Periodic Table of Web Design Process – created by New Design Group

Any organisation that has anything to say to anyone anywhere needs to seriously sit down and strategise the systematic creation of content.

You can create a content strategy the easy way or the hard way. The difference is that the hard way works.

Read “How to Create a Content Strategy (In Only 652 Steps)” by Portent, Inc.

There are three ways by which an army is put into difficulty by a ruler:

1. He does not  know that the Three Armies should not advance but instructs them to advance or does not  know that the Three Armies should not withdraw and orders a retreat. This is termed ‘entangling the army.’
2. He does not  understand the Three Armies’ military affairs but [directs them] in the same way as his [civil] administration. Then the officers will become confused.
3. He does not  understand the Three Armies’ tactical balance of power but undertakes responsibility for command. Then the officers will be doubtful.

When the Three Armies are already confused and doubtful… this is referred to as ‘a disordered army drawing another on to victory.’

…

One who knows neither the enemy nor himself will invariably be defeated in every engagement.

—Translated by Ralph D. Sawyer, Barnes & Noble Books, 1994.

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It’s generic, it’s basic, it’s not pretty, but it gets the job done.

What happens, say, if I try to copy-and-paste the text from it? I get this garglemesh →.

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Depending on the tools used, automatically converting text into PDF is not always kind to what would otherwise be a simple, hierarchally-organised document. The process of conversion actually scrambles the text so that, outside of a PDF reader, it’s unintelligible. In fact, non-Adobe PDF readers may not be able to make sense of it either.

Rather than try to explain this to people, I end up re-creating the occasional PDF into POSH — Plain Old Semantic HTML.

Why is HTML better than PDF?

• HTML is much, much smaller in file-size, thus much, much faster to load.
• HTML is easier to display on multiple devices, including screen readers, mobile devices, and Google.
• The visitor can read the document immediately, rather than having to load a PDF reader—or worse, have the PDF try to render inside the web browser. An 8.5 x 11″ or A4 sheet of paper is difficult to read on a mobile phone, but well marked-up text reads just fine.
• HTML is easier for search engines to index than PDF, because the text isn’t scrambled into nonsense, the file-size is smaller, and semantic elements such as headings are preserved.

PDFs are for one purpose only: distributing information that must be physically printed on a specified size of paper. If you want your information available on-screen or on a different size of paper, do not use PDF.

Why is PDF better than Word?

• PDF is a bit more universally available than a Microsoft Word document. Most people have a PDF reader on their computer. Not everyone can afford Word, and not everybody knows that there are alternative word processors that can both read and create .doc files readable by Word.
• Someone could take your Word document, change the text, and redistribute the document as though it came from the original source. It’s slightly trickier to do that with PDFs.

If your print-only document is absolutely complete and final, and you know exactly the size of paper it must be printed on, then you can publish it as a PDF.

Wouldn’t it be easier to convert from the original Word document to HTML?

Yes. Yes, it would.

Word and HTML do not play nicely together, but at least the text wouldn’t be nearly as scrambled. In this scenario, I often copy all the text from the Word document, paste it into a Plain-Text Editor to strip all formatting, and manually re-format the document. At least it saves on all that re-typing.

In a bureaucracy, however, it’s faster and less agonising to just re-type the document than to go through the process of trying to get the original text.

Also, if the original Word author didn’t use styles, but instead manually made things large, bold, or green, then there’s no semantic information in the document to use anyway—just a load of non-semantic presentational markup. If they did use Word styles and marked up elements like headings and lists, then that Word document becomes much more useful.

So what’s the ideal situation?

1. People mark up their content in POSH to begin with. From there, we can create semantic Word, PDF and other documents as needed.Bwah ha ha ha ha! Just kidding.
2. Use an HTML editor that forces POSH. XStandard is the best I’ve ever seen, though I’ve not used it for some time.
3. Have people mark up their content in a semantic word processor using semantic styles, carefully identifying things like headings, captions, list items (the bullet character does not count), tables, &c. Then a skilled HTML author can do the conversion that preserves the semantics and eliminates the presentational markup.

But at least we can make WordPress sites look like we were the cool kids.

Commodore 64 Theme for WordPress

Web feeds are a way for visitors to keep up-to-date on the latest changes to a web page. Feeds are often used for frequently-updated content such as news headlines or events. News feeds are sometimes referred to as XML feeds, RSS feeds or Atom feeds, depending on the way the feed is encoded. Regardless of the term used, they are all functionally the same to the web surfer. We’ll refer to them as “web feeds” for this article.

Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is an easy way for Web sites to share headlines and stories from other sites. Web surfers can use sophisticated news readers to surf these headlines using RSS aggregators. Jennifer Kyrnin – http://webdesign.about.com/od/rss/a/what_is_rss.htm

What does it look like?

Web Feeds generally show the headline, date, and a short summary of a news article. This allows the user to quickly scan the headline and see whether he would like more information. Usually clicking the headline will take the user to the full article. The screenshot is from the popular, cross-platform Flock browser, based on Firefox. (flock.com) Many news feeds can be bundled into collections, with total unread articles showing.

How do I find a web feed?

Web feeds are generally identified with some common icons:

On the college web site, our main news articles have a prominent link to the web feeds for visitors with browsers that do not natively support web feeds. In fact, all Selkirk College “News Pages” have web feeds attached to them.

How do I subscribe to web feeds?

You can subscribe to web feeds using a wide variety of tools. You can use software that may be already on your computer, such as:

• Apple Mail (Mac OS X)
• Firefox (Windows, Mac OS X, Linux)
• Internet Explorer 7 (Windows)
• Mozilla Thunderbird (Windows, Mac OS X, Linux)
• Microsoft Outlook 2007 (Windows)
• Safari (Mac OS X)

Alternately, you can use web-based tools, such as:

• Bloglines.com
• Google Reader

How can I use Groupwise to read web feeds?

Here is a video about how to set up Groupwise 7 to read web feeds. Here is the Novell document. And here is the plugin. Easy as pie. GroupWise 8 has it built in, along with some other web2.0 features.

How can I use Firefox or Internet Explorer 7 to read web feeds?

In Firefox, a popular web browser, the standard web feed icon will appear in the address bar when there is a web feed for that page. For more information on how to use Live Bookmarks in Firefox to read web feeds, visit http://support.mozilla.com/kb/Live+Bookmarks. Internet Explorer 7 will show the same icon. For more information on viewing web feeds in Internet Explorer 7, visit http://www.ie-vista.com/rss.html. Note: previous versions of Internet Explorer does not natively support web feeds. However, you can still use web-based tools to read web feeds.

Further Reading

• Wikipedia Definition of RSS: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS_(protocol)
• Save Time, Know More: Subscribing to Online Information Using RSS. http://library.stmarytx.edu/acadlib/subject/misc/rss.html
• Wikipedia list of Feed Aggregators: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_feed_aggregators

Read Virtual Archetypes: Justin Beaulieu and Jason Friesen (PDF)

With help from SCIgen

See also:

• Exploring RAID Using Extensible Epistemologies
• Simulating DHCP and Spreadsheet with ACANTH