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Geek Meet Gothenburg March 2010
It's been over three years since Geek Meet Gothenburg February 2007, so it's about time for another one. Like last time, this event will take place at the NetRelations office in Gothenburg, Sweden. The date is March 24, 2010.
We’ll be talking about the usual web geek stuff, likely with a bit of emphasis on HTML 5 and other up-and-coming web things. Check out Geek Meet Göteborg – the sequel! on the NetRelations blog for the details and to sign up.
Posted in Web General.
Reverse chronological order comments
Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but I don’t get why some sites display reader comments in reverse chronological order. It seems especially popular on newspaper sites, which also for some reason tend to use paging for comments. I think the combination of reverse order and paging makes trying to follow discussions very frustrating.
Still, since more and more sites seem to display comments this way I guess there are some people who actually prefer comments displayed backwards, so it is probably here to stay.
Posted in Usability.
Seven HTML related working drafts published
On March 4, the W3C published no less than seven new or updated working draft documents related to HTML:
- HTML5
- HTML: The Markup Language
- HTML5 differences from HTML4
- HTML+RDFa
- HTML Microdata
- HTML Canvas 2D Context
- Additional Requirements for Bidi in HTML
Visual display of alternative text
The fact that web browsers have different ways of displaying alternative text when images are missing or disabled is something that I talked about in Safari, WebKit and alt text for missing images and Steve Faulkner expanded on in alt and title content display in popular browsers.
In How should Web browsers render alternative text?, Vlad Alexander asks (and answers) a few questions on this topic.
Posted in Accessibility, Browsers.
Accessibility issues on Vancouver Olympics websites
Being a pretty big fan of many winter sports I have spent most evenings of the past two weeks in front of the TV, watching the action from the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics.
With excellent live TV coverage from the games I had no reason to visit either the Vancouver2010.com or the CTVOlympics.ca website to find more info about the games. But one person who has visited and taken a closer look at those sites is Joe Clark. What he found is that the Vancouver Olympics Web sites are inaccessible to disabled people.
Posted in Accessibility, Web Standards.
CSS efficiency tip: use a single stylesheet file for multiple media
The way most people link CSS intended for different media types, such as screen, print, or handheld, is to use multiple files. The files are then linked either through link elements with a media attribute or through @import statements with one or more media types specified.
There is nothing wrong with splitting your CSS into multiple files and linking them this way (I currently do that here on this site), but there are two drawbacks: it leads to more HTTP requests from the browser to the server and the need to maintain multiple CSS files.
Posted in CSS.
Remember the Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG)
An increasing number of web developers are aware of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) (though they don’t necessarily use them in their work). But another set of accessibility guidelines seem to be almost completely overlooked – the Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG).
Where WCAG addresses the information and functionality of a website, ATAG addresses software that is used to create websites or manage the content of websites. There are two versions of ATAG; ATAG 1.0, which was made a recommendation on 3 February 2000 (yes, over ten years ago), and ATAG 2.0, which is currently in Working Draft status. Since a lot has happened on the Web in ten years, ATAG 2.0 is what I am basing the information in this article on.
Posted in Accessibility, Web Standards.
How to respond to email messages that contain multiple questions
Email messages often contain a number of questions that the sender wants the recipient to answer. I find that many responses to such messages are much more difficult to understand than they should be. Not because of grammar or spelling errors, but because of how the responses are structured and formatted.
I’d like to share two tips that, in my opinion, will make responses to multiple question messages much easier and quicker to read.
Posted in Productivity.
Specify a text colour for img elements
When an image specified with an img element is missing from a web page, some browsers display the alt text instead. Why not all browsers do that is a separate topic which I talk a bit about in Safari, WebKit and alt text for missing images.
I think most people will agree that it is a good thing for web browsers to display the contents of an image’s alt attribute when the image is missing or broken, or image rendering has been disabled. However, many web professionals forget to check what the alternative text will actually look like in those cases.
Posted in Accessibility, CSS, Usability.
sIFR default CSS hides content from at least one screen reader
Just a heads-up to anyone using sIFR to render text: the default CSS that comes with sIFR hides the replaced text from the VoiceOver screen reader. I don’t know if any others are affected – VoiceOver is the only screen reader I have been able to verify this problem in.
Posted in Accessibility, CSS, Typography.
Forgotten CSS selectors
Anyone who has been using CSS for any length of time has probably been frustrated by the lack of selector support in Internet Explorer 6. There are quite a lot of cases where a CSS 2.1 selector will let you target elements in all other relevant browsers, but where you, if you want it to work in IE 6, have to add a class or id attribute to the HTML.
Well, the market share of IE 6 is now finally at a level where we as developers can say that a site “supporting” IE 6 does not necessarily mean “looking pixel perfect”. Fortunately more and more clients understand this as well. IE 7 has been out for well over three years and IE 9 is on the horizon, so I think it’s time to revive those CSS selectors that you never got to use just because IE 6 doesn’t understand them.
Posted in CSS.
Beware of “Web Page, complete” when saving HTML pages with your browser
Every now and then I need to ask a client or another developer to save a copy of a web page and email it to me. Mostly it is because they are viewing a page that is behind a firewall and I need to see the markup. Something that happens a lot is that they send me HTML that is more or less mangled.
This HTML mangling happens when you choose “Web Page, complete” or a similarly named option in your web browser. With this option selected, browsers don’t save just the HTML source of the page – they also save any associated images, stylesheets, javascript files and other resources and change all references to those files to make them point to the locally saved copy.
Posted in Browsers, Quick Tips.
XHTML Media Types Working Group Note updated
The W3C Working Group Note XHTML Media Types - Second Edition contains updated guidelines for the use of different media types with XHTML documents – text/html vs. application/xhtml+xml. The note is about a year old now, so this will be old news to some readers. Better late than never, I suppose.
The document is now more focused on the text/html vs. application/xhtml+xml media types and includes Compatibility Guidelines for ensuring that documents can work with either media type.
Posted in (X)HTML.
Unobtrusive JavaScript is not necessarily accessible JavaScript
Plenty of JavaScript demos and tutorials that you come across on the Web note that they are implemented using unobtrusive JavaScript. While that is great and should always be encouraged, some people seem to believe that unobtrusive JavaScript equals accessible JavaScript. That is not always the case.
Unobtrusive JavaScript is normally mentioned to emphasise that a script uses progressive enhancement to cater for people who use a browser without JavaScript support. But that does not mean that a script is accessible, since two key accessibility issues tend to be overlooked – keyboard navigation and screen readers.
Posted in Accessibility, JavaScript.
Embedding video files without JavaScript
Nowadays, it is more or less the norm to use JavaScript to insert video content embedded in Flash into web pages. While it does work in the majority of cases, there are a couple of problems: it requires JavaScript and it requires Flash.
Some people block JavaScript, some block Flash, some block both, and some use platforms or user agents that do not support JavaScript and/or Flash. Like the iPhone and iPod Touch, for example. So to reach the largest possible number of people with your videos, you may want to look into the method described by Kroc Camen in Video for Everybody!.
A call for consistent display of alt text across browsers
A while ago I posted Safari, WebKit and alt text for missing images, in which I note that most WebKit-based browsers do not always display alt text when images are missing. In alt and title content display in popular browsers, Steve Faulkner presents his results from taking a closer look at this in the browsers that are currently most widely used.
In addition to checking what browsers do with an image’s alt text, Steve also checked if they do something with the title text, if any. Interestingly it turns out that Chrome and Safari display the contents of the title attribute if the image has no alt attribute. This situation shouldn’t occur in well-authored HTML documents, but I’m guessing WebKit displays the title text as error-recovery in the case of missing alt text, since in most cases it’s probably much better than displaying the file name.
Posted in Accessibility, Browsers, Usability, Web Standards.
Is SVG support coming to Internet Explorer?
In a post to the IEBlog, Patrick Dengler, Senior Program Manager of the Internet Explorer Team, announced that Microsoft Joins W3C SVG Working Group.
He goes on to say that We’re excited to take part in ensuring future versions of the SVG spec will meet the needs of developers and end users.
Posted in Browsers, Web Standards.
Telling organisations that their websites are inaccessible
When you encounter a website that has accessibility problems, it can be a good idea to contact the organisation behind the website to let them know about the problem and encourage them to fix it. To help make this a little easier, the W3C WAI has published a draft document called Contacting Organizations about Inaccessible Websites.
The document contains tips, discusses different approaches, and includes a few sample e-mails to show you what a message describing an accessibility problem can look like. Shawn Lawton Henry talks about the initiative a bit more in Take a few minutes to encourage web accessibility. You can make a difference. on the W3C Blog.
Posted in Accessibility.
W3C HTML Accessibility Task Force
As a number of people have stated, there are some accessibility issues in HTML 5. Hopefully the HTML Accessibility Task Force will help straighten those out:
The objective of HTML Accessibility Task Force is to help ensure that HTML 5 provides features to enable Web content to be accessible to people with disabilities. This includes review of existing features for potential accessibility problems, and proposal of new features where needed.
Posted in Accessibility, HTML 5.
Error messages for corrupt HTML
Vlad Alexander asks Should error messages be displayed for corrupt HTML5?. Sure, why not.
Many people who do not like the idea of browsers displaying error messages for corrupt/invalid HTML tend to equate error messages with the “Yellow screen of death” that Firefox and other Gecko-based browsers display when they encounter a non well-formed XHTML document served as application/xhtml+xml. But there are other ways.
Posted in Browsers, HTML 5, Web Standards.
