Re: [WSG] This IE8 controversy
On Jan 30, 2008 1:31 AM, Thomas Thomassen [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: They don't want to default to IE8 rendering because of what happend with IE7. It broke website. Not only that but IE is used so much outside the browser as well. It's a platform. Intranet apps. HTA apps. Even help files uses the IE engine. If IE8 defaulted to IE8 rendering, then you risk breaking ALL of that. And who's going to get the heat for that? The developers! Us! And then when IE9 comes out, what does it default to? The same people who built stuff that relied on IE6 bugs and broke in IE7 will build stuff that relies on IE8 bugs and breaks in IE9 (especially since IE8 will be the first version with any support for the HTML 5 drafts; like any first implementation of anything, there will be bugs). And so on into the future; do we get an X-IE9-Compatible and an X-IE10-Compatible, and an X-IE11-Compatible down the line to deal with that? When I first heard of this new tag I didn't know what to think of it. But I'm starting to like it more and more. What I've yet to hear from from people who don't like the solution is a realistic alternative. Letting the sites break is not an alternative. Well, there are three groups here: 1. Standards-based developers who don't rely on browser bugs to make their stuff work. 2. Standards-based developers who do rely on browser bugs to make their stuff work. 3. Developers who don't use standards-based techniques at all. Group 1 doesn't need X-UA-Compatible because they don't have the problem it allegedly solves. Group 3 doesn't need X-UA-Compatible because they have quirks mode. Group 2 are the only ones who need it, but by accepting it they're giving up on the ability to use any new features down the road (since, to kick future IE versions into a more featureful standards mode, they'd have to stop relying on old bugs). So the solution is to make Group 2 stop existing, and all that's really needed is for browser vendors to do nothing special to cater to them; the simple market force of clients who want functioning web sites will sort things out all on its own by either giving Group 2 an incentive to change its ways, or putting them out of business. -- Bureaucrat Conrad, you are technically correct -- the best kind of correct. *** List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm Help: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ***
Re: [WSG] Priority 2 error - Clearly identify the target of each link.
On 10/20/07, russ - maxdesign [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: The same happens when they come across this sort of link when reading the page contents. A link saying continue reading gives them absolutely no context. They have to guess from associated content what you are pointing to. And yet... here you hit the underlying problem: to what extent should fragments of web content be required to be meaningful when completely stripped of context? To see why this is an important question, change the situation to a Web page which displays academic-style research, and give the user agent a show all footnotes option; at that point, does using Ibid. and/or Id. as footnote text render the document inaccessible? These abbreviations are common and well-understood, yet have meanings which are entirely dependent on context; in the hypothetical case of a user agent which displays footnotes devoid of context, should their use then be forbidden? And getting back to the actual issue at hand: given that there are plenty of real-world situations like this where context is vitally important, is an absolutist proscription to make all instances of this element meaningful when stripped of context really a good idea? -- Bureaucrat Conrad, you are technically correct -- the best kind of correct. *** List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm Help: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ***
Re: [WSG] Ads breaking Compliancy
On 3/3/06, Brian Cummiskey [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: The problem, is that they give you non-standards code, onMouseOver status bar changes, etc etc but you aren't allowed to change the code, for its against their TOS. This is somewhat tangential, but for a while I've been toying with the idea of trying to develop a standards-based ad-delivery framework; the kind of thing where it would provide a configurable, unobtrusive DOM-based script that generates good plceholder markup and gives pointers on techniques for cross-browser display of the actual ads (instead of event-handler-laden tables like so many of the ad systems i've dealt with), and start pimping it to anybody who'll give it a try. Anyone interested? Would it be worth trying? Maybe even one day we could talk the WaSP into starting an advertising task force... :) -- May the forces of evil become confused on the way to your house. -- George Carlin ** 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] o 0
On 3/3/06, Chris Kennon [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: A accessibility/usability quirk was posed to me and led to a me neither response. I've yet to encounter a font for the web that has a distinction between the uppercase letter O and the number 0. If such a font exist, which is it? My first thought was that if it's extremely important, switch to a monospace font because they typically have a slash through the zero to distinguish it. Unfortunately, Courier New -- the most likely thing a PC user will see if you set font to 'monospace' -- doesn't do that :( Monaco, which is the default monospace font on Macs, does use a slashed zero, however, and so does Bitstream Vera Sans Mono, which is coming to be the most common default monospace font under Linux. -- May the forces of evil become confused on the way to your house. -- George Carlin ** 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] Do you still support 4.0 browsers?
On 2/27/06, [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: But in all seriousness, if you were setting up a website for a client who has never been on the web before (no server logs to analyse) and is marketing their gates/fencing business, would you try and support 4.0 browsers? For a given definition of 'support', yes. Has the time come to just have a disclaimer on the site stating support for 5.0 browsers or above? I think the time has long since come to stop having disclaimers about browser support; make sure the content of the site is accessible whether people are using new browsers, old browsers, non-visual browsers, or just shouting into tin cans with strings attached. Then build on top of that any fancy styling or effects you like, so long as they don't get in the way of non-supporting user-agents accessing the content. -- May the forces of evil become confused on the way to your house. -- George Carlin ** 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] TARGET in 4.01 Strict
On 2/16/06, Rick Faaberg [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I don't have that little down-pointing arrow (probably not using the same browser as you are). After 12 clicks, I probably wouldn't even remember the original site's title anyway. I was being somewhat facetious, but every browser I have within arm's reach (which includes all the popular browsers except Safari -- I don't have a Mac here at home to refer to) implements some form of extended Back functionality which displays a list of all the previous pages for the current window/tab and allows any one of them to be selected. I wouldn't assume that. In fact some of my audiences specifically have said that they want back directly to my site and simply closing a window is good way to do it. Even so, I can't help agreeing with others in this thread and state that the best option is to let users choose what they want to do rather than forcing the issue. Consider the options: 1. Force a new window/tab for the link. Users who want the new window/tab will be happy, but users who do not will be annoyed. 2. Force nothing and provide an ordinary link. Users who want a new window/tab will be able to get it by whatever expedient their browser provides (often a middle-click or a Shift+click) With option 1, you cause annoyance because your site forces a particular browsing convention on a set of users who dislike that convention. With option 2, you cause no annoyance because your site allows all users to follow their own preferred browsing conventions. Thus, option 2 is the clear winner. -- May the forces of evil become confused on the way to your house. -- George Carlin ** 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] TARGET in 4.01 Strict
On 2/16/06, Rick Faaberg [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: It's much simpler to close that new window that has all that history in it and go right back to my site, which is where I need my audience to be. :-) One click to close the window. Two clicks to summon the appropriate Back functionality. Does it make enough fo a difference to justify annoying those users who don't want a new window? They can of course continue in that new window - their choice. Their choice? *You're* the one who made their browser open a new window... -- May the forces of evil become confused on the way to your house. -- George Carlin ** 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: Moral High-horse - was Re: [WSG] Failed Redesign and the Medi a
On 2/1/06, Herrod, Lisa [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: There's no need to judge people. Everyone has a choice to work the way they want to. It may not be the best, or your way, but you don't know their reasons and they may be trying their best. And yet, in many other industries, I was doing my best would be considered a completely unacceptable response from a contractor who failed to adhere to the standards of that industry. If, for example, a construction firm puts up a skyscraper that doesn't adhere to building codes, do they get to say Well, we did our best, but it's just so darned difficult to follow every bit of those standards? Do they get to mumble about how they just haven't had time to pick up new versions of the building codes and learn how to comply with them? Of course not. So why should it be any different in our industry, especially now that reasonably compliant browsers are on pretty much every personal computer, and now that there are plenty of tutorials, conferences, communities and even dead-tree books devoted to standards-based design and development? Now, does that mean that we -- people who get standards -- shouldn't be as open and friendly as possible to make sure people learn how to do it right? Absolutely not. But... when people in our industry tout themselves as professionals while making little or no effort to learn or adhere to existing, established standards and best practices, the gloves have to come off and we have to make some noise. When major, respectable organizations launch redesigns that look like they belong to 1997, we have to put pressure on them to do better. If that means getting up on the moral high horse every once in a while and doing some preaching, then we may just have to accept that and do our best to mitigate the consequences. If not, at least it's less competition for you! :) Sadly, it's not. Spending this past year freelancing taught me that at every level of the market there's a huge amount of competition from people who'd have a better chance of producing valid code if they used a Ouija board. And those folks are at least as vocal and nasty as anyone who works with standards. CSS is just a fad, standards-based sites can't work in all the browsers, if it works in IE/Windows, it's not broken -- I've had to defend web standards and lay out business cases for accessibility and clean code more times than I'd care to recount, and frankly I'm tired of being the defensive side in those arguments, and even more tired of wasting so much energy fighting for contracts that I end up losing to design firms that don't know a DOCTYPE from a hole in the ground. The sooner those so-called professionals are dragged into this millennium, the better. -- May the forces of evil become confused on the way to your house. -- George Carlin ** 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] ASP, PHP and Ruby - oh my!
On 1/26/06, Svip [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Besides, Ruby on Rails is a simple form of Ruby, where very little programming is required, but gives you less control of it, in my opinion. But I thank thee again for bring up the language in question. No, Ruby on Rails is a framework built in Ruby which is meant to automate or otherwise reduce the amount of work needed to build database-driven web applications. Programming for Rails-based applications is still done in Ruby, and can use any aspect of the full Ruby language. -- May the forces of evil become confused on the way to your house. -- George Carlin ** 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
On 11/17/05, Patrick H. Lauke [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: 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? I think part of the problem here is that, despite any wishes we might have to the contrary, web browsers don't consistently integrate with the look and feel of the OS. Internet Explorer uses Windows' form controls, yes, and Safari uses the Mac OS' controls, but (for example) Gecko-based browsers have their own set which, while reminiscent of older versions of Windows, really isn't native to anything. And despite much progress on the OS-integration front, Firefox still doesn't really feel like a native application on any platform. Opera occasionally has the same problem; here on Linux, even though it uses the Qt toolkit (or did last time I checked), it doesn't use the default Qt widgets for form controls. And even if there were perfect consistency of browser form widgets with OS widgets, we would still be stuck with a fundamental problem: web applications, by definition, run in web pages, and no OS in widespread use has an application paradigm which matches that of web pages. So despite consistency of the widgets used for certain parts of web applications with widgets used in certain parts of traditional applications, we would still be working in a fundamentally different medium. And I think that web users, on the whole, have come to understand and expect that things on the web work differently from the other applications they use, so striving to be as much like the OS as possible would be a futile and counterproductive task. Which, I guess, leads us to the latter of your two options; as I see it, a web application ought to have a simple, intuitable interface (or experience) which is consistent within that application, because ultimately that is all the control the web application's designer will ever have. This does not mean that conflicts with widespread OS interface conventions should not be avoided when possible, but it does mean that consistency with the OS interface should not be valued more highly than consistency, simplicity or intuitability within the web application. -- May the forces of evil become confused on the way to your house. -- George Carlin ** 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] Chinese food and web standards
On 10/12/05, Craig Rippon [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Genuine question: Is this because they visit, it doesn't work, and they don't come back, forever losing them as a customer? Probably not. Linux users tend to be running either a Gecko-based browser (Mozilla, Firefox, Galeon and Epiphany being the most popular) or Konqueror, and due to the ease of keeping applications at the latest versions on most modern Linux distributions, they tend to be running recent versions. BrowserCam's installation of Konqueror (and most other Linux browsers) is a version that's nearly three years old, so out-of-date that I'm surprised they continue to offer it. Since Gecko-based browsers render (nearly) identically on all platforms, there's no need to worry on that count, and recent versions of Konqueror have made a number of improvements to KHTML as well as rolling in fixes and updates from Apple, which means that Konqueror's rendering is very close to Safari's for most purposes -- enough so that I use Konqueror as a poor man's Mac at times. And the converse is true; if, like many designers, you have access to a Mac, you can use Safari as an indicator of your compatibility with Konqueror. And for what it's worth, the site mentioned above renders as expected for me in Firefox 1.0.7 and Konqueror 3.4.0, and those are the latest versions available for the Linux distribution I use. -- May the forces of evil become confused on the way to your house. -- George Carlin ** 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] Chinese food and web standards
On 10/12/05, Paul Bennett [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: but there should be something similar which uses the KDE desktop. Knoppix uses KDE from (rather rusty) memory http://www.Knoppix.org It does. There's also a KDE version of Ubuntu called Kubuntu: http://kubuntu.org/ -- May the forces of evil become confused on the way to your house. -- George Carlin ** 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] IE team says no to hacks
On 10/13/05, Peter Firminger [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: If you've gone against all sane advice and used CSS hacks then you knew exactly what you were in for with future browsers and potential problems. A hack is a hack is a hack. Calling a hack a conditional comment doesn't magically make it something else. And conditional comments don't have any more forward compatibility than any other hack; if I use, say, if IE gte 6 to get the supposed forward compatibility of conditional comments, and IE7 introduces bugs that aren't in IE6, then I'm traveling up the waterway without a paddling implement. My only option, then, is apparently to code a separate ruleset for each and every version of IE (and possibly each Windows Service Pack, depending on how MS decides to go with bug fixes) and use conditional comments keyed to those specific versions. The nightmare of maintainability thus created will make the dark ages of separate Netscape and IE code look like a walk in the park by comparison. So. How, exactly, is this a step forward again? Sorry for the smug told you so, but many people including myself have made this very clear over the whole life of WSG. You only have yourself to blame. So long as there are bugs in any browser which require hacks in order to get certain parts of CSS or any other standard to work in that browser, forward compatibility will be a serious problem. All the smugness and I told you so comments in the world won't make it otherwise. -- May the forces of evil become confused on the way to your house. -- George Carlin ** 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] Meta Keywords?
On 10/7/05, Martin Jopson [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: So, from John Derek's responses, am I correct in thinking there's no use for the Meta Keywords or Meta Description tags anymore? Any web resources/ reference for this information? I'd like a bit more knowledge before questioning Hitwise. In my experience, they still read the Description tag, but don't necessarily take it into account for ranking purposes; if the Description is present it will be included in the excerpt shown in the search result. Keywords are ignored by all the search engines that matter, due to keyword spamming by SEO folks. -- May the forces of evil become confused on the way to your house. -- George Carlin ** 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] avoid Verdana - I cant get the whole point.
On 10/4/05, Felix Miata [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I've installed a lot of Linux distros, and surprisingly few install Vera by default, though they usually include them on the installation media. Weird. I've not had a Linux install anytime in the past couple of years that didn't install the Bitstream fonts. I have been sticking mostly to mainstream distributions, though (see below for a question about that). What I hope you meant to suggest was 'Verdana, Bitstream Vera Sans, Luxi Sans, sans-serif'. I've really only seen Luxi Sans on Red Hat-derived distributions; Debian-based systems often don't include it (for example, the laptop I'm typing on, running Ubuntu, doesn't have Luxi Sans). Nimbus Sans is a bit more common. It wouldn't hurt to include 'lucida sans unicode' just to be safe from the old W9x lucida sans italic, unless you expect normal line-heights, which you won't get from lucida sans unicode on doze unless you explicitly set line-height for it. Good point. As for falling back to Lucida Sans, I do it because it's a known quantity; it's universal enough that it usually avoids the whims of the system-default sans-serif and thus provides a last-resort consistency, but at the same time its ugliness is usually avoided by the fact that careful font selection will almost always match something else first. FWIW, FC4 apparently ships without Helvetica, something I've never noticed on any Linux before. Ubuntu Hoary (haven't yet tried the Breezy preview release) ships Helmet, which is a reasonable clone, but not Helvetica, and I believe Fedora does the same. While I'm not certain exactly why that was changed, I've always assumed that it has something to do with licensing of the Helvetica name. Out of curiosity, which distributions do you feel constitute a solid baseline for Linux compatibility? Just as IE/Win, Firefox, Safari and Opera represent a good test base for cross-browser compatibility, I've been working with Fedora, Ubuntu, SuSE and Mandrake as a solid base for cross-distribution compatibility. -- May the forces of evil become confused on the way to your house. -- George Carlin ** 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] Top Ten Web Design Mistakes - yeah, right!
On 10/4/05, Andreas Boehmer [Addictive Media] [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: How useless is that?! People who subscribe to Jakob Nielsen's newsletter are *not* normal. They are people who show interest in Usability, people who have got an above average understanding of Website Structure and Web Standards. Believe it or not, people who design and build websites also do use the web from time to time. Sounds familiar? Of course - it's the kind of stuff Web Standards and Usability people love chit-chatting about all day long (including us here on the WSG list). But does it mean they are really the two biggest Usability problems around? I don't think so. Go onto the street and ask anybody who's not absolutely fanatic with Usability or Web Standards what they find is the biggest Usability problem. Will they answer Oooh, I am really annoyed that I cannot change the font-sizes in my Internet Explorer browser because the evil programmer has set it to a fixed font-size? No, of course they won't say that. Because it's not the biggest Usability issue in the world, even though Usability and Web Standards discussions might make you think that. Over the summer I was involved with the development of a major political site (mentions on CNN and in Newsweek, guest appearances by members of the US Congress, tens of thousands of people interacting and discussing, etc.). We had a very prominent address for sending complaints, bugs, suggestions, etc., and after a few days we ran through the emails and looked at the most common complaints. The text is too small was among the top three. The number-one complaint was the fixed width of the layout, which is number 9 on Nielsen's list. And we got an awful lot of bug reports from people who had trouble registering and activating their accounts (take another look at Nielsen's list, and you'll find that covered as number 7). -- May the forces of evil become confused on the way to your house. -- George Carlin ** 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] avoid Verdana - I cant get the whole point.
On 10/3/05, Felix Miata [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Most Linux systems have neither Verdana nor Arial installed, at least not by default. True, but these days nearly every Linux distribution ships the free Bitstream Vera font set, which includes a sans-serif with metrics similar to Verdana. Also, the core web fonts are typically available as an easily-installed package for most distributions, which will provide Verdana and other fonts. I've found that the following works well for providing compatibility to Linux users (and as a full-time Linux user for a number of years, I can personally attest to its effectiveness): Verdana, Bitstream Vera Sans, Lucida Sans, sans-serif -- May the forces of evil become confused on the way to your house. -- George Carlin ** 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] avoid Verdana - I cant get the whole point.
On 10/3/05, Lea de Groot [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: What specifically is the Lucida Sans addressing? Most distributions these days ship the Bitstream Vera fonts, but not all. Lucida Sans, however, is about as universal as you can get on Linux and gives you one last fall-back to aim at before hitting the generic 'sans-serif' family, and has wide enough availability on other systems to enable easy testing of how it'll look. -- May the forces of evil become confused on the way to your house. -- George Carlin ** 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] Barclays standards redesign
On 9/7/05, Kris Khaira [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: - what if we move these away from the top. Then what? What if you have a div with id brand which contains your company's name in an h1 with id company_name? What if a later reorganization of the site moves that h1 into a different container element? The what if we move that over there argument against naming page elements has always seemed somewhat strange to me; I understand perfectly well that in an idealized world, a given page's HTML structure would effectively be set in stone and only the CSS layout would ever change, and so the above would never be a problem. But... In the real world, redesigns often involve a change in structure as well as in layout. Maybe there's an expanded about blurb or mission statement that now needs to go on each page. Maybe there's another sidebar to add. Maybe there's a new type of content to account for. These are all things that come up in an overwhelming number of redesigns, and all of them cause shuffling of the underlying structure as well as of the visual CSS layout. HTML elements should define the information, not presentation. Imagine a page with divs named header, sidebar and footer. Do those only convey information about the visual position of the elements? Or do they also convey some sense of the structure of the page? There's no clear line between semantic and presentational element labeling that I can see, so these things must be taken on a case-by-case basis; for example, posAbsolute is pretty clearly presentational, but topTabs is a bit fuzzier. The only hard and fast rule is that there are no hard and fast rules. -- May the forces of evil become confused on the way to your house. -- George Carlin ** 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] Google XHTML?
For some reason this evening, every time I went to Google I was redirected to http://www.google.com/xhtml, which serves up an XHTML 1.0 Mobile DOCTYPE pointing to http://www.wapforum.org/DTD/xhtml-mobile10.dtd, and uses a MIME-type of 'application/xhtml+xml'. I'm guessing from that DOCTYPE that it's a version for cell-phone/mobile users, but has anyone else on a 'normal' browser been redirected there? Could this be testing for the rollout of a new look for Google? -- May the forces of evil become confused on the way to your house. -- George Carlin ** 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] Google XHTML?
On 4/12/05, Ben Bishop [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Are you faking your user-agent? (eg, Chris Pederick's User-Agent Switcher for Firefox) I'm not faking my user-agent, nor do I have any WML extensions. In fact, I'm on a brand-new copy of Firefox (just installed Ubuntu Linux on this computer) and haven't yet had time to do much customization, so pretty much everything is still at the default settings. -- May the forces of evil become confused on the way to your house. -- George Carlin ** 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] flash and accessabilty
On Apr 9, 2005 4:39 AM, Absalom Media [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Please, scott, I'm being spammed to death with your post in this thread endlessly repeating in the WSG list. The first of the junk copies had an address 'IMB Recipient 1 [EMAIL PROTECTED]' listed as a recipient in addition to the list. And it looks like a couple people did 'Reply All' and sent to that address as well; now I'm getting dozens of copies of those messages, including yours. I've double- and triple-checked to make sure I'm not sending this message to that address or CCing or BCCing it, so this should be a useful test of whether that's the culprit. -- May the forces of evil become confused on the way to your house. -- George Carlin ** 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] Standards compliant site, clients wants to make updates themselves
On Mon, 21 Mar 2005 11:22:29 +0800, Bert Doorn [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: What other options are there, apart from complex, expensive CMS setups (or forgetting about standards)? Why not use a simple, free CMS like Wordpress or Textpattern? Both are free (as in speech and as in beer), fairly simple to configure and work with, and built to support standards. -- May the forces of evil become confused on the way to your house. -- George Carlin ** 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] GMail... Terrible!
On Tue, 15 Feb 2005 22:09:58 +1100, Chris Stratford [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: - BTW - How does a disabled person see that message about POP mail? I cant see ANY source on the page. I wonder what JAWS or other screenreaders would do when they load the page... Unless the screen reader is simply pulling rendered text from a browser with Javascript capability, they won't get past the login screen, which tells them that Gmail does not support their browser. -- May the forces of evil become confused on the way to your house. -- George Carlin ** 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] GMail... Terrible!
On Tue, 15 Feb 2005 13:42:14 +1100, Chris Stratford [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Wow, I only just realised that Gmail would have to have the WORST accessibility for everyone. I just wanted to get the HTML code for the site. And there have to be about 10 frames inside frames. Yeah, Mark Pilgrim wrote up a pretty good review of Gmail's accessibility issues when the service started up: http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/04/10/gmail-accessibility The Gmail knowledge base claims they're working on a DHTML-free version to help work around this, but doesn't say much more about the topic. For figuring out the structure of a Gmail page I've found the best method is to use Mozilla's DOM Inspector; it lets you pick through all of the framesets and hidden DIVs to figure out what's actually going on. -- May the forces of evil become confused on the way to your house. -- George Carlin ** 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] double space after period
On Thu, 10 Feb 2005 18:52:54 -, designer [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Surely, the argument against the double space is only a short step away from it's logical extension: don't have paragraphs either, just have continuous text . . .? The logic behind both is surely the same? No. The logic behind double-spacing after periods was that it was necessary in order to increase legibility during the age of the typewriter. And even during those days, professional typesetters did not use double spaces. Now that the typewriter has mostly gone the way of the dodo it's hard to make an argument for keeping the convention. Paragraphs, meanwhile, are a logical -- not a visual -- device. Just as a sentence is one or more self-contained thoughts, a paragraph is one or more related sentences. Often the first sentence of a paragraph introduces an idea, and the remaining sentences support or elaborate upon it. So it's hard to see an argument for doing away with paragraphs just because we don't double-space after periods any longer; the more logical extension of the argument presented here (as others have already pointed out) would be double-spacing *all* punctuation: colons, semicolons, commas, etc. Which makes no sense as it is completely at odds with existing conventions of English writing. And I stand by my original comment that CSS word-spacing or something like it would be the best practice for increasing space between sentences when necessary; inserting additional hard spaces (via nbsp; or similar) in the content is inflexible and mingles the presentation into the content, while keeping the spacing adjustment in the CSS allows the presentation to be tailored to different classes of users as necessary. Which is really the main accessibility benefit of CSS, as I understand it. -- May the forces of evil become confused on the way to your house. -- George Carlin ** 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] double space after period
On Thu, 10 Feb 2005 08:33:41 +1100, Lachlan Hardy [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Something which no one has mentioned is the possible accessibility benefits of the extra spacing following the period. My thoughts are that the extra spacing will more easily distinguish the sentence for all, but particularly those with cognitive disabilities I'd think that the CSS 'word-spacing' and/or 'letter-spacing' properties, not additional hard spaces in the content, would be the right way to adjust spacing for better legibility. -- May the forces of evil become confused on the way to your house. -- George Carlin ** 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] Re: XHTML Strict alternative to ol start=11
On Wed, 9 Feb 2005 11:49:55 +1100, Geoff Deering [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Please explain why you would use a transitional DTD where a Strict one is valid and works just as well? Depends on the client and how they'll be maintaining their site; I've handed sites over to clients before who were going to use something like Frontpage or Composer to write bits of content which they would then drop into their page template, and going Transitional can keep them valid where Strict wouldn't. Then there are clients who I'm setting up with a CMS that I can set up to generate content which is always valid in Strict, so I'll use Strict. In other words, there is no hard and fast always use foo rule for DOCTYPEs. -- May the forces of evil become confused on the way to your house. -- George Carlin ** 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] Re: XHTML Strict alternative to ol start=11
On Wed, 9 Feb 2005 12:50:56 +1100, Geoff Deering [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: If you have a document that validates as doctype Strict, then why declare it as transitional? For what reason are such decisions made? That is my point, not all these other arguments about where to or where not to use transitional or strict. I don't want to re-open the can of worms that is the XHTML MIME-type, but I lean toward using Transitional on any XHTML that gets sent as 'text/html'. -- May the forces of evil become confused on the way to your house. -- George Carlin ** 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] NVU IDE
On Sat, 29 Jan 2005 10:17:14 -0500, David Laakso [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: The home page for this site has 100 HTML errors, 11 CSS errors, uses inline styles, and sets the fonts in points. NVU is largely the brianchild of Mozilla Project member Daniel Glazman, who has been working on it as a replacement for the ancient Netscape Composer which forms the HTML authoring and editing part of the Mozilla suite. The site linked in the original post is not his, but rather belongs to Linspire, Inc., a Linux distributor who is involved with the promotion of NVU, and that site was not generated with NVU. This doesn't excuse their shoddy code, but I don't think it should reflect upon the editor. Also, note that font sizing is a question of best practices, not one of standards. -- May the forces of evil become confused on the way to your house. -- George Carlin ** 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] double space after period
On Sun, 23 Jan 2005 10:30:51 +, john [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Forgive me if this doesn't specifically relate to standards, but perhaps it does. I'd file it under best practices myself. I'm simply wondering about the grammatically-correct double space after a period. For years, it's never mattered to me, but I have a client who is a stickler for this sort of thing, and he asked if I could please add the extra spaces in his site. It's got absolutely nothing to do with grammar; as a couple other people have pointed out, it was a convention (and by no means a universal one) in the days of manual typesetting and is now quite outdated, yet for some reason primary-school teachers the world over continue to enforce it with maniacal intensity. See the following typophile.com thread for some lively discussion of the history of the convention and the many different ways in which it was (and wasn't) implemented: http://www.typophile.com/forums/messages/30/27993.html?1078892522 If your client continues to insist on double spaces, I'd recommend quoting liberally from that discussion, as perhaps the opinions of professional typographers and typesetters will carry some weight. What do you think? First of all, can this be done in CSS? Secondly, is this even proper with (X)HTML documents? You could play with 'whitespace', maybe, but it wouldn't be worth it. -- May the forces of evil become confused on the way to your house. -- George Carlin ** 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] Slightly OT... Interview with IE Dev team
On Wed, 05 Jan 2005 15:22:45 -0500, Wayne Godfrey [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Oh really? That's a laugh. All Microsoft is interested in is sticking a very large hose directly into your wallet to suck as much cash out as possible. This is the 8000-pound gorilla who believes in web standards as long as those standards are theirs. In fact, that's the corporate philosophy across the board and now they're heading into your living room! Can't wait to see what havoc they reek there. Quoth Neal Stephenson: Now that the Third Rail has been firmly grasped, it is worth reviewing some basic facts here: like any other publicly traded, for-profit corporation, Microsoft has, in effect, borrowed a bunch of money from some people (its stockholders) in order to be in the bit business. As an officer of that corporation, Bill Gates has one responsibility only, which is to maximize return on investment. He has done this incredibly well. Any actions taken in the world by Microsoft-any software released by them, for example--are basically epiphenomena, which can't be interpreted or understood except insofar as they reflect Bill Gates's execution of his one and only responsibility.[1] /me not defending them, just making sure that their actions are viewed in the proper context. [1] See http://cryptonomicon.com/beginning.html -- May the forces of evil become confused on the way to your house. -- George Carlin ** 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] Web Design in 2005
On Thu, 30 Dec 2004 00:17:00 -0600 (CST), [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: They suggested that the looks that are out, or dated are, ...Retro; Swiss/Euro; Minimal; that standards-compliant look, which I thought some of you might find an interesting read. Two columns plus header and footer? Check. Drop shadow? Check. IFR? Check. I do hope they're planning to launch a redesign with the new year, otherwise they're going to have some self-refuting prophecies on their hands. -- May the forces of evil become confused on the way to your house. -- George Carlin ** 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] styling :first-line Pseudo-element
On Fri, 17 Dec 2004 01:41:27 -, Rene Saarsoo [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: But using the 'br' isn't any good too. Maybe this line with the br should be instead a heading followed with a paragraph? Depending on how many of these items there are, a definition list might work well also. -- May the forces of evil become confused on the way to your house. -- George Carlin ** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list getting help **
