Gmail Launches People Widget - Another Enhancement of Gmail or Just an Useless Addon?

Ya as you may have already guessed I am an extensive user of Gmail and none of the enhancements in it goes unnoticed by me. So this time its a new widget from Google which caught my eye. Actually, it was presented in such a way that it should caught the eye, something usual with Google product updates.

People Widget - shows up your contacts, who are mentioned in the current email you have opened, in the right top corner of the mail chain or as Google would say conversation list. I can understand Google realized it very strongly that emails conversations are all about the people you are communicating with. So they are showing additional information about that contact of yours.

So what additional information Gmail People Widget is going to show?

Those additional information includes the following -

How to Create Easy Collapsible and Expandable Lists in JavaScript

Here is a very quick and easy way to make your lists collapsible and expandable on clicks by using JavaScript. Now when presenting a long lists of item you can set them to remain collapsed on page load, but after that users can click and expand any of those list headings to see the full list of items. Unlike accordion, here users can easily open up all the lists one by one. Checkout the Demo of Collapsible and Expandable Lists which is created here.
First, just include a JavaScript file in your <header> section of the page -

<script src="http://www.acmeous.com/tutorials/demo/acmeousCollapsibleLists/acmeousCollapsibleLists.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

Then just below it, within the <header> section of your page, add the following code -

It's Time To Act - Join Hands With Japan and Help Millions of Human Being

March 11 2011, 2:46pm JST, Japan: A massive earthquake of magnitude 9.0 hits the northeastern coast of Japan triggering extremely devastative tsunami waves which appeared in Japan just few minutes after the earthquake. This was the largest earthquake to hit Japan in a hundred years.

Warnings, precautions, and evacuations across the Pacific Ocean.

Effect till now: 7,508 people died, 11,700 people are injured or missing, and millions of people are affected by lack of electricity, water and transportation. Northeast Japan devastated. 6 nuclear reactors crippled.

If this is enough for you to react and start acting like a human being, then stretch your supporting arms of brotherhood to Japan who now needs international support to rebuild.

Support millions of people in Japan by donating whatever you can via The American National Red Cross.

You can also donate through Google Crisis Response

Differences Between Strict and Transitional DOCTYPEs

Attributes which are deprecated in Strict DOCTYPEs:

• align (allowed on elements related to tables only, like - col, colgroup, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, and tr)


• target


• language


• background


• link


• hspace


• noshade


• nowrap


• bgcolor


• text


• vspace


• vlink


• alink


• height (allowed on img and object)


• border (allowed on table)


• width (allowed on img, object, table, col, and colgroup)


• name (allowed in HTML 4.01 Strict, not allowed on form and img in XHTML 1.0 Strict)

Gmail Changes Refresh Link to Button - A Notable Use Case for Information Architects

Now this time it is a relatively small change in Gmail that caught my eyes, but definitely it was not that small to remain un-noticed. Yes, the Refresh feature of Gmail. Frankly speaking I used this feature very less cause I was in a habit of clicking the Inbox link rather, and it was from the time when Refresh feature was not even available to Gmail.

Difference Between XHTML and HTML4

HTML is the Hyper Text Markup Language which is rendered by any web browser you use to visit any website or web application. Whatever programming language, whatever platform a website or web application uses, it drills down to HTML only for your browser. So HTML is the building block of the World Wide Web which has not seen much significant improvement during last 2 decades except the Extensible Hyper Text Markup Language - the XHTML.

Here are the very basic differences between HTML and XHTML -

1) All documents must be well formed and properly nested

<p>The food is <em>delicious</em></p> - Correct.
<p>The food is <em>delicious</p></em> - Wrong.

2) Elements and Attributes must be in lowercase

Gmail Enhances Usability and Simplifies User Experience - Another Great Product Gets Google's Trademark

It was just another regular day of checking my mails on Gmail.
But aahh!!! So is it?
Great, so this time its Gmail. Its now Gmail which is showing the results of all the User Experience studies Google use to do on its products and also on others products. I was really surprised to see that pop-up within my Gmail window which also made me amazed of my web based email system being changed after a bit long time. At the first look it looked to me as the minimalist attitude Google has taken to this which is a kind of regular for Google. But second thought was obviously - Powerful, specially for Contacts.