[WSG] free web accessibility checking toolbar
Steven Faulkner, from the Accessible Information Solutions (AIS) team, has developed a free web accessibility checking toolbar for Internet Explorer http://www.nils.org.au/ais/web/resources/toolbar/ The Accessibility Toolbar software contains a range of Tools: To examine discrete aspects (structure/code/content) of a html document To facilitate the use of 3rd party applications To simulate the user experience of different users Along with a range of references and additional resources. Steven is a Melbourne-based Web Standards Group member. Thanks Russ * The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ *
Re: [WSG] free web accessibility checking toolbar
Windows only unfortunately :( Peter Steven Faulkner, from the Accessible Information Solutions (AIS) team, has developed a free web accessibility checking toolbar for Internet Explorer http://www.nils.org.au/ais/web/resources/toolbar/ The Accessibility Toolbar software contains a range of Tools: To examine discrete aspects (structure/code/content) of a html document To facilitate the use of 3rd party applications To simulate the user experience of different users Along with a range of references and additional resources. -- peter gifford universal head design that works visit 7/43 bridge road stanmore nsw 2048 australia call(+612) 9517 1466 fax (+612) 9565 4747 email [EMAIL PROTECTED] sitewww.universalhead.com * The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ *
[WSG] Web Editor?
Title: Web Editor? What Web Editor out there produces the cleanest and most valid code? - Editor that is embedded in IE (seen it, produces really nasty markup) - Editor that is embedded in Netscape (no exprience) - Ektron (used it many years ago, was pretty happy with it) - . - Etc. And which one works in most of the browsers? Taco Fleur 07 3535 5072 http://www.tacofleur.com/index/blog/ Tell me and I will forget Show me and I will remember Teach me and I will learn
RE: [WSG] Web Editor?
Title: Web Editor? Happy new year all! Have kind thoughts for a poor fella who starts work again today after a short holiday break. Good question Taco. Im currently building an online template based CMS that I have sold to a hosting company. I originally had grand plans of beautifully marked up code being the end result, but it seems that the embedded content editor is the weakest link. Most seem to completely lack the ability to drive the formatting from a CSS file. My goal was to completely control layout from a CSS template. Not to mention that tags like font, i, b, and our other friends are used in abundance. I have looked at: http://www.cfdev.com/activedit/ (just bloody awful) http://www.editlet.com/testdrive/dhtml/dhtml_test.htm# (bad html output) http://www.siteobjects.com/pages/soeditorfaq.cfm (No cross browser, no mac) http://www.interakt.ro/products/KTML/ (span style=font-weight: bold; and font tags!) http://www.devedit.com/ (No cross browser, no mac) http://www.editize.com/ (looks great, but no mention of css) However Im using (till something better comes up): http://www.ephox.com/product/ It seems to have the right notions about what is correct mark-up. The Java 2.5 version even mentions the W3C Tidy app and mapping B and I to STRONG and EM. Works cross browser, you can limit the HTML file you are using with content editable regions, apply strict CSS use its got some good things going for it. It comes in lots a different flavours too. Version 3.0 for windows looks like a real hum-dinger. Cleans imported MS Word code. Tell em the price son!. She aint cheap. Check the pricing page for your preferred version. Im giving serious consideration to (as of this email!): http://www.wysiwygpro.com/index.asp (cross browser, cheap! seems compliant to a degree, uses CSS (even against a HTML snippet)) I gave serious consideration to: http://www.interactivetools.com/iforum/P15734/ (cross browser, spell checker, open source!) but the lack of CSS implementation is what again nabbed that idea. For more info, refer to these lists pretty comprehensive! http://www.bris.ac.uk/is/projects/cms/ttw/ttw.html#os http://dmoz.org/Computers/Software/Internet/Authoring/HTML/WYSIWYG_Editors/ Hope this helps Be great to see some input from others! Brendan !!! A BIG PS !!! PS. Is there anyone out there who wants to chat about building CMS sites? I could really use a sounding board for some ideas, and gain some direction from those who might have had some experience. Too many ideas and a limited attention span are really playing havoc with this wee project. -Original Message- From: Taco Fleur [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, 12 January 2004 9:32 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [WSG] Web Editor? What Web Editor out there produces the cleanest and most valid code? - Editor that is embedded in IE (seen it, produces really nasty markup) - Editor that is embedded in Netscape (no exprience) - Ektron (used it many years ago, was pretty happy with it) - . - Etc. And which one works in most of the browsers? Taco Fleur 07 3535 5072 http://www.tacofleur.com/index/blog/ Tell me and I will forget Show me and I will remember Teach me and I will learn
RE: [WSG] Web Editor?
Thanks for posting your findings. htmlArea does allow you to import CSS files via an import(). Of course this is only useful for editing existing content as there doesn't seem to be a way to apply a particular style to an element via the UI. For this reason when using htmlArea we always load up new pages with a generic content template ( matching the sites structure ) this way the author can add headings, text and images using the correct CSS. Its simple but better than nothing. ChrisB I gave serious consideration to: http://www.interactivetools.com/iforum/P15734/ (cross browser, spell checker, open source!) but the lack of CSS implementation is what again nabbed that idea. * The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ *
RE: [WSG] Web Editor?
I'd have to go with you on this one Taco - Ektron's Ewebeditpro (http://www.ektron.com/web-content-editors.aspx) is currently the best of a bad lot. Cheers Mark -- Mark Stanton Technical Director Gruden Pty Ltd Tel: 9956 6388 Mob: 0410 458 201 Fax: 9956 8433 http://www.gruden.com * The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ *
RE: [WSG] Web Editor?
is that in regards to valid mark-up and cross browser? Or just GUI? This is an IE/Win only product so not in the cross browser department. The things I like about this product are the quality of the mark up customisation tools available. The entire interface is controlled via an XML file, so you can add remove buttons options, specify custom CSS rules and lock your users down to those by removing all other formatting options. The GUI is also pretty familiar works as expected. The install process is fairly straight forward most users can handle it on their own. Cheers Mark -- Mark Stanton Technical Director Gruden Pty Ltd Tel: 9956 6388 Mob: 0410 458 201 Fax: 9956 8433 http://www.gruden.com * The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ *
Re: [WSG] Web Editor?
On Monday, January 12, 2004, at 12:24 PM, Mark Stanton wrote: I'd have to go with you on this one Taco - Ektron's Ewebeditpro (http://www.ektron.com/web-content-editors.aspx) is currently the best of a bad lot. It certainly isn't cross-browser. Tested under IE5, Safari and Mozilla for Mac (OS X), all I got was a regular textarea with HTML mark-up inside. So, if you need a Mac solution, this isn't it. Justin French * The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ *
Re: [WSG] Web Editor?
On Monday, January 12, 2004, at 09:32 AM, Taco Fleur wrote: What Web Editor out there produces the cleanest and most valid code? - Editor that is embedded in IE (seen it, produces really nasty markup) - Editor that is embedded in Netscape (no exprience) - Ektron (used it many years ago, was pretty happy with it) - . - Etc. And which one works in most of the browsers? I've given up on these WYSIWYG editors -- the lack of support on Mac platforms (in which I spend 99% of my time), and the lack of standards support is really frustrating. What I've settled upon (for now at least) is some complex parsing of plain text, much in the same way that Textile http://textism.com/tools/textile/ does, but with a lot less features. For the average content contributor, they can just type regular plain text, with line breaks, paragraphs, lists, headings, etc with ZERO skills. From there, simple styling can be achieved with common plain text equivalents like *strong*, _emphasis_ /italics/, etc. From there, links and images are only a little more complex. All the parsing is done server-side, so I get complete control over how standards-compliant the outputted HTML is. If a client wants a new feature, I just bolt it in. If I want to limit the formatting, I just remove features. Easy. FWIW, I think Textile Beta 2 is a free download too. Justin French * The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ *
Re: [WSG] Web Editor?
Check out RealObject's edit-on http://www.realobjects.com/Overview.552.0.html regards, Ben Justin French wrote: And which one works in most of the browsers? I've given up on these WYSIWYG editors -- the lack of support on Mac platforms (in which I spend 99% of my time), and the lack of standards support is really * The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ *
Re: [WSG] entities
I believe that for quotes it's handy to use the entities because you define proper opening and closing quotes, instead of using the uni-directional default as defined on the keyboard. It's probably safest to use entities in all your text, as then they have no way of conflicting with the actual XHTML syntax. ... but I'm no web typography expert. -- Cameron W: www.themaninblue.com __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Hotjobs: Enter the Signing Bonus Sweepstakes http://hotjobs.sweepstakes.yahoo.com/signingbonus * The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ *
Re: [WSG] entities
On Monday, January 12, 2004, at 02:20 PM, Universal Head wrote: A quick HTML Entities question. For a closed single quote, for example, is it better to use rsquo; or #8217; - and what is the distinction? I can't answer your specific case, but I *can* paraphrase it with an example of my own. I've been using mdash; and ndash; for YEARS in my HTML, until I recently discovered that these don't work on Netscape 4.x (or earlier I guess). Whilst NN4.x isn't exactly a common browser anymore, it still made me think about how other browsers that I no longer test on too often were behaving. Quote from http://www.alistapart.com/articles/emen/ Since Netscape 4.x browsers dont understand many of the named entity references (such as rsquo; for a right single quote), Im not going to mention any of them here (though they have been used by A List Apart, bless its little heart). As such, my text/entity conversion functions (in PHP) now use #8212; and #8211; for em- and en-dashes respectively. I also use the numeric entities for opening and closing single and double quotes, and a whole bunch of other stuff, most of which is mentioned in the above link. The downside? Greatly reduces readability of the HTML source. The upside? Greatly increases the chances that a browser will get it right. Readability isn't a problem for me, because my CMS has decent previewing a conversion tools, but it might be an issue if previewing isn't available. Read the above link, and make your own --informed-- decision. Justin French * The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ *
Re: [WSG] entities
What's the technical difference between the two options? Are the numeric entities the original form and the typographical ones more recent? The reason this came up is that I've been using the numeric ones, and then I started using skEdit which is an excellent coding tool, but uses the typographical entities. Peter A quick HTML Entities question. For a closed single quote, for example, is it better to use rsquo; or #8217; - and what is the distinction? -- peter gifford universal head design that works visit 7/43 bridge road stanmore nsw 2048 australia call(+612) 9517 1466 fax (+612) 9565 4747 email [EMAIL PROTECTED] sitewww.universalhead.com * The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ *
Re: [WSG] entities
On Monday, January 12, 2004, at 04:12 PM, Universal Head wrote: What's the technical difference between the two options? Are the numeric entities the original form and the typographical ones more recent? The reason this came up is that I've been using the numeric ones, and then I started using skEdit which is an excellent coding tool, but uses the typographical entities. Then find an editor that suits your needs better. Whilst skEdit is quite nice in many many ways, it has a few quirks (like the named entities) which turned me off it during the demo period. Back to BBEdit for me!! A good place to learn about entities would be http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/sgml/entities.html -- although it may not specifically answer your question. This should be read in addition to the A List Apart link in my other post. Justin French * The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ *
Re: [WSG] entities
rsquo; is an alternate (easier to remember) code than the official unicode definition of #8217. All possible characters have a specific number assigned to them in Unicode. The lettered helpers came out after unicode was out to ease the pain of having to remember a set of digits that had nothing to do with the character being assigned. As such, browser support for the lettered versions can faulter. The numbered version is official Unicode, and should be recognized just about anywhere. --Ryan http://www.theward.net Universal Head wrote: A quick HTML Entities question. For a closed single quote, for example, is it better to use rsquo; or #8217; - and what is the distinction? Peter * The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ *
Re: [WSG] Web Editor?
Dreamweaver currently produces the cleanest and most valid code, and is one of the most polished WYSIWYG editors out there. Zeld's cronies worked with Macromedia to bring the program up to date with handling standards. It does the job pretty well. I don't use the visual design view all too often when using the program because writing my own code out by hand is easier. Dreamweaver color codes basically everything you enter, and in the newest MX2004 version, is also able to be set to catch code that will not be compatible with specified browsers. So, if you're designing for MS IE 4.0 clients, Dreamweaver will underline code not recognized by that browser in red squiggly like MS Word would do with bad spelling. All in all, an excellent tool, even for those who aren't going to use DW for its WYSIWYG qualities. The program also accepts expansion plugins as do all Macromedia dev programs that will add new features or update currently existing features. The only downside is the pricetag. Like was mentioned earlier though, you get what you pay for. Adobe's latest version of Pagemill is supposed to be decent as well, but after working with it in the past I gave it up for Windows Notepad.Pagemill is expensive and really not worth it in my opinion. When I'm on a mac, I use BBEdit unless it has DW installed :) I use KDE's Bluefish editor when I'm on Linux. --Ryan http://www.theward.net Taco Fleur wrote: Web Editor? What Web Editor out there produces the cleanest and most valid code? - Editor that is embedded in IE (seen it, produces really nasty markup) - Editor that is embedded in Netscape (no exprience) - Ektron (used it many years ago, was pretty happy with it) - . - Etc. And which one works in most of the browsers? Taco Fleur 07 3535 5072 http://www.tacofleur.com/index/blog/ Tell me and I will forget Show me and I will remember Teach me and I will learn * The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ *
