August 12th, 2008

The Kirra Hill Eagle

Beloved by me since childhood and finally mortalised on my web site, the iron eagle sculpture at Kirra Hill. It’s good to see the Gold Coast again.

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August 3rd, 2008

Accessibility and Us

Christian Heilmann, in The Biggest Barrier to Accessibility and Inclusive Design is Us, writes on designing with accessibility as a starting point, keeping adaptive technology edgy, and making it fun.

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July 30th, 2008

The ALA Web Survey

A List Apart’s 2008 Survey for People Who Make Web Sites is now open. If you make web sites please take the survey and contribute to some better aggregate data about the industry. You can also see the results of last year’s survey, the very first for web designers and developers.

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July 23rd, 2008

Tricks and Techniques

Jared Spool at the Higher Education Web Symposium in Philadelphia last week, discussing research on how web teams get things done:

The best teams didn’t have a methodology or dogma they followed. The best teams all focused on increasing the techniques and tricks for each team member.

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July 16th, 2008

Spam Karma Released Under GPL

Dr. Dave discontinues development of his anti-spam WordPress plugin and licenses the source under the GPL. I’ve been using Spam Karma, and Michael Hampton’s Bad Behavior, on this site for around two years to great effect. Dr. Dave is stepping down and making the project available for others to take over. He cites time as one major reason, and the state of WordPress development as the other. Fair enough. Best of luck on future projects, Dave.

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July 12th, 2008

X and Accessibility

In April, 2007 David Andersson summarised the development of, and differences between, HTML5 and XHTML2 and concluded that the web’s future lies with HTML5. I think he’s generally right, though XHTML2 has never been a likely successor to HTML4/XHTML1. The real question is what will become of the X in XHTML given that most authors are doing it wrong?

HTML5 is looking so strong because it’s a pragmatically driven project that incorporates much of what people are already doing—stealing XHTML’s thunder by keeping the standards-based focus while decoupling the web’s primary language from XML. (HTML5 is homologous to XML—it can even be served as XML—but most browsers will never see it that way.) And because it’s well-grounded it’s already being implemented.

Despite the efforts of the W3C to absorb HTML under the XML project, it seems that the two vocabularies will remain on separate paths, running parallel for now. This threatens the W3C’s goal of a semantic (machine-readable) web in its idealist form. WHATWG’s efforts which, like those of the microformats community, are grounded in popular practice, will get us only part-way there, but unlike XHTML2 they promise us something we can use here and now.

So is HTML5 a fait accompli? Taking the contrary view in a recent article, James Edwards still favours the current XHMTL standard, served as XML where possible, over HTML5 for accessibility reasons. He doesn’t mention XHTML5 explicitly (i.e. HTML5 served with an XML MIME-type), but he does say he’d rather stick with XHTML1 than adopt HTML5’s markup spec, which drops support for several accessibility features, including the alt attribute for images and the summary and headers attributes for tables.

Edwards and Gez Lemon, linked above, are right that this is a problem, especially regarding the alt attribute (given the prevalence of images over correctly marked-up complex data tables). This needn’t be a practical quandry: Edwards is taking a stand on principle in sticking with XHTML1 because the spec recognises these accessibility features.

So what should an organisation that is concerned about accessibility do? This is a question I’m trying to answer. Two new sets of guidelines are particularly relevant: WCAG+Samurai released on February 26 (see commentary by Joe Clark and Roger Johansson), and the W3C’s much-revised WCAG 2 Candidate Recommendation released on April 30 (discussed in interviews with Patrick Lauke and Lachlan Hunt).

The two questions that need to be addressed:

• Which set of normative rules, if any, should guide the organisation?
• Which X/HTML syntax, if any, maximises access for both assistive technologies and mobile user agents?

“If any” is important: I don’t want to presume that a single choice must be adopted in either case. It may be true, for example, that more than one versions of HTML could be used without any significant detriment to accessibility, or that neither set of accessibility guidelines is completely appropriate or usable. (I doubt that, but let’s see.) Nevertheless, being able to specify one in each case is desirable, and so is testing and evaluating the results.

I’m planning to follow up on this post once I’ve read the two documents and done some testing, and I’m interested in hearing what people think.

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July 12th, 2008

Josh Weinberg: The Website is Down

The web site is down. / Well, it’s working for me. / No, it’s down. / But Apache is running. / I think you should reboot it. / Well, okay…

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June 30th, 2008

Navigation via the Link Element

Pretty much every navigation menu on every site is different. They have commonalities, but obviously they’re not exactly the same. The minute you want to find something else on the site you’re viewing a small part of your brain energy goes into figuring out what’s available to get you there. You probably look for a navigation menu, some persistent pattern of options that outlines the site’s scope and allows you to move across, down into, or up and out. Unless the designer hates you, you’ll probably find the navigation in the same place on each page. It will take you time and effort to move your mouse there. Not much, but some.

Opera’s Navigation Bar.

Another way to provide navigation is through the page’s meta information. If you mark up the head of each page with link element relationships to nearby documents then visitors with a capable user agent can navigate to nearby stuff using their application controls. Opera is one such browser. Note the available Home, Previous, Next and Author buttons on the lower toolbar in the screenshot. There’s also a Firefox plugin called Link Widgets that works in a similar way. The blue arrow buttons are Top, Up, Previous and Next though there are others you can add by customising your toolbar.

Link Widgets for Firefox 1.5⁺.

In this scenario you expend some brain energy seeing which options are available, and some time moving your mouse to the one you want, say the “Previous” button. But the next time you come to a site that supports this type of navigation, you know those buttons are in exactly the same place, the same distance from each other, the same distance from your Reload and Back buttons, i.e. not far.

In HTML4 this was the intention of the link element: to provide a way for the browser to render links through the user interface (though I just learned about it). Opera’s implementation is quite addictive—fast the way a feed reader is when you’re skipping through a list of posts. I’ve no idea how widely supported this is, but it’s another tick for Opera. I think they are slowly winning me over.

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June 26th, 2008

How Good Are Poppies?

Pretty damn good. These belong to Matt and Katie.

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June 23rd, 2008

Electrical Storm on Saturn

Electrical storm on Saturn by Cassini probe.

This colour-modulated shot of Saturn was taken by the Cassini orbiter in March of an electrical storm that “penetrates from Saturn’s lower to upper troposphere” according to the imaging team. Sounds… large. The lighting produces radio frequencies that scientists use to measure it’s intensity. Meanwhile, Australian amateur astronomer Trevor Barry is making the news for his photos of the same weather event, taken at his home in Broken Hill. Here’s a NASA news roundup that contains a quick grab of Trevor talking about it. Researchers collect amateur evidence because the spacecraft cannot monitor the storm continuously. Massiveness—inherently newsworthy and interesting!

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