Slashdot Mirror

"Anyone" huh? So what now I'm a nobody? There are plenty of people out there that go to great lengths to switch back to a black background. Take a look at the VIM colour schemes people create.

You missed my point. I was referring to people who must context switch constantly in a single work session between a paper medium and a white on black computer screen. These people would easily suffer from eye strain. The consistency of the same color scheme on both paper and the computer screen is appreciated in such scenarios and these scenarios are very common.

I'm not sure what you're looking for in substantiation.

Evidently not, because your reply had absolutely nothing to do with what I asked for. I stated that your original argument implies that if printing black paper with white text were equally as cost effective as printing white paper with black text, then the black paper with white text would be the overwhelming majority preference by most people. You must substantiate that implication.

Cite your own sources ... Why should I spend the time and effort digging up references for you?

Since you're the one asserting that the vast majority of all the content on the internet has picked the incorrect color scheme (a not generally accepted position), the burden of proof lies on you, the asserter.

However, I'll bite.
- Here is a survey indicating black on white as the clear preference: http://hubel.sfasu.edu/research/survreslts.html (it is interesting to note that white on black does well too because the higher the contrast, the better. The ZernBurn folks could learn a thing or two from this.)
- Here are two substantiations demonstrating a preference for black on white in order to match surrounding light level as I've previously argued: http://www.office-ergo.com/setting.htm and http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/200608/light_text_on_dark_background_vs_readability/ (I'm citing the article, not the Digg discussion)

Oh gimme a break and stop being so dishonest. You can't get more personal that suggesting tht someone is happy with an inferior solution because they're a basement dweller with no social skills.

It's called a joke, as was spelled out in my original post. It's also a very common one on Slashdot. Since your account is older than mine and has many more posts than mine, I'd assumed you'd be familiar with it. I'd invoke the similar "you must be new here" joke at this time as well, but you might get irrationally offended by that too. ;)

That at least makes you a liar for suggesting I'm alone.

I never suggested you were alone. I suggested you are in the vast minority. Which you are.

I'll tell you what. Here's just one. Count the number of dark colour schemes.
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~maverick/VimColorSchemeTest/index-pl.html

Which proves what exactly?

Fuck off ... Hypocrite ... It's on Digg so it should be right at your level ... If it gives you such pleasure being a childish troll, I pity you.

All those ad hominems and you're calling me a troll? Don't you find that the least bit ironic?

Nobody in the HTML group thought columns would be useful either, apparently. As I said, HTML 1.0 and HTML 2.0 lacked any kind of columns or tables.

No, the idea was to build up the standards gradually. Start with the simple stuff and then move on to the more complicated problems. You know, good software engineering. Plus HTML was never intended to be a page description language. Computers at the time didn't have the kind of huge high-resolution screen that would make multiple columns a good idea.

(In fact, plenty of us still don't think they're a good idea on screens.)

I tend to enjoy "fancy" CSS designs, and I have found differences in basically every browser as a result. As soon as margins, line-height, and other "formatting" of the sort gets involved, things just get nasty. Firefox and Opera and IE7 in Strict are all standards-compliant more-or-less, but when pixels start to matter, I've found I have to do a lot of klugy things.

IE7 in Strict are all standards-compliant more-or-less

hmm user banned from posting.. apparently i am a troll...

the only closed source part is the UI which is hardly anything significant. the engine is entirely open source like gecko. you can even port it to
GTK UIs, non apple iphone competetior devices,
rival browsers . The safari UI is hardly critical as the links i just posted show. If you dont like the safari UI you can just make you own pretty easily with webcore. It is even easier (about 5 lines in cocoa) if you use Webkit

I want a little more attention paid to standards. What is the point of developing standards compliant, accessible websites if the most used browser in the market screws it up without crappy hacks? Oh, wait.. Notgetting sued is a pretty good reason, I guess. Still, the overhead IE creates for web developers (especially ones in areas with a low budget for design work) tends to make things cost much more than they should for the client.

We'll probably just see them get a little above 60% compliance on this round, though. Apathy is great, isn't it?

I used Gmail for your Domain for a few of the domains I have and it's been absolutely terrible. Some accounts just plain won't receive certain emails. Anything I have my php scripts send me, including customer contact forms off of the website just plain disappear. Not in the spam folder, no bounce message, nothing. And I double checked the SPF records, they were perfect. Funniest part is that all of the other accounts DO receive these emails.

Another account stopped being able to send email. I sent maybe 20 messages total out of this account and then it told me that I had hit my limit and could not send any more emails. Except for when I connected via POP3, then it sent just fine. Except a few weeks after that, It stopped receiving messages, instead sending a bounce message that my in box was full. This was my 2 gig in box with about 150 emails in it.

And I know of someone else who let me log into their account to see if I could fix it. their account took around 4 minutes to log in and a similar amount of time to do anything (open an email, switch to the spam folder, archive a message, *anything*). I longed out and longed into my account and it worked perfectly. Deleted cookies and cache and his lagged again. Tried his account on another computer and it lagged again.

I contacted google's support and WHEN they responded, it took no less than a occasionally a week. Ad then it was just with a generic pre-written message, never anything solid. But they didn't even respond half the time.

All in all I was rather shocked at how terrible gmail for your domain is, given that I very much like my regular gmail account.

And I'm not the only one who's seen this: http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/200610/want_ to_receive_email_stop_using_gmail/

Is it true that the release version of IE 7 still suffers from the old bug that causes gaps between list items in some cases? I thought it had been fixed in the betas/RCs. Even if it's not a major bug, it is an annoyance for those of us using CSS-based navigation menus. Are there any plans for a bugfix release soon?

Here are some links to helpful sites relating to speeding cameras:
1. http://www.ukspeedcameras.co.uk/
2. http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/200607/speed _cameras_do_not_make_driving_safer/
3. http://www.nationalsafetycameras.co.uk/nscl/camera s/cameras.html

This piece of FAQ pretty much states that speeding/traffic cameras record all the time 24 hours a day, 7 days a week: http://www.nationalsafetycameras.co.uk/nscl/q&a/q& a.html


The people are trying to fight back by destroying the speeding cameras. The Big Brother responds by installing additional security cameras to monitor on the speeding cameras. Reference: http://www.digg.com/security/Speed_cameras_acciden tally_get_destroyed...oops_

What I have to ask is, "Is CSS to blame for the tiny text in boxes with horizontal scrollbars?"

Ok. I realise this answer is coming very late, but no: Your browser is. This is a particular aspect of Gecko's special handling of font declarations that specify monospace. See Monospace, Firefox and braindeath and Sizing monospaced fonts

The talking point of CSS is that you separate the semantics/tag structure of the content from the presentation of the content. HTML tables should only be used for table-like data, not to separate your logo from your navbar. display:table; in CSS, OTOH, is just a way to achieve grid-like formatting. Doesn't work in IE6, though.

Validation not only is not the be-all-end-all, but it also shouldn't be. I say this as someone who strongly supports validating one's web sites. The reason I say this is because validators can only test so much, and so while they might be a useful starting point and/or test along the way, they cannot test everything. Even if something is technically valid, that does not mean that it accomplishes all of the goals of validation, such as being accessible regardless of the user's browser, disability, operating system, etc.

Check out Roger Johansson's series on evaluating web site accessibility for more on this.

Actually, Web 2.0 is typically characterised by big fonts. I don't see anything 2.0 about either of the designs that haven't been Slashdotted (Michael Johnson and Peter Lada); after all, Slashdot's home page is just a static page with textual content, which is about as 1.0 as it gets, and is all that's necessary.

I've never understood designers' obsession with small fonts. They don't seem to realise that, while they work with a professional quality 21" monitor, hooked up to a Mac with anti-aliased fonts, the vast majority of people (normal people, not nerds like us) don't have such good equipment or such young eyes. Maybe when they're older, with bad eyesight and a crap display bought out of their pension, they'll finally abandon the arrogance that leads to pages whose font size can't be adjusted or which break if you bump the browser up to 32px fonts (which is still too small for some partially-sighted people of my acquaintance).

Neither of the two designs I could reach cope with a change in font size; areas of the page overlap if you increase the font size on Firefox or Safari, and the font sizes are set in pixels (at least some of them), meaning that for IE6 users the text can't be resized at all. Granted, this is an IE6 failing, but it's one that web professionals need to avoid.

With basic accessibility issues like this having been ignored, I don't think either of these designs is ready for prime time. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines were first published in May 1999, seven years ago, yet in my work as a web developer I regularly encounter web designers who don't know the first thing about them - or decide they're not important if it threatens them with changing their beloved "vision". Learn your craft first, people; then you can call yourself a professional.

There's the Fangs extension for Firefox (which doesn't actually speak). IBM Homepage Reader has a free evaluation download. JAWS screen reader has a demo version (if I remember correctly it expires after half an hour of use, then you have to reboot to use it again). Safari can be used as an aural browser. EMACSpeak can be used as an aural browser (in conjunction with EMACS-W3), and was the first (to my knowledge) to support aural CSS. However, it's only really any good if you have a hardware speech synthesiser - its software support depends on an old, obsolete library that is hard or impossible to get hold of these days. Opera has an aural mode.

Actually, that list surprises me somewhat. A couple of years ago, it was just JAWS, IBM, and EMACSpeak if you could get it to work. The past couple of years have really improved matters.

It depends on why you are testing really. If you are doing it for legal reasons, you're probably okay testing in just the aural browser that's most convenient for you. But if you are doing it for a genuine attempt at compatibility, you'll need to test in JAWS, it's the most popular by far.

It's quite a pain to use demo versions when you are only trying to make your websites more compatible with them. The best thing to do if you can't justify buying them is to develop a website so that it works without images, Javascript or CSS, and then test in the aural browsers, writing down everything that doesn't work quite right. Then fix up what you need to, and keep your notes to hand the next time you develop a site (i.e. write a "style guide" for your code).

Can I call BS on that? Rhetoric, all of it and I quote from your above post on the MS IE Blog, "I wanted to make it clear that we know Beta 1 makes little progress for web developers in improving our standards support, particularly in our CSS implementation. I feel badly about this, but we have been focused on how to get the most done overall for IE7, so due to our lead time for locking down beta releases and ramping up our team, we could not get a whole lot done in the platform in beta 1. However, I know this will be better in Beta 2 "

I would like to point out that the above post is dated July 29th, 2005.

Half of the problems with IE's implementation of CSS (from a designers POV) is that they insist on sticking us with defaults other than 0, none, or off. As far as they're concerned they're not bugs - they're features.

The comments you pointed out only highlight MS's opinion that the situation with CSS has very low priority. A very low priority indeed.

According to eWeek.com, "Sources claiming familiarity with Microsoft's IE 7.0 plans said the company will add some additional CSS2 support to its new standalone browser. But Microsoft isn't planning to go the whole way and make IE 7.0 fully CSS2 compliant, sources said."

Of course, one site, 465BeraStreet.com can even wag a finger @ MS for fixing bugs at all, "When Internet Explorer 7 is released, probably later this year, it looks like one long-standing CSS selector bug in IE will be fixed: the Star html Selector Bug, also known as the Tan hack. Since the bug has been used by many web developers to target specific CSS rules at Internet Explorer as a way of working around various CSS bugs in the browser, some are worried that Microsoft fixing the bug in IE 7 may cause developers a lot of extra work."

And to highlight my point that M$ just doesn't care at all about CSS standards or compliancy thereof, CNet quotes Greg Sullivan, of the Windows client group as saying, "While it is true that our implementation is not fully, 100 percent W3C-compliant, our development investments are driven by our customer requirements and not necessarily by standards"

If they can't get around to it until after Alpha/Beta releases to fix issues they've known about for years now and because they themselves say that it isn't a priority to even try to meet the standards, No, I don't expect M$ to give any priority to the problems with CSS where I.E. 7.0 is concerned.

The worst, however, as highlighted above, Microsoft's utter lack of response to the issues in the past has now lead to a situation where any action to do anything positive would swamp designers with so much back-peddling to remove all their I.E. 5.5 hacks that new hacks would have to be implemented to cover up old hacks that are covering up old hacks... all because they didn't do anything earlier and still refuse to do anything about it now.

No my friends, CSS and IE will not be reconcicled - not now, not ever. They missed the boat.

IMHO.

A few sans serif letters may be more readable at extremely small point sizes, but only if the serifs on a fuzzy computer monitor appears to close certain letters that are supposed to be open (e.g. 'u' versus a simple, round version of 'a'). (This can be largely solved with well-chosen alternate letter shapes like the extra over-arching hump on the lower-case a, however.)

In general, though, sans serif fonts have a disadvantage over serif fonts at normal text sizes. Serifs force additional letter separation by their very nature, since fonts typically don't allow one letter to actually touch another. This extra space makes the distinction between certain letter combinations much more pronounced.

For example, with Helvetica, which IMHO makes a TERRIBLE web font, the letters "rn" look almost indistinguishable from the letter "m" until you hit about 18 point where you can see the tiny gap. In a serif font, by contrast, the letter combination 'rn' is forcibly spaced apart by the serif on the top left corner of the letter 'n', making it look very different from a lower-case 'm'. Of course, this deficiency of sans-serif fonts can be improved in a professionally typeset document by changing the kerning. However, this may result in other spacing oddities. And, of course, kerning adjustments aren't practical for web content anyway.

The use of sans serif for web pages is a fad. It will fade when people realize that sans serif fonts are inherently harder to read, even on computer monitors. Or at least, it rightfully should fade. Sans-serif fonts are... like... so 2003.

There is almost nothing that can't be done in any modern browser. What exactly do you mean by "dynamic"? Check out some of these sites.

• CSS Wiki! - + - this is extra copy so this would post
• Centering advice! - + - this is extra copy so this would post
• Centering advice! - + - this is extra copy so this would post
• Fix crappy MSIE support! - + - this is extra copy so this would post
• tips, tricks and good practice techniques! - + - this is extra copy so this would post
• Box model Illustrated! - + - this is extra copy so this would post
• links collection! - + - this is extra copy so this would post
• links collection! - + - this is extra copy so this would post
• links collection! - + - this is extra copy so this would post
• Tutorials, Demos, and Hacks! - + - this is extra copy so this would post
• Best Practices! - + - this is extra copy so this would post
• Best Practices Crib Sheet! - + - this is extra copy so this would post
• Best Practices! - + - this is extra copy so this would post
• Holly Hack! - + - this is extra copy so this would post
• 3 pixel hack! - + - this is extra copy so this would post
• Firefox webdev plugin! - + - this is extra copy so this would post
• Mozilla CSS editor! - + - this is extra copy so this would post
• Debugging Advice! - + - this is extra copy so this would post
• Page Building Process! - + - this is extra copy so this would post
• selectutorial! - + - this is extra copy so this would post

Lists

• listamatic 2 (nested lists)! - + - this is extra copy so this would post
• listamatic! - + - this is extra copy so this would post
• listutorial! - + - this is extra copy so this would post
• Piped List! - + - this is extra copy so this would post

Floats

• floatutorial! - + - this is extra copy so this would post
• float-theory! - + - this is extra copy so this would post

Filtering

• Explorer! - + - this is extra copy so this would post
• safari filtering! - + - this is extra copy so this would post
• filters! - + - this is extra copy so this would post

Type Issues