow color. If you can live with the rendering of the third box below, don’t read any further.

However, applying the filter had the side effect that text inside the box wasn’t anti-aliased in IE 6-8 anymore, and the shadow still didn’t look decent enough. So we added an extra span and applied the blur filter on it.

That led to a more complex code as we needed an inner wrapper where the border and background is applied to, while the outer wrapper merely acted as a … wrapper, where the styles were reset to defaults. HTML first:

1. <div class="wrapper ms-box-shadow">
2. <div class="inner">
3. <p>Internet Explorer with blur filter</p>
4. </div>
5. <span class="shadow"></span>
6. </div>

And here’s the CSS that’s added with Conditional Comments for IE 6-8 only (as IE9 supports native CSS box-shadow, more or less). The shadow element is absolutely positioned, set behind the inner content and blown up to 100%. Not original, but it works:

1. .wrapper, .inner {
2. background-color: #fff;
3. border: 1px solid #d30d01;
4. height: 75px;
5. padding: 10px;
6. position: relative;
7. width: 75px;
8. }
9. .wrapper {
10. float: left;
11. margin: 15px;
12. }
13. /* reset wrapper styles to defaults; work-around for screwed box-model */
14. .ms-box-shadow {
15. background-color: transparent;
16. border: 0 none;
17. height: 95px;
18. padding: 0;
19. width: 95px;
20. }
21. /* Move the inner wrapper to the foreground */
22. .inner {
23. z-index: 50;
24. }
25. /* The shadow element */
26. .shadow {
27. background-color: #000;
28. display: block;
29. filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Blur( makeShadow='true', pixelRadius=4, shadowOpacity=0.30 );
30. height: 100%;
31. left: 0;
32. position: absolute;
33. top: 0;
34. width: 100%;
35. z-index: 0;
36. }

For some reason I got a more similar result with the shadowOpacity set to 30% instead of 20%.

Where’s the crux?

If we are willing to ignore lots of bloated CSS: IE6 only blows the shadow up to 100% when the wrapper has a fixed height. This sucks, but unless you want to add more bloated code in JavaScript I don’t know of any solution for this problem. Still IE 7-8 handle a value of 100% right, and there are many cases where the height is known. Take for example photos where you’d like to apply shadows, some buttons, or horizontal shades lying above images, like the shadow of the second level navigation on this site. Beautiful, isn’t it?

First I talked about the term of disability in a changing social and political context, then I lead to the demographic trend, hence to accessibility as an economic imperative. I showed a few barriers and techniques in practical examples as “virtual wheelchair ramps” and ended with an outlook on the challenges we currently face in the W3C HTML Accessibility Task Force.

The slides are currently available only in German at Slideshare where they can also be downloaded (15 MB). I will further adapt the slides and translate them for a Mozilla P2PU course in September, I appreciate your patience. There are also notes in the powerpoint file for a more detailed description.

But the story continues: beginning in the winter semester I’ll have a lectureship once a week at the university, teaching organic frontend development with contemporary techniques.

The goal of web performance optimization is to become faster and smaller: research at Yahoo! and Google found that just 10-20% of the perceived loading time is caused by the server. A few years ago we thought performance was exclusively connected to the server. However, 80-90% of the loading time incurs in the frontend. Thus WPO is more efficient targeting the frontend.

Two important weak points are JavaScript files and the sheer number of files: JavaScript loads sequentially and blocks subsequent code until each file is loaded. Hence it shouldn’t be located in the head, but in the foot of a page. Secondly older browsers, in particular Internet Explorer, will only load 2-4 files in parallel. Files queue up and get processed when it’s their turn. Therefore aggregation of files is used for reducing the number of HTTP requests.

Several international companies have conducted research or just tracked the effects of optimization.

Effects of slowness

• Amazon: 100 ms delay caused a 1% drop in revenue.
• Google: 400 ms delay caused a 0.59% decrease in search requests per user (earlier tests list larger numbers).
• Yahoo!: 400 ms delay caused a 5-9% decrease in traffic.
• Bing: 2 seconds delay caused a 4.3% drop in revenue per user.

Effects of speed

• Mozilla made their download page 2.2 seconds faster and was rewarded with an increase of 15.4% in downloads.
• Google Maps reduced the file volume by 30% and observed a 30% increase in map requests.
• Netflix enabled gzip on the server; simply by this single action pages became 13-25% faster and saved 50% of traffic volume!
• Shopzilla succeeded in reducing the loading time from 7 down to 2 seconds, whereby the conversion rate increased by 7-12%, they observed a 25% increase in page requests, they were able to retire 50% of their servers, thus saving energy costs.
• AOL observed the number of page views on several websites. While the fastest users requested 7-8 pages, the slowest only viewed 3-4.

As a cream topping Google recently announced to factor in the site speed as a parameter in web search ranking.

Eventually pages become faster, clients are happy, generate more revenue and page views, while power consumption and CO₂ emissions decrease. Saved the world, again! And if you’d like to contribute, start by checking the rules at Yahoo! A few tricks beyond that can be found in the presentation which will be translated soon.

What would Rupert do?

The usual marketing scheme for a successful series would be selling licensed products. So there is a loveless website, t-shirts, coffee mugs, DVDs, comics, eventually the stars produce a mediocre pop song. Fan pages will be sued, and the industry would bitch about weak sales because of evil pirates. However we’ve seen more successful ways, for example when the fantasy and science fiction novels that came along with Forgotten Realms or Shadowrun became more popular than the original role-playing games. All those products are set in the same fictional world, but the different media remain closed in themselves: for understanding the novels it is not necessary to know the game.

Then what is transmedia? Here is a quick introduction:

“Heroes provides the most innovative and immersive interactive TV experience on the web.”

Central in that universe is the TV series, accompanied by a wiki, web comics (in JPEG, flash or PDF format), several websites, mobile strategies, webisodes exclusively published on the web and many more – and they all form a narrative whole!

Transmedia Storytelling

When a character doesn’t appear in the series for a couple of episodes, their story goes on in the webcomics. The fictional characters have their own blogs, pages on MySpace and Facebook and ask their fans for help via SMS. Hanna even publishes clips from news channels in her blog. A fictional candidate for the US congress has his own website hacked by Hanna. Another discusses scientific theories in his book Activating Evolution (would be even more convincing if it was out-of-sale at Amazon). Fictional companies appear in the series, fans can apply for jobs on their websites thus getting insider information, or they can “hack” their surveillance cameras. Fan fiction and art is supported and can eventually become part of the series.

That idea isn’t exactly new, emotionally drawing in the fan base through “secret” information. As early as 1997, before the Star Wars prequels, George Lucas registered numerous domains temporarily forwarding to starwars.com. Then the information was spread around in Usenet and they observed which domains generated the most page views. Then a mysterious swamp environment was created at naboo.com. Apart from the usual swamp noise we can hear the calls of the Peko bird and the Nuna toad. Subtly playing with the methods of easter eggs those animals will move across the screen when you enter “peko” or “nuna” hearing their sounds. After about five minutes the swamp water begins to ripple. If you click on it you originally landed on a simple page with background information. Of course ten years later Heroes is editing and interweaving the content more elaborately – originally there were five people on their web team, now there are more than fifty.

Heroes has a world wide fan community – even in countries where the series isn’t officially aired on TV. It’s one of the most unauthorized downloaded torrents on the web. At least producer Tim Kring doesn’t mind that: Kring says “we fish where the fish are.” The whole multimedia strategy is designed for numerous sources of income. If fans get hooked via illegal downloads, the company will earn money elsewhere with them.

Most importantly today’s fans want to participate in “their” series, and this means more than offering contests and sueing them when they actually adopt content. Heroes is the pioneer massively involving their fan community into that complex alternate reality. The web provides the central communication platform, technically but most important creatively. In that depth this is an entirely new challenge for TV providers and Internet agencies!

This post is to commemorate my grandfather’s grandmother, Antonia Odenweller. She was born 33 years after Lady Ada, on January 7th, 1849, in Kransberg, a village in a valley of the Taunus mountains, about 30 km north of Frankfurt. She was the daughter of the mason Ludwig Friedrich¹ and his wife Eva.² My great-great-grandmother married Joseph Odenweller³ in 1870 who served as a combat medic in the Franco-Prussian War 1870/71, where he received an internal wound that led to his early decease in 1878 at the age of 30. Antonia died March 3rd, 1911, in Usingen.

So what’s got that to do with technology, you ask? Here’s what my grandfather Wilhelm Kliehm wrote about her in his diary,⁴ more than 50 years ago:

Due to the early loss of her bread-winner my grandmother had to earn her livelihood by sewing. Thus she was often out-of-town, and mostly in Winter she was at our place at home.

People tell me about her that she was the most beautiful and strongest of her siblings. She was good at writing poems and provided them to everybody at every occasion. Alas I wasn’t able to obtain any of them until today.

Grandmother was in her younger days (roughly at 14-18 years) in Friedrichsdorf in the employ of Philipp Reis, the inventor of the telephone, at a time when Reis was still working on the invention. Grandmother often had to help him strain the wires across the yard into the barn, listening to the first sounds. So to speak she was the first foreign person Philipp Reis was speaking to on the phone.

In fact the Philipp-Reis-Museum and archive in Friedrichsdorf confirmed that Antonia worked in the household around 1866; according to the notes of my grandfather she would have been employed there between 1863-1867. Philipp Reis started to work on his first prototype between 1858-1863, he also coined the term telephone.

Alas the inventor died of tuberculosis in 1874; I guess otherwise grandma Antonia could have asked him for work after her husband passed away, instead she resorted to sewing. I can imagine her very well straining the wires and assisting Reis, and since she wrote poems I assume she was somewhat smart — who knows what else she contributed to the invention? Had she been born in another century, she might have become an engineer!

The barn where Philipp Reis had his workshop:

In a broader historical context, Prussia annexed the Free City of Frankfurt and the Southern part of the Grand-Duchy of Hesse-Darmstadt in 1866 after the allies lost the Austro-Prussian War. So I guess that brought massive changes to the citizens and could be the reason why my great-great-grandma quit her job in 1866/67 as it was unsafe for a young woman to work in occupied territory.

So this everyday example shows that even in the 19th century women in technology might have been more common than we thought, but were much more constrained by society. A mere 150 years later the constraints are less visible, but still exist in some people’s heads. Let us embrace diversity instead and respect the talents of people, without any reservations. My great-great-grandmother Antonia Odenweller is my personal technical heroine, and so could be you for successive generations.

Footnotes

Please note the German version of this post on my employer’s blog.

³ Joseph Odenweller
(1848-1878, her spouse)

¹ Ludwig Friedrich
(1824-1901, her father)

² Ludwig & Eva Friedrich
(1822-1906, her parents)

⁴ My grandfather’s diary notes (in German kurrent script):

1. <object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="http://www.youtube.com/ v/ VideoID" width="480" height="360">
2. <param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/ v/ VideoID" />
3. <param name="quality" value="high" />
4. <param name="allowFullScreen" value="true" />
5. <!-- Fallback content -->
6. <a href="http://www.youtube.com/ watch? v=VideoID">
7. <img src="http://img.youtube.com/ vi/ VideoID/0.jpg" width="480" height="360" alt="[Video title]" />
YouTube Video
8. </a>
9. </object>

Please note that there are spaces in the code above to allow linebreaks. If you copy and paste you need to remove those.

Here is an example:

1. What are the issues of accessibility in HTML 5?
2. What is the canvas element?
3. What is the difference between video built in natively in the browser or provided through a Flash plugin?
4. Why are people in the HTML 5 working group so nasty to each other?
5. Why is accessibility important in an emerging standard?
6. Can’t accessibility be added later?
7. What is the state of support of HTML 5 in browsers?
8. When can we start to use HTML 5?
9. What can geolocation do for accessibility?
10. Does assistive technology support HTML 5 features?

So please vote for it now, and while you’re at it, show your love to some other accessibility and web standards proposals as well. </thxkbay>

• A link to Google Maps when JavaScript is disabled.
• Support for the Google AJAX API Loader.
• Using the small map control.
• Keyboard accessibility for all control elements within the map.

As a fallback without JavaScript — because people disable it, because their mobile device doesn’t support it, or because it gets filtered by corporate proxies — Patrick used the little known Google Static Maps API, but for some reason he missed adding the link to Google. Here is the fix:

1. <div id="map">
2. <a href="http://maps.google.com/maps ?f=q&amp;output=html &amp;q=50.110950+8.684666" title="Google Maps">
3. <img src="http://maps.google.com/staticmap?hl=en &amp;center=50.112267,8.678384 &amp;markers=50.110950,8.684666,red &amp;zoom=15&amp;size=500x300 &amp;key=[Your API Key]" alt="City map of Frankfurt" width="500" height="300" />
4. </a>
5. </div>

Then I changed how the map is embedded. As it seems that the API loader is more current, I preferred that way:

1. <script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.google.com/jsapi?key=[Your API Key]"></script>
2. <script type="text/javascript" src="/js/accgmap.js"></script>
3. <script type="text/javascript">
4. google.load( 'maps', '2', { 'language' : 'en' } );
5. google.setOnLoadCallback( GMAP.initMap );
6. </script>

Using the small control elements is trivial: SmallMapControl(). The next thing I wanted to change was keyboard access to all controls, in particular for the map type, i.e. Map | Satellite | Hybrid. Patrick refers to an id, but I found that all relevant controls have a title, so I just checked for that attribute. I also dropped setting the style attribute in JavaScript as that belongs in the CSS file. His original function GKeyboardPatch() now looks like this (note the while loop for a slightly better performance):

1. GKeyboardPatch: function( map ) {
2. var button, divs = map.getContainer().getElementsByTagName( 'div' );
3. var i = 0;
4. while ( divs[i] ) {
5. if ( divs[i].getAttribute( 'log' ) || ( divs[i].getAttribute( 'title' ) && divs[i].getAttribute( 'title' ) != '' ) ) {
6. button = document.createElement( 'button' );
7. button.setAttribute( 'value', divs[i].getAttribute( 'title' ));
8. divs[i].appendChild( button );
9. if ( divs[i].getAttribute( 'log' )) { // only control buttons
10. // override the IE opacity filter that Google annoyingly sets
11. divs[i].style.filter = '';
12. // should really set to 'transparent'
13. divs[i].style.background = 'url( http://www.google.com/ intl/en_ALL/mapfiles/transparent.png )';
14. }
15. }
16. i++;
17. }
18. }

Now remember I said I’d rather separate style and behaviour, so here are a some lines of CSS with the setting of width and height for the #map being most relevant, otherwise it will collapse:

1. #map {
2. height: 300px;
3. overflow: hidden;
4. position: relative;
5. width: 500px;
6. }
7. #maps-static, #maps-static img {
8. display: block;
9. }
10. #map span.note {
11. display: none;
12. }
13. #map button {
14. background: transparent;
15. border-style: solid;
16. border-width: 0;
17. cursor: pointer;
18. height: 100%;
19. left: -2px;
20. margin: 2px;
21. overflow: hidden;
22. padding: 2px;
23. position: absolute;
24. text-indent: -100em;
25. top: -2px;
26. width: 100%;
27. }
28. #map a:focus, #map a:active, #map button:focus, #map button:active {
29. outline: 2px dashed #61bf1a;
30. }

And that’s it, thanks again to Patrick for the solid foundation I built upon. Now download the JavaScript code and try to tab through the map below.

Actually on the other website I extracted hCard microformats from the page as well and displayed the addresses on the map, but I was lazy and used jQuery. I thought it doesn’t look well here mixed with Patrick’s clean DOM scripting, but feel free to take it from the original website.

I was responsible for most of the programming beneath the navigation bar on the home page, and every time when I book a ticket there’s a small feature I enjoy so much I want to tell you about it: the buttons on the date selector are really, really tiny (16 × 8px). As you know thanks to Fitt‘s Law, there are even formulas to calculate how much better big buttons can be hit.

So I just added some padding. And that makes a huge difference: try to click on the same buttons later on in the booking process where the padding is missing.

If I could make one improvement I would add keyboard functionality to those buttons. Alas as the datepicker itself came from a third party, the assembled code was beyond my control. But I know that the Deutsche Bahn is listening to the needs of people with disabilities and their disability advisory board members are highly competent, so I trust these and other issues will be fixed soon …

The main idea is to present leading innovators and their perspectives on eAccessibility from the technical, political, and economic side. Experts on seven panels will briefly describe their own work and their view of accessibility and then discuss the issues.

There’s an illustrious line-up of speakers including Deutsche Bahn, the European Commission, France Télécom, the German Federal Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Mozilla, Opera, the W3C, the Web Standards Project, and Yahoo! talking about these topics:

• Accessible Web Applications
• Mobile Access — Device-independent or Accessible?
• Comparison of National Accessibility Guidelines
• Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA)
• Web Standards and Accessibility in Higher Education
• Harmonising European Accessibility Guidelines
• The Business Value of Accessibility

If you have been following my posts in the last two years this will sound slightly familiar. Furthermore I’m honored to have Linda Mauperon, Member of Cabinet of the European Commissioner for Information Society and Media (Viviane Reding) as our keynote speaker. Please see the detailed description of the panels in the conference program.

We would like to take a look on accessibility from different perspectives presenting pioneering thinkers whose organizations have established accessibility in their business and communication long since — and making serious money with it. There should be something of interest for everybody among the topics: for techies, consultants, employees from universities and companies. The conference is limited to a maximum of 200 attendees. Registration opens next week.

Of course there are various gems under the hood of the website, too. Naturally it is extensively accessible (check the cool skip links), but it is also incredibly fast because Yahoo!’s best practices for frontend performance are regarded. There are separate style sheets for printing, for iPhones, and for handhelds. The CMS is WordPress µ, having the advantage of administrating both the English and the German version with the same installation.