Slashdot Mirror

Thank you. I wish so too, but I take some consolation in the fact that, of the last nine days, I have been fortunate enough to spend three in the company of first 100 people, and then 350 people professionally involved in web development, across the spectrum from coding to marketing, all of whom are seriously dedicated to the cause of accessible web design. There really is change afoot in the industry, and those who fail to change will fall by the wayside. Andy Budd said it best:

There are now so many web sites, blogs or publications devoted to helping people learn standards and accessible techniques that there are now no excuses not to work with semantic code or CSS. Those people still delivering nested table layout, spacer gifs or ignoring accessibility can no longer call themselves web professionals.

The posting from Paul Thurott was not last week. It was a year ago. This article is a dupe.. http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/08/02/185 3256

I'd bet that Paul has a better understanding of IE7 now. Not that IE7 is at 100% CSS 2.1, but with CSS folks such as Molly Holzschlag (http://www.molly.com/2006/03/01/microsoft-ie7-pro gress-sneak-preview-of-mix06-release/) and Malarkey http://www.stuffandnonsense.co.uk/archives/mix06_v iva_las_vegas.html backing it, maybe that piece is a bit out of date?

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.

...was compliments of Tantek Çelik, standards evangelist, and main designer of the Tasman rendering engine which drove IE for Mac. In digging for his history with the project, I note a few things:

• Daring Fireball's archived recap of the history of IE for Mac leading up to its cancellation,
• A blog entry describing how after Tantek was finished with IE for Mac, Microsoft moved him over to ...WebTV (?!),
• An entry on the IE Blog where it looks like Microsoft is advertising for various open positions, and many people are responding with mixed emotions.

As for TFA... gah. Don't get me started on TFA. It doesn't mention IE for Mac at all (perhaps the Publications Coordinator who wrote TFA never heard of it?) and makes some innocent and half-assed assumptions about Web Standards—mostly their lack of existence.

And the marginalization of other browsers? Her argument basically runs that other browsers don't stand a chance against IE's installed base, while conveniently overlooking the fact that IE itself was once an "other" browser and citing ways that IE got the leg-up on Netscape without ever noting that those other browsers are doing the same things to IE. The argument basically runs "Yes, things changed in the past, but things will remain as they are now because they're the way they are now." Buh?

• Ahem?
• I said, "ahem?" (look at this page in IE, then in Firefox.)
• I said "AHEM," damnit! (note what computer the man in the hammock is using.)

To date, only my current client has been explicitly concerned about accessibility, and I believe that the initial impetus came from the legal department.

On the other hand, the in-house developers have seen this as an opportunity to get up to speed with a subject which they knew was important, but wouldn't have had the opportunity to explore without that legal push helping to justify the budget for the project. So the whole "fear of being sued" thing can trickle down and lead to developers learning more about the subject, which can only be a good thing.

For some time now I've taken pretty much the same approach as described by Andy Clarke in his article Advocating the Quiet Revolution. There's a multinational corporation out there that may one day become concerned about the accessibility of their European intranet; it's taken care of, and didn't cost any more, because that's just the way I do stuff these days. It may cost more money to build a ramp at the entrance to a restaurant, but if you build a web site the right way from the start, accessibility doesn't add any extra cost. (I'm assuming here that one doesn't have to subtitle hours of video, or suchlike.)

It would be good if more clients were actively concerned about accessibility, and as the implications of recent changes in the (U.K.) law become more widely understood, that may happen. But I think for the moment we're stuck with developers quietly driving a grassroots change for the better, as and when they get the chance.

Submitted for your approval: Mr. Andy Clarke, creative director of his own web and media design firm, Stuff and Nonsense. He has designed, among other things, the web portal for Disney UK, the WWF (that's Wildlife, not Wrestling) UK, and the British Heart Foundation.

Mr. Clark is also a member of the Web Standards Project, and as such has a good deal of weight in the evangelism of web standards.

Of particular interest is his own blog site, And All That Malarkey, which takes on a dramatically different appearance depending on whether you use (a) anything else, or (b) Internet Explorer. This summer, if you can only look at one page in two different browsers side-by-side, let this be the one. You won't be disappointed.

Has anyone else noticed that more and more sites are cropping up that "penalize" users that use IE? Note that I'm not talking about a site that refuses to support css hacks or throws up a "please upgrade" javascript window -- I'm talking about deliberately serving out degraded pages when it detects you are using IE (or refusing to show anything at all). Here are two examples

Stuff and Nonsense, A an otherwise good design/usability blog, Uses javascript to swap turn all images black and white, displays graphic that reads "Internet Explorer 2 old, Stomp to a Betta Browser" (God I hate bloggers sometimes)

Played to death, pretentious online video game zine, uses javascript to redirect users to a "Sorry IE User" page.

What kills me is that when you turn off javascript, the pages display & behave either identically or pretty damn close to Firefox. So it's not IE completely borks the rendering, or cant handle fancy DOM/Javascript tricks... they just dont want you to look to look at degraded content because they dont like IE.

Obviously these are niche sites, but I've seen this cropping up more and more. I hate IE about as much as any other web developer (though thankfully I stay mostly on the server side), but isn't this the same exact crap that sites did back in the day with the custom Netscape 2 tags, and the crap Microsoft pulled (and occasionally still pulls) circa IE4?

A lot of people, especially business users, don't have much choice other than IE. For me, I use IE for printing because Firefox ends up cropping stuff out half the time regardless of how much I futz with the page setup options.

I've heard the argument that such tactics are necessary to force users (and Microsoft) to take web standards seriously. I find this not only condescending and heavy-handed, but also counter-productive: Isn't the whole idea with web standards is that you want to make the web as inclusive as possible? Sometimes people's ideology gets in the way of their ideology.

<!--[if lt IE 7]>
your code
<![endif]>

if(!document.createElement)
return;

No, that's an awfully bad idea because the web is supposed to be for everyone.
On the other hand, you can use IE's lack of standard compliance to feed MSIE a slightly different style (with the same content), as Malarkey did with his last design (try it out with FF or Opera, then return there with MSIE)