Joe Clark's Answers -- In Valid XHTML

We sent 10 of your questions to usability guy Joe Clark, and he took it upon himself to go a bit beyond simply answering them. In his reply he said, "Answers attached in a valid XHTML file. I would suggest at least retaining the id attributes. I copy-edited all the questions, but the words are all the same; they are now merely spelled and capitalized correctly. I think all the links work." Whatever. We left Joe's formatting intact. It's a little different from our usual style, but variety is the spice of Slashdot. Ask the Expert: Accessibility 1) How far should it go?

by newsdee

Macromedia Flash has integrated many accessibility features in an effort to promote development of content for special needs. However, can we realistically try to turn any multimedia feature into its accessible equivalent? Is it even feasible other than providing a text-only equivalent?

There seems to be a stereotyped understanding of Flash content at work here. Flashturbation is not the only usage of that authoring tool.

I believe the question really intends to ask Are artistic uses of Flash, like Josh Daviss Praystation, really amenable to accessibility? The answer is a qualified yes, and I say that because Praystation-like Flash experimentation is essentially a form of cinema that merely uses the Web as a delivery mechanism. Cinematic experiments of this sort are indisputably a different species from other forms of Flash development.

In that example, the solution is to treat the Flash objects as a movie and apply standard movie accessibility features, namely captioning and audio description. Im not one of those people who believes that abstract, experimental, or non-narrative cinema cannot be captioned and described lots of music videos fall into that category, and theyve been captioned for nearly 15 years. (Description of experimental audiovisual artworks has not really been attempted to my knowledge, but description of abstract art in museums and of non-narrative plays and dance performances in theatres have all been going on for years. Its perfectly possible.)

The challenges, then, are two: Infrastructure and interface. There isnt really a very good way of including captions or descriptions in a Flash file as yet (an infrastructure problem). Macromedia knows all about this (Ive discussed it with them at length, and also written about it), and it will eventually be fixed. (Even finding an example of Flash with captioning is difficult today. Youd think Id have a complete list at the tip of my fingers, but I dont. The Macromedia Contribute feature tour is one case.) I dont know of any Flash animation that was ever described.

The interface problem is: How does the viewer turn captions and descriptions on and off? This isnt like a TV set, where you can manipulate onscreen menus (and how do you manage that if youre blind?) to turn captions and/or descriptions on and off. Browsers are not smart enough to automatically turn access features on and off, though I think a future upgrade of one file format that shall remain nameless will be the first to include such a capacity. At any rate, this may be one of the rare cases where an overt visual change must be made to accommodate accessibility actual selectable buttons to turn CC and DX on and off. (The buttons themselves have to be accessible, i.e., part of the tabbing order and with alternate texts and so forth.)

Now, lets consider other examples of Flash.

Banner ads the really big skyscraper ads that bug your arse on so many sites The usual Flash accessibility features can be used, and you can be smart and include the Flash object inside, say, an iframe element, which provides vast options for accessibility. (You can add a long description to the iframe, though thats questionably useful, and include alternate content in case the main content cannot be loaded, which could be an ordinary animated GIF or still image with alt and title.) Comics Flash-based comics can be relatively straightforward to make accessible (Apocamon doesnt seem too tricky its essentially a panel-based comic strip with a wee bit of animation) or could require full-on cinematic techniques, as with Broken Saints. User interfaces Flash can be and is used as a tidier means of providing a user interface, as at FoxSports.com or in the Neuros audio-player demo. The temptation, as in that last example, is also to use motion graphics and audio, which may require the same CC and DX as before, but many user interface can be made adequately accessible with todays Flash accessibility tools (text equivalents, making objects visible or invisible in the document structure, etc.). Manipulable objects Games (including the Royal National Institute for the Blinds ill-advised consciousness-raising game, no longer online) and even some interfaces (like History of Health Care) may include objects youre intended to grab and manipulate with the mouse. The current Flash accessibility tools are not really up to the challenge of adding keyboard equivalents for such manipulable objects. You could hack it together yourself, but there are no built-in commands or primitives you could use in a standards-compliant way. Intros Skippable intros are just as awful today as the day they were invented. Unfortunately, we cant make value judgements about which information should and should not be made accessible. Even skippable intros have to be made accessible, either by treating them as cinema or simply giving them a few text equivalents. The skip-intro link has to be selectable by keyboard, of course. Tools These interfaces let you do something. One I like a lot, if only because I am a typography queen, is Jeremy Tankards font viewer, though it is admittedly overkill because other font-viewing miniprograms do not require Flash. It may be possible to make the inputs to such tools accessible (you can place the cursor in the right place, operate controls, and so forth), but the results might be intrinsically inaccessible. (Note that artists portfolio sites, font and clip-art vendors, stock-photo houses, and other sites that sell visual imagery using ordinary HTML can be made passably accessible even to a blind person. In the Tankard case, perhaps only the name of the font and the text entered would be rendered to a screen reader or other device.) E-commerce Perhaps the most credible Flash instance, E-commerce sites like Ted Baker (see its Footwear store) may include all the features of the other instances Ive listed here. Since E-commerce is a convenient way to shop for many disabled people, I would strongly emphasize the need for accessibility. But it might be stretching the limits of current Flash access tools, since you have to make an interface, product shots and other images, and text all accessible. Thats not difficult in HTML, but I dont have any examples to point to of accessible Flash-based E-commerce sites that we could use as a comparison; I dont know how hard it would be to make such sites accessible. Aside: The most sophisticated Flash site Ive ever seen is DirtyBastards.com. (No direct hyperlink; consider this the strongest possible warning of adult content. Be very sure you want to look at it.) The usability could use an update, but in general its astounding. Should we ever be in the same city, Ill take anyone who can update that site for accessibility to dinner at the restaurant of their choice.

I would add a proviso here. Accessibility does not relate solely to blind people. As mentioned above, any quasi-cinematic work with audio requires captioning; deaf people need accessibility, too. There is much more attention being paid now to the Web-accessibility needs of people with learning disabilities (the most famous of which is dyslexia), which well get to later.

Learning-disabled people are by far the hardest to accommodate online, and for many HTML pages, they are probably impossible to accommodate in any really helpful way. Flash animations could be a good solution for that group because you can build in many levels of information, use audio and graphics, and provide really good controls for pacing (because having too much information coming at you all at once is a barrier for many people). Inevitably, accessible Flash in that context would limit itself to custom-engineered animations specifically made for that audience; I doubt that general uses of Flash will be upgraded for that kind of accessibility.

Text-only sites are not the alternative to accessible sites. Text-only is not accessible. Well discuss graphic sophistication later.

Biggest problem

by robbo

What, in your opinion, is the most common complaint concerning accessibility and Web sites? In other words, if in the interests of accessibility you could encourage site owners to change only one thing about how they operate, what would it be?

Images. Seriously, if youve got an ordinary HTML Web page and you make absolutely all your images accessible including, crucially, adding alt="" to every spacer GIF and every other meaningless graphic youre four-fifths of the way to being an accessible Web site for the group with the greatest single need, the blind and visually-impaired.

I emphasize coding to standards. Unless you have an airtight reason (like youre stuck using an old content-management system you cannot afford to replace), I really dont want to have anything to do with you unless youreproducing valid HTML. Now, tiny invalidities are just that, tiny: <hr> and <hr/> really are the same thing. And Im sure that ultra-purist geeks will now launch a hypocrisy hunt and comb through my entire Web presence to locate pages with non-valid markup. (Knock yourselves out. I make small mistakes, and have not updated scores of very old pages. Im also a vegan with some shoes and accessories made of leather. Complete purity is sometimes unattainable.) In one of the many ironies of Web development, it is indie developers like me who have a higher success rate in achieving valid, accessible sites even though larger commercial operations are the ones where valid HTML and accessibility are more urgently needed.

In any event, if youre producing tag soup, as far as Im concerned youre demonstrably not all that interested in responsible Web development.

The upside? If you do write valid pages, you have to include at least an alt text for every graphic. For no extra effort (you have to do it anyway), you get basic accessibility.

Number two on the list is navigation. Left-hand and top navbars stacked with link after link are a nightmare to wade through if you have a mobility impairment that reduces your ability to use a mouse or keyboard. (Screen-reader users are not so heavily affected; they can skip entire table cells, for example. I suppose all-CSS layouts are harder to skip through. But thats not the page authors problem; its incumbent on the adaptive technology and browser to clean up their act.)

If youre able to use a mouse, you can just avoid the entire navbar. But a mobility-impaired person may be stuck tabbing from one link to another and thats the best-case scenario. Quite possibly, a mobility-impaired visitor may be using software that cycles through a set of input choices for example, the mouse; then the alphabet keys of keyboard; then the number keys; then the function keys. You may have to wait until the keyboard option cycles back again in order to type repeated keystrokes. (You may have a mental image of a sip-and-puff switch or Christopher Reeve using speech-input software. The principles are the same and so is the inconvenience.)

If you, the page designer, stack 20 or even a hundred links in a left-hand navbar and assume that people can simply tab through them, well, (a) tabbing 20 or a hundred times is something youd never expect a nondisabled person to put up with, and (b) some people will have to wait 20 or a hundred cycles of their software in order to do the equivalent of pressing the Tab key.

The solution? Put skip-navigation links on top of every navbar with, say, ten or more links. (Or fewer. Use your judgement. Section 508 regulations technically require a skip link in every navbar, even for a page footer.)

Note that skip-navigation links have to be visible; a lot of people use hyperlinked single-pixel GIFs with alt texts, but those are invisible to mobility-impaired people, most of whom have normal vision. The links dont have to be ugly or intrusive, but they have to be plainly visible and selectable. (If you want to be thorough, you can give them accesskey and tabindex values.)

Do those two things and your site becomes vastly more accessible to two large disability groups right then and there.

Accessible Slashdot?

by ictatha

How does Slashdot stack up? What about blog-type sites in general? What can be done on these types of sites to make them more accessible?

Mark Pilgrim has fully strip-mined this topic. (He also tech-edited my book and is generally formidable.)

The issue here is random vs. serial access. A nondisabled site visitor can jump around the page. If you can see, its very easy to skim the page, and it is also very easy to zip to what interests you if you can operate a mouse or keyboard well. Nondisabled people have random access to the contents of a page. Many disabled people the blind and the mobility-impaired in specific experience a Web site serially, with one item after another articulated (as in speech or Braille) or selected. The page author can make skipping around easier, and so can relevant software like screen readers, but its still going to be harder to navigate than for a nondisabled person.

Slashdot is dominated by words. The page introducing this interview carried about 6,900 words even with minimal comment expansion. The issue, then, becomes navigation, which I discussed in the previous answer. Adding hyperlinks to skip various navbars would be a good first step.

Slashdot could certainly use better semantic markup. Valid code is a must; I want Slashdot to eat my own dog food. Subject lines of postings could and should be marked up as headings (h1 through h6); font elements could be eliminated; Im not wild about table markup to achieve indention, though making structural hierarchies apparent is not easy at all (perhaps unordered lists with a style declaration of list-style-type: none might suffice). It would then be possible to navigate from heading to heading.

If youre running a more limited Weblog with just a couple of screenfuls of text at a time, then my advice is simple: Write valid code, provide a text equivalent for every image, work on navigation a bit, and youve made a big dent in the problem.

Photoblogs or those containing multimedia are, of course, more complicated, but as long as every photo has an alt text and your multimedia is captioned and described, youre doing well. It is certainly easy to add alt texts to your photos, but captioning and description are hard to do well and are technically difficult to implement. Im mentioning the multimedia case merely for completeness; I dont read any blogs that regularly post video and audio. (I suppose The Ben Brown Show was an example.)

Accessibility

by acehole

Do you think that where companies are being sued or forced into updating their Web pages at great expense to include accessibility for the blind in their Web pages when the blind could easily find another similar service offline is reasonable?

You have inadvertently stumbled across an extensive issue in disability law the question of providing equivalent or comparable access, or access that is equal in dignity to that afforded a nondisabled person.

You can draw parallels with the physical world. Think of barrier-free entrances to buildings. If the main entrance is at the centre of the buildings face but uses a staircase you cant remove, then providing a barrier-free entrance at the left side of that building would probably be considered comparable or equivalent access. But if you force a mobility-impaired person to walk through an alleyway and take a rear service elevator that is otherwise used for garbage, your accessibility probably is not comparable or equivalent. (Thats in the case of a relatively new building. A historic building or another exceptional case might permit different treatment of that sort.)

If we consider information media, theres a distinction to be drawn between old and new media, or non-electronic and electronic forms. Books are the canonical example: They cannot be made intrinsically accessible to a blind person because a book embodies a single immutable form. You have to provide accessibility elsewhere, as through a large-print edition (its a separate form), a Braille edition (also separate), or a talking book (separate yet again).

Electronic (or audiovisual) media can carry accessibility along with themselves:

• You can add closed captions and closed descriptions to a television program, DVD, online video segment, or first-run movie. (Im skipping some technical details in the movie example.)
• You can add closed captions to a videotape.
• You can add accessibility features to a Web site.

(In the first two cases, you could instead add open captions or descriptions that everyone sees or hears, but thats a very unusual practice, and by doing so you essentially create a separate work, just like publishing a large-print, Braille, or talking-book edition of a printed book.)

In all the examples above, you the viewer can activate the accessibility if you need it or ignore it if you dont. Because Web sites are electronic and can carry hidden access features, the answer to aceholes question is no, it is not reasonable to expect disabled people to go somewhere else to get the same information or enjoy the same experience.

Accordingly, yes, Southwest Airlines reservation Web site should be accessible, and no, it is not OK to expect blind people to call a telephone number when nondisabled people do not have to do so. (Read various other reasons why.)

Thats unequal treatment right there. It is not comparable or equivalent treatment, and, I argue, it impugns the dignity of a visually-impaired person who has already made a commitment to independence by using the Web with adaptive technology.

I also reject, in the strongest possible terms, the offensive and offhand claim that accessibility can be achieved at great expense. I believe the colloquial term for a claim like this is bullshit. Updating or retrofitting a site for accessibility does cost more than designing it properly in the first place, but thats true everywhere: Have you costed out adding barrier-free access to an old building vs. including it in the original designs? Retrofitting may cost more, but I deny that the expense is great. Even very extensive sites with huge swaths of multimedia can be made accessible, and it is doubtful that, given the budgets of such sites, the expense would be great.

In any event, developers always find a justification for what they like to do, whether it be Flashturbation or coding custom JavaScript features or whatever else. Its a bit late in the day, in Web-development terms, to claim that accessibility is not one of the arrows in the quiver of the competent practitioner.

Now, another of the subtexts in this question really, it is a spiders web of half-truths, barely-suppressed resentments, and ignorance suggests that the only way to achieve Web accessibility is by being sued or forced. I have consistently argued that lawsuits are the worst way to achieve accessibility, particularly in the U.S., with its poisonous atmosphere. Lawsuits merely get peoples backs up and sour the defendant on the entire concept. Defendants are forced to belittle and invalidate the concerns of people with disabilities merely in order to provide an adequate defense in the case. This is no way to run a railroad.

But lawsuits (and human-rights complaints and other actions) are still necessary from time to time. Disability law is old and tends not to expressly include the Web. (Sometimes it doesnt even include established accessibility techniques for old media, like audio description on TV.)

Its unrealistic to wait around forever for clueless lawmakers, who can barely use a cellphone let alone surf the Web, to update the legislation. To get some kind of jurisprudence on the books, lawsuits and complaints have to be filed from time to time. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesnt, but the law is a tool that must be available to everyone, including people with disabilities, whose rights have legal standing.

A competent Web developer builds accessible Web sites and does not wait to be asked to do so, let alone sued or forced.

Market for Web developers

by ragnar

Im considering a starting up a Web development firm with a focus on accessibility. I have good relations with the principals of an accessibility testing firm and believe the businesses can complement each other well. Im a part owner of a Web development firm at the moment that isnt interested in pursuing this market, but I believe there is a significant market.

Can you elaborate on the market for Web development firms that focus on accessibility? Aside from the normal perils of launching a new business (which Im fairly acquainted with), can you expound on the market need for firms that endeavor to deliver accessible content?

Deliver[ing] accessible content and starting up a Web development firm with a focus on accessibility are two different things, so lets focus on the latter.

I would say that the market for accessibility-specific Web consultancies is rather small and will have a short lifespan. I can say this with some confidence as I am an authority on accessibility, with a published book to prove it, and I hardly get any business. Even taking other factors into account, I think its the nature of the work. I have various reliable indications that other consultants arent flush with activity, either.

Why?

• Accessibility is neglected. People cant hire you to do what they never knew needed to be done anyway. Nor will they hire you to do what they resent having to do in the first place and will resist doing until their dying breath.
• Contracts are small. Even very large sites tend to be run by CMSs or templates. Once you clean those up, boom, tens of thousands of pages become accessible. There is often not a lot of billable work involved, as I know myself all too well.
• Attainable expertise. If, as I contend, accessibility is merely one of the skills a competent developer must have, eventually all the competent developers will gain that expertise. They wont need outside experts. Even if in-house access knowledge is demonstrably worse than outside consultants, there are all sorts of precedents for companies making do with barely-passable accessibility because its cheaper. There is a preference for meeting the letter of any requirements (whether self- or externally-imposed) rather than doing accessibility well.

Now, what may work massively better is, in fact, accessibility testing (and certification). It is extremely difficult and time-consuming to test site accessibility with actual disabled persons using actual adaptive technology. A firm that updates Web sites to accessibility standards, advises on how to write new sites that conform, and tests them to prove it may be a winning combination.

The issue of then certifying a site as being accessible (or meeting certain requirements) becomes a bit trickier, but Id really like to see someone give it a go. Note that any venture like this will require thoroughgoing knowledge of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, the Section 508 regs, adaptive technology, and multimedia accessibility, and that knowledge definitely includes an understanding of exceptions to the rules. I deal with too many people who literally read and literally apply whatever guideline theyve decided is gospel. Accessibility requires human judgement based on knowledge and experience. Dont set up shop without it.

What of dynamic images (charts and graphs)?

by kuwan

I see that Chapter 6 addresses the image problem which you state is a core concern in accessibility. My question is, what is your solution to data-intensive sites that display their information using graphs? For sites that have constantly changing data (stock charts, for example), what solutions/tools are there to make their graphics accessible?

The answer is that such information, in certain cases, cannot be made meaningfully accessible to a blind or visually-impaired person, or probably to a learning-disabled person. Other disability groups should be unaffected.

This, of course, leads me to my perennial complaint about the Web Accessibility Initiative and accessibility advocates generally: Theyve got no style. They have no understanding of graphic design and typography, and they project this ignorance onto the rest of the world.

To use one of my maxims, accessibility opponents think accessibility means a text-only Web site and hate the idea, while accessibility advocates also think it means a text-only site and love the idea. Theyre both wrong.

One consequence of this ignorance of visual design? The implicit claim that every illustration can be epitomized in words. You could only make this claim if you were so visually unsophisticated that you couldnt differentiate one kind of illustration from another. Of course, this is hogwash: The reason why we use illustrations is because words (or numbers) are sometimes too hard to understand by themselves.

A graph of stock performance, radar weather maps, ultrasound images any picture that is worth much more than a thousand words presents a quandary. The goal here is accessibility a disabled visitor must have equivalent access to the information conveyed by the graphic. If the underlying data is numeric, in theory you could provide the underlying data (as through the longdesc attribute of the img element just set up an HTML file, or, theoretically, a spreadsheet or a PDF, that could be loaded to describe the illustration at length).

But remember, all that numeric data was so hard to understand for nondisabled people that it was turned into a chart; now youre expecting screen-reader users to wade through those numbers one at a time? Like packing, unpacking, and repacking a suitcase, converting data to graphics and back again tends to leave something behind in the transformation.

You may have provided a text equivalent in such a case, but you have not provided accessibility.

I am not giving a carte-blanche exemption here. Many charts and graphs have one or two key points that could, in fact, be added to something as simple as an alt text: alt="Graph shows 12.2% increase in HIV seroconversion in gay males 18 to 24, 1996 to 2001". Even severely complex illustrations require at least a structural placeholder, like alt="Hubble photograph of Jupiter, its rings, and its satellites".

Its true that genuinely equal access to the information embodied in complex illustrations can be unattainable. These are exceptional cases, but they do come up.

Useful links:

• National Braille Associations recommended practices for converting illustrations into accessible forms
• PopChart by Corda attempts to automatically write long descriptions of (numerical) graphs

Deaf-blind

by gmhowell (26755)

Text-to-speech works fine for blind people (mostly). Deaf people can see most Web content. What the heck are deaf-blind people supposed to do?

One of the joys of Delphi, GEnie, Compuserve, etc. is that the discussion boards worked fine with simple telnet access, and Braille TTYs. The various Web boards that have supplanted them dont seem like they would work as well (sorry, havent tried any yet; those Braille TTYs aint cheap).

Yes, this is a personal question (see .sig).

I need help with tech solutions for the deaf-blind. Please contact me via E-mail if you have any experience in this.

Well, deaf-blind people are difficult to accommodate. Theyre also rare: Though adequate population numbers are hard to find, perhaps 11,000 deaf-blind people live in the U.S. But in some contexts, the fact that theyre deaf has no bearing on accessibility. Blindness is the issue.

Screen readers (manufacturer list) not only can turn Web sites and computer software into voice, they can also typically output text to Braille displays. (I wouldnt call them Braille TTYs, since those are used to communicate by telephone.) Braille displays are fascinating, rarefied, and costly devices. Tieman, Freedom Scientific, and ALVA are notable manufacturers. Not all that many people use them, in part because not all that many people read Braille (maybe 10% of blind people), though essentially all deaf-blind people read Braille.

Anyway, for a Web site that does not include multimedia, the fact that youre also deaf has no influence on accessibility if youre already blind. For a deaf-blind person using a screen reader with a Braille display, ordinary Web accessibility becomes the issue, though Id say that navigation help becomes much more important there. Experienced speech-output users run speech at superhuman speeds (300 words a minute is not uncommon), meaning you can burn through a page, albeit in serial fashion, pretty quickly. Given that Braille displays provide one or a couple of lines of Braille at a time, its a more time-consuming procedure.

Now, for sites that do contain multimedia, there is no viable option. An obvious course of action (requested by one activist group) would be to combine caption transcripts and audio-description scripts so that one could essentially read a text rendering of a videoclip, but there is no technology that can actually do that yet. (Yet. I have plans.) Combined script-transcripts of this sort have been attempted manually a couple of times (and I mentioned the idea back in 1999), but I dont know of any research on how well it all worked.

Alternative (non-computer) devices

by superflippy

Increasingly, people are using non-computer devices (cell phones, PDAs) to browse Web sites. What alternative devices are disabled people using, and how are they using them in ways Web developers might not have considered (e.g. voice browser in cell phone)?

Im not really up on that topic. The PAC Mate is one such device; its essentially a screen reader without a screen or free-standing computer.

Accessible site, or accessible browser?

by vofka

I am a partially-sighted person, and I have to admit that I do frequently have difficulty with accessibility issues, particularly with large corporate Web sites which all seem to be full-flow multimedia blitzes which require 1600x1200 resolution or higher, and usually override the default browser fonts to make them smaller.

However, there are a number of browsers, such as Mozilla (just one example, Im sure there are others!) which allow the user to zoom the text on a page, to override colour settings etc.

Though it is undoubtedly important for Webmasters to pay great thought to the design of their sites in terms of colour, font size and multimedia content, how much relative importance should be placed on browser design, and the browsers ability to override the design decisions of the creator of a site?

Its important and overlooked. It would be nice if we had a browser that actually supported all of HTML; we dont (no, not even Mozilla). Then it would be nice if CSS1 and CSS2 were fully supported admittedly an onerous task what with the myriad interactions and the various ambiguities in the spec.

At that point, yes, the user customizability in CSS and the many options available in HTML would presumably be up to the user to control. I think its ridiculous that the only really effective way to override a page authors CSS is for you, the harried, humble Web-surfer, to write your own CSS declarations (dont forget !important!) and activate the file in your browser, if thats even possible. This is the sort of thing that should be built into browser preferences, available for easy use. The first time you start up a browser, it should explicitly ask you if you have any accessibility requirements; a lot of people dont even know about what few customization features browsers currently offer.

Ill make another of my analogies. Remember the lack of visual sophistication of accessibility advocates? They want designers to work at their level by providing accessibility, but they never seem to understand that the converse is also true accessibility activists must learn to work at designers level by providing good site design. By the same token, if page authors are expected to use every practical accessibility feature, then browser makers must be expected to support all of them and support them well.

In the immortal words of Comedy Central, Weve upped our standards. Up yours!

See also: User Agent Accessibility Guidelines.

Physical vs. cognitive political clout

by Aquitaine

Dear Mr. Clark,

I am a Web developer for the Program on Employment and Disability at the School of Industrial Labor Relations at Cornell University. Web accessibility is a serious issue for us, and we try to keep abreast of innovative approaches to design so we can find that elusive place where universal accessibility meets intelligent and aesthetically pleasing layout. We recently spoke with Cynthia Waddell (one of 8 authors of Constructing Accessible Web Sites, also out fairly recently) on this subject, but I found her unwilling to commit to anything other than suggestions rather than real technical solutions.

There are two sticky issues that I have encountered. The first is the notion of universal access. Mrs. Waddell indicated that, working with the W3C, she was coming up with a list of Web sites that met Priorities 13 of the W3C WAI and were still aesthetically impressive (she did not have a list ready). As you are no doubt aware, many sites that tout universal access are themselves victims of poor design -- the problem of Yes, its W3C/WAI compliant across the board, but its ugly as sin. Do you believe that a site can have a single interface that is truly universally accessible, or do you believe that sites should have alternate interfaces? (The Web equivalent of Do we have a ramp and stairs or just a ramp?)

Along those lines, it is apparent to me that the accessibility guidelines are designed to be useful in a manner proportional to the lobbying power of disability rights groups. That is to say, blind people and deaf people, although they comprise extraordinarily small percentages of people with disabilities, have an enormous amount of political clout when compared to people with cognitive disorders -- ADD, ADHD, dyslexia, autism, schizo-affective disorder, schizophrenia, et cetera. Because these disability groups lack the considerable power of a strong advocacy group, do you feel that they have been left by the wayside when it comes to Section 508 or WAI? (And do you personally believe that total-WAI compliance is necessary, or just Section 508?)

My apologies for several questions at once, but we take this issue very seriously here and your answers will go a long way to helping us do what we do to better suit the community that ILR serves.

Thanks so much, Samuel W. Knowlton

To answer your first question: A single interface works for most Web sites. You can simply make the site itself intrinsically accessible to most disability groups.

The only alternative the question seems to envisage is specifically custom-designing an alternative interface for disabled users. In other words, a site would exist in two or more predesigned forms. Thats not the only way.

Some work is being done to permit people and the devices they use to specify formats and capabilities they may possess or require. Have a look at Composite Capabilities/Preferences Profiles. It all boils down to semantic markup again. A single HTML page, if marked up properly, could be visited by a plain-Jane browser and displayed in a way thats familiar to nondisabled users; nothing special would happen.

But if you had a CC/PP-compliant browser or other device, and if the page were coded correctly, and if the server understood CC/PP protocols, then the page would automatically reconfigure itself to your needs without the original page authors having to do anything special. In fact, authors could not predict what kind of transformations would occur, nor would they care.

So a few things could happen. If youre totally blind, your page could be rearranged so the search box and content are at the top, with sidebars, navbars, and anything else uninteresting at the end and no images loaded at all. A low-vision person could ask for larger type on content sections and normal-sized type everywhere else, unless a command were issued to blow up, say, a navbar. (There could be continuous interaction between the user and the server.)

XHTML 2.0 might push this concept along a little, what with its section element, but its all still a pipe dream, really.

Now, as to the second question, putting blind and deaf people together in a group claimed to have an enormous amount of political clout is not really applicable to Web accessibility. Deaf people face very few accessibility barriers in using the Web multimedia is pretty much it. Blind people face very large barriers because the Web is a visual medium. Theres a qualitative difference.

Its true that people with cognitive disabilities have been neglected in Web accessibility. Why? Few people in the wider accessibility field have expertise on the topic. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0, when its finished, will contain many more provisions for this group.

The qualitative difference remains. It is arguably difficult or impossible to make Web sites most of which are dominated by text genuinely accessible even to certain specific groups with cognitive disabilities. Remedies proposed in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 drafts would not guarantee access for learning-disabled people. Some of those remedies involve adding illustrations (non-text content) to every single page (yes, the Web Accessibility Initiative may issue that requirement) or rewriting the page according to some kind of half-arsed, doctrinaire editing scheme.

There wouldnt be the same jump in accessibility between a noncompliant site and one that meets those guidelines as you would find with, say, visual impairment. Sites would end up being merely less confusing as opposed to not confusing. You might have met the spec, but you could not be sure you had achieved accessibility.

Certain cognitive disabilities do not even require accommodation online.

Moreover, while accessibility for many other disability groups almost never alters the visual appearance of a page (visible skip-navigation links are a counterexample), it could be argued that a page thats truly accessible to people with learning or cognitive disabilities would have to be custom-created by experts. Thats the stark truth involved in achieving high accessibility for this group. You have to alter content as opposed to metadata or presentation. To accommodate other disabilities, you add information, like alt texts; to accommodate certain learning disabilities, you must remove or alter information.

I am in favour of improved accessibility for cognitively-disabled persons, but Ill only support proposals that can be shown to actually make sites accessible to that group. Im also not willing to destroy the Web as we know it ostensibly in order to save it for a disability group whose needs might not even be met in the process.

Nobody has presented credible evidence that current proposals actually will work, and certainly the evidence supporting the current WCAG 2.0 proposals is weak. In other words, if we want to fix this problem, its going to take a lot more work.

And to answer the final question, Section 508 regulations backhandedly incorporate almost all of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0, but go beyond the latter in certain respects. Both guideline sets have all sorts of problems, but complying with either of them will assure reasonable accessibility for large numbers of people.

Comments

VERY LARGE HEADLINES

[sulli]

and everything else was plain text. so why, exactly, is this an improvement on today's quite readable webpages?

Re:VERY LARGE HEADLINES

[Anonymous Coward]

The headings sure are.. LARGE.. but otherwise, an improvement. Most slashdot interviews are attrocious and I can't be bothered to read them because they're so poorly fucking formatted.

Re:VERY LARGE HEADLINES

[elmegil]

The XHTML tags, while they don't affect your display on "most" browsers, do appear to break the information up into chunks that could be identified seperately by browsers with the accessability features he talks about. He's got it split into sections which presumably could be summarized for someone with, for example, a vision disability, so they could skip around without having to hear the entire page read to them.

Re:VERY LARGE HEADLINES

[aftk2]

It's an improvement (supposedly) because Clark marked up his text in regards to structure, not presentation. He didn't think "Hey, will make this text embarrassingly huge," instead he sought out his headings, and marked them accordingly. The real problem is that Slashdot's presentation is fugly, and it doesn't use CSS to set the tag to something less enormous.

The upside being, later on in /.'s life, if/when the site is pushed kicking and screaming away from font tags, the presentation of that one article will be relatively easy to fix. :-)

Re:VERY LARGE HEADLINES

[Da VinMan]

Quite readable != the ability to consistently process.

Today's HTML is a travesty. Standards overlap each other, attributes for a tag are more or less context sensitive and dependent upon the given browser's interpretation, etc. Producing a readable HTML page might be fairly easy, as long as you don't care about the little things (like font size, positioning, etc.) across multiple browsers and their different versions (where each browser + version + platform is yet another testing permutation).

XHTML gives you the ability to standardize your markup and extend the markup in a systematic way. I haven't had the opportunity to use it in a project, so I won't say anymore than that right now. However, I do think that anything that clarifies HTML rendering is a good thing.

Re:VERY LARGE HEADLINES

[redtail1]

Mod this post up... aftk2 is right. We should be moving away from using (X)HTML for presentation. A simple H1 { font-size: large; } setting in a CSS file is all that's necessary.

Re:VERY LARGE HEADLINES

[Nadir]

Because he used valid markup, as he explains in his replies. Especially the part about h1...h6 headings. The fact is you also need a good stylesheet to make it pretty.

Re:VERY LARGE HEADLINES

[_prime]

The semantic meaning of the h1-h6 tags is more important than how you see them rendered on this page: any sort of code reader (including a search engine bot) will assign more importance to items blocked in proper heading tags. It's also the only way a code reader would know about a section heading given that simply making a heading bold or larger using the font tag would only indicate importance rather than a main heading.

I agree that the standard way web browsers render headings is unpleasant, but it's easy enough to make a heading look better. Use CSS to make them smaller and/or reduce the margins. This way you get the correct semantic markup and have them look the way you want.

Re:VERY LARGE HEADLINES

[mark_lybarger]

The real problem is that Slashdot's presentation is fugly, and it doesn't use CSS to set the tag to something less enormous

wouldn't you think the default settings would be more normal?

Re:VERY LARGE HEADLINES

[0x0d0a]

The *entire point* is that it *isn't* too large. Your *client* may well preset it as too large, but his XHTML file is entirely correct -- written as HTML was supposed to be written. Not with all this invisible table and forced positioning and crap forced through with CSS and stuff like that.

Re:VERY LARGE HEADLINES

[Anonymous Coward]

> VERY LARGE HEADLINES (Score:1, Flamebait)

"Flamebait"?!? More like, "Stupid moderation, AGAIN". Someone please remod this to something sensible; it was a reasonable question/statement.

Re:VERY LARGE HEADLINES

[Anonymous Coward]

Around here "Flamebait" is a badge of honor

Re:VERY LARGE HEADLINES

[JebusIsLord]

No, CSS is the way to do it properly. Using the FONT tag is incorrect since it uses HTML for formatting. Using CSS to format is recommended.

Re:VERY LARGE HEADLINES

[Fastolfe]

They are, but keep in mind Clark's responses were given in a stand-alone XHTML document. If Slashdot were doing their site correctly, they would have

1. been using things like <h1> .. <h6> to begin with, and would have defined CSS styles (if needed) so that they looked normal with respects to the rest of the site to begin with; and
2. only used a portion of Clark's XHTML responses (so as not to embed one XHTML document within another), and hopefully would have reduced his <h1> tags to <h2> or <h3> to fit within the semantic structure of the site

So no, really, Clark did not intend for his answers to appear this way, but it isn't really his fault. He gave his responses in a beautifully marked-up XHTML document, and Slashdot chose to use his document as-is without any further work to make it "fit". It's not Clark's job to do Slashdot's site design, but it was his decision to give Slashdot good, quality, semantic markup of his responses.

The point is, if Slashdot were using HTML like it was designed, Clark's answers would have integrated beautifully into the site.

Above and beyond the call of duty

[redtail1]

From the blurb...

I copy-edited all the questions, but the words are all the same; they are now merely spelled and capitalized correctly. I think all the links work.

Very cool. Hire him!

Re:Above and beyond the call of duty

[SiliconJesus]

Hell - just have him copy-edit Rob's stuff... No offense Taco. I guess speeling iz opshunal here at slashdot...

Re:Above and beyond the call of duty

[anthony_dipierro]

But only if he promises to stop capitalizing "web."

Re:Above and beyond the call of duty

[anthony_dipierro]

"Life is just to damn short to worry about grammar on Slashdot!" - CmdrTaco

Re:Above and beyond the call of duty

[Anonymous Coward]

katz hasnt posted since he posted some stupid story about his new book, it was a giant advertisement. I think he got fired, or by the looks of the posts attached to his story, murdered.

Re:Above and beyond the call of duty

[kalidasa]

There's only one Web. There's only one Bible. There's only one White Album. They're proper nouns. World Wide Web (and Web when used to mean the WWW) and Internet should be capitalized, regardless of what the style books say.

Re:Above and beyond the call of duty

[anthony_dipierro]

Yeah, I know it's proper, but it looks stupid.

Re:Above and beyond the call of duty

[Anonymous Coward]

Well I guess getting your ass pounded by a horse on a day to day basis shorten your life span.

Re:Above and beyond the call of duty

[TechnoLust]

"I copy-edited all the questions, but the words are all the same; they are now merely spelled and capitalized correctly." ... It's a little different from our usual style, but variety is the spice of Slashdot.

Like they said, /. wouldn't be /. without the spelling and grammar errors. ;-)

Re:Above and beyond the call of duty

[nzhavok]

really? well you should check out German then you'd love it, all nouns are capitalized :)

Re:Above and beyond the call of duty

[Hallow]

Actually there's more than one web. There's the WWW (World Wide Web), but there are also private webs (think intranets).

Re:Above and beyond the call of duty

[dillon_rinker]

And there are many internets, but only one Internet.

Funny, though...there are many phone systems, but there is no Phone System. Or am I missing something?

Re:Above and beyond the call of duty

[iangoldby]

But only one is the Web (as opposed to a web).

Re:Above and beyond the call of duty

[tomhudson]

They're either proper nouns (in which case, capitalize them) or just plain nouns. For example, You said "there's only one Bible". Bible == "book of books", (66 books in the bible), comes from the greek "biblios" for book. So, is there more than one Bible?

Well, there are over 1,000 different religions in the world, each with their own "book", or Bible.

Then there's all the software "Bibles". For example, perl coders call the Camel Book their Bible.

Besides, whatever happened to the Internet2 initiative? Or, more realistically, since there are large segments of the internet that are not accessable to each other (gov't policies, domain-blacklisting, ISP blocking, white-lists, black-lists, etc), it can ONLY be argued that there is no longer a single coherent Internet, just a collection of linked inter-nets (which is what the so-called Internet was supposed to be). So there isn't even one "Internet".

Re:Above and beyond the call of duty

[torok]

Did he check for duplicate comments too?? Then DEFINITELY hire him!

Re:Above and beyond the call of duty

[Rick the Red]

There's only one White Album.

Actually, there were several "White Albums." When The Beatles was first released, on November 22, 1968, it came in both mono (PMC 7067-8) and stereo (PCS 7067-8), so there were two "White Albums" right from the start; the list just grew from there.

Re:Above and beyond the call of duty

[kalidasa]

Bible as the name for the Christian holy book is a proper noun. Al Quran is not called "the Bible" by its users. And it is actually from Greek "biblos, byblos" for book; "biblion" is a later Greek word for book. (See Edward Maunde Thompson, "An Introduction to Greek and Latin Paleography" chapter 5 for a discussion of the various Greek and Latin words for book.
The Camel Book (capitalized, there is only one) is a bible (lower case; metaphorical use of "bible" to mean "a book of canonical importance to a given community" rather than as the "name" of the book.)
See The Chicago Manual of Style for further discussion.
Yes, originally "the Internet" was a network of networks. Nowadays, though, "Internet" means the collection of all computers with assigned IP numbers when they are connected together. One can also refer to "an internet," but that is something different from "the Internet."

Re:Above and beyond the call of duty

[kalidasa]

But only one is the Web (as opposed to a web).

By Jove, I think he's got it!!!

Take all this as a little Fun with Style, folks.

Re:Above and beyond the call of duty

[fenix down]

The nouns are all so damn long it's only right to stick some capitals in there to break things up a little.

Re:Above and beyond the call of duty

[Slurm-V]

I think you should abstract your pedantry so that it's not in-line anymore.

Re:Above and beyond the call of duty

[tomhudson]

Thanks for replying. Here's a few more thoughts...

Just because a group of "christians" appropriates a word and upper-cases it doesn't give them exclusive use of the term.

Notice, for example, how you proper-cased "The Camel Book", even though there's more than one (it's gone through 3 versions) whereas what you refer to as "The Bible" is supposedly canonical - even though it has gone through literally hundreds of revisions, additions, etc., and there are so many different versions out today, each which claims to be the "authentic bible", and no two exactly alike; this being especially noteworthy since the earliest (partial only) texts are from the 3rd century AD, and complete texts only start from the 9th. Please note that I'm using the term "canonical" in the same sense that Bibliophiles do - "measuring rod or standard". It seems that "The Bible" is then many "standards", and hence no standard at all. Rather, it's the paper version of "broken telephone".

There really is no more "Internet". Not if you are referring to the collection of all computers with assigned IP numbers when they are connected together. See my comment about white/black-lists, government restrictions on access to other countries, etc. Not to be anal, but what we knew as the Internet died a few years ago, thanks, in large part, to spam and script kiddies. And, with the coming of ubiquitous wireless networking and alternate DNS schemes (see the OpenDNS project), in a few years, what was known as the Internet (capitalized) will not even be the biggest collection of networked computers/devices.

There are many style manuals, but they talk about style,and style changes with time, as does the meaning of words. Which is useful - otherwise we'd be hard pressed for puns :-)

Re:Above and beyond the call of duty

[GoRK]

It's funny that with all this talk of capitalization and style guidelines, you are all still putting book names inside of quotation marks, when they really should be underlined or italisized.

Re:Above and beyond the call of duty

[kalidasa]

I capitalize Bible, I capitalize al Quran, I capitalize Torah. I also don't lower case the names of ethnicities or religious groups, as that style is often used in racialist rhetoric (for instance, quite a bit of ink has been spelled over spellings of the word "Jew" without a capital). Your argument about the Internet is overly politicized. Most wireless networking still uses IP. And I seriously doubt an alternate DNS scheme will go far for a long, long time.

Re:Above and beyond the call of duty

[tomhudson]

Oh well, here goes ... :-)

1. As far as capitalizing 'Bible', for the first few centuries, they didn't have any choice - the Greek alphabet originally had only upper-case. Lower-case is a (relatively speaking) modern invention;
2. I think you'll agree that people who want to see racism or intolerance based upon whether a perticular groups' name is capitalized or not have too much time on their hands;
3. Sure, wireless networking uses IP. It doesn't mean that it can't be used to form a complete alternate to "The Internet", especially when a combo of wireless, alternate DNS schemas, and neighborhood wans can bring down the average users' cost by 90% or more. That's one of the reasons most fiber is going to stay dark for a long, loooong time ...

Re:Above and beyond the call of duty

[kalidasa]

As far as capitalizing 'Bible', for the first few centuries, they didn't have any choice - the Greek alphabet originally had only upper-case. Lower-case is a (relatively speaking) modern invention;

Nor the Latin. I take it you read ancient Greek? O tekna Kadmou, tou palai nea trophe . . .

Note that I used the English title, not the Greek. We're takling about contemporary English style, not koine. And the idea of a canonical Bible dates to about the 4th century, when there was no lower case; but by the 9th century, there was no upper case, only lower case (bicameral casing developed from the use of both miniscule and majuscule at the same time much later in the tradition).

I think you'll agree that people who want to see racism or intolerance based upon whether a perticular groups' name is capitalized or not have too much time on their hands

Let's just say that it is often done intentionally to insult people and leave it at that. Frankly, anyone who continues a discussion in slashdot for days has no right to complain that folks have too much time on their hands, no?

Sure, wireless networking uses IP. It doesn't mean that it can't be used to form a complete alternate to "The Internet"

That it can does not mean either that it will be or that it has been. The Internet as we understand it does still exist; if there is to be an alternate Ethernet (I do wish that term were still free; perhaps, given the subject matter this thread has drifted into, Aithernet?) it will have it's own name.

Good corresponding with you, though, even if I don't agree with everything you're saying.

Slashdot is dominated by words

[stratjakt]

And so is his response!

I propose a new mod of -1:Too many words!

Re:Slashdot is dominated by words

[CableModemSniper]

Average it with Shatner's responses and both interviews are perfect.

Re:Slashdot is dominated by words

[vsprintf]

Good point! I was surprised by the shortness of Shatner's answers, especially from someone who supposedly writes books. Apparently, Slashdot does not pay by the word.

Whatever....

[mansemat]

Whatever.

Let's see, a guy takes some of his precious time and answers questions for your readers (unpaid I assume), and you show your gratitude with a snide comment such as Whatever. because he took a little extra time to format things the way he wanted to.

Way to go /.! editors...

Tools.

Re:Whatever....

[stratjakt]

>> but variety is the spice of Slashdot

Yeah, sure it is..

"Hey guys linux look linux linux linux linux ms sucks linux linux OSX i love linux beowulf clusters."

Any 'variety' opinion wise is modded down into oblivion.

Re:Whatever....

[wheany]

Especially since Slashdot uses almost, but not quite, the exact opposite of valid HTML.

Besides: Tables for formatting are dead, long live css. If they used css, they wouldn't have to break long strings of characters with spaces, because only the offending comment would be wide, not the whole damn page...

Re:Whatever....

[b0r1s]

They're clearly upset that he performed simple editorial tasks to correct spelling and capitalization. Obviously those are things editors should do, but the slashdot editors are notorious for being unable to spell even trivial words correctly.

Yet another reason that this site will not make it past 2003.

Re:Whatever....

[runderwo]

"Hey guys linux look linux linux linux linux ms sucks linux linux OSX i love linux beowulf clusters."

Any 'variety' opinion wise is modded down into oblivion.

And then there's people like you, who do nothing but bitch about the Slashdot editors, users, and moderators, but still visit Slashdot anyway for some reason.

Are you masochistic, or what? If you don't like Slashdot's bias, go elsewhere for your news. (Try The Onion for unbiased reporting.) It'd be a more productive use of your time than trying to change everyone who is satisfied with what Slashdot has evolved into. Or are you just not concerned with using your time productively?

Re:Whatever....

[dildatron]

If you are serious, I will bet you whatever you want that slashdot will make it past 2003.

Re:Whatever....

[Malc]

Damn right! He put far more effort in to it than Billy boy did last week. Shatner left me with a bad (worse?) impression. Thank you Mr. Clark.

Re:Whatever....

[eastshores]

If i chew on a piece of aluminum foil for even 10 seconds.. my nervous system gets to experience shorting out via the metal fillings in my back teeth.. but whatever floats your boat =)

Re:Whatever....

[Flavio]

Well said.

Slashdot "editors" seem to take pride in their shitty spelling and grammar, and someone who actually takes their time to produce readable, correct text is a target for their contempt.

It all goes back to what we've all been saying for several years (and CmdrTaco has admitted it himself): if not for Slashdot, these guys would be flipping burgers.

Note that I'm not pressing anyone to act like a square -- I just want them to have a little more class.

Re:Whatever....

[anthony_dipierro]

Obviously those are things editors should do, but the slashdot editors are notorious for being unable to spell even trivial words correctly.

I think you mean the Slashdot editors.

Re:Whatever....

[Anonymous Coward]

I bet you were figuring the world was going to end at 2000 as well...

Re:Whatever....

[FattMattP]

Let's see, a guy takes some of his precious time and answers questions for your readers (unpaid I assume), and you show your gratitude with a snide comment such as Whatever. because he took a little extra time to format things the way he wanted to.

I hope people remember that before they subscribe to slashdot. They'll be paying to remove the ads, not to have a higher quality web site.

Re:Whatever....

[0x0d0a]

Tables for formatting are dead

How about *not* trying to force a format on the end user?

Re:Whatever....

[Anonymous Coward]

VA Software is trading at about $1.19. They'll be delisted by Q2.

They lost $4,000,000 in Q1 2003, and $54,000,000 (yes, 54 MILLION) in Q1 2002. They do have quite a large chunk of money in the bank, but losing $16,000,000 a year, they'll run out in three years.

They're leveling off, but they're certainly not anywhere near profitable. Just check out the chart.

Re:Whatever....

[Anonymous Coward]

you are supposed to unwrap the sandwich before biting into it ...

Re:Whatever....

[curtisk]

I agree, when I read the story header, I was suprised at the "Whatever."

Maybe the editors are just sad and angry that guests and interviewees are well aware of the editorial *cough* standards here and since this was HIS reply to questions asked of him, he wanted to make sure they were presented properly. Those being a reflection of his ideas and opinions.

Re:Whatever....

[Anonymous Coward]

To me, Robin Miller represents all that is wrong with Linux and open-source zealots. This did not suprise me at all. I could pay money not to have him write another word again, ever.

Re:Whatever....

[nzhavok]

Tables for formatting are dead, long live css

• Almost all css sites I have used have been really slow when scrolling (this was on Opera and Mozilla, I don't know about IE). With a different div for each comment I imagine this might be fscking slow, although I should point out I'm a programmer not a web developer.
• stylesheets are implemented differently in different browsers, and the implementations are bound to be more dynamic than tables. The bugs for tables have been worked out why do it again for css.
• Isn't slashcode opensource? Why don't you go in and fix it yourself if it bothers you?

Re:Whatever....

[The J Kid]

Yes...they should use CSS....
It actually makes a page much prettier, yes you read that correctly, prettier.

Just take a look at the (unoffical) Phoenix FAQ.

It's in strict XHTML & CSS... and it looks wonderfull!

Re:Whatever....

[JebusIsLord]

For sure, in a content rich site like w3.org i would agree. However, I wanted my homepage to be pretty so I did the meager content in xhtml 1.1 and all the formatting with the use of CSS and DIV tags. My MP3 database is the only thing in a table, because thats what it IS, a TABLE.

Re:Whatever....

[dildatron]

I am quite aware of their financial situation; however my bet still stands. I bet that slashdot.org will make it through 2003. If you are so certain, why don't you bet me? We can place money for a beer in escrow.

Re:Whatever....

[kwerle]

Yet another reason that this site will not make it past 2003.

Woah. You have grossly overestimated the masses.

Have you never watched prime-time TV? If you have managed to avoid it, then the only question is: who do you think reads /.?

Re:Whatever....

[rmayes100]

Not to mention that CSS is just plain easier to work with. Getting sites to look good with tables is a PITA and takes much longer than just using a style sheet.

Re:Whatever....

[Monkeyman334]

I agree. I think it's especially lame that they said this to the accessibility guy. I mean, here I am, 20/20 vision and great hearing, and I still have trouble reading that awful spelling and grammar CmdrTaco puts out. Joe said alt tags are probably the single most important part in making accessible websites. He probably left out proper spelling of words because he thought it would be obvious for anyone who is responsible for the content they put on their website.

Re:Whatever....

[nhavar]

I guess I would want to know which sites you are visiting that could be so slow and is it CSS or script that's causing it to be slow. Just because someone claims CSS use doesn't mean that they are using it correctly or that they don't have other things on the site slowing it down.

From peronal experience I can say that I've used CSS with DIVs and SPANs and the sites are about 25% lighter, display relatively identical in IE5+/Moz/Opera and I haven't noticed any slow downs, quite the contrary.

Why work out the bugs for CSS? - Because it's the right thing to do. Markup should be used for what it works best for. Tables were designed for the structuring of tabular information and got shoehorned into use as a layout mechanism. Since they were not designed from the get go as a layout mechanism that means they are not as flexible or robust. Creating robust sites using tables (sites that reflow in different resolutions or sites that work well with screen readers) is made much more difficult when using tables.

Re:Whatever....

[Iffy Bonzoolie]

I've found that some things are just really easy with tables, and some things are easy with CSS - not the same things. I admit I don't know CSS as well as I know tables... but there's less to know, I think, which scores a point in table's favor. Usually I use a combination of tables + css.

-If

Re:Whatever....

[hysterion]

Just take a look at the (unoffical) Phoenix FAQ [texturizer.net].

It's in strict XHTML & CSS... and it looks wonderfull!

Sorry but it looks rather brain-damaged to me. First thing you notice, part of the menu is hiding below the bottom of the page, and there is no scroller to get to it. Second thing you notice, half of the page's main area is taken by this message:

Problems viewing the menu?

If you're using a low resolution (800x600 or lower), the whole menu may not be displayed when using the default style. To make the text smaller, select Low Resolution below:

Default Style | Low Resolution

Special sources to deal with different client configuartions... that sounds so 1990s...

Re:Whatever....

[Fweeky]

Almost all css sites I have used have been really slow when scrolling (this was on Opera and Mozilla, I don't know about IE). With a different div for each comment I imagine this might be fscking slow, although I should point out I'm a programmer not a web developer.

Uh, you realise, of course, that table layout is actually significantly more complex computationally than the CSS box model, and most tables based layouts use a LOT more tables than CSS sites use divs.

I imagine the CSS sites you are talking about use fixed positioning in some way; either for menus (e.g. W3's Style Pages), or some fixed background (e.g. css/edge) -- these techniques can be slow, especially on lesser machines with anemic graphics cards. That it uses CSS is irrelevent, it's just much more complex to blit bits of a page (and maybe apply some transparency to others, while redrawing yet others) than it is to move a basic superbitmap around.

stylesheets are implemented differently in different browsers, and the implementations are bound to be more dynamic than tables. The bugs for tables have been worked out why do it again for css.

Because it's better. It has significant payoffs at all levels, in terms of making websites more accessable, more maintainable, more flexible, and less disgusting to look under the hood at.

As a programmer, I'm sure you'll appreciate the difference good design and a good language can make to your work. Once upon a time C++ was (and to some extent still is) plagued with crappy compilers with different behaviors and incompatabilities. If C worked and the issues about it well known, why bother with C++? Or any other language?

Isn't slashcode opensource? Why don't you go in and fix it yourself if it bothers you?

I don't use SlashCode. I don't particularly like SlashCode. Therefore I do not develop for SlashCode. Unless someone asks me nicely, of course.

Re:Whatever....

[ez76]

How about *not* trying to force a format on the end user?

Taking your suggestion to the extreme, why don't we just have NBC broadcast the dialogue of Friends in XML so we are free to enact it any way we choose?

Sorry, there is something to be said for presentation.

Re:Whatever....

[the way, what're you]

Shatner left me with a bad (worse?) impression.

Thank goodness you didn't say Shatner left a bad taste in your mouth. That's a mental image I don't need.

Re:Whatever....

[Malc]

LOL! I actually started typing it, and then thought better. I figured it would just attract wise-guy comments from ACs ;)

Re:Whatever....

[arkanes]

Maybe if someone who actually designs sites had created CSS instead of a bunch of pedantic academics, it'd be straightforward to replace table layouts with CSS. And besides, table layouts are still signifigantly more portable that CSS layouts, rending identically or near-identically on practically all browsers, including text-only ones. At this late point in the game, it's time to accept that tables are usefull for formatting, and in fact often do a better job of it than CSS does. If it bothers you, you can pretend the the table tag is called position if you want.

Re:Whatever....

[an_mo]

I looked at that FAQ and I noticed that the stylesheet lets you do something useful: put the menu at the bottom of the file, something that the interviewee would have solved with ugly "skip menu" links.

In the page you mentioned keyboard navigation start from the body of the page, not from the left menu. Really cool.

Re:Whatever....

[imorgan]

They lost $4,000,000 in Q1 2003,

Cool! Can I have a copy of your CrystalBall.exe?

Re:Whatever....

[Anonymous Coward]

No, cretin, there are two style sheets that can be instantaneously switched, not Special sources to deal with different client configuartions. Why don't you try it, since you obviously have a lower resolution than 800x600? Would you prefer it had some sort of bogus Javascript automatic screen resolution detection thing that only works with certain browsers and platforms?

Re:Whatever....

[wheany]

You seem to assume that:
a) I am a programmer.
b) I know perl.
c) I want to wade through someone else's code to fix some issue I have with Slashdot's layout.

If I remember correctly, Slash uses templates that can be as standards-conforming or non-conforming as the page owner wants. I remeber this from some earlier discussions about the same subject, and someone said that they have complained about it to Slashdot editors, but they just don't feel like doing it. Either the templates are too hard to configure to even someone who has developed them, or Slashdot editors are just lazy. Either way, I am not going to do their job for them.

Re:Whatever....

[nhavar]

I will never understand people using phrases like "this late in the game" as if we are at the end or too far into use to go back and do it correctly. The fact is that the newer browsers are becoming more and more standards compliant and the standards are becoming more and more modular. The older browsers are becoming increasingly less used and in most cases you don't want a site to display identically for each user agent. I want a site to reflow based on screen resolution and user agent. A site should not look the same between a PDA and a Desktop browser at 1600x1200 one or both would be unreadable.

To assume that we want these things because we are all highminded bookworms only devoted to the written word of the standards gods is rediculous and ignorant. We want these things because it will make our jobs easier, our content more manageable, and more flexible to a wider range of consumer. Tables serve you - great - keep on using them even as the momentum pushes towards CSS and then play catch up later.

Re:Whatever....

[arkanes]

What's correct? Pretend for a minute that the table tag wasn't in HTML - the only reason people keep bitching that it's not for layouts is because of that. Pretend instead that it's a subset of div that comes built-in with a bunch of CSS behaviors. If you re-implemented all the functionality of tables (including things like wrap/nowrap, dynamic sizing of itself and cells, and especially colspan and rowspan), it'd be quite a mass of CSS. Pages using that CSS would be, at best, slightly larger than pages using tables for the same layout. You can't even do some of the pre-rendering functionality of tables in CSS, so your page might load or render slower with the CSS - all in all, your BEST case is that you've done alot of work and increased the total download weight of your site for no increase in functionality. Unless a user agent that totally ignores tables or renders them in some totally non-sensical manner by default (into a tree, maybe? I can't think of any other usefull rendering for a table tag) suddenly becomes very popular, tables for layout will work and will continute to work everywhere. CSS is very obviously a work by people who are more concerned with correctness of design than with ease of use or performance - it's complicated, ill-defined, and discards perfectly good solutions () in favor of (imo) poor ones (). Why SHOULDN'T tables be used for layout? They're very well suited for it.

Re:Whatever....

[Anonymous Coward]

Learn about how economic predictions are made. This is obviously a prediction based on earnings and revenue.

They reported it this way, it's likely quite accurate.

Re:Whatever....

[the way, what're you]

I figured it would just attract wise-guy comments from ACs

Thank goodness you didn't say "I figured I would just attract wiseguys." That's a mental image I don't need.

Re:Whatever....

[nhavar]

I seriously suggest that you take a look at wired's site or richinstyle, webstandards.org, alistapart, bluerobot, glish, etc. and see how light weight and flexible their code is. (not a style="font-weight:bolder" in sight) It's obvious that you haven't worked much with html or CSS.

First your asking everyone to pretend. Why should we need to pretend that something works in a way that it doesn't.

Let's say for the sake of argument that I have a four column layout that I want to reflow to a two column layout and possibly a one column layout depending on the screen. With a table I CANNOT DO THIS. Tables are not semantically or structurally designed to do this. Tables are exactly what they imply TABULAR and rigid, they are not designed to reflow or wrap rows or columns. The point of CSS is avoiding all of the dorked up attributes of tables such as spanning. You don't have to add a huge amount of code to get things to appear the same as a table that's not the way it works. Additionally you wouldn't always need to use SPAN and DIV tags CSS can be applied to any element and does not need to be applied inline as your example suggests. This is where a lot of the savings and flexibility comes in - not needing to go into every single tag and add style attributes.

The point is use what works best for what you are doing. Use tables for data and CSS for layout and style. It's easy, it doesn't have to made more complicated, and it can be fast efficient and lightweight.

Re:Whatever....

[nzhavok]

Uh, you realise, of course, that table layout is actually significantly more complex computationally than the CSS box model, and most tables based layouts use a LOT more tables than CSS sites use divs.

Actually I don't have enough experience having neither written enough css/table webpages, nor having written any code to display them.

I imagine the CSS sites you are talking about use fixed positioning in some way

perhaps, however unfortunatly I don't actually have any examples to provide. The only qualification I can give here is when I enforce the user.css in Opera these pages have gone from slow to fast.

As a programmer, I'm sure you'll appreciate the difference good design and a good language can make to your work

I sure do and if I was creating websites today I would most likely use it (I have used it and found it to be very straightforward). I'd probably be hesitant to upgrade any significant webpage I had already coded in HTML unless it had problems.

When it comes to HTML I really couldn't care less whether they are coded properly or not as long as they display fine, many people disagree (and I used to as well) and believe they should be created better however I think there are too many fscked sites already and these people are dreaming. I think XHTML and XML pages should strictly enforced, however I've come to think of HTML as webpages for idiots.

Re:Whatever....

[Keylarn]

It all goes back to what we've all been saying for several years (and CmdrTaco has admitted it himself): if not for Slashdot, these guys would be flipping burgers.

I've always found comments like this to be baffling. I mean you could say that without the car Henry Ford wouldn't have amounted to much either, but it misses the point (1) well he did invent the car so he did amount to a lot and (2) because he did that, we'll never know what would have happened if he didn't.

That being said improved grammar and spelling wouldn't hurt anyone (myself included).

Re:Whatever....

[Flavio]

True.

I'm just saying that CmdrTaco and friends shouldn't think that their success as the creators of Slashdot gives them any license to be arrogant, especially while giving regular displays of gross ignorance.

If anything, it makes them look like fools.

Re:Whatever....

[hysterion]

No, cretin,

How civil, AC. Thanks.

there are two style sheets that can be instantaneously switched, not Special sources to deal with different client configuartions. Why don't you try it, since you obviously have a lower resolution than 800x600? Would you prefer it had some sort of bogus Javascript automatic screen resolution detection

Maybe you'll explain me how two style sheets don't make more than one source? Regardless, any system that has to devote half of the useful area to explaining how to get around its shortcomings is badly laid out.

Oh, and I just did try it (Mozilla 1.2+), and guess what, AC, it doesn't work unless I especially enable javascript. And when I do, the menu covers part of the text. What was your point?

Re:Whatever....

[BollocksToThis]

I think the problem here is that the slashdot editors have this stupid "If you can understand me, then my spelling doesn't matter" attitude, which I believe arises simply because they're fucking lazy.

They would much rather everyone ELSE do the work of figuring out their garbled yet holy and enlightened wisdom, just so they don't have to learn to spell or proofread. You can see this attitude WELL at work when they don't even bother to properly read the articles they link to.

This is probably an offshoot of wanting to be 'journalists' but not actually wanting to work.

Re:Whatever....

[shnarez]

I remove ads very simply: I tell Phoenix not to display any of them by right clicking and saying "Block all images from this server".

After two or three clicks, nothing more you will see. Sure, no more subject/category images either, but i don't care, there are no more bright-blue .NET ads.

And that's worth it.

Re:Whatever....

[FattMattP]

So what? My comment had nothing to do with removing ads and everything to do with what the slashdot editors see as what they think you should get for your money. Instead of getting a higher quality web site for your money, you get a site with no ads. Big deal. As you pointed out, removing ads in trivial as it is.

Re:Whatever....

[The J Kid]

What was your point?

dunno about his point, but my point was (with the phoenix FAQ) that css CAN and often does look really good!

Because

position:absolute;
left:0px;
top:0px;
right:0px;
bottom:0px;

are you're friends! (Use either top or bottom and left & right of course...!

Re:Whatever....

[hysterion]

Hi :-) I don't dispute the virtues of css in general, at all. All I meant (and maintain) is that this is a rather poor implementation.

Re:Whatever....

[Anonymous Coward]

Usually I use a combination of tables + css

IN SOVIET RUSSIA, tables + css use a combination of YOU!

Re:Whatever....

[The J Kid]

that this is a rather poor implementation.

And again I don't disagree with you there! :P
No, really, my point was that the 'CSS + XHTML-cleanness' of the code doesn't hurt the design of the site in any way.

Hope I finally cleared that up. ;)

Re:Whatever....

[hysterion]

> Hope I finally cleared that up. ;) ;)

Re:Whatever....

[albionsoft]

(1) well [Henry Ford] did invent the car

He did? I'll bet that comes as a shock to Nicolas Cugnot, Issac de Rivaz, Jean Etienne Lenoir, Nikolaus August Otto, Karl Benz, Gottlieb Daimler, and all the others who were involved in inventing, building and developing cars before Ford came along. Or at least it would come as a shock if they weren't all dead.

roblimo == timothy

[Anonymous Coward]

please stop posting these stupid interviews...

a little different from our usual style

[MrFredBloggs]

Yeah, if he spell-checked/corrected it first...

Re:a little different from our usual style

[anethema]

Yeah, if he spell-checked/corrected it first...
That and there is only one of each question

Joe Clark?

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought we were talking about this Joe Clark

Re:Joe Clark?

[Anonymous Coward]

And all the while, I thought we were talking about this one.

Breaking news !!!

[stud9920]

Rob Malda, CTO of Slashdot, under the name of "CmdrTaco", decided he would take two hours of his precious time to make slashdot's code compliant to a standard. Any standard. Slashdot's stock price dropped even lower than usually, it is understood that wasting TWO WHOLE HOURS to write compliant code was too big a spoil for the already too low cash reserve of the company. Film at 11.

Re:Breaking news !!!

[nickclarke]

Just go the Microsoft way:

"Well, it complies with our standards"

Re:Breaking news !!!

[kac5]

See, this is the thing that I don't understand. Designing any NEW page on a current website can be easily designed into an accessible page. Closing tags doesn't take that much or an effort, making sure it's in lowercase and adding alt tags isn't much of an effort. I know all you people out there say that uppercasing tags makes it so much easier to read the code etc, however most text editors nowdays are smart enough to colour code tags for you, which make it even easier to read.

And I know that there's the current layout of the website (the whole look and feel thing) that the new page has to stick to, but I believe making any new page on a website as accessible as possible is going far enough for the meantime (until you get sued).

In Australia, if an organisation is sued (sp?) but they have a plan that says that within 5 years time the website will be accessible, then they won't have to go to court and pay out millions of dollars as long as they reach their goal. It doesn't take much time and effort to make sure a new webpage is accessible, people are just too lazy to learn the "new" ways and to change what they've been doing for the last 15 years. And commercial organisations are always changing the layout of their pages (every 2 - 3 years) so why don't they actually put in that extra effort to learn something new and make the new look and feel accessible?

It all comes back to change, ppl don't like it and never will.

Viva la difference!

[airrage]

I think one of this guy's answers had as many words as the entire Bill Shatner interview. Nice job.

Re:Viva la difference!

[Anonymous Coward]

I was thinking more along the lines of oposites. Bill's was one one end of the spectrum and this one is on the other.. Zoiks!

Re:Viva la difference!

[Anonymous Coward]

Quantity != Better
Bill's Interview was just fine, this guy rambles on about stuff.

Re:Viva la difference!

[zbuffered]

this guy rambles on about stuff.

This is /.! Rambling on about stuff is what it's all about!

Re:Viva la difference!

[Anonymous Coward]

Stats:
Joe's first answer: 1299 words.
ALL of Bill's Answers: 339 words.

No, I'm not making this up.

Geez! Virtue lies in the middle my friends!

Re:Viva la difference!

[5alligator]

sorry, you lost me there...

Re:Viva la difference!

[Anonymous Coward]

wow! you mean you really actually on your own figured out how to cut n paste into the wc program?

and youre not making that up?

im not sure i can believe you!!

LOL

[tps12]

I'm sorry, but that's ridiculous. The "usability expert" dictates the formatting, and it's not only incredibly ugly and clashes with the already shaky Slashdot look and feel, but it's confusing as well. For God's sake, the question titles are bigger than the headline!

Re:LOL

[Anonymous Coward]

> already shaky Slashdot look and feel

Eh? Perfectly readable to me.

> confusing as well

Headlines - big.
Detail - small.

Huh! Pretty confusing! Here it is again:

Headlines - big.
Detail - small.

>Karma: I invented putting my Karma: in my sig.

So...what's your karma today, sad boy?

Re:LOL

[elmegil]

It's not like he was able to force CSS stylesheets on slashdot to make the actual formatting look good as well as realistically breaking up the content.

Re:LOL

[Anonymous Coward]

he dictated the structure of his document - what was headings, sub-headings, paragraphs etc. How that formatted is the job of css (and browser defaults).

Don't blame the guy for the formatting.

Re:LOL

[CERonin]

Not really his fault. He was trying to make a point as a usability guy. The slashdot crowd could have made his article "slashdot compliant" (*shudder*) with a little CSS magick.

They chose not to do so. Are they trying to make a point?

In any event, you may wish to "veiw page source" and put yourself in the role of software responsible for parsing the page for a blind person. It's an interesting change in perspective...

Re:LOL

[Anonymous Coward]

So...what's your karma today, sad boy?

If you add up the moderations and the comment's current score, you should be able to verify that my karma is currently Excellent, as it has been for many, many months.

-tp

Re:LOL

[Xzzy]

> For God's sake, the question titles are bigger
> than the headline!

He addressed this in one of the questions, not directly but he kind of hinted at it: This is a problem with browser software, NOT the XHTML he submitted.

Your browser chose to draw that headline in a huge 72pt typeface, his XHTML didn't.

This reflects an inherent weakness in web browsers that's been around since netscape 1.1N.. users to not have sufficient control over the rendering of pages to achieve a visually pleasing display. It's been getting worse ever since, as web designers resort to more and more html hacks to try and strike a balance between pleasant design and varying browsers.

The original goal of HTML was to be a document "suggestion" format. Meaning a web page designer marked up his document in a way that a piece of client software could parse it, and order the final results in a way the reader wanted it. Since then, HTML has become more of a postscript type thing, where it's being forced to rigidly define what the user sees.

Re:LOL

[Anonymous Coward]

I cannot derive that from the available information, i'm afraid!

Re:LOL

[proj_2501]

Have you noticed that the interview still has its tags included? Way to go!

Re:LOL

[Anonymous Coward]

Good Lord! You are right. The interview is enclosed by this:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transition al.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;
charset=iso-8859-1" />
<title>Ask the Expert: Accessibility</title>
</head>
<body>

[snip ...]

</body>

</html>

Re:LOL

[Cutriss]

I feel this may be in part due to culture clashes between programmers and artists.

I have a friend who will be receiving her art degree in the next week, and recently she's been doing a lot of work with Flash and Cold Fusion. On the one hand, I really like her Flash applets, but on the other hand, she always puts them in a popup window, with the webpage itself being just a loader. It's annoying as hell, because her Flash apps were always of reasonably small size, something on the order of 400x300. There are other issues I have with them too, but I won't address those here.

I asked her why she didn't just load the applet in the page itself, and she barked at me, claiming that she did so to retain control of how the app looks. She didn't want any ugly toolbars or whatnot that she had no control over clashing with her design.

I tried to talk to her about HCI concepts and the idea of presenting information in a creative way without interfering with what the user wants, but she'd have absolutely none of it. To suggest such a thing was tantamount to restricting her creative control.

Personally, I thought it was rather presumptuous. Yes, a computer is a tool, but ultimately, it's still a computer, and you have to respect the boundaries of functionality when it comes to designing things to run on a PC.

So, to put it bluntly, I'm starting to believe that the problem isn't that Slashdot readers don't understand W3C/WAI standards or good markup practices - It's that the programmers aren't the ones doing the webpages.

Re:LOL

[Anonymous Coward]

Without CSS he could have embedded style="" in the headings.

Re:LOL

[Fweeky]

For God's sake, the question titles are bigger than the headline!

Yes, because it's basically an entire standalone XHTML documented copied and pasted into the site (probably one of the most retarded things I've seen SlashDot do).

All those headings are <h1>'s, which SlashDot should be using for the site logo (with images off, in lynx, screenreaders, etc, it'll be rendered as a main heading), with a <h2> for the headlines, and so those questions should be <h3>.

If SlashDot used these more semantic tags, and Roblimo was smart enough to transform the document properly (h1 -> h3, and rip off the HTML pre/postamble), it'd look great, and the stylesheet SlashDot should be using to provide all this style would make it fit in perfectly.

Quick example of the sort of markup SlashDot uses, compared with what it should be using:

Here's the headline to this story:

<table WIDTH="100%" BORDER="0" CELLPADDING="0" CELLSPACING="0"><tr><td
VALIGN="TOP" BGCOLOR="#006666"><img
SRC="//images.slashdot.org /slc.gif" WIDTH="13" HEIGHT="16" ALT="" ALIGN="TOP"><font
FACE="arial,helvetica" SIZE="4" COLOR="#FFFFFF"><b>Joe Clark's Answers -- In Valid XHTML</b></font></td>
</tr></table>

Compare with what it *would* be in a design using CSS:

<h2>Joe Clark's Answers -- In Valid XHTML</h2>

Plus about 6 lines of CSS which you only load once, and much of which could be shared among other similar looking elements.

Much too elegent for SlashDot though. After all, if it doesn't look great in Netscape 4 it's not worth doing! :P

Re:LOL

[Anonymous Coward]

I asked her why she didn't just load the applet in the page itself, and she barked at me, claiming that she did so to retain control of how the app looks. She didn't want any ugly toolbars or whatnot that she had no control over clashing with her design.

can you say .....FREAK!

it never ceases to amaze me as to how gigantic of egomaniacs artistic people are...

Re:LOL

[bethenco]

Hearing your anecdote was very interesting to me.

I used to wonder why standards compliance on the web is so abysmal and why so many web sites are filled with cruft (needless Java, Flash, client-side scripting, images used for layout, etc.). The goal in making a usable website seemed obvious to me: make sure there aren't any nasty design bits tangled up in your content. If you want, include the design bits cleanly separated off to the side (e.g., in a stylesheet) so they can be easily disregarded, changed, or removed.

After reading your post, I realized that not everyone has the same purpose in mind for the web that I have. As a programmer / computer engineer, I tend view the web as a means of conveying essentially non-artistic content. You want to keep the content in the form of clean, well-defined data so it can be properly interpreted and further transformed by programs. But for some people, the web is a medium used not only to convey information as simple data, but to convey information through artistic sensibilities.

Perhaps in some cases, content cannot be separated from design because part or all of the content *is* the design.

To me, the ideal website is still close to a text-only, content-structured document, but I think I now understand why a seemingly intelligent person might make an entire website in a Flash applet.

Re:LOL

[nakaduct]

[users lack] sufficient control over the rendering of pages to achieve a visually pleasing display

False. Both IE and Mozilla provide a global style sheet, in which you may say: h1 { font-size: 18px !important } to obtain pleasantly-sized headers.

Re:LOL

[Anonymous Coward]

False. Both IE and Mozilla provide a global style sheet, in which you may say: h1 { font-size: 18px !important }to obtain pleasantly-sized headers.

OK Grandma, now, can you see the desktop?

Yes, my computer's on it!

Good, ok, click on my computer.

What, move the mouse on it and click?

Yes, but actually, double click.

It's not doing anything.

Are you sure? It should open a window.

No no, all my windows are closed. Can I move the mouse off my computer now? My wrist gets tired at this crazy angle.

What?

You said to move the mouse onto my computer and double-click. Well, I put the mouse on the computer, and now it's too high up for me to use properly.

OK, forget it Grandma, I'll edit your stylesheet myself when I see you next.

Re:LOL

[albionsoft]

Your browser chose to draw that headline in a huge 72pt typeface, his XHTML didn't.

But it is predictable that most web browsers will chose to draw that headline at 72pt. Design decisions cannot be divorced from content structural decisions. Telling someone it is their fault that your page looks bad is not an option in the real world.

Now, in this case the guy may not have the ability to include a CSS, although I'm not sure why, or Slashdot may have chosen not to give us the one he did include.

Back in reality, web pages are used to market ideas, products, services, etc. A good visual impression is part of that. Turning round and saying "your browser isn't good enough" is not acceptable - while you're making that point, the customer is off shopping elsewhere.

Now, I'm not suggesting that web pages shouldn't aim for the perfect "content in HTML, presentation in CSS" split, but an attitude of "my code is valid, fix your browser" makes your page as inaccessible as anything else.

Hypocrit

[athakur999]

He says he uses valid XHTML, but then goes on to use non-standard quotes through his answers. Hypocrit :)

Re:Hypocrit

[roseanne]

> non-standard quotes

Because he didn't use &quot;? He used ISO-Latin-1 encoding and Entities &#8220; and &#8221; -- what are you using that doesn't display this? I'd say the tool is broken, not the markup. The only thing he could have done better was use the character entity names -- &ldquo; and &rdquo;.

Re:Hypocrit

[0xdeadbeef]

What part of ’ “ and ” don't you understand? While it may not work in old browsers, it is certainly standards-compliant, unlike the moronized quotes of Microsoft. I suppose you're making a joke. What is truly annoying is that Slashdot's comment system eats these unicode entity references. But then again, after three years they still haven't fixed the "plain text" and "extrans" mix-up, so what do you expect?

Re:Hypocrit

[King of the World]

What you call 'entities' aren't stand alone definitions of characters, they require a charset. #8220 and #8221 map to unicode characters, and as slashdot doesn't have a unicode charset it's up to the browser to be leniant and assume that they meant Unicode.

Re:Hypocrit

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not standards compliant without a charset. Read above.

Re:Hypocrit

[Fastolfe]

Entities like map to Unicode code points. These can safely be used regardless of the character set declared in the document. Charsets change the meaning of the bytes used in the text of a page. HTML entities are separate from that and map directly to characters.

The fact that Slashdot isn't declaring a character set for its pages is a completely separate issue (and one I think they should definitely fix), but whatever they decide to use, will always map to the same character.

Re:Hypocrit

[Fastolfe]

I failed to preview my post. Wherever it looks like a word was left out of my post, pretend I said something like &#8220;.

Re:Hypocrit

[roseanne]

Agree. And in point of fact, Clark's xhtml file was encoded in iso-latin-1, not Unicode (view source). But it's in fact legal for HTML Docs to do so, AFAIK. From the (hopefully definitive?) W3C document:

To support these entities [like #8221 etc], user agents may support full [ISO10646 (=Unicode)] or use other means. Display of glyphs for these characters may be obtained by being able to display the relevant [ISO10646] characters or by other means, such as internally mapping the listed entities, numeric character references, and characters to the appropriate position in some font that contains the requisite glyphs.

OTOH, it's a 'may' recommendation (not a 'MAY' -- don't know if that matters). So technically the UA is not at fault, but it's something one could fix. What UA is this? Even Lynx (and Links) render these quotes correctly, replacing them with ASCII 33 ($TERM is linux).

Re:Hypocrit

[King of the World]

You can already guess which browser needs the charset... Netscape 4.

Re:Hypocrit

[roseanne]

It may or maynot need the charset, but Netscape 4.79 seems to show the quotes fine even without it.

Re:Hypocrit

[King of the World]

I'm not sure about this page in particular, but I am sure that Netscape 4.08 (the browser) cannot display NCR unicode characters without a charset to help it along. (btw. 4.79 is the suite number, not the browser)

"Whatever"

[Anonymous Coward]

It's nice to see slashdot's dedication to supporting and implementing standards.

Re:"Whatever"

[Anonymous Coward]

"Standards are law! Standards are great! Standards should be followed always! Except when they apply to us."

Re:"Whatever"

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the "Whatever" was a response to "I copy-edited all the questions, but the words are all the same; they are now merely spelled and capitalized correctly. I think all the links work."

Methinks some of the Slashdot editors have very thin skins to take offense at remarks not even directed at them - unless they Do know about their own sloppy work, and resent it being pointed out, even indirectly?...

Re:"Whatever"

[fobbman]

I thought that snide and condescending comments added to /. stories by the editors WAS a standard?

XMLT (xml for trolling)

[Anonymous Coward]

<post id="4589034" modscore="-1" modtype="troll">
<troll type="goatse">
<a href="http://www.goatse.cx">Make <italics>this</italics> more ascessible, i just dont want people to see it! I want people to <caps>FEEL</caps> it, make it come <caps>ALIVE!</caps></a>
</troll>
</post&gt ;

His formatting, unlike Slashdot's

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually makes semantic sense... and is valid! Too bad it's wrapped in invalid crappy HTML.

Slashdot... it's time to redesign to standards!

Because Slashdot is broken.

[Levine]

Because Slashdot does not properly utilize the Heading tags.

The concept of the H1-H6 tags is to subdivide a page into distinct sections, like the headings of a paper. Therefore, perhaps the title of your blog would be in H1 brackets, each post you make to it having its title in H2, and if you wanted to sub-divide your posts into logical divisions you could use H3-H6.

Not to toot my own horn, but I've accomplished this sort of thing on my own at http://thirtyfour.org - the website is entirely readable without any extraneous formatting whatsoever. Content should be seperate from design: if you remove the "design" from your site your "content" should still be accessible. On Slashdot this is impossible: the content is shoehorned into tables and divisions which make things difficult.

Anyway, there you go.

levine

Re:Because Slashdot is broken.

[SweetAndSourJesus]

Not to toot my own horn, but I've accomplished this sort of thing on my own at http://thirtyfour.org - the website is entirely readable without any extraneous formatting whatsoever.

What do you want, a cookie?

Your site doesn't validate, so stop with the tooting.

Re:Because Slashdot is broken.

[Anonymous Coward]

What do you want, a cookie?

Yes, I would like a cookie. Chocolate chip if you got any.

Re:Because Slashdot is broken.

[zapfie]

Might I suggest you avoid the underline tag at all costs? Many users associate underlines with hypertext links.. so they will click it and nothing will happen.

Re:Because Slashdot is broken.

[Anonymous Coward]

And the same people are choking while eating an unwrapped sandwich. Keep using the underline tag folks, nothing to see here.

Re:Because Slashdot is broken.

[0x0d0a]

If you *really* want to be true to the content-separation ideology (the way HTML really should be done), you shouldn't use underline at all -- instead, use EM or something that implies emphasis. The user may be using a system that does not support underlining, or may not like the use of underlining on his web page.

Of course, few web designers are capable of designing a proper HTML page, so most of this isn't cared about any more.

Re:Because Slashdot is broken.

[zapfie]

Troll, but I'll bite. One important part of any interface is consistancy. When you break consistancy, you break the model of how things work that the user has created in their heads. For example, when you see an underlined letter on a menu, you know that you can press ALT and that letter to select it. When you see a scrollbar, you know you can use it to navigate a document. When you see underlined text on a webpage, you know you can click it. When you start breaking these things, the user is no longer sure if what they learned works in all situations.

Re:Because Slashdot is broken.

[JebusIsLord]

mine does. http://www.autobotcity.net

as an aside, the jetfire transparent image in the background only works properly with Mozilla/Netscape 6+, not IE because it has a broken CSS implementation. Check it out in both if you dont believe me. ALL my formatting is done in CSS (no tables or anything), and everything validates.

Re:Because Slashdot is broken.

[SweetAndSourJesus]

Sweetness, baby.

I'm sending your cookie.

Re:Because Slashdot is broken.

[iangoldby]

See Eric Meyer's CSS Edge site for the original and details of how it is done.

+1 Informative. I thank you 8-)

Re:Because Slashdot is broken.

[JebusIsLord]

I actually lost that URL so thank YOU. I sure wish MS would release a version of IE that does it justice though. My friends keep telling me my site looks fugly.

Re:Because Slashdot is broken.

[Fweeky]

I've accomplished this sort of thing on my own at http://thirtyfour.org - the website is entirely readable without any extraneous formatting whatsoever. Content should be seperate from design

Funny, I didn't see much in the way of design there at all -- in fact, you've abused certain tags, like blockquote, to achieve presentational aims -- exactly the opposite of what you seem to be aiming for, unless you want to argue that your blog is a load of quotations of yourself. So, where are your <cite>s? :P

Now, my turn: http://www.aagh.net/ -- see how I provide a load of <link>s at the top for UA's to make use of, how the navbar is a marked up nested list, despite not looking much like one in CSS capable clients. Note the content is divided liberally with divs which, once stripped, leave you with a perfectly readable and well structured XHTML document. Note the print stylesheet, so if you want to print a page, you don't get a useless navbar printed with the content. Also note that it's not finished, but you get my point :)

Re:Because Slashdot is broken.

[Tattva]

I disagree. It is certainly okay to use XHTML as a document format, obeying all the rules about the intent of each tag, and use it raw with a CSS to render it into a display format, but that is hardly the only valid solution.

The important thing is to keep content and presentation seperate. There are an infinite number of ways to do this if you're willing to write backend source code. One way of doing that is XHTML and CSS. It has the minor advantage of not requiring backend code in the simplest case.

Using a backend database with a proprietary format and an HTML rendering scheme of some kind is another way of achieving the same ends. I haven't looked at Slashdot's formatting, but it is apparent that they have chosen a backend database strategy. Cry all you want about the intent of HTML, there is no reason to treat it with any more deference than Flash or any other arbitrary formatting language if you know which web browsers you care about (and can therefore test against them.) Developers care about the end user experience and development costs, not the standards conformance of their proprietary display technology. The only thing missing is an interchange format or standard format converters so that they can take external input (the raw XHTML recieved from Mr. Clark) and translate it into their backend format, for later display through their display filter. They already have this, as I am using it right now, but it could use extending.

I couldn't care less if they use FONT tags instead of stylesheets to achieve pretty formatting in the browsers they choose to support. If they can save time or make the output a little prettier by violating all of the anal-retentive HTML rules that have been retrofitted onto the standard, good for them. Their raw data is in a consistent, protected format (I assume), even if they didn't choose the naive backend XHTML format you so love.

Re:Because Slashdot is broken.

[Tattva]

as an aside, the jetfire transparent image in the background only works properly with Mozilla/Netscape 6+, not IE because it has a broken CSS implementation

Thanks for pointing out you deliberately break your web site on the most prevelant web browser. I won't have to waste time going to a rank amateur's web site.

Wow, to think you would deliberately sabotage your own work to prove someone else made a mistake. Doesn't that sound a little dysfunctional?

Re:Because Slashdot is broken.

[JebusIsLord]

Dude, its a page visited by maybe 10 people a week, all friends. I really only intended it to be an experiment in formatting with CSS, and everyone who uses it uses Moz anyhow. I really couldn't care less if people don't visit it because of that. It's not like I'm marketing something on it.

Re:Because Slashdot is broken.

[mackstann]

I don't believe he stated that he intentionally broke it in IE. It sounds to me like he found something neat in CSS, decided to do it, then found out that it didn't work so well in IE. So what?

On my site, I use CSS :after, :before, :first-letter, :first-line, and :first-child selectors, which currently only work in Mozilla, but so what?? IE has an incomplete CSS implementation. I enjoy web design, doing [x]html, and CSS alot. I enjoy using the newest techniques, while still using standards compliant code. If IE is broken, and displays my correctly coded page wrong - I don't care. Get a better browser.

BTW - neither site fails to work in IE, only some visual effects are missing - hardly a big deal. You go to a website for information - right?

and one last btw - the navigation bar at right works in mozilla, but is mysteriously gone in IE, but it *should* work in IE, i need to get around to fixing that. ho hum.

I won't have to waste time going to a rank amateur's web site.

i'm sure he's crying.

Re:Because Slashdot is broken.

[Matthew Bafford]

I'm not sure if it's just me (I'm red/green color blind), but I can't read the nav-links on the side when I hover over them. Give it a little more contrast.

Other than that, it looks fine.

Using Mozilla.

-y

Re:Because Slashdot is broken.

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't accept it! He just wants to track... um.. stuff.

Re:Because Slashdot is broken.

[Anonymous Coward]

doing [x]html, and CSS alot.

Just thought I should let you know... 'a lot' is two words. Not one.

Re:Because Slashdot is broken.

[Anonymous Coward]

For New Zealanders wanting to see an excellent example of stupidity in designing an interface, you can check out the Auckland City Library catalogue interface.

Practically NO link is styled as a link, the mouse pointer gives no indication when you move over something you can click, and the whole thing only seems to work in IE.

It takes government involvement to screw things up THAT badly.

Re:Because Slashdot is broken.

[5alligator]

dude, your site doesn't render at all for me (moz1.0rc2/linux). Also, something's interfering with keyboard input (like CTRL-w)
Also note that it's not finished
oh, my bad... gee, good luck with you little blog!

Re:Because Slashdot is broken.

[Fweeky]

dude, your site doesn't render at all for me (moz1.0rc2/linux)

Fine in Moz 1.0.1 and 1.2.1/Win32 here. Although it does bring up one border rendering regression in 1.2.
Also, something's interfering with keyboard input (like CTRL-w)

Upgrade. I don't support prereleases ;)

I serve as application/xhtml+xml for Mozilla -- maybe rc2 is buggy with it.

Wow!

[helstar]

He actually took the time to fix our spelling and grammar and Rob says "Whatever", not even a bit of thanks. Why not work on that extra-special spell check feature so many have been begging for?

Valid XHTML... not for MS

[Huge Pi Removal]

This is obviously the type of "valid XHTML" that crashes Mac IE (OS 9). Hmmmmm......

Re:Valid XHTML... not for MS

[venomkid]

IE on OS9 is the buggiest mass production browser I've seen yet. I know, I test sites on it.

You're better of running *shiver* Netscape 4.x.

Re:Valid XHTML... not for MS

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh yeah, MS is famous for its international standards adherence. (Rolls eyes)

If you want "valid XHTML" to display, get yourself a real browser. And a real OS, to boot.
Steve Jobs himself used NEXTStep until OS X got made.

Re:Valid XHTML... not for MS

[Huge Pi Removal]

Hey, I'm using OS 9 because we still have a lot of people on 9 here at work. I'll be switching to X in a couple of weeks... And don't you try telling me OS X isn't a real OS...

Exactly!

[sootman]

Joe: ...[T]he words are all... spelled and capitalized correctly. I think all the links work.
Roblimo: Whatever... It's a little different from our usual style...

Couldn't've said it better myself. :-)

too many words, too many notes

[Alien54]

And so is his response! I propose a new mod of -1:Too many words!

reminds me of the royal in the movie "Mozart" : "There are too many notes"

To which the reply was: "Tell me which ones you want me to take out"

Re:too many words, too many notes

[Anonymous Coward]

Absolutely correct sir!

The person writing the banal comment about "too many words" you responded to should simply refrain from reading anything longer than two sentences. In any case, it is probably too argumentative and too complex of a conversation to a person with his learning disabilities to follow.

Rather than make an intelligent comment (or even a well thought out derrogatory comment on the article) he chose to answer... it has too many words!

What's next? If the article is too complex in argument... "My brain hurts".

Re:too many words, too many notes

[Anonymous Coward]

Wasn't that "Amadeus"?

Re:too many words, too many notes

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, here's one: "I don't get it" used as an argument.

Re:too many words, too many notes

[Alien54]

Wasn't that "Amadeus"?

You are Correct. Pardon my brain fart.

I've got a question that wasn't asked

[Illuminati Member]

Do you ever sit down and think that you are being anal retentive about something that isn't really that important?

I'm not going to give you the "GET SOME PRIORITIES" troll, here, but don't you think this is a silly thing to get in a tiff about? Since when does anyone follow the standards already trying to overcome the net? The net is just this amoeba that will never truely take form.

I am sincere in my question, because I saw my third wife get really gun-ho about a standard (which standard? I'm not at liberty to say), and ended up eventually passing away (God rest her soul) due to the effects of what she was trying to accomplish. Why someone would be so stubborn about something simple like a standard is confusing to me.

I wish I was blind

[Anonymous Coward]

then I wouldn't have to look at the formatting. To be fair, css will be playing its part.

Usability expert?

[Anonymous Coward]

He's an accessability guy, dumbass!

Percentage...

[DraKKon]

What percentage of people browsing the web are blind or the like? maybe 1%? Why should I make my site accessable to the 1%? I know this is flame bait, but let me take this a step further..

My site is in english, so I also be required (or whatever he is pushing for, I don't care.) to support russian? or all of the other languages?

(I couldn't care less about my karma on ./ anyway... it's usless. just as my eToys stock)

Re:Percentage...

[Anonymous Coward]

I had a web developer use this exact argument on me about making his site useable in Mozilla.

Re:Percentage...

[Ignorant Aardvark]

"What percentage of people browsing the web are blind or the like? maybe 1%? Why should I make my site accessable to the 1%? I know this is flame bait, but let me take this a step further.." Oh, just a little thing called the Americans With Disabilities Act. Face it, if you are blind or deaf or stuck in a wheelchair, your life is going to suck more than the average person's. We don't need selfish people like you to make it any more difficult on them. Here's another quote that makes just as much sense ... "Less than 1% of kids are really smart, so why are we spending all this money on them for magnet programs and charter schools?"

Re:Percentage...

[Anonymous Coward]

As someone who operates a site with about 50,000 regular _members_ and a strong proponent/user of Mozilla (it's my only browser), I gave up giving a fuck caring about Mozilla.

Three percent of my users use something other than MSIE. Of the remaining three percent, two thirds use Netscape and lots of 4x Netscape. Approximately 1% actually use Mozilla.

Now, as someone who offers a free serice, why am I going to waste the small amount of free time I have off of work to fine tune my code to work when Mozilla or Netscape fuck the presentation up for those 50 people, when it works beautifully for the other 49,950 people?

Besides, even if I tried, fixing the code for the Mozilla people fucks up the presentation for the MSIE people.

Re:Percentage...

[Anonymous Coward]

Ever hear the term "scapegoat"? Companies create devices that can read the screen, but they don't work very well. So instead of making their product work better by working with folks at MS & Macromedia, they turn the mob on all the little website developers saying you aren't doing a good job of making their system work for them. Of course they phrase it as "you're not adhering to standards and are denying access for the blind! It's discrimination!".

Re:Percentage...

[rleibman]

Because if we spent every to make everything totally accessible to everyone with every conceivable disability, without taking into account other issues (cost, who the users are, etc) our whole civilization would colapse in a morass of sysiphean work which would never be finished.
As to why spend money on the 1% of really smart kids... Simple, because they have the most potential to make our civilization better, producing things that make ALL of our lives better and more productive.

Rleibman: A member of the 1%

Re:Percentage...

[MattGWU]

You only speak that way because you are not a member of "The One Percent". What if you were of this "One Percent", and the web developers of the world were as 'fashionably apathetic' as you are? You'd probably be pretty pissed off.

Accomodating people with dissabilities is a bit different than worrying about supporting all of the worlds languages (which many sites DO pull off, by the way). Is it so hard to maybe adhere to a standard that allows your page to be rendered in a variety of ways to accomodate different viewer (or reader) types? I'm sure it isn't beyond the bounds of your art (And it's not, if you had read the interview) to aid the less fortunate in their quest for information, pr0n, exciting business opportunities, or weight loss pills. After all, the 'web development' industry brought us the cheesy flash intro and the stupid vibrating banner ad. What if they put that kind of effort into things that may actually help people?

That's about it. On the whole, I don't think the world would care if you don't consider the needs of others in your web-page design (If your website really mattered and had much traffic, you probably wouldn't have gotten requests by now since the One Percent would have statistically wandered by, but that doesn't sound like it's the case so this all has 'moot point' action). But then, you don't care that the world doesn't care. However, the world doesn't care that you don't care that the world doesn't care if you fix it or not. See? We're all fashionably apathetic and therefore super-cool.

Re:Percentage...

[Anonymous Coward]

I think that you miss the point. Making accessible content (ala the W3C guidelines) isn't just intended to cater to the "1%" you are talking about.

It also caters to the multitudes of different web browsing devices available. This can include a 3-line LCD display on a non-PDA cell-phone... future "smart devices" that connect to the Internet and can read you the news on news.google.com on your way to work while you're driving, the realization of being able to verbally request information from a computer and get a verbal response.... imagine the verbal version of Ask Jeeves or something of the like...

You're in the bathroom and are running out of toilet paper... "Jeeves, what's the cheapest e-grocer for (insert your favorite brand here) toilet paper? Order a 4 pack and deliver on the double!".

From a technological standpoint it's really about making web sites for the information vs. the visual aspects. In other words, make sites, and most importantly, the information they provide accessible to the world and a growing multitude of devices (and an unlimited variety thereof). Include enough "alternate" markup that with all the gizmos available (on your fancy desktop with it's powerful processor / accessories) turned off... in it's most basic form, the site can still be used and still does what it is supposed to do.

As per your site being in English, a simple addition to your tag will tell any browser or technology (such as google, that can automatically translate) what language it is. Use for US english... now, you can have it translated by anything out there because you've added additional HTML markup to describe your site as English. Try it, now people using google, again as an example, to find your site will be able to browse a site with all text (even alt tags!) translated!

It's rather small additions to the HTML that make a world of difference!

Re:Percentage...

[autopr0n]

Rleibman: A member of the 1%

What, the bottom 1%? You obviously don't understand anything about HTML and web technology. You don't even seem to really understand what the "net" is.

Making websites accessible to begin with doesn't cost anything.

Re:Percentage...

[Anonymous Coward]

What "we" don't need is up to more people than you.

Re:Percentage...

[Anonymous Coward]

Being pissed off because he's part of the "One Percent" would still just be based on self-interest. Your pseudo-intellectual attempt at a witty barb did nothing to convince the poster to do something positive. But you probably just wanted to feel like the most important guy at the coffee shop for five minutes anyway.

Re:Percentage...

[Anonymous Coward]

Note that the above post, while intelligent and relevant, has a score of zero while the pompous lecturers who tell us all about right and wrong get moderated up. Slashdot - News for Pundits, Opinions That Don't Matter.

Re:Percentage...

[esigler]

Simple. Wanna know what's big, blind, and doesn't give a rat's ass about images?

Google.com

That's right, making your web site more accessable for that 1% makes it more accessable for the search engines, thus your site will become more relevant to the correct searches.

Does that 1% seem a little more important now?

Re:Percentage...

[DraKKon]

No.

Re:Percentage...

[DraKKon]

Didn't you see the Opera press release? http://news.com.com/1601-2-961985.html No need for WAP and the like... Opera rules. So I don't care about the 3 line old school phones..

I'm not saying that I don't create 100% compliant websites.. my wap site works well..

My other sites, may not have all of the alt tags populated, because they are spacers...

Re:Percentage...

[DraKKon]

Well.. you could create the same site with different sizes and such for the 50 people.. heh..

Re:Percentage...

[beebware]

>> Why should I make my site accessable to the 1%? I agree! I'm just about to go and make sure only users of Microsoft Internet Explorer on Windows can access my site(s): why should I make my site accessable to the few people using that Mozilla crap on non-Windows machines?

Ok, that was slightly 'trollish', but kinda makes the point: at least "we" (able-bodied, full-sighted people) can make a choice like that: non-abled bodied people HAVE TO choose to use certain browsers/technologies. I bet if they had to use Mozilla on Linux, Slashdot would be one of the first communities to complain that the majority of websites 'aren't compatible'...

Re:Percentage...

[uchian]

What percentage of people browsing the web are blind or the like? maybe 1%? Why should I make my site accessable to the 1%? I know this is flame bait, but let me take this a step further..

Because one day, you might be one of those 1% and then you'll really wish that the other 99% cared about the 1%.

<i>My site is in english, so I also be required (or whatever he is pushing for, I don't care.) to support russian? or all of the other languages?</i>

Your site does, if it is written properly. Try looking at the language translation page on google, which will automatically translate a web page for you, or Babel fish.

Whilst the translation isn't perfect, I have not seen a page anytime recently where I couldn't at least get the gist of what was being said.

Re:Percentage...

[Anonymous Coward]

That's right, making your web site more accessable for that 1% makes it more accessable for the search engines, thus your site will become more relevant to the correct searches.

Also, if a search engine can find all the text on your page, you don't have to worry about translating it to every language - Google can do the translation for you.

Re:Percentage...

[DraKKon]

So if I rely on someone else to translate my site, why not let someone else make my site accessable to the blind or disabled?

Or is that too hard so someone said fsck it, I'll make the webmasters do it instead..

and if I did become a member of the 1%, I really doubt that I would care about the web. I mean, no pr0n.

Some Thoughts

[Alethes]

1) I bet a lot of people wish Captain Kirk had replied this thoroughly.

2) I bet there is now, or there will soon be, a huge market for web developers that specialize in accessiblity. This is definitely a few steps further than making sure all the major browsers can view your content.

3) I wish I had thought of this when the interview was up, but how difficult is it to create websites with text to speech software in mind? Would it be better to have a section that spells all the words phonetically so they are the most understandable to the end user? It seems that it should be possible to automate that process, rather than having to maintain two versions of the site, or having to create audio files that play automatically with an onMouseover.

Re:Some Thoughts

[Anonymous Coward]

I think people referring to Shatner as "Captain Kirk" are one of the reason's why he DOESN'T give long drawn out answers.

Re:Some Thoughts

[5alligator]

how difficult is it to create websites with text to speech software in mind?
No, not at all. This is the point of seperating the content from presentation. Doing so allows a user-agent to do its job. When Joe was going on about empty alt attributes, he's refering to text-to-speech browsers.

Creating accessible sites is really not that difficult, despite what many here are moaning about. Check out some of these links:

happycog
evolt.org
css-discuss

Wired's new look

[joib]

Wired has introduced a new layout, which is xhtml compliant (and looks quite sophisticated too). See this interview for more info.

Re:Wired's new look

[indiigo]

Is the "World's Largest Casino" popup ad also XHTML compliant?

I know, I know, I should be using moz, but I'm lazy today and IE it is...

Re:Wired's new look

[Saltine Cracker]

I especially like the Alternate Styles allowing for smaller/larger fonts!

Re:Wired's new look

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow. I'm not used to actually being able to read Wired without going into seizure.

You should have removed the <html> tag!

[aWalrus]

I took a look at the source code for this page to see what he was talking about and I know the guy sent his very own file nicely formatted, but you guys should at least have removed the <html> <head> and <body> tags from his document. It is extremely bad form to insert a whole html document inside another one. I don't think this page renders well in most browsers. Maybe the Slashdot Editors can update the story removing that from the source code?
--

Re:Viva la difference! (THIS ONE)

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe this is the one you were referring to:

I'm not really up on that topic. The PAC Mate is one such device; it's essentially a screen reader without a screen or free-standing computer.

I've been reading Joe's articles for a while.

[mdemeny]

You may also be interested in his article in The Atlantic , The King of Closed Captions

Also, the content on his content-related weblog The Nublog is pretty interesting.

He may be abrasive sometimes, but he usually gets it right. Moreso than Jakob Neilsen.

Re:I've been reading Joe's articles for a while.

[Anonymous Coward]

Am I the only one who think the cover of his book resembles the Goatse-guy?

Re:I've been reading Joe's articles for a while.

[Dave2 Wickham]

Evidently not...
see here

Wait, who is this?

[poot_rootbeer]

This isn't at all what I expected the principal from Lean On Me to be like!

Re:Wait, who is this?

[sjbrown]

The principal from Lean On Me was a former prime minister of Canada?

Why we have standards

[Alethes]

There's a Terry Pratchett quote I love that says, "Pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny. Free men pull in all kinds of directions."

Standards make us more productive and efficient. Standards allow us to pull in all kinds of directions without running into eachother.

Re:Why we have standards

[Anonymous Coward]

No, standards put us under tyranny. Perhaps you don't get your own metaphor.

Re:Why we have standards

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh yeah, that make sense. Kind of like those tyrants that make us all stop at red lights and drive on the same side of the road (per country, anyway). We'd be much more productive without standards.

What disability laws are in effect?

[abhinavnath]

The interviewee talks about companies being forced/sued to be accessible, in the real world and on the web. Does anybody know what laws govern this? What is Section 508, or the WAI?

I'm not sure that there ought to be laws mandating accessibility to disabled people. I mean, that's really upto the business or individuals concerned.

Re:What disability laws are in effect?

[GeckoX]

Ignorance sure is blissful isn't it?

I can accept that, just PLEASE tell me you're not a web developer, actually, any kind of developer?

Cover Photo

[Transient0]

Joe Clark has written a book. Does anyone else notice a striking similarity between the cover photo and a certain infamous image.

Sorry, not meaning to troll. I like Joe Clark, I also work in accessiblity. It's just that that image(the book cover) is right on his main page, and I can't go there without having my visual memory of things I would rather not remember activated.

Re:Cover Photo

[cybermace5]

That was pretty bad. Now we'll have "joeclark.org/book/" trolls. Where is the mercy in this world?

Re:Cover Photo

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, yeah. Well, this is one weird dude. For one thing, he's a vegan. And now this. Deep psychoanalysis is necessary.

Re:Cover Photo

[Timmeh]

mod this down! it has a link to goastse! you moderators didn't even read the whole comment before you modded this up.

well i tried..

Re:Cover Photo

[Fnkmaster]

Well, both of those images are all about "accessibility" so in some very twisted way, it makes sense. Ugh.

Re:Cover Photo

[zapfie]

Uh.. the link to goatse was actually on topic and funny, if you had bothered visiting both links he provided.

Re:Cover Photo

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh... his post was actually on topic and (mildly in my opinion) humorous, if you read emough slashdot you'd realize that gets posted all the time by trolls.. regardless of whether the parent had posted a link to goatse... eh

Re:Cover Photo

[some guy I know]

this is one weird dude. For one thing, he's a vegan.

There's nothing weird about being vegan.
However, the fact that he's vegan, but also wears leather shoes, now that's weird.

PC Party

[Malicious]

Wow. This guy leads the Canadian PC Party?

Who Knew?

Re:PC Party

[Anonymous Coward]

This guy leads the Canadian PC Party?

Oh, isn't that cute. Canada has parties now and everything. They think they're America. Just adorable! Little cute-wootie, snugga-wugga Canada, oh yes you are so precious yes you are!

(sigh) They grow up so fast.

Re:PC Party

[Anonymous Coward]

OMG man.
Take a history course.

Re:PC Party

[DataSquid]

you juke, but that's why i clicked on the article :) i thought just maybe it was him...

Slashdot gets so much respect in the industry...

[Anonymous Coward]

"Typos, misspellings?

Whatever, dude..."

Gangsta Geek Rap

Valid?

[brunson]

...or well-formed?

Re:Valid?

[Anonymous Coward]

LOL!

Mod parent up! :-)

Inconsistent

[new_breed]

Why is only the first headline numbered '1)' and the rest not?

Maybe it was the formatting...

[DwarfGoanna]

But I read all these answers in the voice of Morgan Freeman. What do you mean it's not that Joe Clark?

Let's see

[Merovign]

(this is only half-joke)

Convert all web pages to accessible formats, convert all books (ever) to audio books, redesign pedestrian access for the sightless...

or put money into researching artificial eyes.

I honestly wonder which would be cheaper?

There is a real problem with spending all of your time accomodating a problem rather than fixing it.

I used to work with hearing-impaired people (have forgotten most of my ASL), there was a definite "subculture" atmosphere that really didn't spend any time caring about a cure, some of them (not all) just wanted other people to do the work for them.

Not to say that there should be no accomodation, there are no guarantees after all. But the problem with ADA and other such "devices" is that, like farm subsidies or AFDC, you can build a culture of entitlement that masks the problem instead of solving it.

Re:Let's see

[jck2000]

there was a definite "subculture" atmosphere that really didn't spend any time caring about a cure, some of them (not all) just wanted other people to do the work for them

Sounds kind of like /.'ers complaining about slipped deadlines or minor bugs in major open source projects.

Re:Let's see

[Anonymous Coward]

You're also look at one option you KNOW you can do, versus another that you MIGHT be able to do. Not to mention the fact that it has taken many thousands of years of civilization to approach the second option. Millions of blind people have died during that time.

Re:Let's see

[Ravagin]

But see, the point is that if you do all your websites to standards, that's a lot of the accessibility work done right there. It's not doing extra work for accesibility, it's doing the job right. And I'd even argue that making your website accessible (in 508 terms) is part of doing the job right - the web is about disseminating information and making it available to everyone.

Re:Let's see

[Anonymous Coward]

It's so damned expensive treating cancer, let's just stop all treatment and spend all the cash we save on preventative research...

Can you see the flaw?

Re:Let's see

[swb]

It's so damned expensive treating cancer, let's just stop all treatment and spend all the cash we save on preventative research...

Can you see the flaw?

Actually, no I can't see the flaw. My mother was terminal with breast cancer that had spread to her bones and internal organs. 12 months after the terminal diagnosis, she spent three weeks in the hospital with after kidney failure due to ureaters being pinched off by tumor growth. After this episode we had a long conversation with her oncologist (dad, mom, me and my sister) about the value of further chemotherapy. "Yes, it's still of some value. Remission could happen." MRI and bonescans indicated massive, agressive spread. After more chemo, she died about 4 months later.

So yes, I don't see the point of treating some cancers or stages of cancer unless maybe I'm getting rich off the insurance payments, like the greedy oncologist. We're all familiar with the People magazine stories of people who pulled the plug and climbed halfway into the coffin only to return to normal, cancer free life.

Only we're not familiar with the other 99% who suck chemo juice for maybe two years and end up dying horrible, painful, stretched-out deaths, so doped up they're hardly aware of themselves and those around them. (Mom was on a tasty cocktail of 5mg of atavan and 150 mg of morphine per day -- for comparison, I weigh 2.5 times what she weighed her last months and I got 30mg of morphine after surgery and could hardly stand, 2 mg of atavan makes me a drooling idiot).

There has to be a better way that both directs more benefits to the living (like affordable insurance premimums to cover survivable "problems" like childbirth), more dignity to the very sick (no chasing false hope!), and resources to find meaningful cures. Dumping $150k into 70 year olds with terminal cancer is cruel to them, their families and people who don't get to see a doctor for a sore throat because insurance needs to pay for terminal cases ineffective treatment.

Re:Let's see

[jeremyf]

You're absolutely right! I'm lucky in that my mom had cancer and she had a great oncologist. He told me "your mom only has a 10% chance of surviving if we treat her." So we pulled the plug! Whew, glad we saved the insurance companies thousands of bucks.

(PS I hope you burn in hell)

Re:Let's see

[shannara256]

> Convert all web pages to accessible formats,
> convert all books (ever) to audio books,
> redesign pedestrian access for the sightless...
>
> or put money into researching artificial eyes.

One of the common misconceptions is that only the disabled benefit from accessible web pages and audio books and so on. Everybody benefits from these things.

For example, people on a long road trip listen to audio books, all the time. There's a market for audio books, and it consists of more than just the blind.

Standards-compliant web pages benefit not only the blind, but also those using Lynx, and those using their PDAs, and those using their cell phones. Besides that, are you going to argue that malformed HTML is a good thing? If you're going to do something, do it right. The defination for HTML 4.0 (at least, maybe earlier versions as well, I don't know) requires that you have an alt="" tag on all images; that right there improves accessibility a great deal.

Closed captioned TV shows and movies are a blessing for those who can hear perfectly as well as for those who can't hear at all. Personally, I keep closed captioning on all the time. I have excellent hearing, but sometimes I don't hear what the actors say because they're unclear, or someone is talking to me, or there's some other noise, and I'm able to look at the TV and read what was said. I intend to keep closed captioning on if & when I have kids, because I believe it will help them learn to read sooner/faster/better.

I don't know much about designing accessible buildings, but I'm willing to bet that there are similiar general-purpose benefits there, as well. For example, elevators and motorized doors, which are designed or included for wheelchair access, are also good for (say) making it easier to move carts around. It's much easier to wheel the cart containing a few thousand dollar's worth of equipment onto an elevator than it is to get the manpower required to carry it all up and down stairs.

> There is a real problem with spending all of
> your time accomodating a problem rather than
> fixing it.

That's true, but there's a problem with that statement: it's not the same money. You can't just reallocate all or even most of the money from improving accessibility to researching artificial eyes. They're two different industries, with their own markets (like with the audio books). Different people are going to put their money into each.

Re:Let's see

[pjrc]

(this is only half-joke)

But it's fully covered in Joe's answer to the question posted by "acehole".

Convert all web pages to accessible formats, convert all books (ever) to audio books, redesign pedestrian access for the sightless...

or put money into researching artificial eyes.

Joe put it very well. You obviously missed it:

I also reject, in the strongest possible terms, the offensive and offhand claim that accessibility can be achieved "at great expense." I believe the colloquial term for a claim like this is bullshit. "Updating" or retrofitting a site for accessibility does cost more than designing it properly in the first place, but that's true everywhere: Have you costed out adding barrier-free access to an old building vs. including it in the original designs? Retrofitting may cost more, but I deny that the expense is "great." Even very extensive sites with huge swaths of multimedia can be made accessible, and it is doubtful that, given the budgets of such sites, the expense would be "great."

I honestly wonder which would be cheaper?

I honestly wonder if you read the answer to the second question, where Joe says that HTML-based sites can take care of much of the accessibility problem by simply using valid HTML with good ALT tags, and including a "skip nav links" link near the top of the page.

Even if you went crazy and did all this stuff, it's all pretty simple and easy things to do. Much of it is just good practice in HTML. Most of the "captioning" (that ordinary IE users never see) is helpful for indexing in google and other search engines, which is pretty good reason to do it anyway.

The key point is that it's not expensive. Almost every single image on every good website involves quite a bit of work, at least croping and scaling. Many times a thumbnail is created and a link made to the larger image, or a dedicated page with the larger image. Fancy drop shadowing and other effects are commonly added, as are rounded corners. Considerable work goes of course goes into creating the image in the first place, wether that's composing it or taking a photo (posing the subject, lighting, transfering from the digital camera or negative, etc).

The effort (and expense) of an ALT tag is so very minor compared to the effort/expense that went into the original preparation of the image and its placement within the site.

Likewise, adding a "skip nav" link into the nav bar is a rather trivial task compared to the design of the nav bar itself. Many sites are built from a template (like mine). All you need to do is add it into the template. Yes, that does take some small amount of work, which is more than doing nothing, but compared to all the work that went into the nav bar, it's really very minor. Sites that don't update from a template STILL go to all the trouble of having navigation links. They're doing it _somehow_, and adding just more more tiny link, that's the same on every page and never even "breaks" because it always points within the same page is really just a very tiny increase.

It's really not hard. I did it to my site today after reading Joe's responses. I probably spent about 20 minutes on it, mostly updating some test pages before updating the live site. Now, I'll admit that I haven't updated the home page and some special pages yet... but the vast majority of pages that are built from the template were very easily updated. Also, I should admit that I checked a several sites and nearly all are using the approach of a small invisible GIF with "skip navigational links" as the ALT text (contrary to Joe's suggestion)... so I went with the established practice used on lots of other major sites that are targeted at people with disabilities.

Nearly all my images (about 630 unique files on pjrc.com) have ALT text already, as that's just a normal part of good HTML practice.

It's really very cheap and easy. I can afford it. I spent no money, 20 minutes on the "skip nav" link, and I just type an ALT tag for every image (which is less work than even the simplest image processing). It costs a LOT less than research to develop artificial organs!

Re:Let's see

[Malcontent]

"or put money into researching artificial eyes"

To paraphrase Chris Rock.

Patient: "Doctor I can't see"
Doctor: "I can't do anything for you, here take this dog"
Patient: "WTF? There are people who can see that can't take of a dog!"

It's a much longer and much funnier joke but that's the gist of it.

Re:Let's see

[jejones]

I agree with you in principle, though whoever eventually succeeds will find themselves accused of "cultural genocide"; vide the reactions to cochlear implants.

Re:Let's see

[gmhowell]

Probably not. The 'blind community' is much more accepting of this research than the 'deaf community' was of cochlear research. The two groups are way, way different.

Re:Let's see

[gmhowell]

One of the problems with books on tape vs. other methods is somewhat addressed in my question: WTF do deaf-blind people do?

There's another, related issue that isn't addressed: literature and its acceptance as an art form is dying amongst blind people. The brain processes information differently when heard vs when it is read, either by Braille or by sight. The 10% figure he cites is accurate, and a bad sign.

Now, combine audio book with a speech-to-text with a text-to-Braille converter, and you're getting somewhere.

Re:Let's see

[gmhowell]

Oh, yes, the greedy doctors. You really have no idea about the realities of practicing medicine in the US, do you? Nine out of ten (or more) families would go ape shit if told they couldn't do anything. You and yours are the tenth person. If the patient hasn't seen it, it's very possible they'll fight to the last, and beg, borrow, or steal for an extra day, no matter how shitty. The doctor who refuses this or counsels against it may, at best, get a malpractice suit. At worst, he gets investigated by the state, loses his license, and goes to jail.

You said it yourself. The doctor said: "it [chemo] is of some value." Did you ask him what 'some' meant?

Don't accuse me of not being empathetic. Aunt died of intestinal cancer, one of lung cancer, and two or three others of various cancers. It's an awful, shitty way to go. But I have the luxury of having seen it from both the side of the patient and the side of the physician.

Most people want hope, even the faintest, slightest glimmer. There's also strong evidence that an encouraging word from a doctor or nurse improves patient outcomes. Hopefully, that is what the oncologist was guilty of. I've met some right nasty bastard doctors. But I have yet to meet one who would prolong someone's suffering just for a few bucks.

Re:Let's see

[swb]

Whether the docor was providing "hope" or sound medicine, I don't doubt that covering his ass was a major factor in his decision.

The biggest problem is that medicine generally is much more of a zero-sum financial game than people realize, and spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on very old people with very complex health problems *and* terminal illnesses actually denies care to a lot of people.

It raises insurance premiums, which eliminates insurance has an option for many employers and classes of employees. It forces insurers to limit the access and types of care available. This latter issue is a big problem, because in many cases inferior medical care of the young leads to expensive complicated care for them whtn they're not so young, which only aggrevates the cost component.

I guess to some this all leads down the road to mercy killings and care denied based on diagnoses or age limits or something else out of a bad future movie, but at some point we really do have to ask ourselves about the costs and the benefits in medecine, as well as adjusting our attitude towards life and dying.

As long as "another day at any cost" remains a valid an acceptable mindset, we're in trouble.

He's the Yin to Shatner's Yang

[Ignorant Aardvark]

Well, I do believe the average response length has been average out between the latest two interviews to a reasonable average. First, we have Shatner, who replies succintly in few words. And then we have Clark, who spends a lot more time in crafting his answers. It's the difference between night and day.

Kudos to the Slashdot editors for not modifying the XHTML format. It would've insulted Clark, who spent time getting it set up this way, and we probably would've ended up with a lot of mispelled words anyway.

Re:He's the Yin to Shatner's Yang

[Twirlip of the Mists]

Please don't talk about Shatner's yang.

"Whatever"

[Anonymous Coward]

It's good to see slashdot likes standards... I don't know if there will be one day a valid html version of this site.
Just as a reminder current w3c recommandation is XHTML 1.1.
The markup for the main page is html 3.2 and is NOT valid!

Re:that's hypocrite

[Anonymous Coward]

somebody mod the parent up!!!!

spelling and grammar

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, what good spelling and grammar.

I must say that this is a departure from Slashdot's usual style.

If you people admit having the problem, but deny it's a problem, you are ALCOHOLICS!

Begging the question

[wytcld]

Most of the modded-up responses so far are disrespectful. Certainly some sites should try to be accessible to various sorts of people with different assortments of sensory function. We have here some generous advice on how to do that.

So what's the dissing about? Maybe it has to do with my own reaction to the general notion that all the Web should be accessible to the disabled. Should we ruin the design of a site for 99 visitors just to make it more appealing to 1? Should ski resorts have to provide wheelchair accessible slopes? With the majority of our media currently focused on services for the mentally disabled, how much farther should we go? Is the ideal to produce a world in which everyone is equally crippled - or may as well be?

Those question aren't at issue here. We should be discussing how to make sites which desire to be accessible work. Right?

Re:Begging the question

[Hektor_Troy]

wytcld (179112) wrote:

We should be discussing how to make sites which desire to be accessiblework. Right?

Joe Clark wrote:

Seriously, if you've got an ordinary HTML Web page and you make absolutely all your images accessible - including, crucially, adding alt=""to every spacer GIF and every other meaningless graphic - you're four-fifths of the way to being an accessible Web site for the group with the greatest single need, the blind and visually-impaired.

Maybe we should be discussing reading the articles before commenting them. Just a thought.

Re:Begging the question

[hopews]

Just thought you should know that most ski resorts are accessible to handicapped skiers. There are blind skier programs and many people ski with specially designed skiing devices.

His document isn't valid XHTML

[Anonymous Coward]

Line 393 [of his document - the one embedded in the Slashdot article] has a malformed element. (XHTML tags & attributes are supposed to be lower-case.)

Nice try, Mr. Smarty-pants!

Re:His document isn't valid XHTML

[albionsoft]

XHTML tags & attributes are supposed to be lower-case

Which is one of the best reasons for not being 100% XHTML compliant. Lots of us would rather use upper case tags - it simply makes the code easier to read. But, no, we have to standardise on something that makes no difference at all to the functionality, just so that someone else's prefered coding style can be enforced on us.

Next they'll be specifying the size of the tab stops.

All very interesting

[sielwolf]

The main problem with enforcing standards on the web is twofold. First, the web is very ad hoc. It isn't like television or telephone which is regulated by the government and maintained by singular utilities. Also it is inherently multimedia which means you can get some far out web designs that, although interesting in an art-installation sort of way, are in no ways easy to use.

Second is that the web is considered a secondary or tertiary source of information at best. I mean unless you are using it for periodicals or the like, the web is a lot of free-floating crap and ego-stroking. We all know that web access is a privelige and broadband is outright rare (beyond the geek-centric). Outside of Amazon and a few others, what companies actually do a bulk (or even a significant minority... say 10%) of their business online?

Of course some other natures of the Web make it perfect for the disabled: it is pull-media and electronic information that can be parsed (unlike say reading a newspaper or getting info at a mall kiosk).

But until internet access is as common as asphalt roads (which don't exist on probably 50% of inhabited areas) making demands of this fledgling tech is a bit much. Now should demands be made? Definitely. But can you expect reasonable results? Probably not.

Personally I'd rather see the government spend money on stemming the tide of AIDS and easily curable diseases in the 3rd world instead of worrying if memepool.com is standards compliant.

Re:All very interesting

[dvdeug]

the web is considered a secondary or tertiary source of information at best.

Not for a lot of things. A lot of people, especially in rural/sparsely populated areas, buy stuff through Amazon and like; it's both cheaper and easier than driving down to the city. It's a first source of information for most of us without an encyclopedia. Especially for the blind, the web can be a primary source of information; do you want to get someone to dig through a library's shelves for you for that obscure piece of information, or would you rather hit the web and have your screen reader read to you?

internet access is as common as asphalt roads (which don't exist on probably 50% of inhabited areas) making demands of this fledgling tech

"fledgling tech"? I see too many commericals on TV about Earthlink and .COM! (Yahoo commericals?) and various internet services to believe fledgling. And who doesn't have Internet access? Most people have a library nearby with internet terminals - I know Podunk (I mean, Alva), Oklahoma, with a population of 4300 does.

Yes, asphalt roads don't run up to McMurdo Base in Antartica. But Alva has them and so does every other small town I've seen. Maybe the 1% that live in the middle of nowwhere don't have asphalt roads, but those of us with electricity and running water have asphalt roads.

Personally I'd rather see the government spend money on stemming the tide of AIDS and easily curable diseases in the 3rd world instead of worrying if memepool.com is standards compliant.

Think of the children, eh? They aren't mutually exclusive, and memepool.com isn't a site that the government would worry about; it's commerical accommidation, not Joe Blow's website.

Re:Ah...

[Anonymous Coward]

Nuh-uh! Dagbladet! VG! Fædrelandsvennen! Farsunds Avis! Heck, even Dagens Næringsliv beats Aftenposten. Who uses the word aften anyway?

html inside html? allowed?

[Anonymous Coward]

"We left Joe's formatting intact"

To the extent that a whole html document complete with

" <!DOCTYPE><html><head></head><body> "
and " </body></html> "

is slap bang in the middle of this one. Thank heavens my browser doesn't take any notice!

meta-information

[dallen]

Take a look at the source. There are a few things that intrigue me, and some that seem annoying.

He uses lots of "title" attributes in his links, which, in my browser (Mozilla 1.1), can only be read if I mouse over each and every link; I can't tab to them and see the meta information. Some of them seem pretty useful context info, unfortunately..

There's the "abbr" markup, such as: <abbr title="(audio) description">DX</abbr> which gets underlined in Mozilla, which is a neat tag I didn't know about, but also requires mousing over it and waiting a second for the meta info.

For some reason, punctuation characters are apparently turned into Unicode HTML elements, such as &#8217 for single-quote. I'd love to know why that's good standards.

Re:meta-information

[503]

For some reason, punctuation characters are apparently turned into Unicode HTML elements, such as &#8217 for single-quote. I'd love to know why that's good standards.

The standard single and double quote characters are actually prime and double prime characters. They're used for linear measurements such as feet and inches or angular measurements such as minutes and seconds. The Unicode characters Joe used are "real" quotations marks. Some old typewriters and type setting machines had separate keys for all these characters, but to reduce key-count they were overloaded onto the prime and double prime keys. (Some "hyper-efficient" keyboards went as far as overloading the zero and o.)

Web standards and accessibilty rely on proper semantic structure. Real punctuation marks are semantically different from the "fake" version. When a screen-reader runs across a "normal" quotation mark, should it read it as an inch sign or a quoatation mark? When Unicode characters are used, there is no confusion.

The better solution for quoted matterial would be to use the <q> tag. The user agent is supposed to add the apropriate quotation mark (depending on nesting and language). For example, French quotes would be delimited by guillemets; English nested quotes would switch between double and single quotation marks.

Cognitive Disorders

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess I don't see how one can accommodate (indeed, I'm not sure I can see how one can disaccommodate) someone with schizophrenia. So perhaps the best thing is to ask what disabilities can really be accommodated.

I don't mind making my content accessible as far as the requirements of accessibility do not change the content itself (do not limit the content from doing what it is trying to do). But some of the cognitive disabilities discussed could only be accommodated by actually limiting the value of my content itself.

Some of my content will be very difficult for someone with dyslexia. That's the nature of the content and the disorder, and though I may sympathize, there's only so far I can manage to extend my content to that audience.

offtopic, for just a sec...

[spazoid12]

"but variety is the spice of Slashdot"

that is pretty funny.

riiiight...

[jonr]

"..variety is the spice of Slashdot."
Yeah right!

Re:riiiight...

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah, you get to choose what your favorite OS is.

As long as it's either OS X or Linux

I just have one question

[hardave]

This will probablly burn Karma, but oh well.

Joe Who??

For the moderators, this isn't a troll, it's just bad Canadian political humour, and I suppose I can understand you getting the two confused. Google for Joe Clark.

Re:I just have one question

[c13v3rm0nk3y]

Curses! I was going to make that clever post!

Mod the top post up. It's funny. Laugh!

Re:I just have one question

[MrResistor]

How exactly is one Progressive and Conservative at the same time? Is that the joke?

Parking Spaces

[cbowland]

My question is why should I have to look at ugly websites just so that the handi-scrappers that might happen by can waste their time as well? They already get all of the good parking spaces, must we give them a leg up on the web as well?

Re:Parking Spaces

[Photon Ghoul]

That's not even in the least bit funny. How about I come over, chop off your legs, gouge out your eyes and destroy your eardrums, then we can talk?

Re:Parking Spaces

[cbowland]

Wow - that's a lot of hostility for a Monday.

Although, you kinda illustrate my point. If I accepted your offer (not likely!) I think I would need to go to a hospital for treatment and file a police report - neither of which I can do online!

In an ironic twist, using your +1 bonus makes my lame attempt at humor more visible.

Re:Parking Spaces

[Photon Ghoul]

The hostility wasn't real. I was simply trying to get a point across - that poor attempts at humor at the expense of others misfortune is disgusting and there would be a very sweet irony out of people making that sort of humor experiencing the misfortune themselves. (No, I don't think anything is necessarily sacred when it comes to humor, either.)

I used my +1 and didn't post anonymously because I am not a coward and don't mind taking the moderating down.

Re:Parking Spaces

[ShavenYak]

How about I come over, chop off your legs, gouge out your eyes and destroy your eardrums, then we can talk?

Umm, how can you talk if you've destroyed his eardrums?

Re:Parking Spaces

[JebusIsLord]

I don't know, some funny things are insulting, but in this case he's just insulting because he thinks its funny.

Re:Parking Spaces

[sparrow_hawk]

Ehrm... you didn't read the article, did you?

In it, he specifically condemns people (both pro and con accessibility) who think that "making your site available to the disabled" == "making your site ugly and text-only".


This, of course, leads me to my perennial complaint about the Web Accessibility Initiative and accessibility advocates generally: They've got no style. They have no understanding of graphic design and typography, and they project this ignorance onto the rest of the world.

To use one of my maxims, accessibility opponents think accessibility means a text-only Web site and hate the idea, while accessibility advocates also think it means a text-only site and love the idea. They're both wrong.


Jeez, people.

OMG: Visit his website!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Click on the link to his website, and check out the cover of his book.

Inspired by Goatse!

IHBT?

[wiredog]

Maybe. Anyway, look up the Americans with Disabilities Act. (ADA)

How about allowing more formatting?

[tiltowait]

I had the same problem with CSS being stripped from a story I submitted. Yes there can be lameness-filter problems with allowing CSS, but the more Taco tightens his grip...

Re:How about allowing more formatting?

[kevinvee]

but the more Taco tightens his grip...
The sooner he'll go blind?

Re:How about allowing more formatting?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope, the sooner the orig. poster whines somemore(NOTE: The orig. poster is probably also the one to worry 'bout blindness.)

Re:How about allowing more formatting?

[Slurm-V]

Hence the need for improved accessibility.

Use your own advice

[Anonymous Coward]

It'd be a more productive use of your time than trying to change everyone who is satisfied with what Slashdot has evolved into.

And it'd be a more productive use of your time to not try to change everyone who isn't satisfied with what Slashdot has evolved into.

Re:Use your own advice

[runderwo]

And it'd be a more productive use of your time to not try to change everyone who isn't satisfied with what Slashdot has evolved into.

Sorry, but it's a matter of the signal to noise ratio. If you go to alt.microsoft and start yelling about how everyone who posts on alt.microsoft sucks and how the newsgroup is completely useless, at the very least you're going to get killfiled, and possibly blocked from posting by your ISP. This is because alt.microsoft was created for disseminating relevant information and for on-topic discussion, not to hear the mindless rambling of trolls who had nothing better to do.

Just because Slashdot uses moderation instead of outright censorship doesn't mean that anti-Slashdot trolling is somehow useful to people who read Slashdot for content and on-topic discussion. In fact, it's a mind-numbing distraction, and my appeal for the idiocy to stop still stands.

Re:Use your own advice

[stratjakt]

Ah, but that wasn't what I was talking about, was I?

Perfectly on-topic and factual posts are modded down, if they don't fit the readers mindset. Completely infactual, outright lies and trolls are modded up if they're pro-linux.

All those "I'm an admin of over 6 zillion terminals and I converted to RedHat thursday" bullshit posts in particular bother me. It bothers me as a reader, as people are trying to shove complete horseshit down my throat, and it bothers me as someone who uses Linux, because I know broken promises and false claims have only hurt it.

*MY* appeal for that idiocy still stands. And I'll point out to others as oft as I feel appropriate, that the information and discussion they are hearing is from an overwhelmingly biased, cult-like following, who definately arent above stretching the truth to make a point.

There is no variety, there is only 1 side to every story here.

And that's fine and good for alt.microsoft, but so long as /. calls itself a news site, it's pathetic and wrong. I remember when it was an actual news site, and not Linus' personal cheering section.

Re:Use your own advice

[runderwo]

Perfectly on-topic and factual posts are modded down, if they don't fit the readers mindset. Completely infactual, outright lies and trolls are modded up if they're pro- linux.

You can be cynical all you want, but you'll have to point out said posts if you really want to make your point, instead of generalizing about it. When you generalize, at worst it makes you look like you're trolling, and at best it serves no useful purpose towards the end you would like to meet (a less biased Slashdot, I presume).

And I'll point out to others as oft as I feel appropriate, that the information and discussion they are hearing is from an overwhelmingly biased, cult-like following, who definately arent above stretching the truth to make a point.

I'm just not seeing the "overwhelming" bias part. For example, USA Today is a liberally slanted piece of news; it gets slammed left and right for that. But from its own readership? Hardly. Its readers read it because they know its reporters share their interests. If someone reads USA Today and doesn't like their slant (while being unable to refute them on a factual basis), they can go read The Washington Post. Why bother disrupting the flow of discussion on a site that doesn't share your ideals?

I remember when it was an actual news site, and not Linus' personal cheering section.

Shrug, to me it's still a news site; just because it covers news you'd prefer not to hear doesn't mean that it is without merit. I'm personally glad Unix and open source have a site where they can get coverage that is accessible to the "average Joe" net junkie. Yes, they might be a corporate mouthpiece for VA Software, but who honestly gives a fuck? The media is the media. If you trust the media in any form, you're doomed.

Re:Use your own advice

[vsprintf]

Completely infactual, outright lies and trolls are modded up if they're pro-linux.

infactual - You just made that up, right?

Which Slashdot have you been reading? Every anti-MS-bashing comment gets modded up. I'm beginning to think Bill is paying the boys and girls in Redmond overtime to patronize Slashdot.

Re:Use your own advice

[Anonymous Coward]

Limiting "speech" is censorship (not to be confused with government censorship of course). And /. does that. Explicitly. They limit posts per day on accounts. ACs get 10. The typical account supposedly gets 20 (from what I hear). Pay for the service, you get more (again, from what I hear, and the source is quite good, being from an editor).

Ironicly, there was some whining going on earlier about how MS and large corps nearly pay for Senator seats by using campaign donations and the outrage that, shucks, suddenly a donator may expect the Senator to listen more to them with greater preference.

How odd that the very forum pointing this out and slamming it uses just such a tactic.

Re:Use your own advice

[Natalie's Hot Grits]

"but you'll have to point out said posts if you really want to make your point, instead of generalizing about it"

If you don't agree with his premise about slashdot moderation, you probably don't know what you are talking about. If you don't read slashdot enough to be able to recall the posts he speaks of, then you are not informed/qualified enough on this topic to have this discussion listing all these (arguably obviouls) truisms.

If, on the other hand, you don't agree his argument is valid, say so. Don't go off putting words into his mouth about generalizing. When someone posts something that is factual, and you don't agree with it, that is not the definition of "invalid" or "generalization".

While uninformed and unsound arguments such as yours might seem right to people that don't know any better, they still degrade the quality of the world.

Re:Use your own advice

[runderwo]

If you don't read slashdot enough to be able to recall the posts he speaks of, then you are not informed/qualified enough on this topic to have this discussion listing all these (arguably obviouls) truisms.

Um, or maybe the posts don't exist? This is why citations are important whenever you're going to make an argument and expect to be taken seriously.

Sure, it's MY fault that I can't prove his argument...

When someone posts something that is factual, and you don't agree with it, that is not the definition of "invalid" or "generalization".

When someone makes sweeping claims of any sort, that is the book definition of generalization. Generalization is almost completely useless as an argumentation technique because it requires the vast majority of evidence to be clearly in favor of the argument, in order for holes not to be found. But if the vast majority of evidence is already in favor of the argument, there is rarely anything to argue about!

In effect, the original post was a baseless generalization, and none of the replies did anything to defend it whatsoever. If someone wishes to make an argument, they must provide evidence beyond appealing for the reader to accept it at face value. Otherwise, it is NOISE.

Re:You should have removed the tag!

[Anonymous Coward]

OMG! Another new low for Slashdot!

ROTFLMAO!

Harder than you think

[Second_Derivative]

There have been great strides in artificial eye technology: I think Slashdot even posted a link to a rudimentary artificial eye prototype already: the person with these artificial eyes percieves sight as flashes around the outlines of objects. It's amazing stuff and it's certainly an area of active research.

The main problem though is interfacing with the brain, and that's not an easy nut to crack. In particular, there is pretty much no hope at all for someone who is blind from birth; such people have a stunted visual cortex so even if they were given eagle eye artificial optics, it would be useless as their brains would be incapable of processing the information, so they wouldn't even understand the _concept_ of vision. I'd link to the story if I could find it, but suffice it to say it'll be quite some time before all forms of blindness can be eradicated.

And on the topic of vision concept, here's an idle thought: imagine if everything red looked green to you, everything green looked blue and everything blue looked red. How would you know that your perception of a given colour wasn't the same as someone else's? (answer: you can't. Think about it. Maybe this explains why some people have totally screwed up senses of aesthetics. Or in fact you could extend it further; how do you know that other people even 'see' the same way as you do? A few very rare people can see four primary colours. Imagine what THAT would feel like. But I've gone even further off topic now than I was originally...)

Re:Harder than you think

[dead sun]

Well, assuming we can get the people who are blind but once had vision to see again, what would stop us from giving these artificial eyes to the blind at birth? The brain would get visual information from the start (I don't think you build too much vision in the womb, could be wrong) and thus the areas of the brain responsible for vision would not underdeveloped. This, of course, offers no hope to those born blind before we can do this. Still, once the procedure is down for how to interface the things it should be possible. I would guess that inplants on infants would be tricky, since they can't give you meaningful feedback. However, there's no reason that brain activity couldn't be scanned to see that the hookup went well.

As for the idle thought, I fail to see how it matters in the least to those who would be given vision. In the case of those who are getting vision restored I'm sure some form of calibration must take place in order to get the colors right. For those who would be given vision who had never yet seen, they would learn what color is what for the first time, and would be just like anybody else. It is an interesting concept that I think many have pondered though. Luckily we're now advanced enough to state that light of a certain wavelength is a certain color, all that's up to debate is any given person's perception of it, which, I assume, would be slightly harder than trivial to calibrate through artificial eyes.

Re:Harder than you think

[pogen]

Well, assuming we can get the people who are blind but once had vision to see again, what would stop us from giving these artificial eyes to the blind at birth?

Hmmm... Well, newborns don't exactly pop out and tell you that they're blind. I'm not sure how easy it is to diagnose all forms of blindness when they're that young -- even healthy newborns can't see very well at first.

But more importantly, who's going to pay for it? In a world where so many people lack even basic medical coverage, I don't think this is a realistic solution. This sounds like it would be a very, very expensive procedure... And whatever the costs and limitations of improving accessibility, at least the benefits can be reaped more or less equally by all (i.e., not just those who are rich).

Then there is the fact that artificial eyes do not give you perfect or even average vision, and possibly never will. Even if you could magically provide working artificial eyes to all of the blind in the world, they will still need accessibility accomodations in order to be able to function with what will always be an inferior substitute for normal human vision.

Finally, even if artificial eyes could someday provide perfect vision, it would take a great deal of time to get there. Meanwhile, how many generations of blind people will be born, live out their lives, and die?

So no, I don't think that diverting attention and/or funds away from accessibility is a good idea.

But as long as we're talking about it, I might turn the tables and suggest that some of the money being used to research artificial eyes would be better spent on prevention of toxoplasmosis and other afflictions that cause many of these people to be born blind in the first place.

Re:Harder than you think

[dead sun]

I think you take my statements wrong, and that's probably my fault. I'm not suggesting that we take away all the funding for improving blind people's lives. I just think that it is a loftier goal to try to give vision rather than merely give people a way to cope without it. By no means am I suggesting we don't accomodate those without vision.

I'm sure there are probably a bunch of kinks that would need to be addressed in order to diagnose anybody as blind or not at birth. I'm certainly no eye doctor, but I'd hope there would be some way to check if a child had no response to visual stimuli. If there's some reaction then I would think that there would be some development in the brain geared towards vision. Again, I could be wrong on that, but it sounds right to me.

But more importantly, who's going to pay for it? In a world where so many people lack even basic medical coverage, I don't think this is a realistic solution. This sounds like it would be a very, very expensive procedure... And whatever the costs and limitations of improving accessibility, at least the benefits can be reaped more or less equally by all (i.e., not just those who are rich).

Well, I think you probably hit it on the head as to who's going to be covering at least the research costs. My guess is that the rich with blind children, or the rich who had some accident will be the first to reap the benefit of said technology. While it certainly isn't the best basis of forming a line, one would hope that the technology could become affordable enough to be a procedure which is routinely done. If the artificial eyes are even close to average vision then I'm sure it could take a large chunk of future costs away as well, not to mention grant some form of sight. As such perhaps benevolent governments, wealthy individuals, or another third party might help subsidize the costs. I don't know how much time, effort, or money goes into teaching the blind to function in society, but I'm guessing it is fairly large. I would imagine that niceties like seeing eye dogs and the like are expensive as well, not to mention require special training. These are areas that would be lessened in cost or eliminated with artificial eyes. Plus people who have lost their vision wouldn't have such shock when being placed in society, and with enough evolution of the technology, could probably keep their normal jobs.

I have no doubt that it will take a long time to get to the point where we can replace people's vision. I have no doubt that at least a couple generations of the blind will come and go before the technology is near perfect. But let me stress again that I don't think we should make these people's lives worse while we're working on it. I do think, however, and it is likely the case with most things, that pouring too much money in one area does nothing. If more money is made available for the advancement of the blind then perhaps it wouldn't hurt to try to take this avenue.

To bring the whole thing back on topic I think it's great that standards are emerging that will allow better access to the disabled online. Just reading the interview I've been thinking of little changes I can make to my own personal site that would be for the better. Like alt tags, those would be easy.

Lastly, maybe some money from artificial eye research should be put into preventative measures. Things like toxoplasmosis seem to be relatively easy to avoid if you're aware they exist, I'm not sure exactly what else causes blindness at birth though. Perhaps it would be best to encourage family doctors to discuss these things if they're preventable. That solution doesn't help people blinded later in life though. I think the more routes that are being worked on the better. I'd rather see poorly than not at all, though for those who can't see I think we should do what we can to help them out.

YOU LOOSE! (was: Re:LOL)

[haedesch]

If you do not understand the basics of web design (which every 14 year old knows these days) then you really shouldn't comment on it.

XHTML is NOT formatting. HTML shouldn't be formatting either. You create a structure with HTML, you make it up with CSS.

viva la slashshit

[Anonymous Coward]

Way to go slashshit for supporting flash, and javashit.

should be limits on accessibility

[Anonymous Coward]

This is just going too far. I'm all for making web pages accessible to all those who have the cognitive ability to read them. Adding jumps over navigation bars are fine, because intelligent blind people can still read my content.

But asking me to put an illustration on every web page is outrageous. I'm not saying I'm some brilliant dude or that my web site has anything intelligent to say, but let's take the examples of Mensa, the New England Journal of Medicine, FAQ lists, and RFCs.

Are they supposed to dumb down their content? Put little cartoonish pictures on every page that explains to even the most learning disabled (AKA cognitively limited) people everything they have to say? That is taking it too far. If 100% of the public is mentally incapable of reading a work, it still may be a very good and important writing.

Should we add little cartoons to all editions of Shakespeare? I think not.

Taken to extreme, every web page would say either "Goo goo ga ga," or "Ga ga goo goo," depending on the author's mood. This is not a future I want to see.

Re:You should have removed the tag!

[wsapplegate]

> but you guys should at least have removed the [...] tags from his document. It is extremely bad form to insert a whole html document inside another one.

Huuuuhhh... You're talking about Slashdot, the website for standards-loving geeks and nerds who doesn't even validate (and note that they've forbidden entry to validator.w3.org to hide the fact). In comparison, another site where I dwell, LinuxFR; not only validates but doesn't use old-fashioned table-based layouts, ditched in favor of more modern and user-customisable floating layers. To this day, I'm still ashamed at the sheer number of sites (even Linux/OSS/Free Software ones) that don't even do the minimum to be good netizens : provide an error-free site with a DOCTYPE that triggers standards-compliance mode in browsers. I shouldn't maybe draw conclusions too fast (some of these sites could still use non-standards-compliant middleware like ad banners generators and the like. I believe I remember Wired's Douglas Bowman said this were the major cause hampering efforts towards compliance) but I think the main problem lies with the laziness and the usual if it works with IE, it works nearly everywhere state of mind. And you can throw all the blows and whistles you want into your new shiny standards to attract followers, you cannot overcome laziness... *sigh*

ARRRRGGGGHHHH!

[0x0d0a]

as long as you don't care about the little things (like font size, positioning, etc.) across multiple browsers

No *kidding*. The *point* of HTML is that the author should *not* care or try to force a font size on the end user -- the end user should be free to choose whatever's most convenient for them.

Unfortunately, the market got flooded with "web designers" who came straight from print magazines or got all their ideas from print magazines.

Re:ARRRRGGGGHHHH!

[pacc]

The *point* of HTML is that the author should *not* care or try to force a font size on the end user

I agree, and since the end-user is slashdot they should have made some effort in getting a CSS stylesheet since that's the part that is their job.

Re:ARRRRGGGGHHHH!

[zerocool^]

No *kidding*. The *point* of HTML is that the author should *not* care or try to force a font size on the end user -- the end user should be free to choose whatever's most convenient for them.

Unfortunately, the market got flooded with "web designers" who came straight from print magazines or got all their ideas from print magazines.

Hi-Ho, a trolling we go, eh?

Look, I'll make this very simple. Plain text webpages are ugly. XHTML compatable pages are ugly. HTML 1.1 compatable pages are ugly. Leaving the border around your image link is ugly. Not using tables is ugly.

Why do you think people hire webdesigners? Because they know how to create an eye catching site. Why do you think magazines look like they look? Because, through trial and error, they have found what works.

People want webpages to seem alive. People want an interactive web. This is something that's a foreign concept to most linux users: You are all used to seeing pages like CGIwrap's webpage that is an assault to the eyes at the expense of being compatable with all browsers including lynx and mosaic. Or, you might get as advanced as the apache webpage which is not as much an assault on the senses, but is still boring.

I don't care what this loser says, he needs to get out of the ninteys and give people what they want. It's all about target marketing. Linux geeks are content to see pages like the cgi-wrap page. HOWEVER, normal people are impressed by things that move, things that make noise, things that interact. You're suggesting we should give people a bycicle because it'll get them from a to b and it's easy to use. But there will always be a market for flashy sport compacts, and if you ignore these people in favor of backwards compatability, you're going to alienate a good section of the population.

Take a look, for example, at the 2 Advanced Studios webpage. Tell me you've seen a cooler webpage, and I'll tell you you're lying. Or, take a look at some of the work they've done.

Making a good looking, interactive page, with javascript menus, flash animations, etc, means "I have taken an interest in my work, and I care what it looks like". Some of you may have seen his XHTML bullshit at the top of this page and thought, "Oh, wow, this guy is great. This page is so readable, and so well organized." But, what most of the rest of us that live in reality said was "Jesus, that's aweful. It looks like he made it with an old copy of Frontpage 98 that was included with his windows 98 install". It looks aweful.

For example, this guy is claiming that flash intros suck. Some of them do, but done right, it definately adds to the "wow" factor of the website. And the "wow" factor makes you money, or gets you accolades, not the "this will work in every browser ever, including my cell phone and my command line" factor.

Get with the times. There are graphic designs artists and webpage designers for a reason. The reason is because they know how to make a page look better than you do.

This guy's just a douche that's to stupid to smell the change and know he's obsolete. People like him are the reason it's ok to have a website that looks like shit, and I say I've had enough.

~Will

Re:ARRRRGGGGHHHH!

[Anonymous Coward]

you sir, fuck Will Dunn Goats.

Re:ARRRRGGGGHHHH!

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm, a web page that requires a Pentium II, very good! Web design isn't all about pretties, it's about delivering information. The scope for 'eye-catching' design is 'style' and this becomes far easier with style sheets and semantic HTML. Anything less is just an unmanageble, inaccessible, incoherent blob of eye-candy.

I would not class 2Advanced as good web design. It's right up there with other arty stuff, but Web/Graphic Design it ain't.

Re:ARRRRGGGGHHHH!

[Anonymous Coward]

Tell me you've seen a cooler webpage

No, no, it was very cool. Especially the clouds zooming over... something. However, I *HAVE* seen:

more attractive websites
more navigable websites
more readable websites

What we're looking at there is graphic design, or possibly multimedia design. It's not web design, and it's sure as all hell not accessible. Put it in a high resolution, and it's pretty damn hard to even read. I still don't know what that site was all about... I marvelled at the flashy lights, realised I couldn't see the point, and left. I'll never see it again. Is that really successful?

Re:ARRRRGGGGHHHH!

[0x0d0a]

Plain text webpages are ugly.

You may have your client set up to render them in an ugly manner -- if you like the soft gray on a dark blue with techish fonts of the site you linked to, you can certainly tell your browser to do that.

XHTML compatable pages are ugly.

That is simply inane. XHTML is not particularly far from HTML. If your entire body of knowledge about XHTML comes from the above article, you're probably under a few misconceptions -- the guy used XHTML as it *should* (and HTML *should*) be used. You can covert Flashy Website Foo to XHTML easily.

HTML 1.1 compatable pages are ugly.

HTML is very heavily designed around being backwards compatible. So if your pages don't work with an HTML 1.1 browser, it's quite probable that you're doing something that doesn't fit with the *current* spec.

Leaving the border around your image link is ugly.

Actually, it's simply removing a source of information from the user -- one that they could remove themselves if they wanted to.

Not using tables is ugly.

Tables as tables are fine -- the problem is that very, very few tables on most GUI-tool-designed-websites are actually tables of data.

Why do you think people hire webdesigners?

Because they know they "need a website", want to market their company more, and don't have a clue what to do from there.

Because they know how to create an eye catching site.

For an artsy-type site, this might be reasonable. For most sites, though, I'm not randomly browsing the Web with the sole criteria of whether I look at a site being how "cool" it looks. It certainly doesn't drive me to come back to see what the webmaster has been doing to the site. Usually I'm looking for something -- news, when Daylight Savings Time starts, how many DIMMs a motherboard can take, whether my library has a given book.

When I go to fordvehicles.com, I'm not looking for a random "interactive movie" -- I want to know where I can find a dealership. I want to know what features are on this year's models. I'm not saying to myself "Hmm...where can I find a moving interface laden with lots of little movie transitions...oh, I know! I'll try fordvehicles.com...and while I'm there, if I like it enough, maybe I'll buy a car!"

Why do you think magazines look like they look?

It depends on the magazine. Look at, say, Forbes. You won't see goth text, purple backdrops, or pseudo-metal rims on the page edges.

Also, magazines are a "push" medium. My subscription comes to me, and I get it. I'm usually not looking for a particular piece of information, nor am I usually in a rush to get that data -- I'm reading in the bathroom or while waiting for my lunch to arrive.

Websites are a "pull" medium. I'm looking for data, and the more screwing around I have to do with some moving, jiggling, unusual interface, the harder it is for me to get what I'm looking for.

People want webpages to seem alive.

Perhaps you do. I can live without my text organically pulsing.

People want an interactive web.

Sure, there are times when interactivity can be handy. Slashdot lets me click "select all" to mark messages for deletion, for example. There are also times when it's entirely pointless and irritating, like menus that popup unbidden when I simply pass the mouse over them.

You are all used to seeing pages like CGIwrap's webpage [cgiwrap.com] that is an assault to the eyes at the expense of being compatable with all browsers including lynx and mosaic.

Actually, I find this website to be rather clean and easy to navigate.

Or, you might get as advanced as the apache webpage [apache.org] which is not as much an assault on the senses, but is still boring.

Still pretty decent.

I don't care what this loser says,

Oh.

he needs to get out of the ninteys and give people what they want.

I'm you on the "what they want" bit, though I suspect that "what they want" may be a bit different.

It's all about target marketing.

Um...all right.

Linux geeks are content to see pages like the cgi-wrap page.

Yup.

HOWEVER, normal people are impressed by things that move, things that make noise, things that interact.

"Normal people" are two year olds? Sure, there was some novelty when Flash first came out, but the model that was being proposed in the early days of web design (that people would "keep coming back to your site to see your improvements") simply didn't pan out. Content is what draws people and builds a lasting interest. Cheap novelty just gets in the way after people got familiar with the Web.

You're suggesting we should give people a bycicle because it'll get them from a to b and it's easy to use. But there will always be a market for flashy sport compacts, and if you ignore these people in favor of backwards compatability, you're going to alienate a good section of the population.

Bit of a loaded metaphor. I'd consider what I'm proposing to be more usable and powerful than what you are.

Take a look, for example, at the 2 Advanced Studios [2advanced.com] webpage. Tell me you've seen a cooler webpage, and I'll tell you you're lying.

Well, let's see. They've got a big page with no useful information or links at startup (sorry, perhaps it comes up with Flash, but like many people that have gotten tired of the Web playing movies and sounds at them, I've disabled Flash). There's a nice big "site requrements" page, implying that someone would actually upgrade either their browser, their plugin, their *processor*, or change their monitor/bit depth to use the website. That, frankly, smacks of unprofessionalism -- failing to cater to the user. It looks to me rather like a teenage hobbyist web designer's page.

Or, take a look at some [spacex.com] of the work [westonfl.org] they've done [fordvehicles.com].

All of which come up as broken embed icons to me, since I don't use Flash. Even with people that do use Flash, instability has long been a hallmark of webbrowsers rendering Flash -- this may have changed in the last two years or so, but I haven't really paid much attention.

Making a good looking, interactive page, with javascript menus, flash animations, etc, means "I have taken an interest in my work, and I care what it looks like".

Actually, the end user isn't looking for that sentiment at all, and hasn't remotely considered the web designer or HTML or anything like that. He's thinking "where's what I'm looking for?" Put in Javascript menus and you alienate people like my sister, who has a slow computer, my parents, who can't get comfortable with things *happening* when they simply move the mouse around to go elsewhere, me (who hates mouseless rollovers and Flash).

Some of you may have seen his XHTML bullshit at the top of this page and thought, "Oh, wow, this guy is great. This page is so readable, and so well organized." But, what most of the rest of us that live in reality said was "Jesus, that's aweful. It looks like he made it with an old copy of Frontpage 98 that was included with his windows 98 install". It looks aweful.

And so it should have Javascript menus and be significantly less navigable?

For example, this guy is claiming that flash intros suck.

Yup, nothing like waiting through a 15 second intro to see a website to improve usability.

Some of them do, but done right, it definately adds to the "wow" factor of the website. And the "wow" factor makes you money, or gets you accolades, not the "this will work in every browser ever, including my cell phone and my command line" factor.

The end user doesn't give a shit about accolades, any more than he does what marketing awards were given to the guy that designed the Viewsonic logo when he buys his monitor.

As for money -- you know what two of the most heavily used websites in the world are? Google and Yahoo. You know what? Both are fairly simple and minimalistic. You know what else? They beat out their competition, which put tons of sidebars, tables, and all sorts of crap in on their pages during the portal craze. Google is a great example of what I'm talking about. People what their information, and they don't want to screw around getting it. The dot coms that assumed people did because "conventional wisdom" said they did are all dead now. Maybe a bored 12-year-old at school gets a few moments of interest out of the bitmapped Javascript menus that you put so much stock in. I can guarantee you that the working adult is not interested in blowing an extra ten minutes on a website when he's looking for something, though.

Get with the times. There are graphic designs artists and webpage designers for a reason. The reason is because they know how to make a page look better than you do.

My entire point is that I *shouldn't* dictate what the page looks like. The *user* should be able to do that. I should be able to dictate the content in it. If the user likes that soft gray tech look on midnight blue that you seem to favor, that can be done. If the user doesn't see too well, the font can be enlarged (which *cannot* be done with your bitmapped interfaces, but *can* on the single site you were insulting). This is not 1% of the population -- most 50+ish year olds I've seen end up increasing the font size well above what I use, or squint at the screen. Same for blind/deaf/WebTV/Linux/MacOS/alternative browser users/cell users...

This guy's just a douche that's to stupid to smell the change and know he's obsolete. People like him are the reason it's ok to have a website that looks like shit, and I say I've had enough.

Ah.

Re:ARRRRGGGGHHHH!

[Anonymous Coward]

Look, I'll make this very simple. Plain text webpages are ugly. XHTML compatable pages are ugly. HTML 1.1 compatable pages are ugly. Leaving the border around your image link is ugly. Not using tables is ugly.

Stop trolling and have a look at Wired's new web site. It's done in XHTML/CSS and doesn't use tables for layout. It also works in older browsers which doesn't use CSS and XHTML (looks very plain in them, but that's exactly how it should be; reasonably graceful degradation)

Also, you don't seem to know that there are different "levels" of XHTML. Strict pretty much forces you to use CSS if you want to control (or rather, suggest) the appearance of your pages. Transitional is the same as HTML 4.01 with small modifications to make it XML compliant.

Using JavaScript, Java, Flash etc. is also perfectly legal in XHTML web pages.

Re:ARRRRGGGGHHHH!

[albionsoft]

Not using tables is ugly.

Tables as tables are fine -- the problem is that very, very few tables on most GUI-tool-designed-websites are actually tables of data.

Okay, this is one that has puzzled me for some time now. I've often heard the idea that web designers shouldn't use tables for page layout, but css layers instead. Now, the main justification for using tables is that a large proportion of web surfers don't use a browser that properly supports layers. (The argument that they should use a better browser counts for exactly nothing in the real world...) But my question is :

What exactly is a table for, if not page layout? As far as I can see, the only purpose of a table is to define the physical relationship of different pieces of content.

Now I'm all in favour of a clean division of content in the html and presentation in the css, but (even ignoring the current problems of making a site look good on most browsers) there are going to be some tags - such as table - which are going to cross that boundary.

Thoughts anyone?

Re:ARRRRGGGGHHHH!

[0x0d0a]

What exactly is a table for, if not page layout? As far as I can see, the only purpose of a table is to define the physical relationship of different pieces of content.

Tables do have that attribute, mostly because it's very difficult for a browser to do much else with them.

Tables are the proper way to present an "array" of information. The table paradigm *does* happen to let the designer specify the ordering of columns, for example. Some sacrifices have to be made to allow joined cells. :-) But there really is nothing preventing web browser designers from allowing users to reorder columns from the specified order, as long as they don't have joined cells. This could be a useful feature if you only care about, say, three numbers (car price, name, and top speed), and want to move those columns in a big table to the far left of the table for easy comparison.

So in this case, I'm not defining physical relationship of different pieces of content -- tables were just a convenient way to embed that information and provide a "suggested" viewing order. :-)

Pareto's 80-20 law

[briancnorton]

I'd like to know how to overcome Pareto's 80-20 law. It states that 20% of ones time will be spent accomplishing 80% of a goal, and the rest to fill in the remaining 20% If I can cut out 80% of my development time by eliminating unneeded features like accessibility (hear me out) Im going to. I say that accessibility is unneeded, but I mean that there is a good quantity of information available that may be narrated, but would not convey the same information as a visual counterpart. Is there a need to make the Guggenheim museum narrate that that "starry night" is a picture of a nighttime sky and skyline in an impressionist style." What is a disabled user going to take away from that? While I whole heartedly agree that online taxpayer funded services should be accessible, I cant see any need for a photo album to include alt tags, or a movie to be narrated, or a flash animation to include audio cues. For the most part however I think that the money spent on these items would be far better spent on curing blindness. I have no doubt in my mind that that will happen before half the web is accessible.

Re:Pareto's 80-20 law

[Anonymous Coward]

Accessibility is not "unnecessary", if you consider it as a subset of usability/HCI, nor indeed if you're blind, deaf, dyslexic or mobility impaired. Colour-blindeness affects a sizeable proportion of the male population, age withers us all... Add up all of these "unnecessary targets and you're accounting for a very large audience indeed.
Yes, there is an effort vs benefit pay-off, and we all only have so much time to work on concepts that might be considered outside of our normal work. However, a little effort in educating oneself about the main targets of accessibility and usability will mean an ability to easily account for these demands in future projects.
Many of the comments in this thread are just typical FUD and laziness. Grow up, realise that not everyone is as lucky as you are to have two of everything that functions, and learn about user-centered design.

Use Validators and Load Generators to Test WebApps

[MichaelCrawford]

I couldn't quite fit the title in the space allowed for the subject.

One of the most important things that you need to do to make a website accessible is to use valid markup. This is also important to allow interoperability with standards-based browsers like Opera and Mozilla.

You can ensure your site has valid markup by using a validator to check your HTML. You will find that you have an easier time writing valid markup after working with a validator for a few pages, after that you'll find very few mistakes, and they will be easy to fix. Don't let the validator's complaints about your first attempts scare you.

Maintaining server responsiveness while under heavy user load is important for basic usability for any user. You can test how your application responds to heavy traffic by testing with a load generator.

Please read:

• Use Validators and Load Generators to Test Your Web Applications

Thank you for your attention.

Other way around

[0x0d0a]

HTML *used* to be perfectly accessable. It was *beautifully* designed so that anyone could use it. It's with all the new layout-oriented stuff that people start being made miserable -- some browsers can't display some sites properly, blind/deaf people are put at a disadvantage, you need a fair amount of CPU time just to browse web pages.

Re:You should have removed the tag!

[Anonymous Coward]

Dang... even left on the doctype declaration. I think he's just bitter that someone, once again, showed him how easy it would be to do things *correctly.*

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transition al.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
<title>Ask the Expert: Accessibility</title>
</head>
<body>

Opera Browser supports many accessibility features

[Anonymous Coward]

including using a browser side style sheet

It's better than IE and Mozilla in many ways.

Even includes screen reader compatible menus.

http://www.opera.com/

Apostrophes

[Fruit]

I notice that Joe Clark consistently uses a single closing quote (') as an apostrophe in his text. Now I know this is common practice in the typesetting business, but aren't those two characters conceptually different symbols?

Wouldn't it be better--and easier--to use the simple ASCII apostrophe (') instead?

Re:Apostrophes

[dvdeug]

Now I know this is common practice in the typesetting business, but aren't those two characters conceptually different symbols?

No; they're the same symbol used two different ways.

Wouldn't it be better--and easier--to use the simple ASCII apostrophe (') instead?

Easier, yes. But the Unicode apostrophe is unified with the single closing quote, and the ASCII apostrophe is basically deprecated.

Re:Apostrophes

[Fastolfe]

Yep, this is an example of someone disliking the look of the "correct" glyph (the apostrophe, or ' ) and choosing to use a totally different character instead (the right single-quote) because it looks more appropriate.

MS Word does this, and I suspect other applications do it as well.

In a perfect Unicode world, single-quoted strings would be composed of a proper left-single-quote - text - right-single-quote. In the real world, single-quoted strings are composed of apostrophe - text - apostrophe. So the apostrophe glyph needs to work in both situations, as an apostrophe and a single-quote. Most people tend to prefer that that character go straight up and down as a result, which means Word needs to use the wrong character when the majority of its users want an apostrophe that looks like a right-single-quote.

Re:Apostrophes

[Mike A.]

Word's problem is worse - it doesn't use the correct Unicode code point for right-single-quote (and double quotes as well). Instead, it uses a high-ASCII code point that isn't used for anything else in any real character set, causing the "dumb-quote syndrome" you see when viewing such text on non-Microsoft operating systems.

Re:Apostrophes

[Fruit]

So, basically, they have two billion codepoints at their disposal and they still think it's necessary to unify two symbols with a completely different meaning?

Yes, the symbols look similar. So do the latin 'o' and the cyrillic '', yet those have different codepoints, as they should. They just aren't the same letter.

Similarly, the function of an apostrophe is wildly different from that of a quote. An apostrophe denotes an omitted letter, a closing quote the end of a citation. A typeface designer is now unable to make different characters for an apostrophe and a closing quote. Personally I would prefer if an apostrophe would look more like a prime character (). But the typeface designer had to supply something which can function both as a quote and as an apostrophe. Sounds like a bad bargain to me.

I know what the current Unicode recommendation is. I just wonder why they recommend it.

</rant>

Re:Apostrophes

[dvdeug]

Yep, this is an example of someone disliking the look of the "correct" glyph (the apostrophe, or ' ) and choosing to use a totally different character instead (the right single-quote) because it looks more appropriate.

No. As noted by the AC below,

U+0027 APSOTROPHE is the most commonly used character for apostrophe. However, it has ambiguous semantics and direction. When text is set, U+2019 RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK is preferred as apostrophe. Word processors commonly offer a facility for automatically converting the U+0027 APOSTROPHE to a contextually-selected curly quotation glyph.
-Unicode Standard

The ASCII apostrophe is basically deprecated in Unicode; it's used for at least five different other characters in Unicode, so they decided just to replace it completely.

Re:Apostrophes

[dvdeug]

I know what the current Unicode recommendation is. I just wonder why they recommend it.

As you said, this is common practice in the typesetting business. Unicode is not in the practice of making typesetting policy; furthermore, Unicode tries not to seperate characters by function unless they're clearly distinct characters. The Latin 'o' and the Cyrillic 'o' get seperate codepoints because they're in different scripts.

Re:Apostrophes

[Fastolfe]

This may actually be an artifact introduced when moving the text out of Word and into another application (e.g. a browser). A logical document has no character set, merely a series of logical characters. When you paste text into a text box, though, and submit that as a browser would submit a form, the browser's supposed to make a best effort guess as to how those logical characters should be encoded. If it's trying to squeeze a right-single-quote into, say, iso-8859-1 (which doesn't have it), you can expect quirks like question marks to be inserted instead.

Re:Apostrophes

[Fastolfe]

Yep, I noticed that also. My bad.

Re:Apostrophes

[Fruit]

Hmm... if this is the only explanation there is (and I have no reason to assume otherwise) then I suppose I don't have to feel bad about stubbornly using the "real" apostrophe instead, deprecated or no. :)

Thanks.

Re:Apostrophes

[mzajac]

But the "typewriter quote" isn't a real apostrophe. It's a hack invented by nineteenth century typewriter manufacturers to save a key in their mechanism, and to optimize the typing pool.

A real English-language apostrophe looks the same as a real English-language closing single quotation mark -- like a little closed figure "9". That's how they're printed in books, and that's how they're printed in third grade printing class.

The typewriter quote is an established business convention, and it's fine for casual email etc. But if you're doing any kind of finished graphic design work, you must use a real apostrophe. I always shake my head when I see that some car manufacturer has spent $100k on a commercial that went to TV with a big fat typewriter quote in the text.

These aren't new in Unicode. Real quotations and apostrophes have been usable in the Mac-Latin character set since 1984, and in Windows too, although there's no easy way to type them on Windows. Typographic quotes work on the web in most version 4.x and newer browsers. You can read about how to use good typographic quotes, dashes and spaces on the web at A List Apart in The Trouble with EM 'n EN.

Re:Apostrophes

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep, this is an example of someone disliking the look of the "correct" glyph (the apostrophe, or ' ) and choosing to use a totally different character instead (the right single-quote) because it looks more appropriate.

Step 1: open a book. Step 2: look at the pretty apostrophes. Notice that they are curly. The mark you typed is for abbreviating feet.

Curly vs. straight quotes.

[lordpixel]

I probably can't actually demonstrate it to you because the Slashcode will filter them out (LAME), but what he's doing is using curly rather than straight quotes.

There are three single quotes and three double quotes common on most computers. Good old ' and " which are straight, and the much nicer to look at curly or "smart" quotes (see MS Word, or the post above).

I think &rdquo; would make a right double quote if Slashdot allowed me to enter one.

Many people edit their HTML text in Word or some other editor which automatically inserts curly quotes. However, you'll often see a problem if the article writer has a Mac and you have a PC, or vice versa. All of the "smart" curly quotes get converted to meaingless codes like this: it?s. This is because the curly quotes aren't in the 7-bit (0..127) ASCII range, rather they're either Microsoft or Apple 8-bit (0..255) extensions, which are different.

In order to avoid that happening to anyone he's using Unicode escapes which specify the character precisely. Ultimately, it wouldn't really be necessary if people used better tools to edit HTML, or used Unicode aware editors and had their web server mark the pages as Unicode when served.

Re:Curly vs. straight quotes.

[dallen]

*squint* Ah, of course; I hadn't noticed he used curley-quotes.

Re:Curly vs. straight quotes.

[n3k5]

> All of the "smart" curly quotes get converted
> to meaingless codes like this: it?s.

Weeeell, if you're picky about proper punctuation, you shouldn't put any kind of quote in "it's", but rather an apostrophe.

Re:Curly vs. straight quotes.

[lordpixel]

True enough, but few typefaces would distingiush a right single curly quote from an apostrophe.

It would be interesting to know if Unicode actually makes such a distinction. If so, you could use the appropriate escape code and get it right.

Might fall into the category of splitting hairs though. Its the sort of thing I'd like my software to figure out and do for me, rather than I myself needing to worry over much about it.

Re:Curly vs. straight quotes.

[Fastolfe]

This is because the curly quotes aren't in the 7-bit (0..127) ASCII range, rather they're either Microsoft or Apple 8-bit (0..255) extensions, which are different.

Or Unicode.

A lot of the "it?s" problems would go away if Slashdot would simply declare a character set for its pages instead of letting the user agent make a bad assumption. I've suggested this a few times but it's never happened.

They could even go a step further and standardize on UTF-8, which would let us be entirely multilingual, with Japanese articles, Chinese comments, etc. It's arguable if that's even necessary or desirable on Slashdot, but why force everyone to use ISO-8859-1 (which, by the way, does not contain those "smart quotes").

All it takes is a single line in the HTML document:

<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />

Re:Curly vs. straight quotes.

[lordpixel]

Yes, a very good point. UTF-8 would be a better idea.

I didn't actually know the "smart" quotes were missing from ISO-8859-1 (Latin-1) but a brief trip to Character Map on NT confirms what you say. They're in "Windows Characters" and 147 and 148, but not in "Latin 1".

I knew Microsoft used a modified version of Latin 1 for the "standard" windows charset, but I didn't realize how different they were until 5 minutes ago.

Cheers.

Re:Curly vs. straight quotes.

[Fastolfe]

It doesn't look like Unicode has a single-quote character that just goes straight up and down. The ' character is an apostrophe in Unicode. The only single-quotes that are there are paired (left/right), though there is a double-quote that goes straight up and down. *shrug*. Here's what I could find:

http://new.fastolfe.net/reference/charsets/unicode -search?query=39+34+8216+8217+8220+8221&type=d ec

Re:Curly vs. straight quotes.

[lordpixel]

Heh. That's almost ironic. So by using

Dec8217 Hex 2019 RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK

as the story author is, he's actually being grammatically incorrect (because he should be using an apostrophe). However if he does the "right" thing and uses an apostrophe, it looks uglier.

This one is interesing too:
http://new.fastolfe.net/reference/charsets/u nicode -search?query=%60&type=string&font=

Yes, its a grave accent, but most programmers would know it as a "back quote" or "back tick". I guess that's an example of a particular technical group repurposing an existing symbol because it happened to be convenient historically (as its a part of basic ASCII).

Re:Curly vs. straight quotes.

[Fastolfe]

Yep.. I wouldn't fault the author, though. It's probably something like Word doing the repurposing. Apparently the designers of Word (probably due to user feedback) felt the ' glyph was undesirable for apostrophes, so instead of fixing the glyph (assuming that would go over well with those that would continue to use it in terminal applications as a single-quote, which should only really matter with fixed-width fonts anyway), they chose to use a different character instead. Same type of problem...

Re:Curly vs. straight quotes.

[kubrick]

All it takes is a single line in the HTML document:



Or you send it out in the HTTP headers, of course.

Re:Curly vs. straight quotes.

[Anonymous Coward]

Oops, forgot to convert the <> characters. And then didn't preview. :(

Re:Curly vs. straight quotes.

[VGR]

Not quite. From The Unicode Standard 3.0, page 499:

2019 RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK
= SINGLE COMMA QUOTATION MARK
- this is the preferred character to use for an apostrophe

Re:Curly vs. straight quotes.

[dvdeug]

Here's what I could find: [a list of names of Unicode characters]

The name of a Unicode character never tells you everything about it. In this instance, Apostrophe is merely a legacy backlash - if you were reading the standard (available for free at the Unicode website), you would see the note below apostrophe noting this, and the note below the single right quote noting that it was the real apostrophe.

Variety is the spice of Slashdot...

[telstar]

...until the same story gets posted 3 or 4 times.

Jakob Nielsen

[Anonymous Coward]

useit.com has scores of info and alertboxes regardins flash usability and general usability.

Even though Jakob generally talks through an unorthodox orifice, and spouts things that really are obvious, it's suprising how many people just will not adopt these simple ideas.

validator.w3.org

[Anonymous Coward]

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fs la shdot.org


W3 validator says

I got the following unexpected response when trying to retrieve <http://slashdot.org>:

403 Forbidden

Please make sure you have entered the URI correctly.

Heh

Re:validator.w3.org

[The Bungi]

The slashborks apparently couldn't take the "Slashdot is not compliant" jokes so they blocked requests from the validator. AFAIK it's been blocked for a while now.

Utterly laughable, Slashdot editors miss point

[lordpixel]

OK, so let's look at this XHTML compliant document shall we?

Do a view source, look at the first coupld of lines, which is the same ordinary "start of page" you're going to find on every page on Slashdot:

"<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2 Final//EN">
<html><head><title>Slashdot | Joe Clark's Answers -- In Valid XHTML</title>"

See how it claims to be HTML 3.2. Not XHTML at all.

So now we page down 3-4 times.... now we see this:

<p>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transition al.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;
charset=iso-8859-1" />
<title>Ask the Expert: Accessibility</title>
</head>
<body>

Hilarious. So this guy sent them a complete, well-formatted XHTML document, and they pasted it into a

tag in the middle of a regular Slashdot page.

What exactly was that supposed to achieve? How stupid do you have to be?

At the very least they could have stripped out the and tags, because as it is they now have a document with *nested* html, and body elemements, and 2 head elements. This is illegal in every version of HTML that's ever existed.

Utterly utterly missing the point!

Even worse, Slashdot's Plain Old Text mode doesn't even let me paste that HTML in. I have to go through by hand and manually escape each and every < and > into &lt; and &gt; . What's the point of a plain text mode that doesn't know how to escape stuff for me. I can't just type Plain Old Text - instead I have to know all about escape codes and enter them myself?

Re:Utterly laughable, Slashdot editors miss point

[Anonymous Coward]

Even worse, Slashdot's Plain Old Text mode doesn't even let me paste that HTML in.

Use "Extrans (html tags to text)"

Plain Old Text lets you insert HTML tags to format without having to worry about adding tags for line breaks.

Some of us actually know how to explore the world for ourselves without an owner's manual.

Re:Utterly laughable, Slashdot editors miss point

[Trogre]

"What's the point of a plain text mode that doesn't know how to escape stuff for me. I can't just type Plain Old Text - instead I have to know all about escape codes and enter them myself?"

I thought that was the point of "Extrans" mode.

Re:Utterly laughable, Slashdot editors miss point

[lordpixel]

Fair enough. If that's how it actually works.

I don't think that's very logical.

I can't see how "Plain Old Text" can be read as meaninging "you can type HTML in here". The logical reading of the English words would be "whatever you type in here is treated as plain old text" To me that implies markup should have no effect.

I can't guess what that would be, becuase I don't know how it differs from "Code" and "HTML Formatted".

There's got to be a more descriptive name. Then again, given one of the options is named "Extrans (html tags to text)", I guess my expectations are too high. I suppose the bit in brackets is obvious enough, but why not just "Convert all HTML tags to Plain Text"? What is Extrans? The software used to do the conversion? What % of Slashdot users benefit from knowing the name of the process?

Re:Utterly laughable, Slashdot editors miss point

[WWWWolf]

Hilarious. So this guy sent them a complete, well-formatted XHTML document, and they pasted it into a tag in the middle of a regular Slashdot page.

Also, when I saved the page in browser as a HTML file, then opened it in XEmacs to remove the Slashdot HTML to view it as the author wanted, I noted the original file had DOS line delimiters (\r\n), while Slashdot HTML (obviously) had UNIX line delimiters (\n).

A very interesting cut and paste job, yes, I agree completely =)

Re:Utterly laughable, Slashdot editors miss point

[accessify]

Am I not good to you: http://www.accessify.com/tools-and-wizards/quick-e scape.asp And you might want to read this too: http://www.accessify.com/default.asp

That's really great Corky

[Anonymous Coward]

But we're all still thinking, whoop-dee-fucking-doo.

Skip Links

[Anonymous Coward]

He points to a site which discusses skip links. That site provides a two examples, one of which has been redone with the skip link made invisible.

CSS

[decathexis]

Many people have complained about the fact that the posted XHTML response looks "ugly". I don't see how you can blame XHTML for this. I thought Slashdot editors would have figured out how to slap 3 lines of CSS on top of Joe Clark's XHTML, which would make it fit with Slashdot style while preserving 100% of accessibility. That's what the separation of content and presentation is all about.

Instead, they left it anadourned so that it clashes with the rest of the site and provides them with a pathetic excuse for continuing using font and table tags instead of semantic markup. Whatever.

Eye sores

[greygent]

For someone who's apparently into usability, they sure know how to make things utterly unreadable. What a tool.

I'll pass on this interview (that is after I click this submit button). I'm not going to read this horribly formatted shit.

I hope this comment meets whatever anal specs he requires.

Re:Eye sores

[CoolVibe]

That's not that person's fault bub. Your beef should be with the slashdot webmasters, who could make his answers readable with some simple CSS.

The thing is that the XHTML has _NO_ formatting/styling at all, it's dominated by what's around it, and sitting snugly in place.

Blame Rob, not Joe.

Semantic model for web pages

[rossjudson]

Sounds like this may be needed. Note that this is not the same as having a semantic model for the web itself. Clark talks about having various parts of a web page -- the search dialog, various navigation panes, and so forth. With a proper, extensible, and well defined semantic model for essential web page characteristics that could be acted on by rule bases that can tune and alter the resulting web page for a particular user, rearranging content and presentation to suit.

Re:Semantic model for web pages

[Fastolfe]

Look forward to more of this in XHTML 2.0!

Re:You should have removed the tag!

[Viqsi]

Oh, that's nothing. They didn't even fix the line endings. Most of Slashdot uses Unix CR line endings, whereas the document that was sent uses CR+LF line endings (as seen in Windows). You can tell in an editor that shows the extra characters (I used Vim) when you look at the source for the page.

Now that's pretty damn sad.

I'm partly deaf, and I don't get accessible movies

[Buran]

Ok, instead of complaining about the bad HTML in the story, try this:

In the response to the question of accessibility and the law governing it, the answer includes: "it is not reasonable to expect disabled people to go somewhere else to get the same information or enjoy the same experience."

If that is the case, then why is it apparently OK for a movie theater to fail to provide subtitled films? I have never once been able to walk into a theater on a given day and say "I'm deaf and I need subtitles on this film." Yet, adding subtitles is trivial especially with more films being produced digitally or even projected digitally. The technology is right there under their noses, and it's commonplace on TV now. It's been required in new TVs since 1990.

Yet the theaters seem to think it's reasonable to tell me to wait til a film hits DVD so I can turn on captions or subtitles. I'm sorry, but that doesn't cut it. Telling me I have to wait while telling the person with normal hearing next to me that they can see the film Right Now If You Buy A Ticket is inexcusable.

Oh, and those audio assist headphones you're probably about to tell me about in your reply? They don't work for the completely deaf or those who already wear hearing aids. Like me. Sorry, do not pass Go, try again.

Wehrenberg, one of the two chains in my area, offers a few open captioned films, but not on any date, not in any theater, and by far not the films I want to see. I want LOTR. I want Insurrection. I want Die Another Day. I want Harry Potter. I've never heard of Truth about Charlie or Red Dragon.

Please, write in and tell 'em it's inexcusable.

Wehrenberg Theatres
1215 Des Peres Road
St. Louis, MO 63131
USA

American Multi Cinema
2049 Century Park East Suite 1020
Los Angeles, CA 90067
USA

Finally something we can all agree on

[Anonymous Coward]

"I want Slashdot to eat my own dog food."

I'm not qutie sure what he meant by it, but I'm going to take it literally. Yeah! Eat my dog food, bitches!

MOD PARENT UP

[Anonymous Coward]

Precisely! People bitch when someone gives short and terse answers. Then they bitch when someone gives long and thought out answers.

ED's, NO MORE INTERVIEWS. All they do is piss people off

Re:I'm partly deaf, and I don't get accessible mov

[spakka]

I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.

It's spelled 'deaf'

your website sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

it is ugly

I'm sorry, I would have written a SHORTER letter

[podperson]

...but I didn't have time.

As a usability person, surely brevity is a key feature of usability in prose...

(end sarcasm)

In general, there are two types of usability advice: prescriptive and proscriptive. The most famous usability folks are proscriptive folks (see "The Design of Everyday Things," by Don Norman).

It's easy to be critical ("it's too difficult for some people to skip 20 links at the start of a web page" for example) and hard to provide good solutions ("put a skip link before every navigation block" is NOT an example).

Proscriptive usability advice is entertaining, and often thought-provoking. But it isn't generally usable advice. OK I now know how NOT to do whatever it is I want to do. So that leaves infinity minus one options.

What Macromedia has attempted to do with Flash is a useful step towards allowing accessibility considerations to be handled by Flash developers.

But if I import an image called "Anatomy.jpg" into web page in dreamweaver, you'd THINK that by default it might put Alt="Anatomy" into the image tag. Or, it might put "Anatomy" in the popup menu next to the Alt field in the properties floater to save me typing it in. But no.

There's the accessibility problem in a nutshell. I think many of the accessibility issues are software problems, either with content software or browsing software:

1) Skipping navigation stuff.

Surely this is a fairly simple feature to add to a browser. Any solution that requires extra code to be added to almost every web page in existence is not a usable solution.

2) Alt=" " etc.

Well only a tiny minority of the world's web pages are hand coded. I really don't think this is a problem with web page design, it's a problem with web page design software. If an image has no link, then it should be Alt=filename or Alt=" ". Again, don't expect everyone in the world to hand tune their HTML. Again, 90% of the problem could be handled in the browser anyway (IE tells you an image's filename if you hover the mouse over it).

3) Standard HTML.

It's very hard to find web pages that are 100% standards compliant. Again, here we have a solution that requires modifying almost every web page in the world (and while we're at it, fixing a whole bunch of standards). Solutions need to be usable by both end users and developers.

Conclusion

Maybe the efforts of Joe Clark et al to force web designers to manually implement laborious accessibility solutions will in the end create a market for tools with better accessibility options built-in, but unless you're a likely lawsuit target or have a specific target audience you need to reach, it seems to me you should do the best accessibility job your toolset affords you to do, and meanwhile wait for that market to fix your tools.

I use BOLD tags because STRONG takes longer to type -- even though I know that STRONG is good and BOLD is evil. Now, that's usability.

Re:I'm sorry, I would have written a SHORTER lette

[JebusIsLord]

the EM tag is what you should be using, for emphasis. 2 letters :)

A resource to learn the new thingies?

[Anonymous Coward]

So, I was a web author "back in the day" (93-97, before I moved on to better paying gigs). I always felt strongly about standards compliance. I also tend to hand-code everything out of a distrust of someone else interpretting the standard into an HTML editor.

One of the nice things about the "old days" was that there were plenty of resources around that did a good job of providing detailed-but-not-obfuscated tutorials for things like HTML, Javascripts, etc.

I haven't found a single concise course that would teach XHTML without a ton of jargon yet. I would very much like to retrain myself on XHTML and ECMAscript.

While it was run by a company that wasn't exactly always standards compliant, I found the library at help.netscape.com (before it's mangling in the late 90s) to have been my favorite resource.

Any recommendations? I don't see paying $30+ for a book when there are usually good resources online.

Re:A resource to learn the new thingies?

[Anonymous Coward]

I was in the same boat. It's not hard once you get into it. Here ya go.

XHTML intro

CSS intro (you don't want to use XHTML without CSS)

Javascript

Good luck.

Well...

[autopr0n]

That comment sits at two, so apperantly some people find value in bashing slashdot...

Re:Well...

[Anonymous Coward]

You should have just told her that you blocked popups, and thus couldn't see her applets.

To the artist, this is your fault, not hers. You're going out of your way to make her design break.

If you really want to go this way, you have to have other people complain that it doesn't work (without the "popup blocking" technobabble, preferrably these people should pretend they don't know why it doesn't work). You have already complained about this feature from one angle, you can't complain about it from a different one.

You can't just tell someone "you're absolutely wrong" and espect them to change, you have to show them (subtilly) through impartial evidence that their method does not work. You say "I don't think that's a good idea, this way might be better," then if she insists, arrange for complaints to come in, completely unrelated to you.

Stubborn artists who think they know technical things are delicate and dangerous creatures and must be dealt with carefully :)

Re:Well...

[Anonymous Coward]

still have this ugly monitor frame around her work

But you can always use a 'pretty' Apple.

Am I the only one?

[dadragon]

Am I the only one who read the title and thought: "What does /. want with Joe Clark, the Canadian politician?

Joe Clark is the leader of the Canadian Progressive Conservative party (Torys), for you non-Canadians.

Re:Am I the only one?

[Anonymous Coward]

Now, what does Gilles Duceppe want ?

Re:Am I the only one?

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

I was thinking of "Crazy" Joe Clark from Lean On Me. I think he's doing security work now.

Well, who knows

[autopr0n]

IMO, CSS is generaly better looking then Table stuff, but table stuff can look nice, and CSS can look fugly (just look at the W3C's CSS page!).

Of course at this point, any change would be great

I think...

[Anonymous Coward]

that he read Bill Shatner's response to Slashdot's questions and thought that he would make up for Bill's brevity.

Attitude?

[LookSharp]

I would say that the market for accessibility-specific Web consultancies is rather small and will have a short lifespan. I can say this with some confidence as I am an authority on accessibility, with a published book to prove it, and I hardly get any business.

Are you sure that you hardly get any work because there is no market, or courld it possibly be because... say, oh I don't know...

...you're a dick?

(PS - This is intended as a humorous remark, not a personal attack. Although some personal introspection might not hurt the situation.)

my absolute favorite....

[Lumpy]

... Unless you have an airtight reason (like you're stuck using an old content-management system you cannot afford to replace), I really don't want to have anything to do with you unless you'reproducing valid HTML....

this is the phrase that needs to be said by EVERY hiring manager for every web design firm on the planet. 90% of all the problems with accessability are because of LAZY webdesigners not adhering to HTML standard and producing VALID html. And no, Microsoft IE specific is NOT valid HTML.... I dont see it mentioned anywhere in the HTML spec.

Validation is not a panacea

[Fweeky]

It's very easy to make a page which validates perfectly but which uses completely pathetic markup making it less accessable than even a tables based tag soup design like SlashDot.

Concider:

<div class="heading">This is my document heading</div>
<div class="para">And this is my body text. It's <span class="bold">valid</span> and <span class="bold">well-formed</span>, but the markup is a joke -- just imagine trying to read it if the stylesheet doesn't load!</div>
<div class="para">And sadly, this sort of "div-soup" design accounts for a significant proportion of CSS-based designs. Some even used spans instead; of div's, resulting in a page that, without CSS, is one long line of text!</div>

This is the HTML equivilent of writing a C application and putting absolutely everything in main(). Sure, it'll compile, but do you want to be the one to maintain it?

Because:

[Anonymous Coward]

Because it's the right thing to do.

Usability != good looks

[autopr0n]

If the slashdot 'editors' spent 2 minutes writing a few lines of CSS in some between some tags it would have looked fine. Obviously that was beyond them. Because they are stupid idiots.

Broken Link

[antizeus]

The "Text-only is not accessible" link is broken. Which is a shame, since it's the only link in the article that I wanted to follow.

Well...

[autopr0n]

You should have just told her that you blocked popups, and thus couldn't see her applets. You can still tell her a lot of people do that, and that a lot of people won't even be able to turn stuff off

I really don't see why people fuss about stuff like that (toolbars and the like). It's not like people consider that part of the 'art'. I mean, I still have this ugly monitor frame around her work, no matter what.

Of course...

[jpsowin]

At Rob's site, he says:

"I belong to the Online News Association, Internet Press Guild, and Society of Professional Journalists, in case that matters to anyone. I am an excellent copy editor and proofreader, and I could easily edit CmdrTaco's and Hemos's writing into Perfect English, but I like them both just as they are. Indeed, I believe their (as I often call it) "unique approach to the English language" is partially responsible for Slashdot's success. (More on that in my book.)"

Whatever.

Re:I'm partly deaf, and I don't get accessible mov

[dvdeug]

If that is the case, then why is it apparently OK for a movie theater to fail to provide subtitled films?

I would say that's over the line for reasonable accomidation. A store can provide ramps without hurting other user's experiences; a webpage can provide accessability without hurting other user's experiences; but to add subtitles calls for either negatively influencing everyone else's view of the movie, or running a seperate movie -- the later of which may not even be economically possible.

Wehrenberg, one of the two chains in my area, offers a few open captioned films, but not on any date, not in any theater, and by far not the films I want to see.

Then complain to them. I don't know how they select the films, but every reasonable buisness listens to complaining customers. Maybe there's economic reasons they can't run Lord of the Rings; or maybe the manager is treating this as his own private best of the bunch and just needs a little nudging from upper management.

Not a vegan

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm also a vegan with some shoes and accessories made of leather.

Well then, you're not a vegan. But you're still a perfectly good vegetarian and we love you for that.

that's not splitting hairs

[n3k5]

Using a quotation mark instead of an apostrophe just because it will look OK most of the time is like using a instead of just because it will look OK most of the time: It's a Bad Thing, especially if accessibility is of concern; it makes it harder for software to make sense of the text and render it correctly on alternative devices.

Yes, _of course_ Unicode makes a distinction.

Re:I'm partly deaf, and I don't get accessible mov

[mindlace23]

to add subtitles calls for either negatively influencing everyone else's view of the movie, or running a seperate movie

You are incorrect. Subtitling can be provided by a simple scrolling LED marquee that displays text in reverse.

The person needing subtitling gets a mirror that they attach to their chair that inverts the text.

Viola! subtitling provided to the person who needed it, without affecting the other's experience.

Maybe you should try using a real operating system

[autopr0n]

Might solve some of your problems. It's also a lot more likely that some flash ad or something crashed your browser.

Re:I'm partly deaf, and I don't get accessible mov

[Buran]

... but to add subtitles calls for either negatively influencing everyone else's view of the movie ...

Not the way the most common system works -- Mr. Clark kindly sent me an email with a few links in it. (Thanks again!)

Here's the company that does a lot of this:

http://www.mopix.org

It's done with a screen showing captions in the back of the theater, in reverse. You view 'em with a reflecting mirror. If you don't have a reflector, you don't see a thing.

Then complain to them.

I plan on it -- and included their addresses so others can write, too.

Re:Is it worth it?

[Anonymous Coward]

I volunteer to tap-dance messages in Morse code on his chest. Dork.

"Text-only" correct link (Was: Re:Broken Link)

[Creosote]

The last digit was missing from the URL. The correct link is http://infocentre.frontend.com/servlet/Infocentre? access=no&page=article&rows=5&id=286

Re:Ah...

[Anonymous Coward]

Hear me, for I am a spooky prophet sent from four slashdot stories into the future!!!

AFTENPOSTEN!!!

PSTN

[mmol_6453]

It's called the Public Switched Telephone Network, though its name doesn't do it much justice now.

It got its name from being a publicly available way of connecting two wires from one house to another, without laying wires from each house to each house.

There are some interesting advantages and disadvantages to that. I'll probably write it up in my journal.

Frig!!! It's LOSE not LOOSE people!

[Anonymous Coward]

n/t

Awesome effort

[Anonymous Coward]

In addition to the formatting, he's even got the compliant "tooltip" display for some of the links! (They work with my Mozilla, at least). We should all aspire to be so thorough.

Re:You should have removed the tag!

[Anonymous Coward]

Why? HTML and XHTML are line-ending independent. Who cares if they're CRs or CRLFs?

Whatever.

[Anonymous Coward]

and that is why tne net is full of CRAP that is totally useless unless you have parallel computers running pattern recognition programs to index pages and content that ends up with poorly indexed crap. Yeah, who the hell needs data you can actually use?

Reply :Apostrophes

[Anonymous Coward]

U+0027 APSOTROPHE is the most commonly used character for apostrophe. However, it has ambiguous semantics and direction. When text is set, U+2019 RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK is preferred as apostrophe. Word processors commonly offer a facility for automatically converting the U+0027 APOSTROPHE to a contextually-selected curly quotation glyph.

- The Unicode Standard

Thats funny

[emkman]

variety is the spice of Slashdot.

I never knew variety and repost were synonyms

Nice work, Joe!

[Black Rabbit]

I always did think you were the one of the more honest guys around, even though I would never be caught dead voting Tory. Your successor and nemesis Lyin' Brian Mulroney did so much damage to our country that we're still suffereing from the hangover, these days called the Alliance.

Reply: Curly vs. straight quotes.

[Anonymous Coward]

I've posted this already somewhere before, but...

U+0027 APSOTROPHE is the most commonly used character for apostrophe. However, it has ambiguous semantics and direction. When text is set, U+2019 RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK is preferred as apostrophe. Word processors commonly offer a facility for automatically converting the U+0027 APOSTROPHE to a contextually-selected curly quotation glyph.

- The Unicode Standard

I bet this guy is a barrel of laughs at parties..

[clink]

Section 508 clearly defines...

And even more tragically. . .

[kfg]

these print designers are going back to their magazines and recasting them as "webpages."

The average magazine these days is mostly design and hardly any print. What's more, the design *sucks.*

I want my "old fashioned" words and pictures back. Take your design and stuff it.

What's more, I fully agree with you. On an actual webpage I want words and pictures *I* control the display of. Once again, take your "design" and stuff it - twice over.

The function of a magazine or webpage is not to be a medium for distributing "design."

*Design* is a medium for distributing information. If the "design" does not *enhance* the information in some way it's worse than a failure, it's an impediment, no matter how sucessful it may be as "art." Hell, even ART is supposed to be a medium for "information."

So inform. Don't "design."

One of the things that makes the web so powerful as a tool for distributing information is that it *allows* the user to manipulate the "design" in a way that makes the information more accesable to him/her. That's the whole bloody point!

Forcing me to read your semaphore font with black text on a tetured navy blue background doesn't make me marvel at your innovative "design." It makes me scream and go to another page.

Accesability? Hell, a good chunk of the web isn't accessable to *anyone* because it's the "designer's" brain that's disabled.

And they're taking print with them.

Feh!

KFG

Re:And even more tragically. . .

[DarkFall]

"Hell, even ART is supposed to be a medium for "information." "

Actually, art is communication...and while some communication is informative, it doesn't have to be.

As far as going off on this tangent about artists and information, I ask you again to make a distinction between information and communication. Not everything you see online or in print is information. At the same time...art comes in many forms and through many mediums..some is visual, some is audible and some is even edible.

There are all sorts of artists in the world. Some are good, some not so..and some you may or may not get depending on how well you identify with what they are trying to communicate to you. Some use HTML as a medium to communicate, and some do it well, and some don't and many don't care...design and art can and does co-exist with information..you'll find that most often it's the individual that can't co-exist with some design and art...out of purely subjective (albeit valid) reasons.

In short...most often (not always) something sucks because you don't like..that doesn't make it bad.

Re:And even more tragically. . .

[SoupIsGoodFood_42]

The average magazine these days is mostly design and hardly any print. What's more, the design *sucks.*

Really? I haven't noticed that at all. Of course, that could be because I never see any actual content in mags any more. It's almost like buying an porfolio of advertisements.

Seriously though. I think you're confusing the difference between bad design and properly done typography/typesetting type design.
I can guarantee you, that a thoughtfully designed web-site, will not only look better than plain old HTML, but will also be easier to use and read. And if they use CSS, then it will also work around accessibility problems, ranging from disabilities, to choice in font sizes.

Unfortunately, there are so few websites that do proper design via CSS etc, that I can't pull a link out of my head at the moment (except for maybe A List Apart).

There is no reason a designer should not be able to get a design to look the exactly the way they want it. As long as the user is able to override it easly.

Re:Troll, but I'll bite.

[Anonymous Coward]

you know, after seeing all these 'troll, but i'll bite' statements, i've finally figured out why: people that bite trolls have an axe to grind.

repeat:

Troll biters are only trying to toot their own horns.

Section 508, web accessibility

[Benetech]

I was very impressed with Joe's answers on these questions. I was one of the members of the federal advisory committee that drafted the initial take on Section 508's web accessibility regs. His statement about the web accessibility business is right on: this is a temporary blip as we go through a transition to where accessibility just becomes another part of good design.
One thing I will take issue with is Joe's statement that accessibility advocates want alternative text sites. I think that approach falls under the separate and unequal approach: tried that and it's been discredited. The goal for almost everyone is that the same site work for everybody and look good. It isn't hard.
The issue about people with cognitive impairments is that they have few advocates at the national lobbying table (other disability groups are good at self-advocacy), plus it isn't clear what to do to make sites more accessible other than make them more usable for everybody.

Text descriptions of graphics

[mttlg]

One consequence of this ignorance of visual design? The implicit claim that every illustration can be epitomized in words. You could only make this claim if you were so visually unsophisticated that you couldn't differentiate one kind of illustration from another. Of course, this is hogwash: The reason why we use illustrations is because words (or numbers) are sometimes too hard to understand by themselves.

This is the problem I have with some accessibility guidelines - if a picture is worth a thousand words, they want that thousand words in a caption. My web site has hundreds of pictures, so I will never be in full compliance with these kinds of guidelines. My approach has been to add some basic descriptive text to a page with thumbnails, making the same text available to everyone. The text itself is used to tell a story, and the details from the pictures that are mentioned are selected based on their relevance to the story. The consequence of bringing my site into compliance with these unrealistic guidelines through special description tags would be less content available to general viewers, since the time to write the descriptions would be taken from the time I would use to add new content.

While my site is just a personal site that shouldn't necessarily be required to be accessible (though this leads into another topic for debate), I would imagine that this would be an issue at some level for most sites - how do you balance providing special content for the disabled and providing basic content to everyone?

Many other types of accommodations are commonly utilized by all types of people - wheelchair ramps and TV/video captions are good examples of this, and this would be the rough equivalent of navigation aids and ALT tags, which are the two main accessibility features that Joe Clark mentioned in his second answer. When you get into special HTML tags like full text descriptions of images, most people probably won't even realize that they exist, as is the case with things like radio reading services for the blind.

At this point, I have no idea where I'm going with this (my apologies for any accessibility issues regarding the lack of a concluding point). I started with one of this guy's points and mostly ended up at another one, so I guess he seems like a reasonable person.

Oh come on

[kfg]

I mean, where else but Slashdot could you find hot grits down petrified Natalie Portman's pants?

You don't find that sort of variety just anywhere.

KFG

Re:Oh come on

[Natalie's Hot Grits]

"You don't find that sort of variety just anywhere."

Yea I do. :)

hmm

[drinkypoo]

Seriously, if you've got an ordinary HTML Web page and you make absolutely all your images accessible - including, crucially, adding alt="" to every spacer GIF and every other meaningless graphic - you're four-fifths of the way to being an accessible Web site for the group with the greatest single need, the blind and visually-impaired.

If your accessibility software requires alt tags for my meaningless shim images (not that I use any) then your accessibility software sucks.

XHTML & CSS Specs

[Oculus Habent]

One of the biggest problems is that the specifications provided to make everything the same are filled with optional components. There are several different border styles, but only a few work because most are optional. While this provides freedom to the person following the spec, it doesn't provide a consistent experience.

Re:Troll, but I'll bite.

[zapfie]

Troll, but I'll bite. Not really.. it's more acknowledging that the parent post was probably only really posted to induce argument, but they feel it worth talking about anyway.

Re:I'm partly deaf, and I don't get accessible mov

[Anonymous Coward]

To be honest, it's piles of shit like you that make me want to shit on the ADA and light it on fire.

Forcing people to cater to your disability for a non-essential is pretty fucking sad. I'm not catering to your deafness. I don't care. If I'm ever fucking deaf, I'm not writing a movie theatre and complaining because they don't wipe my ass for me. Maybe you should sound off like you've got a pair, son.

LOSE! IT IS LOSE, MOTHERFUCKERS! LOSE!

[Anonymous Coward]

ENGLISH! DO YOU SPEAK IT!?

I rather thought that your conclusion. . .

[kfg]

was a self evident axiom. The inmates have clearly taken over the asylum. Still, that's the beauty of the web. You're free to make your own webpage, even a shitty one.

However, and no inate disrespect to your friend, but her problem isn't her "artistic vision." It's her arrogance. It's the same sort of arrogance that thinks what's on TV should meet her standards and refuses to accept the argument that she could just change the channel. Well, the arrogant "artiste" is a cultural sterotype. Some stereotypes are more stereotypical than others though. This seems to be one of them.

It doesn't have to be that way though. I know. I am closely aquainted with nationally known fine artists ( Hell, one of them bore me), some of even of relative fame, and one of the things that's always struck me about some of the best artists is that they fully understand that *their* artistic vision doesn't mean crap. Sooner or later they are going to *show* their "vision" to someone else. That someone else, like it or not, is the final arbiter of what their vision "is."

"Artistes" who so vehemently defend their artistic vision in the manner of your arrogant friend aren't artists. They're masturbaters with oil pastels. They're making artistic love to the one they love best, themselves. They'll even state that explicitly if prodded, although they have no idea that's what they're doing. You see, if asked they'll proudly state they are engaged in "self expression."

Well fine. Go ahead with your artistic therapy or Turette's Syndrome. See if care though.

Your "self expression" only becomes *art* when *I* look at it though, and I'm only willing to engage in the artistic dialog ( written as in poetry or visual imagery as in a painting), and it *IS* a dialog, if you are speaking to me. You must, at some point, not only recognize my existence, you must respect it.

You want to tell me your vision? Fine, but in exchange you have to listen to mine. Art (as opposed to talking/painting to yourself) is an *exchange.*

Your artist friend hasn't figured this out yet. If she never does she is unlikely to ever be a great artist, or human being.

Of course that doesn't mean she won't be a "sucessful" artist. There are plenty of people with money who love to be abused artistically. Go figure.

In the meantime what most of us will do when we go to her page, instead of appreciating her art ( which she may find desirable), we'll just think, "Well, that's annoying," and go away.

What's more, no matter how good her art was we'll think of her *art* as annoying, even though it was just her presentation of it.

Mondrian dispensed with the frame. Your friend seems to want to do the same, but doesn't realize that what she's *actually* done is replace it with an annoying and distracting frame because she doesn't understand her medium. Also not a good thing for an artist.

If she payed attention to her audience she'd already know this.

A webpage is *explictly* intended to be viewed by others. Why else did they bother to put the page on the web? Ignoring your audience, or outright disdaining them, is just plain doofey.

And did I mention it's arrogant?

With regards to accessability I have such an arrogant friend too. When I've suggested he could make his webpage ( an otherwise very fine one) a little more accessable to the blind, or even just Netscape users, he has replied, in essence, "Fuck 'em, they're only about 10% of the web population."

Don't be an arrogant web designer. Respect your audience. Otherwise, why the hell should they respect you or what you have to say?

10% of the web population has already told my friend, " Well fuck you too buddy," without ever reading one word of his *opinion* driven webpage.

Now that's what I call getting the word out, eh?

KFG

Re:I rather thought that your conclusion. . .

[MrResistor]

Ouch! The truth hurts!

Really, very well put.

Re:I rather thought that your conclusion. . .

[Bert Peers]

Excellent points, but there may be a category you're missing -- the artists who want to open a dialogue and "exchange", but with noone willing to listen. It's possible ofcourse that all of the people you lash out against figure themselves in this category. But even then, I can imagine how some people are trying to make this connection, they just don't want to lower the quality or topic of the conversation to a level that is sure to draw many participants. The question is, when does positive elitism end and narcism begin ?

Also, I'm not sure you can completely justify a blame on the artist for being self-righteous, while at the same time reserving the right to disregard an artist because the presentation "annoys" you, ie, because he's not entirely up to _your_ non-artistic standards. That's just a recipe for populism.

Re:hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

If your HTML requires meaningless shim images, then your design skills suck.

HTH. HAND.

The moment of truth

[Anonymous Coward]

It was when Ensign Burrito gave up his day job and started jacking with the site full-time. I remember thinking "well, that's the end of that." Kind of like watching the first round of indignant replies to the Canter & Siegel spam; it was the end of an era, right there in front of me, going to hell in real time.

Linus farts in an elevator! 315 comments out of 769... "M$ W1ND0Z3 SUX!1" (Score: 5, Orthodox)

Did you miss...

[PatientZero]

...that Bill Shatner's responses were transcribed from a telephone conversation by a Slashdot editor?

Excellent point!

[Anonymous Coward]

Out of a hundred sitcoms that air weekly, there's one Friends that gets it right. Then there's one Simpsons that makes you want to throttle someone for fucking up such a good property with such crappy execution. Then there are several dozen "how the hell did this get on the air" and the rest tend to stand as arguments in favor of eugenics and retroactive abortions.

How sorry should I feel for someone whose ass-ugly, bottom-up design doesn't render exactly the way they want it to on my box? And for the record, NO you may not play MIDI without my permission.

Accessibility of Other Formats

[Anonymous Coward]

Other formats also benefit from modifications for accessibility - such as Acrobat, various office documents formats, etc.

We are currently working on software to aid in generating accessible formats from MS Office formats (boo, hiss, myself included) such as PowerPoint, Word, and Excel. By their heavy use, these formats deserve attention. For example, many professors around here post their lecture notes as PPT files without considering their accessibility. We aim to make tools available that can help the uninitiated make more accessible materials. If interested, you can check us out at PowerPoint Accessibility Wizard.

Dan
dlinder AT uiuc.edu

Your sig...

[Anonymous Coward]

Much more accurately describes OSS. I think that's what they call a "fruedian slip" there guy.

Funny..

[Felipe Hoffa]

And what is the attitude of slashdot editors to criticism? Just try parsing this page through the W3 XML Validator.

Re:I'm partly deaf, and I don't get accessible mov

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

Hmm, I didn't know Oppenheimer was deaf

Yes, I understand that. . .

[kfg]

and almost wrote "even if that "information" is in the form of emotional content." That's why I put "information" in quotes.

I was not railing against design or art. I come from a family of artists, commercial graphic designers and marketers. My stepfather was the Sales Development Manager for all of GE Broadcasting Company and my mother has been in the Guggenheim.

I know my way around art, and I know my way around design. I've been surrounded by *good* examples of both since before birth.

Yes, good and bad are subjective, but they're also subject to "market" approval. If your market is strictly those who dig black semaphore fonts on navy blue backgrounds than your page sucks to me because I'm not your market.

If your "market" is anyone interested in your opinion on something than the above is bad because the majority of the people you are trying to reach turn away in disgust. You are not communicating with them. Communication is a *two way* interaction.

This is bad design. It does not communicate what you intended to whom you intended. You have not engaged them in the discourse.

I'm sorry, but I'll stand by my statement that most of the web sucks because it does not communicate *what* it intends to *whom* it intends and print has followed right along in its footsteps.

Of course I'm making the possibly invalid assumption the "intent" is something more than to "communicate" the money out of your pocket into theirs. That's a different topic though.

KFG

How sad

[autopr0n]

I remember a year or so ago everyone was posting Chinese and japanese text all over everywhere (mostly in their .sigs. Actualy, I think I might have been the first... under a diffrent account, obviously)

Its really amazing how anal slashdot is about censoring things. They bitch about 'freedom of information' but then ban ASCII art and non-english char sets. It even makes it hard to show things like simple graphs or whatever.

And...

[Anonymous Coward]

This is -precisely- why there are "web designers"...

Tell me, oh wondrous one, how many of the browsers will support what you've submitted?

Enough said.

Go back to academia and buy a clue.

Re:hmm

[dvdeug]

If your accessibility software requires alt tags for my meaningless shim images (not that I use any) then your accessibility software sucks.

If you don't have alt tags for your meaningless shim images (which are required by the latest HTML standards), your HTML sucks. How is accessibility software supposted to know whether you didn't bother to add ALT tags (and it should try to read the graphic name so the reader has some idea what's there) or if it's a meaningless image? It could guess, but wouldn't it much better if you just told it?

Re:hmm

[drinkypoo]

How is accessibility software supposted to know whether you didn't bother to add ALT tags (and it should try to read the graphic name so the reader has some idea what's there) or if it's a meaningless image?

Well, a computationally non-intensive method to decide if an image was important to the document at large would be to determine the amount of variance in the image, especially if there is none. If every pixel is the same color, or it's just a transparent image with no data on the color channels, or the transparency is maximum regardless of the raster layer, you can probably assume it's a shim. If the image is too small to convey a character, then you can assume it's not text. If most of the images have alt tags, but some of them don't, then obviously it's not 100% that the ones without them don't need them, but it does make it more likely. And finally, images with alt="" don't actually mean that there's nothing on the image, all it means for sure is that the HTML editor has inserted an alt tag for compliance.

An image without an alt tag on a page with other images with alt tags which is not linked to anything is probably not important.

Re:hmm

[dvdeug]

As I said, it can guess. But most of your suggestions require the program to download the image, which is a waste of time if you can't display it.

DirtyBastards.com

[sparkz]

No direct link - great, so they get slashdotted, and don't even know why!

IN SOVIET RUSSIA

[Anonymous Coward]

trolls bite YOU

Anally retentive

[Anonymous Coward]

You guys are just being anal. My philosophy is if it works it works. Screw being pendatic about not using font tags and stuff like that. If it looks good then use it!

Flashturbation

[Anonymous Coward]

How dare anyone make a work of art than cannot be enjoyed equally by everyone with any handicap, and why is Macromedia exempt from this logical ruling?

Painters should be shot for using a 2 dimensional medium that cannot be appreciated by the blind, and Van Gogh should have been flayed for first, using excessive color and denying the color-blind full appreciation, and then quartered for over-use of paint because running one's hand across the surface of "The Starry Night" could be potentially harmful for the tactilely hypersensitive. And I probably deserve at least 39 lashings and bread and butter for dinner for not describing my site logo sufficiently with alt tags for those using lynx to gain the full appreciation the cleverness of my graphic design.

Fuck you, I say to all the handicaps, gimps, and retards who want to view my webpage, get elected president, and be like Mike. But not really, just those who think that because they're parents didn't spoil them enough that they have to go around righting wrongs that aren't there.

Barrier free entry

[Anonymous Coward]

as long as motherfuckers like you are around, businesses are going to list "ability to climb" stairs as one of their job requirements, and people who could otherwise work and/or enjoy productive lives are going to sit on their ass and watch Oprah all day and waste my money up until the point I join them on welfare because my boss was sued for not putting the ramp in the middle of the fucking walkway, or because we were 6 months behind trying to make our website "torte lawyer and fuckwit vegan impregable" and lost our market. One day your free ride will run out, and the governed won't be able to support you all.

Ow! Stop It!

[KanSer]

Is he trying to punish us for what we went through with Bill Shatner? WE'RE SORRY!

Roblimo

[Anonymous Coward]

"Whatever. We left Joe's formatting intact. It's a little different from our usual style, but variety is the spice of Slashdot."

Whatever??? Shut the fuck up. Don't whatever the man, he went to quite a bit of trouble you asshole.

flash .. love it .. hate it..

[n3m6]

the one thing i hate about flash. cannot be indexed with web spiders. and that means none of the flash sites can be found from google.com.

Re: What's the difference?

[The Cydonian]

(... in the immortal words of Woody Allen's character in Annie Hall: ) it's all mental masturbation.

Vegan?

[Anonymous Coward]

I make small mistakes, and have not updated scores of very old pages. I'm also a vegan with some shoes and accessories made of leather. Complete purity is sometimes unattainable.

Joe, as long as you don't eat your shoes and accessories I think you're OK.

S.

Re:hmm

[drinkypoo]

I'd just only download the smallest images, or those loaded the largest number of times on a page. In addition I would load the smallest images first, might as well since you're not going to look at any of them.

Irony...or Stubbornness?

[RAMMS EIN]

``In one of the many ironies of Web development, it is indie developers like me who have a higher success rate in achieving valid, accessible sites even though larger commercial operations are the ones where valid HTML and accessibility are more urgently needed.''
I think this is largely due to the stubbornness of PHBs. They don't want the relatively new accessibility features, they want what has worked in the past: <font>, <br> and <img>. In part, they are right. If your entire website is in HTML 2.0 with FONT tags all over, changing that to XHTML with CSS is a huge venture. It is well-known that such operations are costly and error-prone. CSS is a compatibility nightmare due to lacking browser support (especially from the folks at Redmond). And the vast majority of viewers are thought to be better served by a flashy but standards-violating site than a standards-compliant site that doesn't look perfect due to their browser not fully supporting those standards.

Another issue is laziness, uncompetence, or convenience. Many webmasters prefer using specialized authoring tools for creating their websites in a WYSIWYG manner. I don't know any such tool that complies to the latest standards as well as me and my text editor do. WYSIWYG is the wrong paradigm for websites. They are browsed in vastly different environments, by vastly different people, with vastly different needs, and corresponding software. The correct paradigm would be WYSIWYM (What You See Is What You Mean), in line with the ideal of the semantic web. I've seen people use tools that provide buttons for making text bold or underlined, but not for emphasis or strong emphasis. It makes me barf. It can be argued that web authoring tools are less error-prone than typing in a text editor. This would be true, if the code output by said tools would be valid according to current standards. It is said that authoring tools are efficient. This is probably true for some. I am quicker with a good text editor than with any authoring tool I've tried. Menu options? No thanks, I'd rather type tags and run scripts. In some cases, easy to use authoring tools can be a necessity. Suppose that various departments had different sections on the website where they periodically posted updates. The people working in those departments may not have enough expertise to author XHTML. They shouldn't have to. Hiring a qualified webmaster for each department may not be an option. Here, authoring tools help out. If the code they spit out stinks, that's the price you pay for not hiring a qualified webmaster. It's a trade-off.

One thing that bothers me when writing webpages is the unability to test things. I can check if my webpage is compliant with XHTML 1.1. I can check that my CSS is valid. I can verify that it works well with lynx. I can even have friends check if it works well with MicroSoft Internet Explorer. However, that still doesn't tell me how accessible my page is to people with disabilities. I can't test how it works in OmniCorp's BrailleBrowser, because I don't own a copy, and I can't read braille anyway. I can put in aural CSS if I want, but I have no way to do anything meaningful with it, as I don't have any software that interprets it. I don't know anybody who does use a braille browser, or a screen reader that interprets aural CSS. I don't know where to get software to test these things, and if it requires me to pay up, never mind, it's just a hobby. The best I can do is making sure my pages comply to standards and hope for the best.

Re:I'm partly deaf, and I don't get accessible mov

[Anonymous Coward]

Nor the god Shiva for that matter.

Particularly snide

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought that was particularly snide and uncalled for. The respondent spent a lot of effort and this is the response?

Re: book names underlined or italicized

[tomhudson]

Do you underline or italicize your name? :-)

Besides, underlines don't show up on slashdot - and people would try to click on them and complain aobut broken links :-(

I use italics for parenthetical meterial (like this) as a side-note, or for extra contextual material. Most people get it. Besides, if you were to do this in plain text (which all html should downgrade gracefully to), quotes are the common way to denote a book name. :-)

Thanks for taking the time to respond.

I guess I'm not a person

[some guy I know]

People want webpages to seem alive. People want an interactive web. This is something that's a foreign concept to most linux users: You are all used to seeing pages like CGIwrap's webpage

That page loads almost instantly, has no scripting, flash, or other security-reducing crap, doesn't try to override my browser preferences, and is very readable.

Take a look, for example, at the 2 Advanced Studios webpage. Tell me you've seen a cooler webpage, and I'll tell you you're lying.

That page takes over 10 seconds to load over my 56K modem line, and uses pictures for text, which are unreadable without a microscope on my 1600x1200 19" display.
I don't think that that's very cool at all.
And I'm not lying.

give people what they want. It's all about target marketing. Linux geeks are content to see pages like the cgi-wrap page. HOWEVER, normal people are impressed by things that move, things that make noise, things that interact.

So, you are writing that web pages should be designed like Fisher-Price toys, that your target market is people with the intelligence or attention span of babies?

Making a good looking, interactive page, with javascript menus, flash animations, etc, means "I have taken an interest in my work, and I care what it looks like".

Making a page with javascript menus, flash animations, etc., means "I don't care about the viewer's bandwith requirements. I don't care about viewers who have all of that crap turned off due to security concerns, company policy, etc. I don't care whether my page is accessible to people with disabilities. I care more about what the page looks like than about the information. The content on my page is so uninteresting, so dull, so incredibly boring, that I have to dress it up to try to distract the user from realizing that I don't really have much to say."

they know how to make a page look better than you do

But I don't want my web page to look better than I do. :)

People like him are the reason it's ok to have a website that looks like [feces], and I say I've had enough.

People like you are the reason that web designers think that it's OK to have a website with all flash (pun intended) and glitter ("Oooo! Shiny!"), but devoid of content.

Re:hmm

[mzajac]

That's ridiculous.

You're proposing that accessibility software makers do tens of thousands of hours of programming and testing work, so that handicapped people can download megabytes of extra files to get wildly unreliable results.

All because you're too lazy to put alt="" in an image tag where the standard requires it.

Interesting, but

[gmhowell]

Others have mentioned what I'll say, but it bears repeating. You have an interesting idea. A few problems. First, if company foo doesn't have to spend $1000 on improving their website, would they put that towards research of artificial eyes? No. Without doubt or hesitation, no. So your proposition isn't 'either/or'.

Second, building an artificial eye is orders of magnitude more difficult than building an artificial ear (ie, cochlear implant). There is also the question of damage to the optic nerve. Sure, some blindness is caused by damage to lens, cornea, etc. But there's much that is caused by damage to the retina and the optic nerve. The leading cause of deaf-blindness is Usher's Syndrome. That entails damage to the retina. I didn't catch the details on the most recent Slashdot story, but I think most of the artificial eyes in development won't deal well with this.

Also, take a look at a cochlear implant. Surgery, a piece over the ear, and a processor about the size of a pack of smokes (or deck of cards for those afraid of the tobacco gods). That only has to convert sound into 10-20 signals. HOw much more is needed to provide vision?

Anyway, nice idea, but it fails in practice.

As Thoreau wrote. . .

[kfg]

"The ways by which you may get money almost without exception lead downward. . . . If you would get money as a writer or lecturer, you must be popular, which is to go downward perpendicularly."

I fully agree.

I also fully recongnize the value of art that isn't appreciated. Van Gough is the classic case. He was speaking a language no one at the time was willing to listen to. That didn't disuade him from saying it, although he eventually appears to have become despondent enough over the fact to take his own life.

I fully recognize the value of art that *I* don't appreciate. Cubism leaves me cold. I don't know why, it just does. Maybe the "fault" is mine. Maybe I just " don't get it." Who knows? But I recognize it as legitimate art nonetheless and think of Picaso as an "artiste" arrongantly fixed on his vision. ( An arrogant jerk *otherwise,* but that's a different issue).

On the other hand I *like* Mondrian, but I'm not sure it's art. I rather think it's just pleasing graphic design. An awful lot of people don't even think it's that.

Terry Gilliam went through a nasty, vicious, personal and very public fight to get Brasil released in America but I don't think he was being an arrogant "artiste." His fight was perfectly valid. To change or delete one minute of his movie would have in some manner changed what it said. Most people think the movie is junk. A devoted few of us adore it. Gilliam knew who we were, what he wanted to say to us, and how to say it to us. He was a master of his craft who wouldn't back down when studio execs demanded he fit some form of popular mold, even if that mold was only a precise time length. I bless him for it.

On the other hand I don't know what the hell the guy who drapes miles of fabric over landscapes is up to. He seems to though, so what the hell, more power to him.

I had a photography professor once who derided Ansel Adams at every oportunity. I never really did figure out why.

Ultimately art is in the eye of the beholder, which, as it happens, is my point. When I am working as an artist I do my thing. When people like it, I like the fact. When people don't, well, ok. It's not like a personal attack or something. But what I don't do is put *unintentional* barriers between myself and my viewers because of my "vision."

The girl in question is obviously trying to present her "vision" in a particular way. She is *failing* in that attempt because of her narrow focus. It is that narrow focus that is the arrogance that is coming between us, not that I don't understand her art, but that I understand certain aspects of it *better* than she does because I understand her *medium* better than she does at the moment. When you present art on a computer you cannot make the computer, and certain aspects of its interface, just "go away." Your art *must* take that into account if you are going to present it properly. She has had this explained to her by a friend. She doesn't want to hear that so she ingnores it citing her "vision."

Ok, here's an example of art I won't like. I won't even *look* at it because the artists "vision" is one I'm not willing to deal with. My hypothetical artist paints images desinged to provoke emotional trauma. He only displays them one at a time in a tent and to get to the tent you have to walk across a field of broken glass in your bare feet so that you are in the proper state of mind when you view his painting. That is part of his "vision."

Well I'm sorry, but I'm not going to do that, BUT, I respect his vision as art and understand that *I* am the one rejecting the dialog in this case. This isn't the same as with the girl and her unintentionally annoying webpage.

I know a guy who makes fine ceramic pots, and then damages them in some way because if they are useful they aren't art.

Nonesense.

This sort of thing is just falling prey to the fallacy that just being unpopular makes it art. This fallacy is easy to fall into because so much that *is* popular is crap.

But*sometimes* the unpopular is unpopular because it legitimately *is* annoying garbage.

KFG

Re:As Thoreau wrote. . .

[Bert Peers]

Thanks for the examples, quite educational -- I see where you're coming from. I also agree with the first part, that the actual value of _art_ pretty much exists independent of our appreciation.

But about the medium or way of presentation... I'm just a little blurry on how you distinguish between an unintentional barrier, and the imaginary glass-guy, who also seems to be only citing his vision as a justification for the barrier. Can you call unorthodox use of a medium unintentional if it goes back to the artist's vision ? I'm not denying that all those undertones of being deliberately impopular might be there, camouflaged as "vision" -- but I still don't find much of a reasonably objective method to draw this decisive line between "It's ok, I just reject it" versus "This is an abuse of the medium / exhibition process". I mean, how do you separate someone who's just flat out wrong, inexperienced or overreaching, from someone with the guts to ignore all (or at least, your) conventions, especially when it comes to the way the medium is used and not the art or technique itself ? (Or did you imply that on a computer, presentation _is_ part of the technique).

Oh bugger, in the above I MEANT to say.. .

[kfg]

that I *don't* think of Picaso as an "artiste."

Serves me right for trying to post so late at night.

KFG

No, the girl explicitly stated that she chose. . .

[kfg]

a particular technique of display because she was doing it on a computer, on the web. She was unhappy with the way the web interface distracted from her art. She didn't want the viewer to be aware of the *web* when viewing her art. So she chose a technique she thought would make the web "invisible."

This was *her* stated goal.

I equated that in my original post with Mondrian carrying his images around the edge of the canvas and dispensing with the frame because he wanted people to see his art, *NOT* the frame. In a framed image the frame effectively becomes part of the viewer sees, and thus part of the image.

The girl and Mondrian both had the same goal. In fact, odds are, this idea came down to the girl from Mondrian in some way or other.

The difference is that Mondrian understood his medium and how to accomplish his intended goal in a way that didn't *distract* from his art. If he had just taken the frame off the canvas people would have been looking and the rough, unpainted edges of his paintings instead of the image itself. So he carried the image over the edge and to the back of the canvas. Now the whole work is visually complete. The technique *matched* the medium.

The girl, on the other hand, in trying to remove the "frame" from her image ( the web interface) did so by imposing a "rough edge" of another sort that draws even greater attention to it than the largely psychologically "invisible" web interface would have.

It's as if Mondrian had dispensed with the frame by hacking a hole in the gallery wall and hanging the painting behind it. Now the viewer on looking at the painting is distracted by this odd hole in the wall he has to look through. It wasn't part of Mondrian's "vision" to display his art through a hole in the wall, just without a frame.

The girl chose a display technique to achieve a certain *goal.* The technique wasn't supposed to be part of the art itself. If that were the case I'd simply like it or not like it. The technique was supposed to be *invisible,* so I'd only see her art. Instead I see this odd hole hacked in the web that I have to view her art through.

The girl doesn't *intend* for me to view her art through that hole as part of her work. That would be cool. The girl doesn't percieve that the hole *exists* even though it's glaringly obvious to virtually all of her viewers.

Her technique isn't bad because I find it distracting. Her technique is bad because her stated goal was * that I shouldn't be distracted.*

Stretched canvas has certain inate physical properties. They can't be ignored. You can use those properties in various ways, some of which might well be inovative, but you can't simply give it certain properties that you *wish* it had. There are things you can do on stretched canvas that you can't on the web, like carry an image around the edges. The web has no such edge.

There are certain things you can do on the web that you can't do on stretched canvas, like flash animation. But there are certain things you *can't* do on the web because of it's inate properites. A good artist understands her media and works *with* it, not against it. If you find yourself working against your media that fault is yours. You have simply chosen the wrong media to work in.

Or you have to change your technique.

Any webpage is inherently contained in a frame. It's part of the physical property of the medium. You *cannot* make it go away. What you *can* do is employ perceptual tricks to make the viewer *less concious* of it. She employed a technique that made people *more* concious of it.

Again, I've no quarrel with her doing whatever the hell she wants as part of her art. She can make any statement using any technique she wants. With regards to the artistic statement itself there is *no* objective method to draw a line between what's "right" and what's "wrong".

But if you come across someone trying to drive a Jello cube through a pepperoni with a hamster and you ask them what they're doing and they say, " Building a birdhouse," you're likely to think they're going about it the wrong way.

But if they say, " Doing my own thing man, it's, like, my vision," you won't think "right" or "wrong." Weird maybe, but not right or wrong.

Yet the only difference between the two scenes is * what the artist said.*

KFG

Re:hmm

[drinkypoo]

Actually, I personally don't use shims, nor do I use graphics links in most cases. Shims are for people who can't understand that HTML is no TML. If I want per-pixel control I'm using PDF. Even THAT is device-independent but it's a whole hell of a lot closer to 1:1 from my screen to yours than HTML could ever be.

I do think however that it's ridiculous to whine about how people aren't making standards-compliant pages when the problems can be solved in software. It's a lot easier than getting people to do the "right thing".

Re:Wired's new look - and W3C too!

[ManxStef]

Indeed, but apparently this isn't newsworth according to the Slashdot editors, and neither is the W3C's move to XHTML & CSS:

Here are your recent submissions to Slashdot, and their status within the system:

• 2002-10-11 14:09:06 Wired redesign to use XHTML and CSS (rejected)
• 2002-12-06 16:39:05 W3C redesign to use XHTML and CSS (rejected)

There are couple more comments on the Wired changeover at the Web Standards site and CSS guru Eric A. Meyer's site - both sites are excellent examples of XHTML & CSS themselves BTW.

Cheers,

Hmm... okay

[Bert Peers]

Point taken :) There are still a few things in your point of view which I find most peculiar... but I already feel too guilty for typing such short blurbs in response to your lengthy expose, so I won't evoke more and just shut up instead :) Thanks for the insights !

Well, I'll just close out by saying that. . .

[kfg]

everything I've said only relates to the intended functionality and communicativness of art and design.

Otherwise it's just a question of taste, and as they say, there's no accounting for it, and all parties bring their own biases "to the table," producers and viewers alike.

Communication between humans has always been a nasty and contentious undertaking.

KFG

Re:Well, I'll just close out by saying that. . .

[mojonixon's love-chi]

Yes, but you have left one question yet unanswered... Is Ulm _truly_ the fashion-crime capitol of Europe? Peter

Tables and page layout

[albionsoft]

Okay, a good point. Not something that any popular browser actually allows, as far as I'm aware, but something to aim for in the future.

But (you knew there was a but, didn't you) is this really different from, say, wanting to position a nav bar at the right or bottom of the screen, rather than the left or top? I still don't see your example as not defining a physical relationship. You are still defining that this cell is a member of this column and this row, and are still defining that the data is being presented in a tabular layout. The changes being allowed are fairly minor, at least compared to what should be possible if we had a true content/presentation seperation.

Re: book names underlined or italicized

[ttfkam]

Do you underline or italicize your name?

No, because according to the rules of English, you shouldn't. According to those same rules of English, book titles are italicized or, in the case of handwriting, underlined.

I use italics for parenthetical meterial ( like this) as a side-note, or for extra contextual material.

You are among a small minority. Parentheses are commonly used for asides that do not fit within the context of the associated sentence.

Besides, if you were to do this in plain text (which all html should downgrade gracefully to), quotes are the common way to denote a book name.

_Book Name_ is more common in practice. This is one of the many areas where plain text is deficient over a document with structured formatting.

If you really want to split hairs, you shouldn't have used parentheses in your last sentence as the parenthetical material is closely associated with the content of the enclosing sentence. As a comma is too soft a break in the flow of the sentence, it would have worked better with an mdash.

"Besides, if you were to do this in plain text -- to which all html should downgrade gracefully -- quotes are the common way to denote a book name."

I realize that two hyphens are not technically an mdash, but at least it holds some semblance of correctness. Think of English as a complex programming language and the reader as a compiler or runtime environment. The more strict the input, the faster it gets processed.

Your use of italics in parentheses and quotes around book titles is akin to errant C macros that redefine core functionality. It obfuscates. You are, of course, entitled to your own writing style, but don't presume that it's correct or encourage others to adopt the practice.

Just because people are largely ignorant of the rules of English does not mean that those rules do not exist. It's a crying shame that grammar isn't taught in most U.S. public schools anymore.

FYI: I studied literature in college; however, I thought that an analogy to programming would go over better in this forum.

Re: book names underlined or italicized

[tomhudson]

First off, I don't italicize my name because, unlike books, I am a living thing. Secondly, if you check books, when they quote a person, and include the person's name, it's often to the bottom right, in italics, along w. dob and other info.

Parenthetical material is just that, anything you decide as an author to stick in parenthesis. It usually is additional information that expands on the sentence's main thought (see your usage in your post as an example).

Look, we ALL studied literature in college. Big fucking shit. The use of __ to represent an em-dash is ludicrous for most readers. Readers aren't compilers.

As to the use of italics in parenthesis, this helps visually set off the parenthetical material. This helps the reader see that the parenthetical material isn't an essential part of the main sentence.

As to using C macros that redefine core functionality being obfuscation, that's totally rediculous. The core functionality of C is the set of keywords and operators, which cannot be redefined. In C++, they (operators) can be overloaded, but the keywords cannot.

Perhaps you meant C libraries? The libraries are not, and have never been, part of the C language core. There are standard libraries that ship with most C compilers, but they are always implementation-dependent.

Would you call this obfuscation?

#define strs char**

#define str char*

It makes clear that, in C, a string is really a pointer to the first of a series of bytes in ram, and that an array of strings is really a pointer to a bunch of pointers. It also lets the user type less.

a note on macros

[ttfkam]

The preprocessor is not C.

#define char int

is perfectly permissible. The following compiles and runs fine. Go ahead, try it. I'm not saying it's good coding style, but would you argue that all coders demonstrate good coding style?

#include <stdio.h>
#define char int

int main () {
char hello = 387;
printf("%d\n", hello);
}