Unfortunately, the grades were a lot lower than I expected, the highest is 46, while the mean is only 28.54 – this is out of 100 marks.

The mean is only 28.54 / 100 .. This is the first time I have experienced that such a low mark for an assessment. Would it mean that whole class get C for this course -,-? I can’t image it ..

I am upset at looking at the score. I think I should work very hard for the exam .. haha ~ However, I cannot get an “A” for this course ~

He has talked about the “go to top” link. Actually, this link will cause some accessibility problem when the developer put the link at the right hand side (which is common practice for back to top link?) For example, if one are using magnifier for viewing the web page, and then he click the “back to top” link. As a result, the user would be seeing the top right corner of the page. This becomes a problem as many of us expect the top of the page means the top left corner. So, we should take care not to just use #top in the <a> tag anymore for the accessibility issue.

I have searched for references to see what it is. Actually, there are several definition of Web 3.0 now:

1. John Markoff: Web 3.0 = intelliigent Web. e.g. semantic web, microformats, natural language search, data mining, machine learning, recommendation agents, and artificial intelligence technologies. It emphaisze machine-facilitated understanding of information in order to provide more productive and intuitive user experience.
2. Nova Spivack: Web 3.0 = 3rd decade of the web. The characteristics are transformation, ubiquitous connectivity, network computing, open technologies, open identity, the intelligent web, distributed database, and intelligent applications.

Everyone may think the solution and even make another definition of Web 3.0. What I think is that I must not be that person

1. Contexttual advertising
2. PPC (Pay per click)
3. Affiliate Marketing
4. Rich Media Advertising
5. RSS
6. Blogging
7. Viral Marketing
8. Auto responder Marketing
9. Search Engine Optimization
10. Podcasting
11. Behavioral Advertising
12. Mobile Marketing

1. Wave http://wave.webaim.org/

2. Cynthia Says Portal http://www.cynthiasays.com/

3. Etre http://www.etre.com/tools/accessibilitycheck/

• Woopra: a new tool that is ideal for less trafficked websites, especially for blogs. It offers standard metrics that Google does. Besides, it has real time visitor analysis and a built in chat tool to chat with the visitor through a popup window.
• Crazy Egg: a tool that like an advanced version of Google Analytics. It allows you to visually see EXACTLY THE SAME where visitors are clicking on your site. It is great for you to find out which area are popular and not.
• Enquisite: a free tool but do not have search engine reports. However, it is still enough for you to analyse your site to help you making your site better.
• 4Q: a tool that will survey your visitors. The answers should provide enough data to tell you why your visitors are doing. It is free and easy to set up. It should be a good choice if you want a survey tool instead of getting numbers from others.
• ClickTale: a tool that enables you to record and watch what your visitors do like usability test. It takes only few minutes time to set up and let you know what your visitors are doing, the mouse moving pattern, how far they scroll. 

Accessibility is important to a web site because of following reasons:

• Increase Market Share and Audience Reach: every uses including physical, sensory and cognitive disabilities, constraints and/or technological barrier can access the information -> the potential type/number of audience may increase
• improve Efficiency: it improve the maintainability and efficiency (reduce site maintenance, search engine improvements, re-purposing content, address server-load/bandwidth)
• Demonstrate Social Responsibility: provide equal access and opportunity to every one

Beyond ALT Text:

Making the Web Easy to Use for Users with Disabilities

This is actually a research report which contains the usability test results, test data and 75 additional design guidelines. The following are part of the good guidelines:

• Never blur pictures to indicate unavailability.
• When graphics contain useful information, provide the information in text also.
• Avoid using pop-up windows.
• Avoid using images as the only method for linking to something.
• Design pages consistently.
• Limit the amount of information that forms require; collect only the minimum needed.
• If the company name includes an initalism or acronym, tell screen readers how to pronounce it (you should do this for all abbreviations of this type on the site).

The above guidelines extracted are also the important guideline to normal website. It helps making the web easy to use for all users. For the details, the report explains why such guideline is important and there are some illustrations too.

You may find the full version by downloading the report. The report seems FREE to get it now. It should be a good reference to the web designer.

The theme / keywords this year is cityu web hacker dogs cats

http://cityu-web-hacker-dogs-cats.cubeforge.net/

Everyone in CityU may join it as well.

Arial, Book Antiqua, Comic Sans MS, Georgia, Courier New, Tahoma, Times New Roman, Trebuchet MS, and Verdana

Although the fonts is available / readable, it does not mean it is suitable for use in web publishing. For use in web-based content , different studies have resulted in inconsistent findings. It is difficult to say which font family is the best. The following are the comparision of the suggested web fonts:

Georgia and Times New Roman

The above fonts are difference in size, length of words. Some are bigger and some are confused as “I”, “1″, “l” is similar. Each font have their own advantage, I think the one major factor to affect the decision of the use of fonts is the author’s preference.

Reference:

http://www.webaim.org/techniques/fonts/