[WSG] All is not well...
http://www.janelehrer.co.uk/live5/ In IE, when the window is shrunk, the content block drops underneath the logo image (ugly). Why does that happen when, in FF, it stays in position and compresses nicely? Also, in IE, there are gaps between the border images. Again, in FF, a nice smooth line. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Adam ** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list getting help **
RE: [WSG] Accessibility: Default placeholders
Geoff Deering Okay, so if this was implemented in user agents, what would be your educated estimate of percentage of users who would configure this and therefore avoid this problem of interpreting the incorrect state of form controls? I'd estimate it to be roughly the same as the percentage of users that have reconfigured their OS to use different default colours which would make them get confused by *judiciously* styled form controls. Patrick Patrick H. Lauke Web Editor / University of Salford http://www.salford.ac.uk Web Standards Project (WaSP) Accessibility Task Force http://webstandards.org/ ** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list getting help **
[WSG] Bi-directional text
I need to mark-up a document (XHTML) written in English, but which includes some Hebrew words. I'm trying to decide the following: 1. How should the words be marked-up: span, dfn, or just leave them in the flow? 2. Is the bdo element needed, or just the dir attribute? 3. How should the transliteration and translation be included: title attribute or following in the flow? 4. How's the browser support for bidi? 5. What should be included in the head element? Thanks ** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list getting help **
Re: [WSG] Accessibility: Default placeholders
Patrick Lauke wrote: Geoff Deering Okay, so if this was implemented in user agents, what would be your educated estimate of percentage of users who would configure this and therefore avoid this problem of interpreting the incorrect state of form controls? I'd estimate it to be roughly the same as the percentage of users that have reconfigured their OS to use different default colours which would make them get confused by *judiciously* styled form controls. Patrick And what percentage of users that access those web pages would you expect that to be? -- Geoff Deering ** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list getting help **
RE: [WSG] Accessibility: Default placeholders
Geoff Deering I'd estimate it to be roughly the same as the percentage of users that have reconfigured their OS to use different default colours which would make them get confused by *judiciously* styled form controls. And what percentage of users that access those web pages would you expect that to be? You tell me...as they're the ones that you mentioned as a group that would potentially have problems with designers styling form controls in the first place, if I recall correctly... it just says it changes the background color, because this is under the control of the custom settings of the users desktop Anyway, I think we've bored the rest of the WSG list enough with this fundamental philosophical difference. You advocate not styling form controls at all to avoid any potential problems; I say that judicious styling, combined with more refined and obvious browser controls (it should be fairly easy to find the overrides, not buried under 3-4 levels of options), plus possibly alternate style sheets / site preferences, should not be a major problem as long as designers are made aware of the potential problems and don't just make arbitrary design choices (which anybody who calls hHimself a designer shouldn't anyway). There's probably no way to get our two views closer, so I'll agree to disagree once again :) P Patrick H. Lauke Web Editor / University of Salford http://www.salford.ac.uk Web Standards Project (WaSP) Accessibility Task Force http://webstandards.org/ ** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list getting help **
Re: [WSG] Good practice of CSS styled forms
Hi Goran, Our glossary provides a few form references, including usability, accessibility, styling, etc. Have reviewed the references up to a point. As per usual with the web, caveat emptor. http://www.motive.co.nz/glossary/forms.php Best regards, -- Andy Kirkwood | Creative Director Motive | web.design.integrity http://www.motive.co.nz ph: (04) 3 800 800 fx: (04) 970 9693 mob: 021 369 693 93 Rintoul St, Newtown PO Box 7150, Wellington South, New Zealand ** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list getting help **
RE: [WSG] Bi-directional text
Your greatest problem may be deciding which encoding to use. If your English language text will be inlcined to use a broad spectrum of characters then it may be prudent to use images for the Hebrew words and put the definition in the alt tag. Who are your users?? This will help you decide which approach is best. -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Mordechai Peller Sent: Thursday, 17 November 2005 10:06 PM To: wsg@webstandardsgroup.org Subject: [WSG] Bi-directional text I need to mark-up a document (XHTML) written in English, but which includes some Hebrew words. I'm trying to decide the following: 1. How should the words be marked-up: span, dfn, or just leave them in the flow? 2. Is the bdo element needed, or just the dir attribute? 3. How should the transliteration and translation be included: title attribute or following in the flow? 4. How's the browser support for bidi? 5. What should be included in the head element? Thanks ** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list getting help ** ** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list getting help **
Re: [WSG] Bi-directional text
Paul Noone wrote: Your greatest problem may be deciding which encoding to use. Probably utf-8. If your English language text will be inlcined to use a broad spectrum of characters I don't understand what you mean. it may be prudent to use images for the Hebrew words That wouldn't be very good for accessibility. put the definition in the alt tag. If I include the definition in mark-up, I'd use a title attribute (but since I'm not planning on using images, the alt attribute isn't an option, anyway). Who are your users?? This will help you decide which approach is best. They most likely can read Hebrew, though not necessarily very well. Similarly, their understanding would also be somewhat limited, though the text would be discussing the word so that would be a problem. What's more of a problem (as far as definitions goes) are Hebrew (and in some cases Yiddish or Aramaic) words written in a transliterated form because they have become a sort of jargon. (Interestingly, there are a few words where to use the English equivalent would hamper understanding because it's more likely that visitors would know the word in Hebrew, but not in English.) ** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list getting help **
Re: [WSG] Bi-directional text
Umm Paul Noone wrote: Your greatest problem may be deciding which encoding to use. If your English language text will be inlcined to use a broad spectrum of characters then it may be prudent to use images for the Hebrew words and put the definition in the alt tag. images for words? sounds like an approach I'd expect in the mid to late 90s. Andrew -- Andrew Cunningham e-Diversity and Content Infrastructure Solutions Public Libraries Unit, Vicnet State Library of Victoria 328 Swanston Street Melbourne VIC 3000 Australia andrewc+AEA-vicnet.net.au Ph. 3-8664-7430 Fax: 3-9639-2175 http://www.openroad.net.au/ http://www.libraries.vic.gov.au/ http://www.vicnet.net.au/ ** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list getting help **
Re: [WSG] Bi-directional text
Mordechai Peller wrote: I need to mark-up a document (XHTML) written in English, but which includes some Hebrew words. I'm trying to decide the following: 1. How should the words be marked-up: span, dfn, or just leave them in the flow? Depends on the structure of your text and its purpose to soem extent. But considering you need to markup a change in language, I'd be inclined to use a span tag to apply the lang and xml:lang attributes. 2. Is the bdo element needed, or just the dir attribute? Do NOT use BDO, this is a bidi override, and is used to change the default directionality of characters. If it is a single work in hebrew amidst LTR text the you don't really need the dir attribute, since each Hebrew character is right to left anyway. If you were going to use a group of words or a phrase, then i'd wrap it in an appropriate element and indicate the dir, e.g. span lang=he xml:lang=he dir=rtl/span 3. How should the transliteration and translation be included: title attribute or following in the flow? Posisbly the best approach is to have the transliteration and translation in teh etxt rather than in an attribute value. One of the nice things? or is it problematic things about HTML and XHTML is that a lang declaration applies not only to the content of the element, but also to the value of the attributes of the element. A span with a 'lang=he' implies that the valuses of any alt or title attributes in this element are also written in Hebrew. 4. How's the browser support for bidi? for most browsers, its more an OS issue. 5. What should be included in the head element? not sure what you mean by this. All you should need to do is declare the encoding. Have a look at http://www.w3.org/International/resource-index.html#bidi Andrew Thanks ** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list getting help ** -- Andrew Cunningham e-Diversity and Content Infrastructure Solutions Public Libraries Unit, Vicnet State Library of Victoria 328 Swanston Street Melbourne VIC 3000 Australia andrewc+AEA-vicnet.net.au Ph. 3-8664-7430 Fax: 3-9639-2175 http://www.openroad.net.au/ http://www.libraries.vic.gov.au/ http://www.vicnet.net.au/ ** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list getting help **
[WSG] Webpatterns and WebSemantics
Hi all, I've just published this http://westciv.typepad.com/dog_or_higher/2005/11/webpatterns_and.html There has been some discussion recently about what makes something a profession (or a discipline), in the context of our industry/ profession/discipline http://www.molly.com/2005/11/14/web-standards-and-the-new- professionalism/ In the article I quote Brad Appleton, who makes the observation that Fundamental to any science or engineering discipline is a common vocabulary for expressing its concepts, and a language for relating them together WebPatterns is a project to help collaboratively develop this common vocabulary for expressing its concepts, and a language for relating them together, in short a pattern language for the web. I've also setup http://webpatterns.org, to help foster and develop the idea and the conversation. It's a little like microformats.org, but with a focus more on site architecture than just data. Very interested in people's thoughts, thanks for your time, john John Allsopp style master :: css editor :: http://westciv.com/style_master support forum :: http://support.westciv.com blog :: dog or higher :: http://blogs.westciv.com/dog_or_higher Web Essentials web development conference http://we05.com ** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list getting help **
Re: [WSG] Accessibility: Default placeholders
Patrick Lauke wrote: Geoff Deering I'd estimate it to be roughly the same as the percentage of users that have reconfigured their OS to use different default colours which would make them get confused by *judiciously* styled form controls. And what percentage of users that access those web pages would you expect that to be? You tell me...as they're the ones that you mentioned as a group that would potentially have problems with designers styling form controls in the first place, if I recall correctly... No, you tell me, because this is your suggestion on how it should be handled. it just says it changes the background color, because this is under the control of the custom settings of the users desktop Anyway, I think we've bored the rest of the WSG list enough with this fundamental philosophical difference. You advocate not styling form controls at all to avoid any potential problems; I say that judicious styling, combined with more refined and obvious browser controls (it should be fairly easy to find the overrides, not buried under 3-4 levels of options), plus possibly alternate style sheets / site preferences, should not be a major problem as long as designers are made aware of the potential problems and don't just make arbitrary design choices (which anybody who calls hHimself a designer shouldn't anyway). There's probably no way to get our two views closer, so I'll agree to disagree once again :) P I think that people on this list are intelligent enough to know that if they are bored with this thread they can easily ignore it by identifying it by it's subject heading. But it may just be, if anyone is still following it, that this discussion may at least provoke thinking more deeply about the impacts of such design implementations. I think that is one of the characteristics of the people on this list; they approach design in this medium with a real care about the user experience. I feel their intention comes for a real desire to be the best possible designers, implementing great design, and try to emulate best of practice within that context while understanding why there are standards conventions to aid the user experience, accessibility, appropriate use of markup etc. It's not a philosophical difference here, it amazes me that this is the perspective you draw, because it's clearly a difference of understanding and interpreting the impact of standard interface design elements when they clash with interface design conventions for communicating the state of the user interface. It's not a philosophical issue, it's clearly a functional issue. No, you are completely misunderstanding what I am saying if you have drawn the conclusion that; You advocate not styling form controls at all to avoid any potential problems. I know my English expression could be improved, but if you draw this conclusion, you have completely missed the point, and I think I have covered enough ground to make that clear enough. And the final solution you provide, which definitely has potential merit, has many problems right at this point of time. No user agent I know of currently has this capacity to abstract form elements styles. So this isn't something one can recommend. If designers are depending on users to override designs elements that conflict with standard interactive design conventions, I feel their fundamental approach to design is flawed, because they are not putting the basic principles of the design of the interface of device interact as a primary consideration. As for your last statement, are designers well aware of this particular issue? It seems from the discussion here they are not, and as I have mentioned before, it is therefore important to highlight this problem, because many designers try follow standard so they don't inflict miscommunication on users, and the sad thing is that this particular issue, I feel has not been address properly in web standards. It's not designers fault. It's just been overlooked. How do you feel when you have been designing something with all the best intention, then find out you have unintentionally implemented a design that conflicts with user interface principles? Software development and particularly web development are rich in history of these types of misunderstandings and implementation. -- Geoff Deering ** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list getting help **
Re: [WSG] Webpatterns and WebSemantics
On 11/18/05, John Allsopp [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Very interested in people's thoughts,Interesting and challenging idea John. I'll be keeping a keen eye on the site as it develops. We've tried for years to organise a similar ideal within our own crew here and while I'm sure a pattern exists, I think its come out of chaos more than collaboration. ;) Cheers Chris B
Re: [WSG] Accessibility: Default placeholders
Geoff Deering wrote: It's not a philosophical difference here, it amazes me that this is the perspective you draw, because it's clearly a difference of understanding and interpreting the impact of standard interface design elements when they clash with interface design conventions for communicating the state of the user interface. It's not a philosophical issue, it's clearly a functional issue. I see it as philosophical divide in this context: is a web page creating its own experience and UI, self contained and - sometimes - distinct from the OS that is displaying it, or should a web page integrate seamlessly with the user's OS as if it was a native application? Yes, form controls are (to simplify) delegated by the browser to the OS, which serves the second viewpoint but not the first. No user agent I know of currently has this capacity to abstract form elements styles. So this isn't something one can recommend. I'm not recommending that designers can rely on the user agent to take care of it...but arguing that it's time once again to give browser developers a gentle kick to implement more functionality as laid out in UAAG. It seems that, beyond a very low baseline, browsers have dumped the onus back on the web developers / authors, and I'd like to see more happening on the user agent front. For one, user customisation options should be prominent and easy to access/use, not buried deep within obscure dialogs...which would then also make it more realistic to expect users themselves to set up their own browsing environment to suit their needs. A trivial and unrelated example (which I may already have mentioned...can't remember) would be my little Firefox text size toolbar to have font sizing options directly and prominently in the browser's interface http://www.splintered.co.uk/experiments/70/ - if this type of functionality was available and visible by default in FF, it would make any text sizing widgets that some web developers have now started to add to their sites redundant - but currently the argument goes it's a neat idea to provide the widget on the page, as most users don't even know they can resize their text. Or, again unrelated, how about a sensible and user friendly way to access longdesc on images? Why do browsers make it pretty much impossible to access this image attribute? http://www.splintered.co.uk/experiments/55/ If designers are depending on users to override designs elements that conflict with standard interactive design conventions, I feel their fundamental approach to design is flawed, because they are not putting the basic principles of the design of the interface of device interact as a primary consideration. I'm not saying they should depend on users to override settings...just that *if* users do end up having a problem even with a judiciously, carefully implemented design choice, that the browsers should allow them an easy way to override this aspect. I'm thinking of the fallback mechanisms that, IMHO, should be in place at the user agent end, rather than saying that designers should consider every possible scenario or just not use styling at all. As for your last statement, are designers well aware of this particular issue? It seems from the discussion here they are not, and as I have mentioned before, it is therefore important to highlight this problem, because many designers try follow standard so they don't inflict miscommunication on users, And that is the angle that is keeping me posting here...the more we talk about it, the more the awareness (hopefully not just between the two of us, but other designers coming across these posts) we raise. :) and the sad thing is that this particular issue, I feel has not been address properly in web standards. But is it a standards issue, or is it a usability + design issue? I.e. by making it a standards issue, it seems to imply that we'll have stringent, rigid, dogmatic guidelines that would go beyond the remit of web standards. We also don't have standards on things like never make your H1 smaller than your H2 or similar, but leave it up to the common sense of web authors/designers. Software development and particularly web development are rich in history of these types of misunderstandings and implementation. Linking back to my philosophical question at the beginning: is web development a subset of software development, or is it - for lack of a better term - the development of an experience. A related point from that: should web applications (functional, intranet-type apps) still have their own feel or integrate seamlessly (from a visual standpoint) with the OS? And...what am I still doing up at 3am? Sheesh...time flies P -- Patrick H. Lauke __ re·dux (adj.): brought back; returned. used postpositively [latin : re-, re- + dux, leader; see duke.] www.splintered.co.uk |
RE: [WSG] Bi-directional text
Thanks for your comments, Andrew. At least your other reply was of some use. Just when _did_ this list stop being one of altruistic support for accessibility issues and become a forum for personal insult? -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Andrew Cunningham Sent: Friday, 18 November 2005 11:14 AM To: wsg@webstandardsgroup.org Subject: Re: [WSG] Bi-directional text Umm Paul Noone wrote: Your greatest problem may be deciding which encoding to use. If your English language text will be inlcined to use a broad spectrum of characters then it may be prudent to use images for the Hebrew words and put the definition in the alt tag. images for words? sounds like an approach I'd expect in the mid to late 90s. Andrew ** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list getting help **
RE: [WSG] Accessibility: Default placeholders
for the record, I'm still following the thread. this isn't even close to finished. -Original Message- From: Geoff Deering To: wsg@webstandardsgroup.org Sent: 11/18/05 12:54 PM Subject: Re: [WSG] Accessibility: Default placeholders Patrick Lauke wrote: Geoff Deering ** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list getting help **
Re: [WSG] Bi-directional text
Hi Paul, Paul Noone wrote: Thanks for your comments, Andrew. At least your other reply was of some use. Just when _did_ this list stop being one of altruistic support for accessibility issues and become a forum for personal insult? My deepest apologies Paul, I wasn't meaning to be insulting. Sorry if it appeared that way. Just my frustration level at the time I read the email. When I read your email, I'd just finished doing a first pass of a review of Australian government websites with translated information, and I was quite frustrated at the peculiar interpretations of accessibility standards that seems to be out there. For instance the number of government sites that have non-English information (even in languages that use the straight Latin alphabet) imbeded in GIFs or JPEGs is much higher that I though it would be. The common practice is to create an image of text for one langauge audience, and provide the alt attribute text in a totally different language (ie English). In essence the audience of the document and the audience of the alt attribute are two discrete groups. To compound the issue, most translations are provided as PDFs, with little effort to ensure that the text in the PDF is extractable or reusable, either by a screen reader, a PDF to HTML conversion process or even a PDF to TEXT conversion. Within Australia, It would appear that when it comes to non-English language content, we tend to throw web standards out of the window. Although there are some very good examples out there, on the whole there are many very bad examples. Again, my apologies. I did not intend to offend. To explain my comment that may have appear flipant or insulting: back in mid-90s, using images of text was the only way to provide some languages on the web, since early web browsers could not render those languages. Another common practice was to deliberately identify the wrong encoding for the page and then specify fonts needed to render the page. Web browser technologies and web standards have progressed dramatically since those days. And current use of images to represent non-English language text does not comply with web standards. I find it unfortunate that the practie is still used so much within Australia government sites. Andrew -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Andrew Cunningham Sent: Friday, 18 November 2005 11:14 AM To: wsg@webstandardsgroup.org Subject: Re: [WSG] Bi-directional text Umm Paul Noone wrote: Your greatest problem may be deciding which encoding to use. If your English language text will be inlcined to use a broad spectrum of characters then it may be prudent to use images for the Hebrew words and put the definition in the alt tag. images for words? sounds like an approach I'd expect in the mid to late 90s. Andrew ** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list getting help ** -- Andrew Cunningham e-Diversity and Content Infrastructure Solutions Public Libraries Unit, Vicnet State Library of Victoria 328 Swanston Street Melbourne VIC 3000 Australia andrewc+AEA-vicnet.net.au Ph. 3-8664-7430 Fax: 3-9639-2175 http://www.openroad.net.au/ http://www.libraries.vic.gov.au/ http://www.vicnet.net.au/ ** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list getting help **
Re: [WSG] Can't select text on IE
On 11/16/05, CHAUDHRY, Bhuvnesh [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
The problem: Using IE6, I am unable to select a part of the text from the
content area. When I try to select a para or a line, all the text on the
page within the parent div tag including the side menu bar get selected.
There is a JavaScript workaround - I'm not sure where I got this but
it's fixed the problem on one of my sites where it was occuring (code
at the end).
It introduces a page flash under certain cache settings in IE,
however. So it depends what's more important to you and your client,
the flash or the text selection.
Regards,
Kay.
--
Kay Smoljak
http://kay.zombiecoder.com/
// begin code
// fix absolute positioning text selection problem with IE6
if (window.createPopup document.compatMode
document.compatMode==CSS1Compat){
document.onreadystatechange = onresize = function fixIE6AbsPos(){
if (!document.body) return;
if (document.body.style.margin != 0px) document.body.style.margin = 0;
onresize = null;
document.body.style.height = 0;
setTimeout(function(){ document.body.style.height =
document.documentElement.scrollHeight+'px'; }, 1);
setTimeout(function(){ onresize = fixIE6AbsPos; }, 100);
}
}
// end code
**
The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/
See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm
for some hints on posting to the list getting help
**
