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Posts Tagged ‘facebook’

Today marks the one year anniversary of the day we started the Designing With Web Standards group on Facebook (DWWS). Since October 27, 2007 over 4,100 members have joined, representing over 50 countries around the globe.

Update: As of  Jan. 26, 2009 – there are over 4,800 members.

Designing With Web Standards - Facebook Group

Quoting from the DWWS Facebook group page:

Designing With Web Standards is “the foundational web standards text”. “A core text cited by many as the beginning of the true revolution.”

“Web standards” didn’t really exist until Mr. Jeffrey Zeldman, and his colleagues, coined the term, applied it to a set of ill-enforced W3C and ECMA recommendations, and persuaded browser makers to support these core technologies accurately and completely. That was “The Web Standards Project.”

Designers still weren’t using these hard-won standards, so Mr. Zeldman pushed A List Apart in the direction of web standards evangelism, and this had a great effect. An underground of smart, forward-thinking designers and developers embraced web standards.

Still, most people didn’t get the concepts of web standards, and the industry was oblivious to the benefits or even the existence of web standards.

So the book was written, and published, revised and re-published and the story of web standards continues. It’s the book that launched a thousand other books, from Web Standards Solutions on. It changed some people’s careers, launched others, shook up the industry. However imperfectly applied, web standards are behind most “Web 2.0″ apps.

And yet web standards are still a semi-underground movement, and standardistas are still a rare breed.

Back on November 2nd, 2007 – Jeffrey Zeldman wrote about the group in his blog.

In July of 2008, we wrote an update about DWWS group activities, and related events.

In the past year, 4,171 members have to joined the DWWS Facebook group – to ask questions about the Designing With Web Standards book, and dialogue about Web Standards.

The DWWS Facebook group is already very global. Members are from the following countries, or regions: Australia, Argentina, Bangladesh, Belgium, Belize, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Ecuador, Egypt, El Salvador, Finland, Fiji, France, Ghana, Germany, Greece, Guatemala, Haiti, Hong Kong, Iceland, India, Indonesia, Israel, Italy, Jamaica, Jordan, Kenya,
Luxembourg, Malaysia, Malta, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nigeria, Norway, Pakistan, Panama, Peru, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Serbia, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sri Lanka, Sweden, Switzerland, Thailand, Tunisia, Turkey, UK, USA, Venezuela, Vietnam, etc.

Join the DWWS FB group and let’s learn about web standards together.

Just getting started with web design or web standards? Check out Jeffrey Zeldman’s DWWS page, or our recent book review of Jeffrey’s book – Designing With Web Standards.

Demonstration of a simple FBML tag (fb:user-agent), used to render special messages to various browsers.

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 <fb:user-agent includes="firefox">
    We love Firefox!
 </fb:user-agent>

A simple example, from the new book FBML Essentials.

Book Review

FBML Essentials – Facebook Markup Language Fundamentals, written by Jesse Stay, published by O’Reilly Media, July 2008, 167 pages, ISBN:0-596-51918-6,  $29.99

FBML Essentials - Facebook Markup Language - book cover

Facebook is the world’s largest and fastest growing social networking website (with 132 Million unique vistors in June of 2008).

FMBL Essentials, the new book from O’Reilly Media, is all about learning the essential markup elements and fundamentals of Facebook application design.  FBML (like HTML)  provides the basic markup tags for building a Facebook application.

According to the author Jesse Stay, this book is essential for anyone who wants to be a part of Facebook’s future. “FBML is only the beginning of your adventure in Facebook Development. Reviewing and knowing what tags are available will help save you time as you develop on Facebook.”

Whaaoo there Jesse, let’s not go-a-galloping on that horse so quickly. Some people might need to sign-up for Facebook first.  Or maybe read Facebook, The Missing Manual,  and get familiar with the Facebook blog and FAQ.

Somewhere along your journey of joining Facebook — and finding your first 20 or 200 friends –  you might have started thinking about becoming a Facebook application developer.  Perhaps you stumbled across the Facebook application developer area, and said to yourself – hmmmm, that would be fun to try. You might be  a curious technology geek like me, or “social geek” like FBML Essentials author – Jessy Stay.

OK, cowboy! Are you ready to ride? Buy this book. Read it. Learn FBML fast.

You’ll discover:

• A sample Facebook application – with explanations of how it works
• Design rules for images, CSS, Javascript, and forms – related to FBML
• An introduction to FBJS, Facebook’s version of JavaScript
• Concise explanations of all the FBML tags – logic tags, user tags, profile tags, etc.
• How to create forms with FBML
• Dynamic FBML attributes, including MockAJAX
• Tips on testing your FBML code

You can tell Jesse Stay is a very sharp guy when you read his blog.  He wrote his first FBML application in just one week, and sold it 2 months later. Jesse has consulted for several of the top 100 applications on Facebook. Now Jesse’s working on an iPhone Interactive entertainment application that will help cowboys change gears faster, or something like that.

This is funniest musical video about the FaceBook socio-technological revolution I have ever seen. (It’s also the only one I’ve ever seen.) So take a look… and I think you will get a few chuckles as you ponder the impact of FaceBook and YouTube.