Re: [WSG] standards-compliant designers
There is blame to go around, for sure. I had an accessibility issue just this morning, while trying to find out about filing an insurance claim on my husband's car (which someone ran into in the middle of the night ... and took off). In Firefox, my browser of choice, the text on the page I needed was overlapping, and many of the links were not clickable. I switched to IE, and the page was totally fine; everything was in perfect working order. I couldn't help but check the source code, and of course, it was designed using tables. There were 187 errors, according to the W3C validation service. I e-mailed the company and received a quick reply that they had recently discovered an error that was preventing a small number of customers from accessing their claim information. Pretty generic, as expected. The company is customer-service based, according to its policies and my experience, so why would the powers that be within it not choose to make its Web site accessible to all? It's not like they don't have the money to make it happen. I propose that most people would choose not to inform them of the difficulties they have in the first place. It reminds me of the days (long ago!) when I was a waitress. Most of the customers who had a bad experience due to the food or the service (from other waitresses, of course!) wouldn't complain or explain; they'd merely pay their bills and leave, never to return, intent on informing everyone they knew about that awful restaurant. And then I think about how many times I personally have chosen to just let bad experiences go in fast-food restaurants, convenience stores, gas stations. The girl who jerked my money out of my hand with a scowl on her face and no thank-you. The guy who took five minutes to wait on me because he was too busy on his cell phone. I have gone to the manager sometimes, but most of the time, I just consider it too much hassle and let it go. The same is surely true of Internet experiences, I propose, at an exponentially greater rate of occurrence. The next page is just a click away. If it's a page that must be accessed, however, as in my insurance experience this morning, it's a different story, of course. But most of the time, I personally simply leave the site and make a note of what not to do. I'm self-taught. I sorted through HTML as a sort of grief therapy when I'd lost my baby (and almost gone with him) in 1999 and was out of work for months. I began learning about CSS more than three years ago and only learned about accessibility/Web standards within the last couple of years. But I'm diligently learning as much as I can (with three kids and a full-time teaching job that invariably comes home with me most days...). I'm going to make it my personal goal to begin contacting the people who make sites that aren't accessible to let them know in what way I had difficulty using their site. Not in a lofty, condescending way, but in a I thought you may want to know way. Maybe they won't care. Maybe they'll be offended. Maybe they won't get it at all. Maybe it won't do any good. But maybe it will. Jo Hawke http://www.viabledesign.com On Jan 9, 2008 8:59 PM, Matthew Barben [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I tend to agree with Mark. IT guys in my experience tend not to be 'joiners' you work in a corporate IT department and you will quickly realise that people use terms like 'Crypt' and 'Beige' I have worked from both sides of the fence as both an indepentant but also as the main web guy within a large organisation. Yes there are situations where we have had to use external vendors to design websites purely because they have to resources to deliver quickly...and I can see how these agencies can produce very poor code and have the business owner say 'yes'. But there are also organisations where they will impose a set of design guidelines upon these firms and really put the pressure on them to deliver (especially is industries where you are an essential service and need to deliver to a wide audience of both abled and disabled people). Does it make the firm a bunch of non-compliant designers...perhaps. But I say for every poorly design website, there is someone who says 'Yes that is what I want' or 'that'll do'. Steve Green wrote: Of course I made up that 1% figure but I don't suppose it's far out. Just look at the phenomenal number of crap websites out there. There are something like 100,000 people offering web design services in the UK (10,000 in London alone) yet GAWDS membership (which is global) is only around 500 and I believe WSG membership is similar. Don't confuse volume with quantity. Lots of people do. There are a lot of crap sites out there but that doesn't mean there's 1 crap designer for every crap site. A lot of the time, the crapness has to do with the business manager who over-rules any technical considerations because he wants animated pictures of little ponies flying round the product. 1
Re: [WSG] standards-compliant designers and shoddy work poor QA
The answer is very simple. 100% of potential users of a website have IE on their computer. Every user smart enough to know there are non IE browsers are smart enough to know sometimes you have to switch back to IE to make the website work. The question becomes from a business perspective is the additional funds needed to train their developers to code in a compliants standard way, hire a proper qa department etc worth it. I've seen worse issues. Had someone ask me to review their new website and the first problem I found is you can't submit their contact form because the javascript is looking for a field that isn't there. Obvsiously the web design firm they hired dropped in a javascript for to check fields and was so incompetent they didn't customize it for this customer. The customer on the other hand didn't bother to check if their form submitted or go through it before paying them. Then there is the website I went to where you had to pay to read the authors short stories. Or you could enter user id test password test and enter the password protected site and read all the stories for free. Great web design firm he hired. QA has always been the area most software companies fail on. The QA guy is the mean person who tells you you screwed up. The last time I worked for someone they had a policy not to release a new version of their software when it had outstanding show stopper issues. So the CIO solved the problem by ordering QA to downgrade Show Stopper issues to a lower category of problem so he could send out the next release and sell more software to customers. Solving the actual problem was beyond them of course but if you downgraded it he solved the issue. I was not popular for suggesting this was not a good QA practice. But heck I was just the implementation specialist who had to deal with the customer when the software didn't work as promised. Shoddy work is nothing new. It will end when it impacts customers to the point it costs people business. Michael Horowitz Your Computer Consultant http://yourcomputerconsultant.com 561-394-9079 Viable Design wrote: There is blame to go around, for sure. I had an accessibility issue just this morning, while trying to find out about filing an insurance claim on my husband's car (which someone ran into in the middle of the night ... and took off). In Firefox, my browser of choice, the text on the page I needed was overlapping, and many of the links were not clickable. I switched to IE, and the page was totally fine; everything was in perfect working order. I couldn't help but check the source code, and of course, it was designed using tables. There were 187 errors, according to the W3C validation service. I e-mailed the company and received a quick reply that they had recently discovered an error that was preventing a small number of customers from accessing their claim information. Pretty generic, as expected. The company is customer-service based, according to its policies and my experience, so why would the powers that be within it not choose to make its Web site accessible to all? It's not like they don't have the money to make it happen. I propose that most people would choose not to inform them of the difficulties they have in the first place. It reminds me of the days (long ago!) when I was a waitress. Most of the customers who had a bad experience due to the food or the service (from other waitresses, of course!) wouldn't complain or explain; they'd merely pay their bills and leave, never to return, intent on informing everyone they knew about that awful restaurant. And then I think about how many times I personally have chosen to just let bad experiences go in fast-food restaurants, convenience stores, gas stations. The girl who jerked my money out of my hand with a scowl on her face and no thank-you. The guy who took five minutes to wait on me because he was too busy on his cell phone. I have gone to the manager sometimes, but most of the time, I just consider it too much hassle and let it go. The same is surely true of Internet experiences, I propose, at an exponentially greater rate of occurrence. The next page is just a click away. If it's a page that must be accessed, however, as in my insurance experience this morning, it's a different story, of course. But most of the time, I personally simply leave the site and make a note of what not to do. I'm self-taught. I sorted through HTML as a sort of grief therapy when I'd lost my baby (and almost gone with him) in 1999 and was out of work for months. I began learning about CSS more than three years ago and only learned about accessibility/Web standards within the last couple of years. But I'm diligently learning as much as I can (with three kids and a full-time teaching job that invariably comes home with me most days...). I'm going to make it my personal goal to begin contacting the people who
Re: [WSG] standards-compliant designers and shoddy work poor QA
On Sun, 13 Jan 2008 12:31:45 pm Michael Horowitz wrote: The answer is very simple. 100% of potential users of a website have IE on their computer. Michael Horowitz Your Computer Consultant http://yourcomputerconsultant.com 561-394-9079 Sorry to spoil your fun Michael, but 100% of Apple Mac OS X 10.4 or better don't have IE installed at all. There are also 100% of Linux users who don't have IE installed by default. Nokia, Motorola, etc don't have IE installed on mobile devices. The Asus EeePC, the hottest selling bit of technology at the moment, does not have IE installed. IE can't be installed unless the custom-built default OS is replaced by Windows XP, which is not a simple process and unlikely to be be attempted by regular users. Cross platform compatibility, with fluid designs, is becoming even more of a requirement as people start to use non-Microsoft products. -- Regards, Steve Bathurst Computer Solutions URL: www.bathurstcomputers.com.au e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Mobile: 0407 224 251 _ ... (0) ... / / \ .. / / . ) .. V_/_ Linux Powered! Registered Linux User #355382 Registered Ubuntu User #19586 *** List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm Help: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ***
[WSG] Developing for Mac Browsers
Hi I'm tossing up whether to buy a Mac or to save my money and buy a new PC and just have Linux and Windows on it. I've read that Safari for Windows will help Web Developers without a Mac be able to develop for that. Is there a difference between Mac versions of browsers like Firefox and Safari or can I safely develop in non Mac versions and expect my web sites to behave the same on the Mac? Currently my main OS is Kubuntu but I'll soon be trialling Red Hat Desktop 5 Multi OS. Thanks -- Peter Mount Web Development for Business Mobile: 0411 276602 [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.petermount.com *** List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm Help: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ***
Re: [WSG] standards-compliant designers
That's a great idea, I think i'll do that too. it's really annoying that people disregard the fact that there are other browsers out there, and make their site solely for ie6 and they don't even think about validating it... But your idea is good, to tell them about it will hopefully bring a change, especially if it gets a following and more people do it. On Jan 12, 2008 3:34 PM, Viable Design [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: There is blame to go around, for sure. I had an accessibility issue just this morning, while trying to find out about filing an insurance claim on my husband's car (which someone ran into in the middle of the night ... and took off). In Firefox, my browser of choice, the text on the page I needed was overlapping, and many of the links were not clickable. I switched to IE, and the page was totally fine; everything was in perfect working order. I couldn't help but check the source code, and of course, it was designed using tables. There were 187 errors, according to the W3C validation service. I e-mailed the company and received a quick reply that they had recently discovered an error that was preventing a small number of customers from accessing their claim information. Pretty generic, as expected. The company is customer-service based, according to its policies and my experience, so why would the powers that be within it not choose to make its Web site accessible to all? It's not like they don't have the money to make it happen. I propose that most people would choose not to inform them of the difficulties they have in the first place. It reminds me of the days (long ago!) when I was a waitress. Most of the customers who had a bad experience due to the food or the service (from other waitresses, of course!) wouldn't complain or explain; they'd merely pay their bills and leave, never to return, intent on informing everyone they knew about that awful restaurant. And then I think about how many times I personally have chosen to just let bad experiences go in fast-food restaurants, convenience stores, gas stations. The girl who jerked my money out of my hand with a scowl on her face and no thank-you. The guy who took five minutes to wait on me because he was too busy on his cell phone. I have gone to the manager sometimes, but most of the time, I just consider it too much hassle and let it go. The same is surely true of Internet experiences, I propose, at an exponentially greater rate of occurrence. The next page is just a click away. If it's a page that must be accessed, however, as in my insurance experience this morning, it's a different story, of course. But most of the time, I personally simply leave the site and make a note of what not to do. I'm self-taught. I sorted through HTML as a sort of grief therapy when I'd lost my baby (and almost gone with him) in 1999 and was out of work for months. I began learning about CSS more than three years ago and only learned about accessibility/Web standards within the last couple of years. But I'm diligently learning as much as I can (with three kids and a full-time teaching job that invariably comes home with me most days...). I'm going to make it my personal goal to begin contacting the people who make sites that aren't accessible to let them know in what way I had difficulty using their site. Not in a lofty, condescending way, but in a I thought you may want to know way. Maybe they won't care. Maybe they'll be offended. Maybe they won't get it at all. Maybe it won't do any good. But maybe it will. Jo Hawke http://www.viabledesign.com On Jan 9, 2008 8:59 PM, Matthew Barben [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I tend to agree with Mark. IT guys in my experience tend not to be 'joiners' you work in a corporate IT department and you will quickly realise that people use terms like 'Crypt' and 'Beige' I have worked from both sides of the fence as both an indepentant but also as the main web guy within a large organisation. Yes there are situations where we have had to use external vendors to design websites purely because they have to resources to deliver quickly...and I can see how these agencies can produce very poor code and have the business owner say 'yes'. But there are also organisations where they will impose a set of design guidelines upon these firms and really put the pressure on them to deliver (especially is industries where you are an essential service and need to deliver to a wide audience of both abled and disabled people). Does it make the firm a bunch of non-compliant designers...perhaps. But I say for every poorly design website, there is someone who says 'Yes that is what I want' or 'that'll do'. Steve Green wrote: Of course I made up that 1% figure but I don't suppose it's far out. Just look at the phenomenal number of crap websites out there. There are something like 100,000 people offering web design services in
Re: [WSG] Developing for Mac Browsers
There are some differences between the windows versions and the mac versions, but if it works on windows, it is very likely it will work on mac as well. But aside from buying a mac, you can try to use an emulator or a virtual machine and test the website from there. You can also try to use this site (browsershots) http://browsershots.org/. Good Luck! On Jan 13, 2008 7:51 AM, Peter Mount [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi I'm tossing up whether to buy a Mac or to save my money and buy a new PC and just have Linux and Windows on it. I've read that Safari for Windows will help Web Developers without a Mac be able to develop for that. Is there a difference between Mac versions of browsers like Firefox and Safari or can I safely develop in non Mac versions and expect my web sites to behave the same on the Mac? Currently my main OS is Kubuntu but I'll soon be trialling Red Hat Desktop 5 Multi OS. Thanks -- Peter Mount Web Development for Business Mobile: 0411 276602 [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.petermount.com *** List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm Help: [EMAIL PROTECTED] *** *** List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm Help: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ***
Re: [WSG] Developing for Mac Browsers
I would try to get an old cheap G3 or something on ebay, you can get them very cheaply and often with OSX installed. The rendering differences between Firefox etc will be similar, but the respective font sizes will be a little different (a little smaller on the mac). Joseph R. B. Taylor /Designer / Developer/ -- Sites by Joe, LLC /Clean, Simple and Elegant Web Design/ Phone: (609) 335-3076 Fax: (866) 301-8045 Web: http://sitesbyjoe.com Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Peter Mount wrote: Hi I'm tossing up whether to buy a Mac or to save my money and buy a new PC and just have Linux and Windows on it. I've read that Safari for Windows will help Web Developers without a Mac be able to develop for that. Is there a difference between Mac versions of browsers like Firefox and Safari or can I safely develop in non Mac versions and expect my web sites to behave the same on the Mac? Currently my main OS is Kubuntu but I'll soon be trialling Red Hat Desktop 5 Multi OS. Thanks *** List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm Help: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ***begin:vcard fn:Joseph Taylor n:Taylor;Joseph org:Sites by Joe, LLC adr:;;408 Route 47 South;Cape May Court House;NJ;08210;USA email;internet:[EMAIL PROTECTED] title:Designer / Developer tel;work:609-335-3076 tel;fax:866-301-8045 tel;cell:609-335-3076 x-mozilla-html:TRUE url:http://sitesbyjoe.com version:2.1 end:vcard
