Web Dev Digest Episode 14 Intro ...INTRO MUSIC... Welcome to the Web Dev Digest, your daily web development news roundup. This is episode number fourteen, for Monday, July sixteenth, 2007. I'm your host, Ara Pehlivanian. ...MUSIC INTERLUDE... Hello and welcome the show. Usability vs. Accessibility Mel Pedley of Accessites dot com looks at the difference between usability and accessibility on the web. In an article called “Web Usability”, Pedley says that “unlike web accessibility which impacts directly upon disabled users, web usability affects all users, and can be defined as a measure of how easy it is for a generic site visitor to carry out a task such as finding a given piece of information or buying a certain product.” She  asserts that usability is not the same thing as accessibility and goes on to break down web usability into five core components: learnability, effectivity, memorability, reliability, and enjoyability. She then discusses three usability rules and starts off with Steve Krug’s “Don’t make me think” for the first, her second rule is “Don’t assume” and she rounds off the three with what she calls the “Shop analogy”. She concludes by saying that “Whilst it is true that usability isn’t the same as accessibility, it isn’t rocket science either. And paying attention to the usability aspects of your site will almost certainly improve its overall accessibility at the same time.” XHTML Basic 1.1 is a Candidate Recommendation "W3C is pleased to announce the advancement of XHTML™ Basic 1.1 to Candidate Recommendation. The specification adds four new features for small devices which are the language's primary users. Version 1.1 is intended to be the convergence of the XHTML Basic 1.0 W3C Recommendation for mobile devices, released in coordination with the WAP Forum in 2000, and the Open Mobile Alliance ... XHTML Mobile profile. Implementation feedback is welcome through [August 31st]." JCR 2.0 is under public review The Server side dot com reporting that "The next major revision of the Java Content Repository has entered public review status on the [Java Community Process] web site. Most of the visible changes revolve around querying a repository for content, with the SQL and XPath query languages being deprecated." Google Gears ORM v0.1 Uriel Katz has completely rewritten his Google Gears Object-relational mapping code in version 0.1 of Gears ORM. This "version [supports] relations (both many to one and many to many with automatic table creation), easy loading and saving [of] objects from JSON, real foreign keys, [since] SQLite doesn't support them, using triggers and [more]." Getting into Google Jill Whalen of high rankings dot com has discusses their most recent Search Engine Marketing New England conference at which Dan Crow, director of crawl systems at Google, spoke. The topics he covered were what indexing means to Google, exploring robots.txt, Pagerank, several tags that Google uses such as "no archive" and "no snippet" and news about an upcoming tag named "unavailable after." Other topics included Webmaster Central tools, sitemaps, and Flash and Ajax where Crow clarified that the proper use of the popular Scalable Inman Flash Replacement technique (otherwise known as SIFFER or s.I.F.R.), where bits of text are passed through a Flash object in order to render them with unconventional fonts, is OK with Google. Dangerous Ruling Puts Interactive Services at Risk "The Electronic Frontier Foundation ... has filed a brief urging the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to reconsider a recent ruling that endangers features like search customization and user feedback on interactive web services. The ruling came in a housing discrimination lawsuit against Roommate.com, which runs [an] Internet forum where users can search for potential roommates. A three-judge panel held that Roommate.com could be held liable for the activity of its users because it 'suggested, encouraged, or solicited' and then sorted and categorized content that may have violated fair housing law. But this reasoning threatens both current and future Internet innovators with potentially insurmountable liability problems -- impacting everything from search engine functionality to the ability to tag content on media sharing sites such as YouTube and Flickr -- and is directly contrary to federal law. As EFF argued Friday in its amicus brief in support of appeal, Roommate.com is immune to liability for its users' activities under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which specifically protects hosts of interactive computer services." Firefox now serious threat to IE in Europe Slashdot is reporting that "according to French web monitoring service XiTiMonitor, Mozilla's Firefox web browser has made dramatic gains on Microsoft's Internet Explorer throughout Europe in the past year with a marked upturn in FF use compared to IE over the past four months. A study of nearly 96,000 websites carried out during the week of July 2 to July 8 found that Firefox had 27.8% market share across Eastern and Western Europe, IE had 66.5%, with other browsers including Safari and Opera making up the remaining 5.7%. In some key European markets Firefox has already reached parity and is threatening to overtake IE as the market leading browser." Emerging design trends And finally, Paul Boag discusses emerging design trends in a post to his blog today where he looks at where web design is heading. In particular he discusses the disappearing fold, functional footers, resolution dependent layout, right column navigation, a focus on content and emphasis on typography. Outtro ... OUTTRO MUSIC FADE IN ... You've been listening to the Web Dev Digest, your daily web development news roundup. This was episode number fourteen, for Monday, July sixteenth, 2007. I'm Ara Pehlivanian. Show notes with links to the news covered in this episode can be found on web dev digest dot net.