Refresh Nashville

A List Apart recently published an article entitled, “12 Lessons for Those Afraid of CSS and Standards.”

The first lesson was, “Everything you know is wrong… sort of.” That lesson set the stage up for the critical difference between using standards based and non-standards based markup.

At the implementation level, this lesson is about the differences between table markup and semantic markup:

Table vs. Semantic Markup

Table markup	Semantic markup	Implications
Linear	Hierarchical	Design for the information, not in spite of it.
Procedural	Functional	Put things where they belong.
Location-based	Contextual	Let the markup describe what something is, before you let it describe where something is.
Defines constraints	Defines domains	You don’t need to push the envelope, because it will change its shape to suit your needs.

The remaining lessons offer thoughtful and compelling reasons why designers should seriously consider moving towards standards based Web design. Full Article »

Second Annual Global Event Launches Website and Event Registration at International Conference

Boston, Massachusetts: June 12, 2006 — On June 12, 2006, The Usability Professionals’ Association (UPA) is launching its official Website www.worldusabilityday.org and event registration for the second annual World Usability Day at the UPA International Conference in Broomfield Colorado. World Usability Day 2006, a global series of events will be held on November 14, 2006 and promote awareness of the benefits of usability engineering and user-centered design. Activities will be held at the local level worldwide, and will include events hosted by corporations, organizations, universities and individuals. This year’s focus is accessibility and inclusion. The theme is “Making life Easy.”

In its first year, World Usability Day 2005 was a tremendous success. UPA, along with its allied organizations coordinated 115 events in 35 countries lasting 36 hours that attracted over 10,000 attendees at site locations, and thousands of online participants.

“The overwhelming response to World Usability Day 2005 far exceeded our expectations and have energized our efforts for 2006, ” noted Elizabeth Rosenzweig, Director of World Usability Day. ” We already have regional liaisons in place around the world; and have developed a Web-based system to enable local leaders to submit their events on our Website and register local volunteers.” Rosenzweig added, ” our goals for 2006 include growing the number and size of the events worldwide and offering additional webcasting features that enable World Usability Day to be even more accessible. In order to accomplish this, we will need more event leaders and volunteers as part of the World Usability Day team!”

This year’s World Usability Day Sponsors to date include: Intuit, SAP, TechSmith and Apogee. Additional sponsorship opportunities are available and can be found on the Website.

Any organization or individual with an interest in user-centered design and “making the world work better” is invited to participate in this event. Details for submitting a local event, volunteering, sponsoring or participating are available at www.worldusabilityday.org.

The Usability Professionals’ Association is an international, non-profit, professional association with more than 2000 members in the US and 35 other countries. Members are specialists in evaluating and designing products that are easy to learn and use. The organization provides its members with a wide variety of professional services. Through outreach the UPA:

• Shares information about the skills and approach of usability professionals in meeting needs for usable products.
• Acts as an advocate for usability in consumer, corporate and governmental software, products and web sites.
• Educates the general public about the usability.

For more information, contact:

The Usability Professionals’ Association
140 N. Bloomingdale Rd.
Bloomingdale, IL 60108-1017
email: office@upassoc.org
web: http://www.usabilityprofessionals.org/