Project WolverineBroadcasting LIVE from the orbiting command centre

Projects

Here you can find links to the projects I’ve had a hand in. I am particularly interested in challenges.  The more difficult the better.

Accessware

Accessware is a validator for the New Zealand Web Standards & Recommendations, which are published by the Web Standards Group.

This validator has an HTML parser and CSS parser which can link styles to elements, so for instance, you can identify the background colour of an element, even if the attribute is not applied to that particular element.

It has a few more tricks:

  • a colour contrast analyser
  • very basic JavaScript analysis
  • it can identify if colours are used as identifiers, ie ‘fields marked red are required’ – that’s really cool!
  • element relationship analysis, so it can tell if form fields have associated labels
  • … and more, but it gets pretty technical.

In 2008, this validator won a TUANZ innovation award, which is a prestigious award. Winning this was a very rewarding moment.

Free Our Data

Free Our Data is an effort to encourage Government agencies to grant developers full access to the data that these agencies hold.

The Digital Content Strategy, released by the National Library, is supposed to guide the Government in addressing the changing nature of the web, blah blah blah.

The problem though, is that it doesn’t go far enough. For web developers to truly achieve the goals of the Digital Content Strategy, we need access to the data that the Government holds, and it needs to be released under a more permissive license than the standard copyright details.

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