Happy birthday to the damn fine Heather Champ.

The good people at Web Accessibility in Mind have created this wonderful How to Create Accessible Forms tutorial. It demonstrates a few common form accessibility problems, and shows how to fix them. Lessons include grouping radio buttons and checkboxes in a <fields> tag, and providing a title for each field set using the <legend> tag. Especially valuable is the audio demonstration of a screen reader working through a badly implemented form. If you ever have to convince colleagues of the importance of accessibility, a little audio demo goes a long way.

The Dreamweaver MX Preview Release is out today. Coverage of that and Rachel Andrew’s new Dreamweaver generated XHTML/CSS layouts awaits at Zeldman.

I’ll be speaking at Web Design World in Seattle this July. The topic? Web Design on a Shoestring. Surely, my talk alone should be reason enough to go.

More on Google
Gary Price, the man behind The Virtual Acquisition Shelf & News Desk, has summarized Google’s beta answer service. He also interviewed a Google spokesperson and asked, “What are the criteria editors will use to judge if the answer can be posted? Will all URLs be checked?” Google answered, “We are unable to describe specific criteria. Yes, all URLs will be checked and reviewed by an editor.” Jeez Louise, how about the old library standbys, currency, accuracy, bias and authority, as criteria.

The Shifted Librarian suggests that, "Free answers @ your library" might be The American Library Association’s next campaign.

I still have not heard a peep about my question. Could it be user error? Certainly. I am spazz enough.

My feet and ankles are cold from a rain-soaked dash for coffee. If only my library had cake pans. Thanks Michael.

Jeffrey and I walk around the city most weekends. Last weekend, we passed the intersection of 35th and Lex several times, and I photographed it on two occasions.

“The Internet offers a very easy and fast-growing way to eliminate the editor: It’s called blogging, and it may be just the thing for you. In addition, some people say that blogs have the potential to change journalism as we know it.” From, Lee Dembart’s “THE END USER Adieu, editors?” in Monday’s International Herald Tribune. A few assumptions and misstatements will rub some bloggers the wrong way, but the ideas about the position of our little genre are interesting. Thanks, McMullen.

Sorry about the silence this week. Big project. More on that in a few weeks.

My first Holga.

Also new, linkypoo.

More than once I have caught myself in a morbid monolog about the 11th of September. It happens when I entertain those visiting NYC. I begin to sound like my grandmother, so prone to prattle on about World War II.

It happened again at lunch as Catherine and I dined with three librarians from the Bibliothèque Centre Pompidou. And then I returned to my desk to find Launch New York City: After the Fall, another multimedia site by photographer Geoffrey Hiller. Hiller’s site moved me to look for Bill Biggart’s Final Exposures, the final work of photographer and NYC resident Bill Biggart, who died while making pictures of the Towers just after the attack.

The dark ferocity with which we cling to these events astounds me. I don’t think we do it because we are afraid of forgetting; I think we do it because we can’t quite integrate these experiences into the rest of our lives. We are trying to make them fit, and they just don’t. That is why I drone on, and that is why I look at photos.

OK, enough already.

Happier things:

1. Michael McGrorty’s exhibit of library cards from public libraries throughout the USA. Fearing that physical library cards will soon be obsolete, he has a call out for library cards. Send them to his California address, and he’ll make them into art.
2. Michael Barrish’s Oblivio.
3. Kevin Guilfoile’s First Rule of Book Club.
   

Utterances that bug me:

1. “Pontiff ,” as it is invariably used by reporters in the second paragraph of any story about the Pope.
2. “911” as the clipped, slightly more convenient version of 9/11 which already has such a packaged sound.

My holga film is back. Will post soon.

“… we wondered if the very nature of our profession denied us the civil rights afforded to all other Americans in the workplace. Did our status as librarians deprive us of protection from sexually explicit images as we worked day by day in our jobs? We decided not. ” Newbreedlibrarian hosts Wendy Adamson as she describes her experiences working in a library that was turned into sex central by the Internet. Ours is a complicated profession.

Also at Newbreed, an interview with Michele McGinnis, personal librarian to Kevin Kelly, co-founding editor of Wired Magazine, and an article by Linda Harris Mehr, director of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Library.

Congratulations to the headlemur and his lovely wife on fifteen years of marriage. Also in the zone, a new p i x e l v i e w with Tom Matrullo.

Lee County Librarians have a list of Sleepers, some good books you may have missed. Thanks M.E.!

I’ll pick up my first set of Holga prints tomorrow evening. In the meantime, enjoy these toy camera sites: 2000 Krappy Kamera II award winners, John M. Blodgett’s various and sundry photos, and Robert Vizzini’s 1995 trip to Cuba.

Francois Jordaan has created downloadable XHTML/Dreamweaver mods based on my Dreamweaver article at A List Apart. I have them working on my machine, and they make me so happy. Jordaan made files for all of the non-closing elements, and a mess of special characters.

The Washington Post will try to stop such shenanigans by digitally watermarking, or embedding copyright information in their photos. They will also make use of some fancy tracking software to keep their eyes peeled for unauthorized use of their images.

The Health Sciences Library at University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill has developed some goodies just for PDA’s. A few other libraries are also on the move. Thanks mke!