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Friday Feast #16: Standards, Creativity, Internet Law, Color and Monitor Calibration, Weblogs
11:44 AM - Jul 5, 2002

Lots of great stuff around the Web this past week, especially the ongoing weblogs about the July 1-5 Internet law program. Enjoy!

W3C News

W3C is starting a new discussion list, the Web standards education and outreach forum, for Web standards evangelists, authors, and others to discuss ways to improve the quality of web-standards related books, publications, lectures and training courses. Sounds like a great one! [hat tip: Eric Meyer]

Helping Creativity

Ever get stuck with a project? Just don’t feel very creative at the moment? Rudy takes a walk to help, and a change of scenery can indeed be helpful. Sometimes our minds are our biggest roadblocks, though, without even knowing it. Check out MonkeyMind to help you see your own mind chatter and help dump all that old stuff you don’t need in there. WebsiteTips.com also offers some resources to help your creativity.

Color and Graphics-Related Standards

Standards are everywhere. Here are a few resources for standards and standards organizations related to color and graphics.

• ACM SIGGRAPH
  A membership organization devoted to providing information on computer graphics and interactive techniques, including standards. Their site has information on their annual conference, educational programs, and more.
• Committee for Graphic Arts Technologies Standards(CGATS)
  An umbrella standards committee that “covers the entire scope of printing, publishing and converting technologies represented in one national standardization and coordination effort, while respecting the established activities of existing accredited standards committees and industry standards developers.”
• The Information Technology Standards: Joint Technical Committee 1 develops, maintains, promotes and facilitates IT standards. They have quite a few subcommittees that work on and establish standards in various areas, including standards related to color, such as the ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 24 noted below.
• International Color Consortium
  The ICC color profile was the result of this consortium’s work. They were established in 1993 by eight industry vendors “for the purpose of creating, promoting and encouraging the standardization and evolution of an open, vendor-neutral, cross-platform color management system architecture and components.”
• ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 24
  Their goal is the standardization of interfaces in windowed and non-windowed environments for computer graphics, image processing and the interaction and visual presentation of information. This group is a sub-committee of the Joint Technical Committee 1 of ISO, the International Standards Organisation and IEC, the International Electrotechnical Commission (ISO/IEC JTC 1).
• National Institute of Science and Technology(NIST)
  Their mission is “to develop and promote measurements, standards, and technology to enhance productivity, facilitate trade, and improve the quality of life.” They cover many areas, including the Advanced Network Technologies Division (ANTD), that provides test and measurement research for the Networking industry, including the Internet, such as the SMIL Player, following the W3C’s Audio Video Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL) Recommendations .

Color and Monitor Calibration

In April I posted some good resources for monitor calibration and color. Here’s another one:

• I Can See Clearly Now
  why and how to calibrate your monitor
  About.com’s Desktop Publishing guide, Jacci Howard Bear, has a new article on monitor calibration. Included are visual calibration tests at about.com and links to more, information on hardware and software ICC profiles, and color calibration tools.

Design and Usability

Want Help With Your Site? Ask Your Mom!
The title really means to watch more casual users, especially those who are forty-something and older and browse the Web, visit various sites, and see how they do. This article sites JCPenney’s site as having text that’s too small, a confusing main page and navigation, and more. Good perspective. [hat tip: Meryl’s Notes]

Internet Law

Fascinating reading to be had: Dan Gillmor, Drew Clark, Frank Field, and Donna Wentworth are writing about Harvard Law School’s Internet Law Program July 1-5 taught by Internet law experts Yochai Benkler, William Fisher III, Lawrence Lessig, Charles Nesson, and Jonathan Zittrain.

Music and the Internet

The Internet Debacle: An Alternative View by Janis Ian is an exceptional article about the misconceptions by record companies about free downloads of music. Ian, a professional musician with over 20 albums to her credit, feels strongly that the free downloads benefits the music industry and that the record companies are way behind the times.

Weblogs

Here are a few good ones that also cover web design, standards, weblogging, and related. There are lots more in the Luscious Links section here, too.

• AKMA: Peri Doxas
  Interesting opinion, thoughts, especially about community, weblogging and online interaction, by A. K. M. Adam. [hat tip: Caveat Lector]
• Caveat Lector
  by David Salo and Dorothea Salo (Dorothy is an eBook technology guru, especially the Open eBook Publication Structure). Lots of interesting writing about design, standards, XML, CSS, XHTML, and more. Great reading. [hat tip: kris]
• Simon Willison’s Weblog
  Another good weblog about web design, the Internet, PHP, CSS, and related. Plenty of good links and thoughts. Includes categorized archives—nice.
• the heart of things
  Jonathon Delacour’s terrific weblog with fascinating stories amidst great information and links about accessibility, standards, site design, and related. His desire is to “crossbreed fiction, essayistic speculation, and autobiography in a linear notebook rather than a linear narrative form.” [hat tip: kris]

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