Over at the .net awards I was just confused to find me in category 13 as a contender for “Standards Champion”.

The competition is err… I go and pack:

• Mozilla
• Alastair Campbell/Nomensa
• World Wide Web Consortium
• Dan Cederholm/Simplebits
• Christian Heilmann/Yahoo
• Julie Howell/Fortune Cookie
• Dave Shea/CSS Zen Garden
• Eric Meyer meyerweb.com
• Jeffrey Zeldman/A List Apart
• Molly Holzschlag

Well I’ve got the body of Dave and the hair of Molly (granted more colourful). That should count for something!

As it is Friday and I am jetlagged I declare “pointless API Friday” and give you Scrabblr.

Scrabblr allows you to send a word to it and it returns the scrabble value or an error in case the word has too many instances of a character than there are tiles available. Output formats are either a simple string (no format defined), XML or JSON. For JSON you also can have a callback parameter to use the API in script nodes.

Examples:

• http://icant.co.uk/sandbox/scrabblr/?word=kitten
• http://icant.co.uk/sandbox/scrabblr/?word=kitten&format=xml
• http://icant.co.uk/sandbox/scrabblr/?word=kitten&format=json
• http://icant.co.uk/sandbox/scrabblr/?word=kitten&format=json&callback=foo

The conference that inspired me to start Scripting Enabled, Accessibility2.0 just released transcripts and audio files of all the presentations, including my “Fencing in the habitat”:

[slideshare id=372843&doc=fencinginthehabitat-1209163055552778-9&w=425]

• Transcription of ‘Fencing in the habitat’
• Audio of ‘Fencing in the habitat’

Thanks to AbilityNet for releasing all the transcripts and offering them for us to enjoy. There were some really good presentations at this event, hope you find something!

• Get all transcripts and audio recordings of Accessibility 2.0 here

When I taught a bunch of students last month the ways of the DOM and explained progressive enhancement they were very happy about the ideas but rightfully exclaimed that DOM scripting can get verbose and repetitive. This is when I had to idea to write ViewsHandler , a small framework to write DOM applications.

ViewsHandler is not meant to be a JavaScript templating engine, as I found that whilst you have to create a lot of HTML with DOM, the parts that change in the app are not that many. Templating engines would replace the whole view, ViewsHandler instead offers you to create HTML, add it to a shell or application canvas and store references to the parts that change. That way you only create your HTML once and then only do minor changes to cached DOM elements when you need to.

As a demo I created a small Flickr slide show using ViewsHandler which was exactly the task that I had given my class :)

What do you think?

I just came back from Stanford where I talked about Scripting Enabled, what lead to it, how I build Easy YouTube and generally how giving hack events and unconferences an accessiblity spin can rejuvenate the movement and drive innovation. The slides are available here and the video will follow once Stanford has finished captioning it.

[slideshare id=553629&doc=scriptingenabled-1218646262025037-8&w=425]