A quick note about the soon to be release Firefox 3 version of the Open-source browser. I currently run the latest version of Firefox 3 and everything is smooth after a buggy last release on OSX.
Hope we can raise the bar to a 20% worldwide browser share for Firefox soon!
This monday, my friend at the W3Qc association, Benoit Piette invited Laurent Duveau from the GUVSM to give a keynote about the Microsoft Rich Internet Application product; Silverlight.
Here’s my little recap of the entire keynote
Silverlight is a RIA brought by Microsoft. Its a plugin, like Flash that users can install in their browser. However it’s still a beta, version 2 will be release in 2008 and a mobile version is under development. The current beta, version 2 beta came out in April 2008.
Silverlight use the .Net framework ACL directly inside the browser client. This way .Net programmers can use the languages they are already use to, #C, VB, Ruby, etc. The user on his side just receive Html/Javascript the same way JSP technology works.
Silverlight use the XAML a declarative XML based language by Microsoft.
About the accessibility, Silverlight can tell screen readers the site architecture. For SEO purposes, Silverlight follow the same rules as Flash and use progressive enhancement for the end users. We can think that somehow Google can crawl the XML content underneath the Silverlight application. Like Flash, Silverlight can offer an alternate HTML version for screen readers and search engines.
There’s an upcoming Open-source implementation of the Microsoft Silverlight runtime under development, Moonlight by the Mono team.
Microsoft seem to have done a pretty good job with silverlight, a few years late on Adobe tho. For me it can be useful for .Net programmers to do web application. For sure, its not perfect, it wont replace Html, especially with the Html 5 version comming in the next few years. However Silverlight can gain major ground for intranet applications where you have a complete control over the end users.
This Tuesday, I went to Quebec City, for the Intracom 08 Conferences to be a part of the Tuesday 29th panel. How to improve web development with Benoit Piette, Jean-Francois Renaud, Nathalie Berger and Guillaume Séguin.
Here is a little recap of my day
First of all, I didn’t went to the Benoit Piette’s presentation, I already saw it the day before, in the bus on our way to Quebec City. You can find the slides about the Web 2.0 Browsers battle on his website. So I went to the Aaron Marcus presentation.
Culture make a difference in how people interact, make purchase, communicate, etc.
How you research, design and analyze must be done with cultural input from the end users you’re targeting. Aaron show us some example on how it can end up if you’re not paying attention to cultural specifications, funny to see some old Netscape 4 screenshots here.
An gold rule that is often forbidden in website development; culture should impact the design, the User experience of a website.
Which cultural specificities to look for :
Next one was Lionel Pardin’s presentation. I Was at there with Jean Francois Renaud from Adviso, here a link to his comments on Branchez-vous and my comment too.
This presentation was in my point of view the most interesting one, maybe a too much technical approach for the crowd, but I really enjoy this one. So basically Yan Bodain talked about the four stages of the web and the coming web 3.0, a more semantic web, where machines will be able to do Ontology. The OWL language using the RDF syntax is one of the fundamental technology underneath the Semantic web, which is not a new web but a new way of doing it. This is very interesting and I’ll keep looking at those things, it may unleash a very new way how human can search informations and interact with machines.
So this was finally my turn after a little lunch where I met Julien Sarradet, an old colleague at VDL2. I was on a hour and half panel with five others specialist talking about how to improve the quality of your web projects.
My part of the panel, the Seo point of view of the quality in web development:
SEO for better web projects (pdf, not locked) in French
So Intracom 2008 in old Quebec City wasn’t the perfect conference you can expect, maybe too few people (around 100, not that bad tho), but was really nice for a first time doing a presentation especially being on a panel with helpful colleagues.