Re: [WSG] Teaching CSS

2007-03-17 Thread Kay Smoljak

On 3/17/07, Cole Kuryakin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

With that lengthy pre-amble, I've got to ask – is there a GREAT book out
there that steps through the learning process of CSS right from the bare
bones that both I and my new artist can use?


You're going to get lots of recommendations for great books. I don't
know if there is one book that will suit exactly what you have in
mind, so you may have to invest in a few volumes for your library.

One title that I like a lot, that may be useful if your designer is
used to doing things the "old-school" table-based way, is Dan
Cederholm's "Bulletproof Web Design". It outlines common problems, the
old-school solution, and how the same thing can be done better with
CSS and good markup.

Good luck!
K.

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Re: [WSG] tabular data

2007-03-06 Thread Kay Smoljak

Is there a definition of what is considered tabular data (or is it in
the eyes of the beholder)?


If you would put it in a spreadsheet, it belongs in a table. Your
example is tabular data.

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Re: [WSG] It's times like this you remember how far you've come

2007-03-04 Thread Kay Smoljak

On 3/4/07, Lea de Groot <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

You should be approaching your client and explaining that you have some
problems with the markup thats been supplied to you and its going to
take longer than you anticipated, because you had assumed that the
other contractor would be supplying professional work.


Hey Mike - it's annoying when things like this happen. I've had
similar things happen in the past and I usually tell the client that
the other company's work is sub-standard, but also say that they
should take it back to the other company and ask for a new version
that is:

a) W3C standards-compliant
b) bandwidth-efficient
c) in line with current best practices

This does two things: it tells the client you're not just bad-mouthing
the other company to try and get the work yourself, and also spreads
the word to the other company that it's time to stop partying like
it's 1999.

Whatever you decide to do, you should definitely NOT be recoding their
work without being paid for it.

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Re: [WSG] css generating i.e security pop up

2007-03-01 Thread Kay Smoljak

On 2/28/07, Darren West <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

This behaviour is by design, for security reasons when the script is sourced
locally (ie. if you load the website and script from your local machine) you
will see this alert; I don't get the message and neither will other
visitors.


To add to this, if you need to preview locally, add this "mark of the
web" line to the head of the document:


That will suppress the local warning.

Nice-looking site btw.

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Re: [WSG] Re: Website Directory Structure - Best Practice

2006-03-20 Thread Kay Smoljak
On 3/21/06, Lachlan Hunt <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> This happened to me recently with
> a news article on Yahoo news I think.  I can't remember what article it
> was or where I followed the link from, but it was rather annoying not
> being able to read it.

I found this out the hard way, I maintain a site with science news for
kinds. Yahoo only keeps news items up for a few weeks, then they just
disappear. Now everytime I want to link to an article I have to
double-check the archives of the site in question to try and work out
how far they go back and if it's "safe" to link. Their site breaks, my
site breaks. Link rot is an ugly thing.

I agree there are some things that need to go from a site, and not
come back... but generally, the URI's should definitely stay, and at
least go somewhere else. I think everyone here is arguing two separate
points. A URI and the content at that URI are two separate things.

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Re: [WSG] Certified Usable

2006-03-19 Thread Kay Smoljak
On 3/20/06, Steve Olive <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Their page is generated from the "Shado CMS built by Straker
> Interactive Ltd" so I assume getting real WAI validation would be
> nearly impossible for their own web site.

Just a quick note: I've played a little with Shado CMS and I'm fairly
certain that it allows you to create your templates however you wish -
I'd be willing to bet that this is one case where the problems
*cannot* be blamed on the CMS.

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Re: [WSG] AIMIA Awards

2006-02-27 Thread Kay Smoljak
On 2/28/06, Miles Tillinger <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I think they're missing a category:
>
> BEST ACCESSIBILITY

That's just one of the reasons why Port80 ran the inaugural WA Web
Awards last year (http://www.wawebawards.com.au). Standards and
Accessbility was one of the categories and although not all of the
finalists were standards compliant, it was one of the many judging
criteria used (our own Russ Weakley was one of the judges). Overall,
the proportion of standards-based entries was quite high and I expect
that to just get better and better.

Planning is already underway for the 2006 awards and as Port80 is now
expanding to other states (Canberra has started, i think Brisbane will
be next) and countries (Rochester New York) in the future other
state-based web awards may start popping up. In short: support any
initiatives that start in your area, if a standards-friendly awards
program is something you'd like to see!

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Re: [WSG] 2 Q: New web site, which DTD I should use? and Compresion

2006-01-31 Thread Kay Smoljak
That's devious! I love it!

On 2/1/06, Joshua Street <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I've found that the BEST way to make developers co-operate is to
> quietly put a bit of PHP in the header to serve application/xhtml+xml
> to browsers that support it, then watch them scratch their heads as
> previously-not-quite-well-formed pages that were parsed as soup


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Re: [WSG] No style

2006-01-31 Thread Kay Smoljak
On 1/31/06, Taco Fleur - Pacific Fox <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Is there any way to specify in CSS that a certain area is to have no style
> at all.

All browsers have a default style sheet, and there's differences
between the default styles in different browsers, so there's no such
thing as 'no style'. The closest you'll get is to specify the same
padding, margins, font etc as your most common browser displays when
no author styles are specified.

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Re: [WSG] IE, selecting text, and lots of absolutely positioned elements

2006-01-22 Thread Kay Smoljak
Hi Josh,

There's a big bug, that's for sure. There *is* a javascript fix, but
it has some small side effects itself (a page flicker when the page
first loads in IE browsers with their cache set to check every time).
The original site I found the fix on is no longer there, but I
deployed it on this site: http://www.primarysales.com.au/

The code is:
// 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);
  }
}

HTH,
Kay.

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On 1/23/06, Joshua Street <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> At least, I'm fairly certain the absolutely positioned elements are
> causing the problem(s).
>
> I can't give an example page (NDA, and it's too complex to bother
> recreating -- the complexity is probably part of the reason it's so
> bad when text is selected/copied), just wondering if anyone else has
> created sites in which absolute positioning is used extensively -- to
> the (unintentional) detriment of text selection capabilities, and,
> most importantly, if there are any known solutions to this problem.
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Re: [WSG] H1 Image Replacement and Search Engine Rankings

2006-01-18 Thread Kay Smoljak
Firstly, you can look into one of the many, many image replacement
techniques that are about to allow a graphical title with a textual
alternative for text-only user agents such as search engine spiders. I
don't know which is currently considered the best so I can't advise
you on that, but I'm sure someone else can and will.

Secondly, many people are of the opinion that the H1 should be
different on each page - that the H1 should reflect the main heading
of the page, not the site heading/company name. Makes semantic sense
to me, anyway.

I believe that H1 elements are weighted more highly in the search
engines than h2 or h2 elements, for what's it's worth, but from
comments made on this list previously it's somewhat of a matter of
conjecture as to whether search engines pay any attention to them at
all. From comments made on Matt Cutts' blog I think that at least
Google places some weight on them, but probably not anywhere near as
much as on other elements such as the page title. That's really OT for
this list, however... a forum like SEOChat.com would probably be more
helpful to you on matters concerning SEO.

Cheers,
K.

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On 1/19/06, Brewer, Dorian E. <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I am using an image replace in my CSS for H1 tags in a new template I am
> developing on my companies' intranet site. Our intranet consists of a portal
> homepage and hundreds of sub sites. The sub sites header would be the
> graphical H1 tag. Every sub site would have a different header and unique
> graphical H1.
>
> I am wondering if by using that same template on our public site if it will
> hurt us in search engine rankings? The catch is the graphical H1 tag would
> be the same on every page since the header is the same throughout the site.
> Are the header tags weighed equally whether they are H1, H2, H3, etc.?
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Re: [WSG] Plesk (hosting control panel system) and web standards support

2006-01-17 Thread Kay Smoljak
On 1/12/06, James Ellis <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I'd check out a Plesk demo and look under the hood - probably the best
> bet. Or just install it on a demo site and see what happens.
>
> One of the gripes I have is that 90+% of these off the shelf systems
> hand you a frontend and a backend in one inseparable lot. It would be
> great to have an application say  "here's the data you requested from
> the backend, present it yourself if you like"...

Thanks James, that's what I'll do... I was just hoping someone else
had been there before! I was horrified to find a java-based templating
system underneath HSphere that allowed you to set the colours in the
font tags and the backgrounds of table cells - a massively complex
undertaking for what could be far more easily accomplished with a
stylesheet.

But enough ranting from me...

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[WSG] Plesk (hosting control panel system) and web standards support

2006-01-10 Thread Kay Smoljak
The company I work for is moving our hosting systems to Plesk. One of
the tasks that will probably fall to me is adding some of our branding
to the Control Panel interface itself. I've worked with the HSphere
control panel system in the past and customizing the look and feel has
been a nightmare - has anyone had any experience with Plesk who could
comment on whether it uses web standards (I doubt it but it doesn't
hurt to dream) or perhaps just good CSS? Is it easy to modify?

Thanks!

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Re: [WSG] Best Web Standards thing I learnt in 2005.

2005-12-21 Thread Kay Smoljak
Not the best thing I learnt, but the best thing I did: going to Web
Essentials. I can't wait for next year.

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Re: [WSG] Can't select text on IE

2005-11-17 Thread Kay Smoljak
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  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.

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// 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
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Re: [WSG] Never ending cross browser problems! Lets just do IE!

2005-10-19 Thread Kay Smoljak
On 10/19/05, Taco Fleur - Pacific Fox <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Is there someone who can tell me why the widths are not the same in
> different browsers for this layout?
> It appears that in IE the second column gets pushed of the screen due to the
> left column being bigger.
> Kay, sorry but this looks like a major problem to me in IE.

So make it a few pixels narrower, to allow some wiggle room?

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Re: [WSG] Never ending cross browser problems! Lets just do IE!

2005-10-19 Thread Kay Smoljak
Hi Taco,

Here's what I would recommend in future - forget the graphics. Start
by working out what layout model you're going to use. Maybe find an
example to start with.

Next, put your basic boxes in - again, don't worry about the graphics,
just colour each div with a background colour so you can see which is
which. Simple stuff - masthead, body, footer. Test it cross browser
until you have it working the way you want. Then add the next layer of
complexity, checking in each browser as you go, and adding graphics
last.

To be honest, the problems you're having in IE on this site don't look
too serious - it looks like the widths aren't quite right. Try making
the right hand column div narrower - different browsers tend to
calculate widths slightly differently.

If you don't test in each browser as you go, you won't know which
elements are working and what's causing the problems.

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On 10/19/05, Taco Fleur - Pacific Fox <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> PS: the url: www.startregistration.com
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Re: [WSG] Couple of question - Image Map etc.

2005-10-16 Thread Kay Smoljak
that means there's a nesting error.. start from the top and make sure
everything is closed.

K.

On 10/16/05, Taco Fleur - Pacific Fox <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Thanks, but that's what I did, whatever is there, does not make any sense to
> me at all, for example;
> Line 43 column 11: document type does not allow element "H2" here; missing
> one of "OBJECT", "MAP", "BUTTON" start-tag.
> What does that mean?
>
> The rest is the same, what is it talking about that I can't put a 
> element in the place it is?


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Re: [WSG] Couple of question - Image Map etc.

2005-10-16 Thread Kay Smoljak
Hi Taco,

On 10/16/05, Taco Fleur - Pacific Fox <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> http://www.startregistration.com

Validate your HTML first - at least then you can eliminate HTML
nesting errors as the cause of your problem. Then post back and we'll
give you a hand.

Cheers,
K.

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Re: [WSG] Chinese food and web standards

2005-10-12 Thread Kay Smoljak
On 10/13/05, Nick Cowie <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> If you want to test in Linux, get a copy of Ubuntu live CD, drop the CD into 
> your drive, reboot from the CD and you have a fully function Linux box, 
> unfortunately it uses the Gnome desktop which knocks out testing Konqueror, 
> but there should be something similar which uses the KDE desktop.

According to Ben whom I'm sitting here now with, Knoppix (which also
runs off a CD/USB Stick or whatever) uses KDE - knoppix.org.

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Re: [WSG] Chinese food and web standards

2005-10-12 Thread Kay Smoljak
Hi Craig,

On 10/13/05, Craig Rippon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>  Kay, thanks. I am a web development student at college and this point came
> up in a lecture, just curious to get opinions.

While it's important to be accessible to everyone, harsh economic
realities dictate that you have to draw the line somewhere with
browser support. Your own logs are the only real way to determine
where that line lies.

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Re: [WSG] Chinese food and web standards

2005-10-12 Thread Kay Smoljak
My layouts are pretty basic, so I doubt it wouldn't work. I think the
number of people out in  the general public using Linux on the desktop
is infintismally (sp?) small.

On 10/13/05, Craig Rippon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> "and the market share of Linux in general in my own web site stats is next
> to nil."
>
> Genuine question:
>
> Is this because they visit, it doesn't work, and they don't come back,
> forever losing them as a customer?
>
> Craig Rippon
> Brisbane, Australia
>
>
>
>
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Re: [WSG] Chinese food and web standards

2005-10-12 Thread Kay Smoljak
On 10/13/05, Ian Fenn <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I have a lovely new em-based page on Chinese food that works fine in
> practically everything apart from Netscape 6.2 and Konqueror 3.05.
>
> 1) Is it acceptable to go live with a layout that doesn't work with either
> of these two browsers? (I notice that a number of prominent web standardista
> websites have done so)

Netscape 6 was based on a beta version of the Mozilla rendering engine
- I forget which one exactly, but pre 1.0 - and for this reason it's
hard to support. Considering that Netscape is up to version 8 now, I
would not include this browser in my "support profile" (thanks to Eric
Meyer's WE05 presentation for introducing me to this term!).

I can't comment on Konqueror - I don't test in that browser, and the
market share of Linux in general in my own web site stats is next to
nil.

I like the design, by the way - very tasty! I especially like the
favicon - nice touch.

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Re: [WSG] Meta Keywords?

2005-10-08 Thread Kay Smoljak
Hi Martin,

On 10/7/05, Martin Jopson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Could anyone please clarify the situation for Meta Keywords and also Meta
> Description. If possible also a web resource that states clearly these
> issues.

Others have already given a range of good responses. To add to the
discussion I believe that the search engine Sensis uses the meta
keywords tag, although I cannot remember where I picked up that idea.
While it may not drive as much traffic to your site as Google, the
amount of television advertising and content site partnering they have
been doing in Australia makes them worth considering (for Australian
sites) IMHO.

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Re: [WSG] Top Ten Web Design Mistakes - yeah, right!

2005-10-04 Thread Kay Smoljak
On 10/4/05, Andreas Boehmer [Addictive Media]
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Somebody pointed out this article by our friend Jakob Nielsen to me:
> http://www.useit.com/alertbox/designmistakes.html

I'm not one of Jakob's fans... but in my limited experience, text size
is one of the few things that annoy people so much they actually
complain. I've been involved with the Perth International Arts
Festival site for the past four years and the most common recurring
complaint we've had is "the text is too small". Of course, after
explaining how font-size adjustment works and explaining to people
they've probably accidentally held down ctrl while scrolling their
mouse wheel in IE, that problem goes away (and the user often thanks
us for educating them on that feature). Almost every other complaint -
and there are not all that many - are people commenting on the actual
content not meeting their needs, or to do with linked sites we have no
control over - in other words, nothing to do with the construction or
implementation of the site itself. I think Jakob is probably quite
spot on in this case.

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Re: [WSG] Secure Credit Card Field

2005-09-18 Thread Kay Smoljak
On 9/19/05, Stuart Sherwood <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> autocomplete="off"

I would check MSDN to see if there's a meta tag equivalent you can
use. I know with their imagetoolbar parameter, you can put a meta tag
in the head of the document to apply the same effect.

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Re: [WSG] a: class border width problem

2005-09-17 Thread Kay Smoljak
sorry, didn't look closely enough... that would be #drNav li.corner a{}

On 9/18/05, Kay Smoljak <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On 9/18/05, kvnmcwebn <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > Im using the class ".corner" to insert a bg image in the button.
> > It works apart from the stuborn bottom border that wont go away.
> > Any explanations for this?
> 
> Could it be a specificity problem? Instead of .corner{} try #drNav a.corner{}.
> 
> --
> Kay Smoljak
> http://kay.zombiecoder.com/
> 
> > /*css*/
> >
> > #drNav a {
> >  margin: 0px;
> >  float:left;
> >  display:block;
> >  _display:inline-block;
> >  padding: 4px 12px;
> >  color: #ff;
> >  text-decoration: none;
> >  width: auto; border-bottom: 4px solid #99;
> >  _height:1%;
> > }
> >
> >
> > .corner {
> > background: url(../botcorn.gif)
> > bottom left no-repeat; border-bottom: 0px;
> > }
> >
> > /*html*/
> >
> > 
> > Web & 
> >   Screen
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Re: [WSG] a: class border width problem

2005-09-17 Thread Kay Smoljak
On 9/18/05, kvnmcwebn <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Im using the class ".corner" to insert a bg image in the button.
> It works apart from the stuborn bottom border that wont go away.
> Any explanations for this?

Could it be a specificity problem? Instead of .corner{} try #drNav a.corner{}.

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> /*css*/
> 
> #drNav a {
>  margin: 0px;
>  float:left;
>  display:block;
>  _display:inline-block;
>  padding: 4px 12px;
>  color: #ff;
>  text-decoration: none;
>  width: auto; border-bottom: 4px solid #99;
>  _height:1%;
> }
> 
> 
> .corner {
> background: url(../botcorn.gif)
> bottom left no-repeat; border-bottom: 0px;
> }
> 
> /*html*/
> 
> 
> Web & 
>   Screen
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Re: [WSG] firefox for OS9?

2005-08-06 Thread Kay Smoljak
On 8/6/05, Drake, Ted C. <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Sorry for a possibly off-topic post.  We have a client on our intranet that
> needs to look at our site on OS9.2.  I couldn't find information on the
> Firefox web site about compatibility with this platform. Does anyone know
> where I could send this person for more advice?

I had a client with OS9 who were using Netscape 4 (!), and I got them
to upgrade to Netscape 7. The later builds don't support OS9, but
earlier ones do, so if you look around you should be able to find one.

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Re: [WSG] correct use of BR tag

2005-07-26 Thread Kay Smoljak
On 7/27/05, Julián Landerreche <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> 1. The cat isin the kitchen (no spaces between the tag and the words)
> 2. The cat is in the kitchen (one space before the tag)
> 3. The cat is in the kitchen (one space after the tag)
> 4. The cat is  in the kitchen (one space before and after the tag)

My feeling would be 2 or 3, because if all the tags were
programmatically removed, there would be a single space left between
the words. Option 1 would then read "The cat isin the kitchen" which
would be wrong. Option 4 would read "The cat is  in the kitchen" which
isn't correct either (although better than option 1).


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Re: [WSG] Right column Float prob?

2005-07-26 Thread Kay Smoljak
On 7/27/05, Ben Logan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Is there a more elegant solution to make this visible to 1024 but pushed
> over to the right on 800 by 600 (I appreciate this is breaking usability
> princinples)

Putting the ad banner *within* your page container div ("holdingarea")
and adding a width to this element would force a scrollbar for lower
resolutions.

HTH,
K.

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Re: [WSG] My life as an 800x600 leper (was: Site Check: Broadleaf)

2005-07-26 Thread Kay Smoljak
On 7/26/05, TN38 [Admin] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> It's not starting to, it always has been.

What I meant was that more people are starting to see it that way.
Although way too many people still think accessible sites are for
blind people :)

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Re: [WSG] My life as an 800x600 leper (was: Site Check: Broadleaf)

2005-07-26 Thread Kay Smoljak
On 7/26/05, SunUp <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> i build web sites. i'm over 40. i have 20/20 vision. i work (and play)
> at 800x600. i LIKE it.

I use a TabletPC to surf the web, on my lap, with a stylus, in
portrait mode - so, 768x1024 instead of the other way around. So
horizontally, that's narrower than your standard 800x600 screen. I
also have a 17" LCD that runs at 1280x1024 natively... sometimes I use
it in the loungeroom, lying on the floor or couch, with the font size
cranked up 5 or 6 times so I can read comfortably from a distance.
Also, I gotta say sometimes I change down to 800x600 to test
something, and the type just renders so beautifully at that res I can
stare at it for hours. Then I get sick of scrolling :)

I think accessibility is starting to be as much about accommodating
*any* browsing situation as much as accommodating disabilities.

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Re: [WSG] Firefox top margin

2005-07-24 Thread Kay Smoljak
On 7/25/05, Webmaster <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Great guess, Dwain! You were right. I would have hoped that any margin I set
> to #masthead h1 would have been applied inside #header -> #masthead.
> Annoying. I suppose that explcitly applying position: relative to it might
> have done the trick.

Margins are always applied to the outside of the element, and padding
is applied to the inside. There is an excellent tutorial on CSS
positioning at http://www.brainjar.com/ which explains how all the
elements and their properties interact - I must have read it 20 times
over when I started.

Another good tip is to use Firefox or Mozilla with the web developer
toolbar, and turn on "outline block level elements". This shows you
the exact space that each element is occupying.

Cheers,
K.

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[WSG] footer technique

2005-07-16 Thread Kay Smoljak
Looks like someone has found a mostly-reliable CSS-only solution to
that common footer problem - getting a footer to stick to the bottom
of the viewport no matter how long or short the content is, which
doesn't overlap the content when the window is resized:

Explanation: http://solardreamstudios.com/learn/css/footerstick/
Example: 
http://solardreamstudios.com/_img/learn/css/footerstick/footerstick.html

Apparently it doesn't work in IE5 Mac or Safari. IE5 Mac I can mostly
live without, but Safari is a bit of a bugger. I don't have a Mac here
so I can't test - I'm curious as to whether it can be made to degrade
acceptably. Could someone with a Mac please check the test page?

Thanks!

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Re: [WSG] looking for an accessibility reference on why text-only is bad

2005-07-09 Thread Kay Smoljak
On 7/9/05, Patrick H. Lauke <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Another importantproblem is that all too often sites have a text-only
> option *instead* of making their main site accessible. 

Thanks for bringing this up again... after further discussion with the
client I discovered that they wanted the text-only version so their
staff on satelite phones in remote areas could access info... which is
fair enough! We'll give them a totally stripped down version using the
CMS.

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Re: [WSG] looking for an accessibility reference on why text-only is bad

2005-06-29 Thread Kay Smoljak
On 6/30/05, Richard Czeiger <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> If after trying to educate the client (a 10 minute phone conversation you're
> NOT going to get paid for), and they still want a text only page "just
> because we think it's best", then cave in...

Actually, in this case the client has had someone write the tender for
them - they quite freely admit that they know nothing and are looking
for guidance. But I know your pain, we have lots of "we know best"
clients too :)

Thanks Jan too - that's a pretty concise summary.

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Re: [WSG] looking for an accessibility reference on why text-only is bad

2005-06-29 Thread Kay Smoljak
On 6/30/05, Richard Czeiger <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Use a styleswitcher to to display your 'text-only' courier-based stylesheet

We *could* do that... but I'd rather educate the client :)

To answer my own question, soon after posting (isn't that always the
way) I found this very good article on Webcredible:
http://www.webcredible.co.uk/user-friendly-resources/web-accessibility/text-only.shtml

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[WSG] looking for an accessibility reference on why text-only is bad

2005-06-29 Thread Kay Smoljak
We're doing a tender for a client that has requested a text-only
version of the site, for accessibility reasons. Now, *I* know that
that's ridiculous and text-only is not an acceptable alternative to an
accessible site, but I need some good verbage/references to explain
that (and what we propose instead) but I'm kinda lost for the right
words.

Does anyone know of a good online article/resource to help me out?
Something specific to Australian legislation would be fantastic.

Thanks!

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Re: [WSG] html nowrap question

2005-06-27 Thread Kay Smoljak
On 6/28/05, Drake, Ted C. <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Here's my question. What is the proper way to put nowrap in a td?
> It currently looks like   I would think it should be  nowrap="nowrap"> or something like that.

Yep, that's correct!

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Re: [WSG] Page structure - navigation

2005-06-23 Thread Kay Smoljak
On 6/24/05, Dennis Lapcewich <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> "What is more important to you, getting a high ranking on a search engine
> so potential customers (who may or may not become a real customer) are able
> to find the site, or keeping the customers you already have by offering
> site navigation that is easy to locate and use?"

The client is requesting that the navigation be placed at the bottom
of the *source code* and then positioned at the visual top of the page
using absolute positioning - so there is no usability issue. It's a
technique I use a lot, for search engine optimisation and
accessibility reasons, and there's absolutely no problem with it.

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Re: [WSG] inline-block support?

2005-05-31 Thread Kay Smoljak
On 5/31/05, kemie guaida <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>  I was sure that there was some major browser not implementing
> display:inline-block, but in a quick test firefox 1.03, Opera 7 &8 and even
> IE 6 are interpreting it correctly.I have yet to test on a mac, but that
> would seem to cover a lot of users.  Anything I'm missing? Any recent
> documentation on browser support?

I've never really thought about it before, but now I'm intrigued...
what specific, real-world problem could be solved by the use of
display:inline-block?

Thanks,
K.

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Re: [WSG] A way to skip a Flash-intro if Flash is not installed?

2005-05-24 Thread Kay Smoljak
I'm not here to bash Flash - used properly, I'm a big fan.

My concern when I developed the JavaScript detection method we use was
to find a way that would work seamlessly as expected without nagging
the user in as many different situations and browsers as possible -
including IE5 which seems a bit funny in how it handles plugins.
JavaScript detection seemed to be the safest way.

K.

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On 5/25/05, heretic <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > I thought that if Flash wasn't installed, the browser would prompt you
> > to download and install it rather than just displaying the alternate
> > content?
> 
> Not necessarily - plus many browsers now give the option to *disable*
> the plugin which may result in different behaviour. For example I use
> Opera 8 with plugins disabled; which simply returns the alternate
> content (if any) as per specification.
> 
> What I've found is most Flash sites just return a blank screen (oddly
> enough, they don't turn up in Google much either).
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Re: [WSG] A way to skip a Flash-intro if Flash is not installed?

2005-05-24 Thread Kay Smoljak
On 5/24/05, Patrick H. Lauke <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Out of interest: why not simply provide the alternative content inside
> the OBJECT element, as per specification? If the OBJECT itself can't be
> displayed (e.g. Flash is not installed), then the alternative is
> displayed...all without getting any scripting involved.

I thought that if Flash wasn't installed, the browser would prompt you
to download and install it rather than just displaying the alternate
content? I use JavaScript detection for cases where the Flash content
is not important and I don't want the user to be bugged to install
Flash every time they visit the page.

I could be wrong - I don't think I tested it with the alterate content
actually in the object tag.

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Re: [WSG] Best way to train someone in css and web standards

2005-05-23 Thread Kay Smoljak
On 5/23/05, Cole Kuryakin - x7m <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I have the opportunity to hire two people in the next few weeks to help me
> with my one-man-band web development business. 
>   
> Problem is, these two know only the most basic aspects of HTML and don't
> know anything about CSS or web standards. 

I would recommend  Zeldman's "Designing with web standards" as a good
primer, on both how to approach web standards and why.

My copy has been around our office several times now and is looking
rather dog-eared and annotated. I'm still not allowed to take it home!

K.

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Re: [WSG] Playing a sound file - what is the best way?

2005-05-17 Thread Kay Smoljak
On 5/18/05, Geoff Deering <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> >IE6 comes with Flash player pre-installed.
> All versions, or a specific implementation/installation?

I can't say for sure, but my feeling is that it's all versions. 

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Re: [WSG] Playing a sound file - what is the best way?

2005-05-17 Thread Kay Smoljak
On 5/18/05, Geoff Deering <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> 1) I have never come across a browser, which installed with Macromedia
> Flash pre-installed.

IE6 comes with Flash player pre-installed.

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Re: [WSG] very frustrated

2005-05-17 Thread Kay Smoljak
On 5/17/05, Kvnmcwebn <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Just curious-Does anyone here do asp and if so would using the ala custom
> corners method for a basic wrapper/template be very difficult to convert
> over to asp?

While a competent server-side programmer in any language should be
able to do almost anything in terms of layout, I am always cautious
when using alistapart's custom corners technique, as it's
unfortunately very easy to break. I have used it on several sites - in
fact including one I did last weekend - but I would be wary of handing
a site over to someone else that used that technique. The main
problems I find are that if your content becomes very long or very
short, the panels start breaking up, plus resizing browser text size
can cause havoc. I've also had some problems with visual "artifacts"
appearing in IE6.

By the sounds of it, your programmer simply doesn't want to be
bothered with a complex layout that's out of their tabular
comfort-zone.

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Re: [WSG] apostrophes, and the like.

2005-05-17 Thread Kay Smoljak
On 5/17/05, James Ellis <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Basically you should only use quotes within tags like  href="blah.php">foo. If you want to avoid problems with badly
> formed markup (XML for instance) then always use the entity version if
> the character e.g
> "bar"

If you use Dreamweaver and paste your content into design view, all
entities are automatically converted for you. It's about the only
thing I use design view for!

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Re: [WSG] Space-saving Form Select vs Space-hungry HTML List

2005-05-16 Thread Kay Smoljak
> Dan wrote:
> > What is the 'official' word on the use of form selects as an alternative to 
> > space hungry HTML lists?

I would avoid doing this for any kind of significant navigation as
search engine spiders would not follow the navigation. I'm not sure
how it would fare accessibility-wise either.

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Re: [WSG] Problem with print friendly and name anchor

2005-05-13 Thread Kay Smoljak
On 5/14/05, Lily Miu <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>   I believe is needed in order for
> XHTML to be validated.  

Sorry Lily, this isn't actually helping with your print stylesheet
problem, but I thought I'd step in and do some CSS Myth-Busting (TM).

For a start, according to Anne van Kesteren (one knowledgable dude)
it's not actually an XML prolog, it's an XML declaration. More info
here: http://annevankesteren.nl/archives/2004/08/xml-declaration

Secondly, the XML declaration is not required for validation. It is
recommended by the W3C, but is not necessary.

The reason why some people recommend that you DON'T include the XML
declaration is because in IE6, if anything exists in the document
above the doctype declaration, be it a comment, an xml declaration,
ANYTHING, IE6 goes into "quirks" mode or "old-browser-emulation" mode.
This causes IE6 to imitate IE5, with the broken box model and other
nasty bugs.

Other people say that you SHOULD include the XML declaration for that
very reason - to reduce the number of rendering engines that you're
trying to accomodate. I haven't seen much discussion of that point of
view lately, so perhaps people are moving away from it (IE5's market
share is definitely dropping throught the floor).

Hope that's helpful,
K.

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Re: [WSG] print css crashing ie6

2005-05-10 Thread Kay Smoljak
On 5/10/05, Gallagher, Robin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I've got a 3-column css page that crashes IE6 when I try to print or print 
> preview. Can anyone suggest a possible cause?

Yep, I've had that before... in my case it was to do with absolutely
positioned divs, IIRC. I fixed it by adding a print stylesheet and
changing position:absolute to position:relative (as well as removing
unnecessary navigation and a few other things).

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Re: [WSG] Form Validation error

2005-05-04 Thread Kay Smoljak
On 5/5/05, tee <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Also, have anybody done the e-commerce site that is fully xhtml validated?

This one is valid: 
http://www.australianopalsrus.com.au 

This one still has a few minor issues that are being fixed: 
http://www.elizabethsbookshop.com.au

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Re: {Spam?} Re: [WSG] IMAGE(was Mystical belief etc)

2005-04-20 Thread Kay Smoljak
Vincent Flanders only includes business and/or public service sites as
"web sites that suck" - he has stated in the past that he considers
personal sites, entertainment sites etc to fall under different
"rules".

Plus he's a lot more "with it" than Jakob, and more of a standards
evangelist which Mr Neilsen is most definitely not.

K.


On 4/20/05, Kvnmcwebn <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> How does the "webs sites that suck" guy compare to Jacob Neilson?
> -sort of the same rhetoric eh?
> 
> To me the web is a functional and creative/expressive medium.
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Re: [WSG] 309 Validation errors - Reliance Petroleum

2005-04-18 Thread Kay Smoljak
On 4/16/05, Steven Clark <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> The other most noticable thing off the bat was the drop down menu and top
> nav disappears entirely with JavaScript disabled.

Companies often don't care about accessibility... regardless of
whether they should or not (obviously we all think they should)... but
I wonder what the person responsible for picking a web designer would
think if you told them them that Google can only see about five pages
of that site?

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Re: [WSG] Hidden Content

2005-03-31 Thread Kay Smoljak
On Thu, 31 Mar 2005 10:46:23 +0100, Mike Foskett
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I don't actually believe that CSS styling will make any difference to search 
> engine ranking.
> These robots spend enough time trawling through the HTML content.
> It would be time wasted to cross reference the content against: visibility, 
> display, colours used, z-index and positioning.

You can see what search engines request by looking at your log files.
They've never requested my css files. However, I read somewhere a
Google staff member said something like "we reserve the right to index
css files or not" which means they may start in the future.

> Does anyone actually know of a page barred, blacklisted or banned by Google?
> I somehow doubt they ever do.

They do ban sites - it happened to one of my clients (although nothing
to do with css) and it took about eight months of campaigning to get
the site included again. However, the biggest risk is your competitors
- if I see a site spamming a search engine I report it. Many people do
the same, and there *have* been cases of the engines taking action.

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Re: [WSG] Hidden Content

2005-03-30 Thread Kay Smoljak
On Wed, 30 Mar 2005 13:56:04 -0500, Tom Livingston
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Flash actually is searchable. 

I'm not flaming you - but have you seen this:

Why Google's indexing of swfs is worthless
http://www.quasimondo.com/archives/000404.php


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Re: [WSG] Standards compliant site, clients wants to make updates themselves

2005-03-21 Thread Kay Smoljak
On Tue, 22 Mar 2005 00:28:47 +0800, Bert Doorn <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Contribute sounds like a good idea, but it means I have to learn
> to use Dreamweaver and its template system.  Plus the customer
> needs to learn how to use Contribute.  Too hard.

You don't have to use DW templates - that's just one suggestion for
limiting the areas they can update. Also, learning the product takes
about ten minutes for anyone - I haven't had a client yet who hasn't
been amazed at how easy it actually is.

I guess if you're happy to say to the client "if you want a CMS I
can't help you" that's fine. Personally, I wouldn't dream of turning a
client away, but that's just me!

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Re: [WSG] Standards compliant site, clients wants to make updates themselves

2005-03-20 Thread Kay Smoljak
> What other options are there, apart from complex, expensive CMS setups
> (or forgetting about standards)?

I've had a lot of success with Macromedia Contribute. You can pick up
a copy for around AUD $220 from Harvey Norman or Harris Technology, it
totally respects server-side code and standards, and if you use
Dreamweaver templates you can specify which parts of the page the
client is allowed to edit. It's very squarely targeted at
*maintenance* rather than "you can use this to build your own web
site". Highly recommended!

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Re: [WSG] Targeting Mac IE5.1 on OSX

2005-02-14 Thread Kay Smoljak
On Mon, 14 Feb 2005 13:27:46 +0100, kemie guaida <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> you can use IE's conditional comments, which let you target specific
> versions of IE:

Unfortunately, conditional comments are Windows only :(

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Re: [WSG] Follow up from Brisbane meeting

2005-02-09 Thread Kay Smoljak
On Thu, 10 Feb 2005 09:35:14 +1000, Josh McDonald <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Secondly - I consider myself fairly well versed in the voodoo that is
> javascript, but what in the flamin hell is that IE7 script? I got
> halfway down the thing adding spacing and indentation in the hope it
> would become readable, but all I got is... WTF?. Why all this
> horrible, horrible chicanery when a couple of IE css expressions
> should do the trick?

The IE7 script is VERY heavily optimised for size/download speed, cos
there's a LOT in it. You used to be able to download the commented
version from http://dean.edwards.name/ - although I haven't checked
recently.

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Re: [WSG] Standards?

2005-02-01 Thread Kay Smoljak
On Tue, 1 Feb 2005 09:57:46 -, designer
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> "I can appreciate that I am getting a 'quality' product, but from a
> practical point of view, what am I getting that improves my business?  As
> far as visitors to my site are concerned there seems to be no advantage -
> after all, my competitor's sites may well be outdated, but they do actually
> WORK, so my customers don't see any benefit."

The advantages are geared towards both the business-owner and the user:
- lower bandwidth intensive/cheaper to host (probably not an issue for
your particular client) and also faster-loading for the end user
- easier to update/redesign in the future
- more accessible (presumably, depending on what was replaced)
- *perhaps* more search engine friendly (again, depends what was replaced)
- forwards-compatible, browser-wise
- available to a wider audience of browser-users

What's not to like? :)

Zeldman's book talks about each of these ideas at length.

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Re: [WSG] newbie with popup menus question

2005-02-01 Thread Kay Smoljak
On Fri, 21 Jan 2005 16:06:27 -0700, Devendra Shrikhande
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Till now I have been using Fireworks to create popup menus for web sites.

Just saw this, looks like there were never any replies... Devendra, if
you're still listening, Fireworks menus are actually really bad,
accessibility-wise and from a web standards perspective. I would
highly recommend checking out the Suckerfish menus -
http://www.htmldog.com/articles/suckerfish/dropdowns/ - they're
simple, lightweight, search engine friendly and all round fantastic.

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Re: [WSG] Search Engines and CSS

2005-01-30 Thread Kay Smoljak
On Sat, 29 Jan 2005 12:24:29 +1000, Lea de Groot <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> No, not particularly - the search engines dont seem to be semantic at all.

In my experience - and seo is part of my job - search engines *do*
place higher relevance on keywords inside H1 tags.

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Re: [WSG] Navigation Help

2005-01-11 Thread Kay Smoljak
On Wed, 12 Jan 2005 00:21:14 +, James Oppenheim
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> But how would make it so the top level navigation is still highlighted when
> the mouse moves down into the dropdowns. I am using images at the moment and
> I would like them to stay highlighted.

The "Sons of Suckerfish" dropdown menu is a more robust version of the
original, and uses less JavaScript too. I have seen them implemented
with the top level staying highlighted, so I know it's possible - that
was one of the things our designers complained about when suckerfish
first came out.

http://www.htmldog.com/articles/suckerfish/dropdowns/

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Re: [WSG] Connditional Comment / @import Problem in IE 5.0.1

2005-01-10 Thread Kay Smoljak
On Mon, 10 Jan 2005 23:22:26 -0500, Michael Wilson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I don't have a test machine with IE 5 loaded, but again, given that I am
> saying [if IE]--no version specified--I think the chances of it being
> some kind of standalone quirk are slim. 

Personally I wouldn't trust the standalone versions to be accurate for
anything. I have a Virtual PC image with Windows 98 SE and IE
5.00.2614.3500 and Windows 2000 with IE 5.50.4134.0600 - but no 5.01,
unfortunately. If you'd like me to take some screenshots anyway just
send the link.

Cheers,
K.

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Re: [WSG] Connditional Comment / @import Problem in IE 5.0.1

2005-01-10 Thread Kay Smoljak
On Mon, 10 Jan 2005 10:31:02 -0500, Michael Wilson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I did a little more testing and things get stranger. IE 5.0.1 breaks
> when I use:

Hmm... you said you're using the standalone IE versions, right? I'd
test in a "real" IE 5.01 before you write it off completely if I were
you... those standalone versions are very, very confused about their
identities :)

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Re: [WSG] Connditional Comment / @import Problem in IE 5.0.1

2005-01-09 Thread Kay Smoljak
On Fri, 07 Jan 2005 15:48:22 -0500, Michael Wilson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> When I included the conditional comment, a rather
> large gap would appear at the top of the page. At first, I thought
> something in the IE stylesheet was causing the problem, 


I've seen something similar when the conditional comment syntax wasn't
quite right. The way they handle GT and LT is a little odd... I'd
check what you have against MSDN.

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Re: [WSG] What can you say to a site like this?

2004-12-31 Thread Kay Smoljak
On Fri, 31 Dec 2004 23:20:42 -0500, Felix Miata <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> You could send this page, or link to it:
> http://members.optusnet.com.au/~night.owl/morons.html

I think that's probably counter-productive. It's not that they are
"morons", it's that they're a quite-large educational organisation,
probably government-run (not sure on the specifics there) and I get
the feeling that site is a culmination of many, many levels of
beaurocracy and probably a stinky CMS someone somwhere along the line
paid an obscene amount of money for. A case of them muddling along,
updating and occasionally forcing someone to hack in new features
(like the font-size switcher[1]) and NOT proactively fixing it, as
opposed to someone purposely making it bad.

My aim in sending a letter of outrage/complaint is to try to bring
someone attention that because of what they're NOT doing, their site
is a) not serving their market; and b) most probably illegal.

K.
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[1] Imagined conversation:
Some pointy-haired boss: 
"Oh dear, what about all this accessibility legislation?"
17yo work experience dude who's just completed their "Certificate in
Multimedia":
"Don't worry, I'll put in a font-size increaser!"
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[WSG] What can you say to a site like this?

2004-12-31 Thread Kay Smoljak
One of my goals for the coming two years is to learn some basic
German, Italian and French for my planned trip through Europe at the
end of 2006. I decided to try and find some information about TAFE
courses online. Big mistake - I should have just called them :)

Check out the Central TAFE web site in Firefox: 
http://central.tafe.wa.edu.au/

First thing: they have a "make text larger" button at the bottom of
the screen. Cool - except that every single piece of text on that
entire page except for the font-size enlarger is an image. So all that
hitting that button will do (on the home page at least) is make the
font-size enlarger bigger. Adding insult to injury, the font-size
didn't seem to be affected in the body text of any subsequent page,
only on some links.

When I tried to search for couse information, I received a JavaScript
alert telling me "Your browser needs updating. This site will not
function correctly with your current browser". Almost all the links
try to open in new windows too. I tried turning off JavaScript to stop
the annoying alerts but then nothing works.

So, I sat down to compose a letter of eduction and complaint, however
I  didn't really know what I should say. I managed to resist the urge
to simply yell "I hope you're not teaching any web design courses"
(actually I know they are) or "My browser needs updating? YOUR WEB
SITE NEEDS UPDATING!". I could sit down and try to explain about
Firefox and accessibility, but will it make any difference? Who's
going to get that message, some enrolments officer who will bin it
straight away?

Does anyone have a boiler-plate "your site sucks, buddy" email that
they'd like to share? Perhaps the Web Standards Group should develop
one, with links to official information sources for government,
standards bodies etc?

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Re: [WSG] Semantic Sanity Check

2004-12-30 Thread Kay Smoljak
On Thu, 30 Dec 2004 15:28:47 -0800, Ben Curtis <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> These are smart people I'm working with, but they think solely about
> presentation. I'm looking to push them on just the right concepts. Did
> I miss any? Am I off base on some?

I started doing exactly what you're trying to do about 18 months ago,
albeit with a smaller team (I think there were about four coders back
then). I am pleased to say that now, we are a fully
standards-compliant shop and nothing new goes out the door that
doesn't validate and have basic accessibility measures. New hires are
vetted extensively for their attitude towards web standards - even the
designers who don't actually write any HTML are expected to be aware
of the issues.

However, it's a slow process. I'd say it took about a year to get
everyone thinking in the right way - and that meant lots of
"transitional" table-based layouts and pages that didn't quite make
the grade went out the door. You have to be very careful, as pushing
the validation issue especially when someone's already under pressure
can turn them against the whole idea very easily.

I found that I needed to be around to help out with browser issues a
lot - at first the attitude to layout problems very much is "it works
fine *my way*... if you want it *your* way, you'd better come up with
a fix yourself". After a while though that goes away as people get
more empowered with what they're doing. I recommend buying a few books
to have around - my copy of Zeldman's book in particular has been
around the office a few times, in fact I haven't even laid eyes on it
since October.

As for your document, if search engine optimisation is important in
your work at all that's a great way to explain the importance of
semantic markup - Google sees "Widgets"
and says "yep, some text". Google sees "Widgets" and says
"aha! I've found a page exclusively about Widgets!".

Another important thing is to demonstrate tools that will make their
lives easier like the Firefox Web Developer Toolbar and the
htmlhelp.com crawling validator, and make sure everyone knows how to
get them and how to install them.

Good luck!

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Re: [WSG] making money out of web standards

2004-12-29 Thread Kay Smoljak
On Wed, 29 Dec 2004 13:08:30 +0800, Wong Chin Shin
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> 1) Designers, how would YOU approach selling this concept? Or would you?
> 2) Managers, what would catch YOUR attention in a pitch geared towards this?

I'm not really either... but I can tell you that the company I work
for lists "standards compliance" and "accessibility" in a small
paragraph about halfway through our quotes - unless  the quote is for
a large organisation specifically concerned with accessibility (this
happens occasionally) OR has asked for a standards-based redesign
(this has happened once). We sell sites based on fulfilling the
business needs of the organisation - that the web site will be
fast-loading, satisfy relevant accessibility laws and work
cross-browser is a given.

Having said that, I know that there *are* companies out there who do
market themselves from a web standards perspective. The biggest-seller
in my experience is search engine optimisation. Many people have woken
up to the fact that they need to be found in Google, and as Sir
Zeldman says, "Google is the blind billionare" - who loves clean,
semantic markup. Admittedly having good markup is not all you need to
do for effective search engine optimisation, but it's certainly a good
start, and also an awesome selling point.

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Re: [WSG] rationalising my refusal to support IE/NS4

2004-12-21 Thread Kay Smoljak
Thanks for your ideas everyone, I'll definitely add some of those
things. I have also pointed out that their existing site doesn't work
too well in Netscape 4 (or with Flash disabled, for that matter).

On Tue, 21 Dec 2004 15:46:30 +0800, Nick Cowie <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> If it is a WA gov site they are quoting four year old state government 
> guidelines which have 
> not been updated and are unlikely in the near future.

It's a WA school, so I'm betting that's where they got it from. Is
that document online or can someone email me a copy off list?

Sorry if it's getting a bit off-topic, I was really searching for
words that would say "your requirements are bad for web standards and
accessibility and therefore bad for your site" which I think is mostly
on-topic.

Cheers!


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[WSG] rationalising my refusal to support IE/NS4

2004-12-20 Thread Kay Smoljak
Hi guys,

I have a requirements document here that I'm quoting for, that
mentions that the web site should be optimised for IE4 and Netscape 4.
Now, I'm not really blaming the client here - they obviously have no
idea what it is they're asking and have probably based it off quote
they got to do their site in 1999. However, I would like to educate
them on why supporting these dinosaurs is not a good idea.

I have added my standard blurb about cross-browser and cross-platform
support, including that "older browsers will receive a plain 'unstyled
text' version of the site, which will still allow all content to be
fully accessed". What I then want to say is that "Fully supporting
version 4 browsers (which are now nearly 8 years old) is possible,
however extra construction and testing time will be required. We would
not recommend supporting fully these browsers, as the visual design
possibilities will be limited, the accessibility of the site lessened,
and download time increased."

I'm feeling like this whole week is one big Friday afternoon, and that
somehow sounds rather lame. Can anyone recommend any other reasons or
throw in some kick-arse buzzwords to make me look good?

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Re: [WSG] Western Australian Government Website

2004-12-16 Thread Kay Smoljak
On Thu, 16 Dec 2004 16:52:38 +0800, Nick Cowie <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> One of the main problems with the WA gov sites is that a little over two 
> years ago a large number of govt departments got amalgamated.  Most of my 
> peers have spent the last couple of years trying to get three, four or more 
> sites into a single logical structure (and boy it is fun with all the 
> internal polictics involved).

I spoke to my friend at the Dept of Premier and Cabinet, and she said
that the particular web site we're discussing here is somewhat of a
problem as it's managed by a different department to the main state
government stuff. They're currently discussing getting rid of it
completely.

Anyway, it will be interesting to see what they come up with when the
new common badging is released.

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Re: [WSG] Western Australian Government Website

2004-12-15 Thread Kay Smoljak
On Thu, 16 Dec 2004 16:05:49 +1100, Natalie Buxton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
 http://www.wa.gov.au/ 
> Alas, I was wrong and it's killing me how poor it is in relation to
> standards, accessibility and usability.

I know some of the people involved with upgrading the web sites for
the entire WA government to a common look and feel. As far as I
understand it will be happening in the next few months (ie, before the
election is called, at which point all non-essential changes to the
sites are frozen).

While I'm not sure if 100% validation is one of their goals for the
new site, I do know that accessibility is a big issue for them and I
have no doubt the new sites will be much, much better than what's
there now. I believe that several years of planning and discussion has
gone into the project!

I might drop an email to someone and try to find out more...

Cheers,
K.

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Re: [WSG] Firefox screen-reader emulator

2004-12-07 Thread Kay Smoljak
On Wed, 08 Dec 2004 01:21:14 +, Patrick H. Lauke
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Kay Smoljak wrote:
> 
> > There's a number of different screenreaders available for testing.
> > Some are free, others have trial periods. I recently installed the
> > demo version of JAWS under Virtual PC - it will run for 40 minutes,
> > which gives you plenty of time to test a few sites.
> 
> I'll have my usual rant here, nothing personal: the demo versions of
> screenreaders (and any other software) are made available by the
> developers so that you can evaluate the product and decide whether
> you're going to purchase the full version or not. If you keep using the
> demo version for proper testing, you're breaking the terms of the demo
> license.

I absolutely agree Patrick. I was merely responding to the previous
poster's statement that he'd never even seen a real screen reader. If
you're going to test regularly, you should definitely purchase one -
I'm still trying to decide which is the most widely used.

I believe the demo licence for JAWS has a provision for testing sites...


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Re: [WSG] Semantic Breadcrumbs

2004-12-07 Thread Kay Smoljak
On Wed, 8 Dec 2004 10:54:54 +1300, Andy Kirkwood | MOTIVE
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Been following the breadcrumb (BC) discussion, and think it may come
> down to defining the *purpose* of the BC. Through a process of
> distillation I've arrived at the following conclusions;
> 
> The ('correct') semantic markup of a BC should be based on what the
> BC primarily 'means'.

While the breadcrumbs discussion over the last few days has been
vaguely interesting - the long drawn out squabbling over semantics
reminds me why I don't bother following the Usenet HTML/CSS newsgroups
anymore! - I'd have to ask if breadcrumbs are really that important.
This is veering off-topic rapidly, but here's an interesting
discussion on real world data on the use of breadcrumb navigation
which suggests they're not utilised by most average users:
http://www.humanfactors.com/downloads/oct04.asp#kath

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Re: [WSG] Firefox screen-reader emulator

2004-12-07 Thread Kay Smoljak
On Tue, 07 Dec 2004 12:14:18 -0500, Jeffrey Hardy
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I've never seen a *real* screen-reader

There's a number of different screenreaders available for testing.
Some are free, others have trial periods. I recently installed the
demo version of JAWS under Virtual PC - it will run for 40 minutes,
which gives you plenty of time to test a few sites. I would highly
recommend it for everyone, even if you're not specifically concerned
about accessibility.

Here's some others:
Window-Eyes (demo version): http://www.gwmicro.com/demo/index.php
Simply Web 2000 (free): http://www.econointl.com/sw/
JAWS (demo version):
http://www.freedomscientific.com/fs_products/software_jaws.asp
IBM Homepage reader (demo version):
http://www-3.ibm.com/able/solution_offerings/hpr.html
pwWebSpeak (free): http://www.soundlinks.com/pwgen.htm
emacspeak (free, Linux): http://emacspeak.sourceforge.net/

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Re: [WSG] No skipping to content needed?

2004-12-04 Thread Kay Smoljak
On Sat, 4 Dec 2004 11:56:59 -0800, Ben Curtis <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Are you saying that I've merely
> created a situation where instead of "skip to main content" I will need
> a "skip to main navigation"? 

This is exactly what I did on the Perth Festival site:
http://www.perthfestival.com.au/2005/

I had a listen to a few different layouts with the demo version of
Jaws, and it seemed like the best solution to me...  Plus, as someone
else mentioned, it makes more sense to agents like NN4 that are
getting the unstyled version.

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Re: [WSG] Text selection in CSS layouts

2004-11-28 Thread Kay Smoljak
On Sat, 27 Nov 2004 16:10:20 -, Aaron Pollock
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Can anyone help as to why (in IE at least) it's not possible to select/copy
> text without selecting other content automatically in this page?

There's a JavaScript fix -
http://blog.tom.me.uk/2003/07/23/boie6selecta.php - but the problem
with it is that if you have IE set to not cache (ie check pages
against the server every time) each page flickers when first loaded.
Luckily it's usually only web developers who have that option set, and
they should know better than to use IE :)

I've never seen that z-index fix before, Johannes - I'll have to try
it out. Thanks!

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Re: [WSG] another problem with new site

2004-11-27 Thread Kay Smoljak
On Sat, 27 Nov 2004 22:19:24 +, john <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I've been getting several emails from visitors saying they're using AOL
> or Netscape 7.1 and they're not seeing the CSS.

Check the list archives - this came up just last week, It sounds like
your server is serving the css files as text/plain instead of
text/css.

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Re: [WSG] optimising CSS?

2004-11-26 Thread Kay Smoljak
On Fri, 26 Nov 2004 18:23:15 -0500, Jeffrey Hardy
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> While nothing will beat the old-fashioned 'by-hand' approach, Topstyle's
> 'style sweeper' does a pretty good job.

Another handy feature of TopStyle is the "orphan class" finder. I
don't have it on this machine so I forget exactly where it is, but if
you set up a Top Style "site" you should see the option. Basically it
finds classes and ids in your css that aren't used in your HTML, and
classes and ids used in your HTML that aren't defined in your css.
Very handy!.

K.

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Re: [WSG] It's so frustrating. Webstandars, accesibility and Firefox as a sales argument.

2004-11-26 Thread Kay Smoljak
On Fri, 26 Nov 2004 15:57:29 +0800, Vicki Berry <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I rarely even mention web standards to clients anymore unless they are


Amen!

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Re: [WSG] Discussion Threading

2004-11-25 Thread Kay Smoljak
On Fri, 26 Nov 2004 14:04:34 +1100, Jixor - Stephen I <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Are there any mail clients that will automatically thread discussions? I
> use news groups regularly and comparatively the discussion list is very
> annoying and cumbersome.

Although it's not trendy to mention it, Outlook will handle threads
quite acceptably if you choose Arrange By -> Conversation from the
View menu :)

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Re: [WSG] Careers in web standards

2004-11-24 Thread Kay Smoljak
We've become a little more cynical... we don't expect to find new
employees with web standards experience already (although we did find
and employ one in the last year). Usually we ask have they heard of
web standards, how much do they use css, and try to guage if they are
going to be open to the idea of doing things a different way. We're
fairly resigned to the fact that we need to train new people.

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On 25 Nov 2004 11:25:56 +1100, Andrew Thompson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> That's very interesting and tallies completely with my experience. Mind you, 
> I advertised for a bookkeeper with MYOB skills recently and more than half 
> the applicants didn't have that and quite a few had no bookkeeping experience 
> or training at all!

> On Thursday, 25 November 2004 11:06 AM, Ryan Nichols <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 
> wrote:
> >My company was recently looking for a XHTML/CSS coder who
> >practices web standards development. We were looking for
> >someone with strong CSS skills, who could implement complex
> >designs in table-less css, practiced standards based semantic
> >markup, and was fluent in accessible XHTML. No programming or
> >design skills needed. I thought it might be interesting to this
> >group on what kind of response we got:
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Re: [WSG] Shared Div heights

2004-11-02 Thread Kay Smoljak
On Tue, 02 Nov 2004 17:19:17 +, Kimberly Lightholder
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>  The question: is it possible to have the div on the left expand along with
> the one on the right so that their respective bottoms always align?

If your left column is fixed width, you could try faking it with a
background image, ala "Faux Columns"
(http://www.alistapart.com/articles/fauxcolumns/).

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Re: [WSG] CSS drop-down menus

2004-11-01 Thread Kay Smoljak
On the Perth Festival site last year (actual page no longer online) we
used some JavaScript to hide and display the Flash movie when the drop
down menu was activated. As the Flash was eyecandy only, it didn't
matter - we figured that if someone was examining the menu, they
weren't watching the page anyway.

K.

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On Mon, 1 Nov 2004 08:38:48 -0700, Shane Helm <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> This works on Mac Firefox, but not in Safari or IE.
> 
> On Oct 31, 2004, at 1:22 AM, Florin Cojitza wrote:
> >  > width="250" height="50>
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > 
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Re: [WSG] Duplicate navigation?

2004-10-31 Thread Kay Smoljak
On Mon, 01 Nov 2004 17:11:38 +1000, Ben Hamilton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I'm wondering if this is possible: to have content inside of a div
> displayed in two places on my page?

Not with CSS. You sound like you need some kind of server-side
scripting include - either SSI, PHP, ColdFusion, ASP etc.

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Re: [WSG] IE misbehaving with a list

2004-10-27 Thread Kay Smoljak
On Thu, 28 Oct 2004 15:43:35 +1000, Anura Samara <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> However, just using the basic version of the CSS rollover lists, I'm
> finding that MS IE 5 is adding a gap between list items if I add any
> font declarations anywhere eg. adding font-family and/or font-size to
> the containing DIV or the UL, LI or A elements.

Try removing all line breaks between your list items, ie:

item oneitem two

Cheers,
K.

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Re: [WSG] Looking for party animals

2004-10-20 Thread Kay Smoljak
Don't forget to sign up if you're in Perth too!

On Wed, 20 Oct 2004 23:51:40 +1000, Nigel McFarlane <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> http://www.openforce.at/mozparty2/?view=AU

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Re: [WSG] CSS - How the max size of a .css file

2004-10-20 Thread Kay Smoljak
On Wed, 20 Oct 2004 15:36:20 -0200, Genau Junior <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I would like to know, how is the max size of a .css file for a website with
> a plenty of functionalities and different style pages. 

Try running a few sites through
http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/ - the analyzer
gives specific recommended sizes for each component of a page (css,
js, html, images), and reasons for each too.

Another useful tool that reports on similar aspects is
http://www.sitereportcard.com/

Cheers,
K.

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Re: [WSG] Adding full doctype to pages

2004-10-17 Thread Kay Smoljak
Hi Lyn,

On Sun, 17 Oct 2004 13:09:28 +0800, Lyn Patterson
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I am using the full doc type  Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd";> on my main page.
> 
> I thought I should add it to all the other pages but when I did so, the
> contents of the left column  moved towards the center in IE and Opera
> so I took it off and things reverted to normal.

You should definitely have a full doctype on every page - without it
your pages are not valid. The differences are due to IE and Opera
going into "quirks mode" - emulating old (bad) browser behaviour -
when no doctype is present.

If you post the pages exhibiting the problem, I'm sure someone here
will be able to give you some idea as to why.

Cheers,
Kay.

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Re: [WSG] Tables, is it Standard?

2004-10-04 Thread Kay Smoljak
On Mon, 4 Oct 2004 09:55:42 -0400, Olajide Olaolorun
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Hi, I would like to know if Tables is standard. You see, I have been
> into web standards for some time now nut I still use Tables and would
> like to know if it is standards

Tables are valid HTML, but in the spirit of web standards, they are
discouraged for layout. Essentially, if you're marking up the kind of
data that you'd find in a spreadsheet, use a table. If you're talking
about laying out a page structure, you should look at using CSS
positioning instead, there's a lot of advantages.

The best tutorial I've found on how CSS positioning works is
http://www.brainjar.com/css/positioning/ - I had it saved on my PDA
and read it every morning on the train ride into work for weeks, until
it really sank in.

Cheers,
K.

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Re: [WSG] netscape 4.7 emulator

2004-09-24 Thread Kay Smoljak
On Fri, 24 Sep 2004 08:47:12 -0700, Ted Drake
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Does anyone know an online resource that emulates netscape 4.7?

Why not just install it on your dev machine? It's not that bad...
http://browsers.evolt.org has an archive with heaps of different
versions.

K.

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[WSG] menus misbehaving in IE5 Mac

2004-09-14 Thread Kay Smoljak
Hi guys,

I'm trying to help out a work mate with this layout. The menu is
"mostly" suckerfish, but on
Mac IE5, the menu bar jumps all over the place. I think it's got
something to do with the floats, but I don't have access to a mac
tonight and I just can't work it out.

Anyone have any pointers for me?
http://www.smoljak.com/wsg/

Thanks!

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Re: [WSG] Overflow on select or options

2004-09-12 Thread Kay Smoljak
On Mon, 13 Sep 2004 06:47:39 +1000, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> so no one can give me an answer on this one?
> Even whether it not at all possible?
> 
> I want the text to overflow if the value of the option is greater than the width...

Duuno, Taco. Anything to do with styling form widgets is highly
OS-dependent, so most people probably don't bother.

K.

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Re: [WSG] Web standards planet

2004-09-11 Thread Kay Smoljak
Hi Jad,

Looks interesting. One question - what's the benefit of registering?
There doesn't seem to be any info about the site itself, who's behind
it, and what you can do if you register.

K.


On Sun, 12 Sep 2004 08:07:49 +0300, Jad Madi <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Greetings
> 
> Yesterday I got nice idea, so I start working on it actually W3 planet
>  try to connect Web standards related bloggers, and web standards
> related sites within one website.
> please check http://www.w3planet.info/
> 
> guys your feedback is worthy
> 
> Thank you
> Jad madi
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> 



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Re: [WSG] web essentials briefing/ westciv CSS Guide

2004-09-05 Thread Kay Smoljak
On Fri, 3 Sep 2004 19:43:36 +1000, Hugh Todd <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > If you're based in Oz however you'd be a fool to miss it.
> 
> Why, though? The calibre of the people looks fantastic, but would it be
> worth spending $750 to see them?

I really, really, really, REALLY wish I could go, but making the trip
across the Nullabor is just not possible this year (moving into our
new house in three weeks time).

The calibre of speakers looks great, and from my experiences attending
MXDU these past two years, a major part of attending conferences like
these is the social and networking aspect. Where else will you get to
hang out with html geeks, standards nazis and css heads? You can learn
stuff just by osmosis.

Yet another reason to support conferences like these is to encourage
the industry to hold more.

Damn, I *so* wish I could go!

K.

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Re: [WSG] Restricted HTML Editor?

2004-08-31 Thread Kay Smoljak
> On Fri, 27 Aug 2004 22:08:41 +1000, Hugh Todd <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > Does Contribute 3 handle HTML entities properly? Contribute 3 didn't.

Sorry for the delay - yes, I can confirm that Contribute 3 appears to
encode HTML entities. I tried entering an ampersand and pasting in
smart quotes from Microsoft Word, and in both cases the correct entity
was inserted.

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