On the heels of my posts about email client standards in early October, Email Standards Project has launched with a website that features a list of email clients and the support for the Email Standards Project Acid Test. This project is being led by Freshview, makers of Campaign Monitor and MailBuild. It’s great to see this getting off the ground and I hope it gains some traction.

Should web designers know how to code?

Really good post on nclud debating whether designers should know how to code. I agree that it is not totally necessary for a web designer to be a CSS master, but I do think designers who know how to code produce better work in general. The biggest problem with not coding your own designs is handing it over to another person to translate. Also, if you code your own work, you can make improvements to the design in the coding process.

NFL Network

If your a football fan that has Time Warner, Cablevision, or Comcast you probably didn’t see last night’s game due to a dispute with the NFL Network. The cable companies insist on making the NFL Network a premium, pay to watch channel. Well, the NFL Network basically streamed the Packers versus the Cowboys live on their website last night. I found the broadcast quite enjoyable and glad to see the NFL fight to get the channel to be on basic cable packages.

The Good

A friend of mine recently used one of the more well known services for a project. It was a new project that had a design, but needed the XHML and CSS code. He let me take a look at the code to assess the quality of the code. The markup was pretty good, they did a real good job with semantics and the code was valid. I did think there was a small case of DIV-itis and the markup could have been trimmed a bit.

My friend said they were accommodating with change problems that came up in the code and the turn around was as advertised. These services are perfect for small agencies that don’t have designers that code themselves and do a lot of brochure-ware small business sites.

The Bad

The biggest problem with these services is knowing when to use them and getting maintainable CSS code. Most of the services are really only suited for new projects. It’s somewhat difficult to use these services with existing sites. Then I found the way they wrote their CSS hard to follow. There are many ways to write CSS and if the service doesn’t write in a similar style, it can be hard to build upon the existing style-sheet.

There were also minor problems with cross-browser consistency. It’s good that they are willing to make changes, but I can see it becoming a pain to go back and forth, especially if you are on a deadline of your own.

The Ugly

I’ve come to think of good XHTML & CSS as sort of an art form and this makes the skill a commodity. WordPress.org says “Code is Poetry” and what these services do is make it more like gossip. I think it’s right for some situations but I think those situations are quite small. For anybody that’s worked on large, highly trafficked sites their services are just not an option.

Has anyone tried these services? What’s been your experience?

Wikipedia describes metadata as data about data. So, for example, you might have this post’s content as the main data but the date published, date edited, author, category, tags, etc. would all be its metadata. It’s supporting data that enables enrichment of navigation for users or intersections with other data to provide more related information.

It’s extremely important for those who dabble in information architecture, interaction design or web design to understand the importance of using metadata to build an effective modern web application.

Metadata as Navigation

Navigation is the more common usage of metadata. This post has supporting navigation to related posts by category, tags, and its publish date. All of these navigation points are associated by their metadata.

I think it’s important as a designer to have access and to look at feeds or database tables when developing the user interface. It enables them to find creative uses for metadata that can complement the interaction. I’ve worked at places were this is not a common practice and always thought it was odd.

Early this year I redesigned rikcat.com and I used my Delicious links feed as the main content area for my links section. I noticed the feed had the tags from my posts. So I decided to provide them to users as links back to the corresponding Delicious tag to enrich the user experience. If I never looked inside the data feed, I would have never had the idea to use them in the user interface.

Metadata for Data Intersection & Mashups

Simple forms of data intersection could be the use of tags on a real estate blog. Say all of your authors tagged their posts with a zipcode relating to the content. Well, you could aggregate all of those zipcodes and geocode the posts. Then use the Google Map API to visualize the related posts on a map to create new entry points to the content.

Yahoo Pipes is a mashup tool that takes multiple sets of data and intersects them on their metadata. It also provides some tools to do content analysis and outputs the results to a feed. You can create and enrich the data to enable new interfaces into content.

Data Visualization

A more advanced example of leveraging metadata is digg.com’s Digg Labs. Via flash applications Digg Labs uses the choices their users are constantly making to create a steady flow of metadata, giving the applications a feeling of activity. Users will generate more metadata than your admin users or, in Digg’s case, its story submitter will, so figuring out how to provoke and strengthen users interaction will help enable more visualization.

ESPN.com Sportsnation Polls use IP look-ups to capture the state where poll votes are cast. Then it uses that metadata to provide a visual map of where votes were cast. The user can also hover over a state and see results from just that state. A great use of the collected metadata.

Conclusion

When designing a site, do you look at the site’s metadata? Do you look at the database field or xml feeds for navigation and content ideas?