Conditional Comments & IE7

Looks like we'll all have to become familiar with conditional comments when IE7 comes out...

In mid October, the IE Blog urged developers to stop using CSS hacks to workaround IE’s problems, and start relying on Microsoft’s proprietary conditional comments.

Good discussion on Mezzoblue on this topic too.

What Exactly Are Accessibility & Usability?

Great post on webmasterworld.com...here

"For years, accessibility and usability have been considered optional improvements. Not anymore. Many countries across the globe are passing laws necessitating a global change in how we view accessibility and usability. Companies and websites have faced legal penalties for not making their sites accessible. The legal requirements in certain countries, or for certain types of websites, obligate many of us to not only be aware of accessibility and usability guidelines, but to actively pursue and conform to them.

Accessibility deals with ensuring that everyone can access your website, regardless of browser used or whether living with certain impairments or disabilities. Needless to say, accessibility is much more than caring for people with disabilities. It is about lowering the barriers for everyone accessing the Internet, about caring for people's needs and preferences, along with writing the best possible content.

As you can see, the step over to usability is quite natural. Usability takes over where accessibility ends. If accessibility is about enabling access to your site for everyone, usability is ensuring that everyone can navigate the site in an intuitive way. Usability is about making your quality content easy to find, about ease and flexibility of navigation, about simplicity and logic.

Accessibility and Usability are two topics not to be ignored or taken lightly. Legislation and the steady increase in public demand for a better web is, luckily, going to impact how we view marketing, site design, and ecommerce -- forever...."

Google bans BMW + Ricoh

Here's a warning to all who use black hat SEO techniques to scam their way up the rankings...

Posted on Matt Cutts blog:

Remember my previous post noting that Google would be paying more attention to webspam in other countries and languages this year? This week our webspam team continued ramping up our anti-spam efforts by removing bmw.de from our index, and ricoh.de will be removed soon for similar reasons. That’s a violation of our webmaster quality guidelines, specifically the principle of "Don’t deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users."

Web 2.0

I've been hearing a lot about "Web 2.0". Here's some points from an interesting article by Frederick Townes I've just read:

Web 2.0 is a catch phrase and one that's getting a lot of attention within the e-commerce community. In the Web 1.0 world, people could access information, but not participate in its evolution. In the new age of Web 2.0, the collective intelligence of the world community becomes accessible and utile. Technology evolves. It builds on what came before. It learns from past mistakes and takes advantage of unrealised opportunities. Web 2.0 isn't a new paradigm or a revolution. It's the natural evolution of a technology that's growing at truly heart-stopping speed. What was yesterday won't be tomorrow..."