t 'n t luoma

So I went to CNN when I heard the jury was in on the Michael Jackson case, and before the verdicts have been read, this is the chart that CNN has prepared:

Here's just one of the accessibility problems: I can't tell the "Not Guilty" and the "Hung Jury" colors apart. The "Guilty" one looks darker than the others, but I'm not sure what color it is (red? brown? Could be green...)

See, silly me, I would have come up with a boring old ASCII symbol like G, N, H (Guilty, Not-Guilty, Hung).

Or maybe X 0 -

*sigh*

Posted by TjL at 04:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

No longer treat missing DOCTYPE or Charset as a fatal error.

That quote (from the What's New page for the W3C validator, ends a long, long, long standing problem that many folks had with the validator: it only worked if you knew what you were doing.

Continue reading "W3C Validator Upgraded to Face Reality" »

Posted by TjL at 01:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has invalidated a claim to Web browser technology central to a case against Microsoft, a move that could spare the software giant from paying more than half a billion dollars in damages, according to documents obtained on Friday. (source: CNet, see also The Register)

It’s a rare day indeed when I find myself on Microsoft’s side in a lawsuit, but this seemed remarkably silly.

Posted by TjL at 10:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

• Act! 2000 for Windows for Dummies by Jeffrey Mayer
• Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability by Steve Krug
• FreeBSD: An Open-Source Operating System for your Personal Computer
• Inside Unix
• Learning GNU Emacs, Second Edition (O'Reilly)
• Practical Web Traffic Analysis: Standards, Privacy, Techniques, Results
• Site-Seeing: A Visual Approach to Web Usability by Luke Wroblewski
• Special Edition Using HTML 4, Fifth Edition
• Talking Your Talent to the Web by Jeffrey Zeldman
• The Complete FreeBSD, Second Edition by Greg Lehey
• The Web Professional’s Handbook
• Usability for the Web: Designing Web Sites That Work
• Web Design Workshop by John Tollett, Robin Williams, and David Rohr
• Web Navigation: Designing the User Experience by Jennifer Fleming

Interested? Email Me. Make an offer.

Posted by TjL at 10:09 PM | Permalink

Well, maybe the third time will be the charm for the hapless Mozilla folks. They tried to call their standalone browser Phoenix, then Firebird, and now they’re trying Firefox. Apparently each name has conflicted with another product. Anyone want to wager how long this one will last?

A quick recap of Firefox’s “features” from Mozilla Firefox’s page...

Tabbed-Browsing

Firefox presents a fast and convenient way to browse the web - now you can open several pages in one window in separate browser tabs. Open links in the background while you read a web page, then continue to the links when you're done - pages are available when you need them, making the web feel faster even over slow connections.

Opera can do that. Actually, Opera can do better than that (learn more about Opera’s MDI feature, which Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox doesn’t offer.)

Popup Blocking

Popup advertising is one of the most annoying things to hit the web in recent years. Firefox shields you from unwanted popup advertising. It also gives you control to allow certain sites to open popup windows, if required to operate.

Yup, Opera can block unwanted popups as well. It doesn’t yet support site-specific settings, but I have found the general settings to work for 99% of the sites out there.

Integrated Search

Firefox makes finding things easy. The built in Google bar provides convenient access to the best search engine on the web. Simply click in the Google bar or press Ctrl+K, type some words and press Enter.

Opera has Google built-in, and about 14 others as well. Plus you can easily add your own. And you can decide which one to search by using single keys, i.e. g = google, z = Amazon.com, etc (Learn more about Opera’s search.ini).

Efficient Navigation

Details are important to us. Sometimes it really is easier to navigate with the keyboard. Firefox lets you open links by simply typing some of the text in the link - no mouse necessary.

Opera welcomes Firefox as the second browser to realize that details are important. You can navigate Opera by Q and A keys, or Shift + Arrow Keys. Or you can search text or links on the page. Or you can get a list of all the links on a page and use the arrow keys to pick which one you want.

AutoDownload

Automatically download files to your Desktop or another location with the new AutoDownload feature. Downloading becomes much simpler without windows popping up asking you where to save, etc.

Opera offers a Quick Download feature which will download without asking you where to save. In case you do happen to care where files are saved, Opera will also pop up a window asking you where to save a file, but (unlike IE and Firefox) Opera will start the download as soon as you request it, and continue to download the file while you decide where you want to save it. (IE and Firefox wait until you have chosen a name/location before the download begins.)

Posted by TjL at 12:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (14)

I bet I used OmniWeb before you did.

Ok, well there’s a fair chance that very few of you have ever used OmniWeb, because it is only (now) for the Mac. But I used it way back when, back in the dark ages of NeXTSTEP and OPENSTEP.

“Big deal” you say?

Well you try writing a browser for an operating system tied to hardware that only runs as 25Mhz (or at the most 33 Mhz... we called those “Turbo” machines.

OmniWeb had a great UI and did things like checked your bookmarks to see if they still existed. It had its problems, but Omni made a browser for an OS that no one else cared about — that was true for Mac OS-X Server when it first came out too.

The problem lately has been that OmniWeb was so far behind with regard to standards that few people used it. OmniWeb5 is addressing some of those problems (though it will still be behind Safari).

I love Opera on Windows, but if I were on a Mac, I’d be using OmniWeb5.

Read more:

Official OmniWeb5 page at OmniGroup.com

First Look: OmniWeb 5 Beta (by Michael Brewer @ MacDevCenter)

OmniWeb 5 Public Beta (by John Gruber @ DaringFireball)

Posted by TjL at 05:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Microsoft plans to release a software update that removes support for handling user names and passwords in HTTP and HTTP with Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) or HTTPS URLs in Microsoft Internet Explorer. The following URL syntax is no longer supported in Internet Explorer or Windows Explorer after you install this software update:

http(s)://username:password@server/resource.ext

This article is intended to give you advance notice of this change in Internet Explorer's default behavior. If you include user information in HTTP or HTTPS URLs, Microsoft recommends that you explore the workarounds that are described in this article before you install this software update. Microsoft will post more information in this article when the software update becomes available.

Source: Microsoft Knowledge Base Article - 834489

Oh my Lord, please tell me they aren’t serious. Internet Explorer has a slew of bugs that deal with this. Rather than fix these bugs, Microsoft is going to discontinue support for the entire thing?

You have got to be kidding me.

Is this innovation? No, it’s laziness. It’s sloppy programming work that caused the problems in the first place. They are relying on people downloading a patch, so should they make a patch which cripples the program or a patch that fixes the problem? WOW.

I really can’t believe this. The combination of audacity and stupidity behind this decision is just staggering.

But you know what? No one can stop them. They answer to no one. Who cares if Opera and Mozilla gets it right? (Opera gets it more right than Mozilla)

Then again, this is even more reason to not use Internet Explorer. These links may not work in Internet Explorer, but they will continue to work in Opera and other browsers.

So do you want a crippled browser with less features and more security holes, or do you want a more secure browser with more features? Download and try Opera.

What’s next? Will they remove hyperlinks altogether? Don’t laugh, they have already suggested that you should not click links.

Posted by TjL at 08:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

What are the most annoying things on the web? I’m not talking about spam or virii or Windows being unstable. I’m talking about things that websites do that are just really annoying. Here is my list:

1. Animated GIFs
2. Blinking text
3. Flash
4. Pop-up/Pop-under Windows
5. really small text
6. background sound

What are your least-favorite things? Vote below.

A note about Flash: 98.7% of all Flash I see is ads, or a site that has gone to 100% Flash and doesn’t seem to care that I am on a really slow connection. I realize that Flash itself can be useful, but in practice, it is far more often annoying than helpful.

Posted by TjL at 04:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

JoinWOW published a little article I wrote a few weeks ago entitled Testing Multiple Versions of Internet Explorer. I haven't had time to keep up with a lot of the discussions, but this was one topic that seemed to come around every once in awhile, so I figured I'd try to write up a little FAQ about it.

Posted by TjL at 08:42 PM | Permalink

Big John has published a great article Toward a more standards compliant Internet Explorer. I'd hope that the next Internet Explorer would be much more standards compliant, but I don't hold out much hope for that, given the basic flaws each version thus far has had.

Still, he raises some good issues.

Posted by TjL at 11:23 PM | Permalink

I've been reading Wired every day since Wired announced their new design.

I love the site except they have the most atrocious animated GIF advertizements. This g*d-awful shaking banner ad was the last straw.

Wired is off my daily reading list for a week. I will be sending them an email to let them know. They can choose to care or not care. I am not calling for a world-wide ban of Wired. You make your own decisions. But as for me and my house, whenever I see an ad I deem to be truly over-the-top, I'm just not going back, or at least not for awhile.

I hope some day folks will realize that annoyance is not a good marketing technique. Oh, and before you grumble to think that I am against all ads, I'm not. Just annoying ones. In fact when I was looking for something online and found a non-annoying ad from a company I had never heard of (a text-ad too, actually), I immediately went and bought from them. I paid more than I had assumed I would and I skipped my usual obsessive price comparisons. Why? Because this company was supporting a site I use all the time and they saved me time by having a good ad where I could use it

To marketing folks: Please, please stop this abuse of my eyes.

Posted by TjL at 12:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Molly invited me to be a part of JoinWOW.

I will be working as the Section Editor for the weekly wow learning center: markup & css.

In addition, I wrote an article art and science meet under the hood about good formatting techniques for markup and css.

Posted by TjL at 09:10 PM | Permalink

(Alex Robinson sent the following message to css-discuss)

And on a different tip, any links to interesting things done using CSS for
purely decorative effect (even if that effect is useful)?

I know of Eric Meyer’s ‘Slantastic’ and Tantek’s polygons (which obviously
got updated to work in Mozilla at some point recently cos they didn’t work
before).

http://www.meyerweb.com/eric/css/edge/slantastic/demo.html
http://www.tantek.com/CSS/Examples/polygons.html

I had the crazy and totally useless idea of a recursive spiral while
travelling back home the other night on the London Underground in a drunken
haze

http://www.fu2k.org/alex/css/test/Spiral.mhtml

The most interesting thing to note about it is the performance of the
various browsers when it comes to displaying the spiral.

Opera 7 and 6 are quite simply the best and can’t be faulted. Opera 5 is
good at drawing the spiral but fluffs the starting position of the first
“arm” of the spiral. IE5/mac is fairly impeccable, but for some reason I
can’t work out it’s screws up the starting point quite spectacularly.
Gecko-browsers suffer from glitches which get worse as the spiral gets
tighter (also depending on how the viewport is sized). IE6 is just that bit
worse, and IE5 comes in a quite erratic last.

Shockingly, I just checked OmniWeb 4.1.1. And it’s almost as good as Opera!

Anyhow, er, that is all.

Posted by TjL at 07:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Note to Mark (and others) W3C says XHTML 1.0 does not have to be sent as application/xhtml+xml.. It says should not must.

Mark comments that he has migrated back to HTML4, which has caused its own problems. Will Mark turn to ASCII?

Personally I think the whole MIME type thing is bunk. If I send XHTML as text/html it works; if I sent it as anything else, it probably breaks.

Old joke:
Patient: Doctor, it hurts when I do this
Doctor: Don't do that

New World Order:
Designer: My Website breaks when I do this
Suggestion: Don't do that

XHTML 1.0 should be sent as application/xhtml+xml the MIME type itself reveals how stupid the thought process was, and how far removed from reality/sanity by not just making it much simpler, like "text/xhtml" The spec does not say it

Just an idea. That is all ‡

Posted by TjL at 11:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

You know, people who write headlines really ought to be expected to read the articles they are talking about

Take the recent poorly worded Apple snub stings Mozilla headline.

If you read the article, there is one person (Jamie Zawinski) who said that Apple was bad mouthing between the lines of their email about their choice of KHTML over Gecko.

There is another person (Mike Shaver) who said (paraphrased) "Yeah, you know what, they went a different way, and if I was in their shoes, I might have gone another way too."

A third person (Mitchell Baker) offered a prepared statement that talked about Gecko's cross-browser focus.

I guess "Apple's choice gains mixed reviews" wouldn't have been a catchy enough headline, although it would have been truer to the story.

Posted by TjL at 10:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Mark is right... But it's worse than he thinks.

Mark wrote: acronym, cite, and q tags are all gone, leaving us, respectively, with abbr, nothing, and nothing. The acronym/abbr thing just means a global search and replace

Of course it's a bit worse than that, as some browser by the name of IE 6/win can't even understand ABBR so even if they just dropped ACRONYM for ABBR you lose all your CSS stylings for IE 6/Win.

At last week's Apple conference, Steve talked about 802.11a as being "doomed" because it wasn't compatible with 802.11b. 802.11g offers the speed increase of 802.11a with compatibility to 802.11b....

One can only hope that W3C comes out with an XHTML 3.0 that is compatible with XHTML 1.x

Posted by TjL at 06:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

This is the sign that greets you when you step off the elevator ("lift" for our friends across the pond) at the hotel where I am currently staying.

On one level it is clear.... if you examine it closely you can figure out where your room is by looking at this sign. But on another level it isn't very good at all.... Bad design. On the plus side, at least they have a clear navigation guide, as they would otherwise no doubt lose customers (and I do mean lose them, as they wander through the halls). But wow, just looking at that the first thing I want to do is find a way to organize it better.

Another note: definite sign I'm getting older: I looked at the the font size on the name tags and said "That's just too small"... and to make matters worse they used a serif font of some kind, which makes it harder to read. Oh well.... at least they spelled my name right ;-)

Posted by TjL at 07:07 PM | Permalink

Mark Pilgrim reports that the new Safari web browser for Mac reports its User Agent (UA) string to be this:

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/48 (like Gecko) Safari/48

I have already written about the evil twisted path of UA sniffing but let me summarize again, because clearly some people still don't get it.

UA sniffing is a bad idea.

Don't believe me? WebStandards.org: Dear Web Developers: Browser Sniffing is Stupid

Why is sniffing stupid?
Short answer: Browsers lie.
Medium Answer: Web designers made bad decisions by starting to UA sniff a long time ago and that made web browser programmers determine that they had to lie.
Long answer: Read my link above.

Once again, here is Opera 7's default UA string on Windows XP:

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 5.1) Opera 7.0 [en]

Reading from right to left that says: Hey, this is Opera 7 pretending to be Internet Explorer 5.5 or Internet Explorer 6.0 (some dumbos sniff for MSIE 5.5 and block MSIE 6.0 and tell you to upgrade your browser!) or Mozilla 4.0. Mozilla is Netscape's name for Netscape. Except now there is a browser called Mozilla, but it isn't called Mozilla in the UA string, well it is, but it's really called Gecko because EVERYONE presends to be Mozilla.

ARGH!

Stop the insanity!
Stop UA Sniffing!
Support web standards!

Some folks who ought to know better (including Mark Pilgrim, who almost always knows better) were caught by Safari because it uses the word "Gecko" in the UA string. Everyone assumed that "Gecko" would be sacrosanct in the UA string to mean "This really is a Gecko based browser."

As of today, that assumption no longer holds water.

The Netscape/Mozilla folks really ought to be pleased with themselves, they have created not one, but two UA strings that everyone wanted to pretend to be... first it was Mozilla because Netscape supported tables before IE did (so when IE supported it, they found they were locked out of some sites because looked at the UA string for the word "Mozilla", and now Gecko because everyone considers it to be the premier rendering engine.

Some folks who ought to know better, folks who support web standards and want to get away from hacks, were tripped up by this, because they were UA sniffing to serve pages as application/xhtml+xml. This is wrong, wrong, wrong!!! If you want to sniff for something, use the HTTP_ACCEPT.

There is no reason for any browser to lie in the HTTP_ACCEPT header, and it is there to tell you what it can handle.

Want to be able to set the MIME type using HTTP_ACCEPT and PHP?

Use that and you will not have to go back and check the UA string for every new browser that comes out... sort of like writing to web standards and not having to worry about checking your HTML in every browser that comes out.

I would like to THANK Apple for doing this, because it helps to expose (again) what a really really bad idea it is to depend on the UA string for anything!!!

Are you ready to admit your UA sniffing addiction and pledge to try and quit cold turkey? If so, add a comment to this post... maybe we'll start a support group.

Posted by TjL at 08:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Summary: Jakob Nielson makes a good point about letting users resize text, but incorrectly places the blame for this on Cascading Style Sheets.

I was reading Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox, December 23, 2002: Top Ten Web-Design Mistakes of 2002 and enjoying it. He nailed a lot of things right on the noggin'.

But he blew it big time on one of them. He wrote:

4. Fixed Font Size
Style sheets unfortunately give websites the power to disable a Web browser's "change font size" button and specify a fixed font size. About 95% of the time, this fixed size is tiny, reducing readability significantly for most people over the age of 40. Respect the user's preferences and let them resize text as needed. Also, specify font sizes in relative terms -- not as an absolute number of pixels.

Now I agree that there is a fascination with overly small font size on the web. I agree that font sizes should be set in relative terms and not in pixels (mainly because Internet Explorer can't resize pixels).

But where he is absolutely totally wrong is in blaming this on Style Sheets.

• Fonts have been fixed size for much longer than style sheets
• Style sheets have given rise to the ability to use relative sizes much easier than ever before
• Blaming this on style sheets is like saying that cars are bad because they can hit people.

Oh, and what is meant by disable a Web browser's "change font size" button? What web browser is he talking about? Internet Explorer? IE6/Windows doesn't have a “change font size” button, but it does have a Text Size button.

No website should be able to disable a button. What I assume he meant was that setting font sizes in pixels renders the button useless. Since software is supposed to work for you (not the other way around), it sounds like Jakob should be talking to the folks who make a lousy browser.

• If your web browser doesn't give you control, perhaps you should use a different one
• Opera makes resizing web text easy, even font sizes set in pixels, allowing you to increase/decrease by 10% or 100% with the touch of a button, and return to 100% by another button
• Mozilla/Gecko-based browsers also make font resizing easy

CSS is a great technology that allows for faster page downloads (something Jakob always wants) and the ability for users to override the page style (something FONT tags never did). They should not be blamed for those who misuse them.

Posted by TjL at 10:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Evolt is a great website, and THELIST is a great mailing list.

We were talking about how ridiculous it is to think that you can put up a web page and protect it from anyone who really wants to get at it.

There are snake oil salesmen who try to tell you differently. What they sell is bunk. Yes it will stop someone who doesn't really care. Yipee.

javascript:d=window.open();d.document.open('text/plain').write(document.body.outerHTML)

Bang, that's all it takes.

Oh, and by the way, if you go to the site with Internet Explorer be sure to disable a certain security preference:

Tools > Internet Options > Security

Click on the Internet icon

Click on customize.

Scroll down to where it says Allow Paste Operations By Script.

Set it to DISABLE.

See, it turns out that they care about THEIR privacy, but not yours, so they are perfectly happy taking over your Windows pasteboard. Do you think they ought to be able to do that? Me neither.

If you don't want anyone to have acceess to it, don't put it on the web. If you want to limit access to it, put it behind a password, but don't think it's fool-proof.

Posted by TjL at 09:34 PM | Permalink

FontMonster.org has some great free fonts for Mac and PC available from their site.

Jump right to font page

I downloaded pinchedfat.zip, poetic.zip, ringpull.zip, sale.zip, squishy.zip, sticky.zip, torn.zip, transist.zip, unconform.zip, unconformrounded.zip, velcro.zip... but you might like others.

(via Zeldman)

Posted by TjL at 09:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Opera continues to be the best browser (IMO ;-) for accessibility testing with its new Opera 7 beta 1 release.

Opera7 ships with several default Style Sheets which directly benefit those testing accessibility issues or those who need accessibility features.

Default Styles Sheets include:

Emulate Text Browser
Accessibility Layout
Show images and links only
High Contrast (white on black or black on white)
Disable Tables

(and others)

These can be accessed via View > Styles or by clicking the DOWN ARROW in the Addressbar

Posted by TjL at 09:58 AM | Permalink

Dilbert on Design by Committee. That is all. ‡

Posted by TjL at 06:35 AM | Permalink

I just happened to notice that MovableType has released a new version, and my name mentioned in the MovableType 2.51 changelog.

Continue reading "One small step" »

Posted by TjL at 11:25 PM | Permalink

Flash Satay at AListApart solves the problem of getting valid XHTML with embedded Flash. If you have to, or even want to, use Flash, at least get it right.

By the way, the ‡ indicates the end of an entry, when I remember to use it, mostly on shorter entries.
‡

Posted by TjL at 03:43 AM | Permalink

It ought to be so easy to write valid web pages. Why isn't it?

Continue reading "It ought to be easy" »

Posted by TjL at 07:00 AM | Permalink

Mark Pilgrim of DiveIntoMark posted a note that he was taking a break from his blog for awhile.

The man knows how to take a break which in this case happens to even relate to his domain name.

I'm jealous.
‡

Posted by TjL at 01:09 AM | Permalink

New levels of stupidity in browser sniffing achieved by KPMG!

Continue reading "Dumb Site of the Day: http://www.kpmg.ca/" »

Posted by TjL at 01:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I had the pleasure (and I mean that) of reading Molly Holzschlag's book Color for Websites.

Before you know it, I had a review of the book and a trip down a historical-biblio-self-history.

Continue reading "recommended reading" »

Posted by TjL at 12:25 AM | Permalink

On 31 Aug 2002, Edwardson Tan announced on CSS-D that he had found an easier way to hide styles from Opera than the Owen Hack.

However, this method will not work for documents sent as application/xhtml+xml.

Continue reading "application/xhtml+xml and html[xmlns]" »

Posted by TjL at 10:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

On a personal site I am developing, I started out with the intention of working just with standards.

There would be no browser-specific code at all. Not for MSIE, not for Opera, and definitely not for Netscape4.

A few days went by and my resolve weakened... I cheated. Just a little bit. I can stop whenever I want to. Really.

What followed what a short course in why we need to follow standards, and why those who ignore web history are doomed to repeat it.

Continue reading "Confessions of a browser sniffer" »

Posted by TjL at 06:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

If you want to change Opera’s default HTTP_ACCEPT, you can edit the opera6.ini file in the directory where you installed Opera.

Hat tip: DarkElf in opera.general

Continue reading "HTTP_ACCEPT and opera.ini" »

Posted by TjL at 07:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

One of the things that I love most about Opera is the ability to use Sidebars / Panels.

I've made about 12 of these now, and they are one of the most popular destinations on the site (and the #1 site for 'sidebars' on Google).

So how do you make a sidebar?

It's actually very easy. If you can make a web page, you can make a sidebar, there are just a few things to take into consideration.

Continue reading "Writing a Sidebar / Panel" »

Posted by TjL at 07:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

So it dawned on me that I could pretty safely set the MIME type for Opera or any Gecko based any browser that claims it can handle application/xhtml+xml in its HTTP_ACCEPT.

For now I have limited this to my home IP address.

All it took was a little PHP... and whaddaya know, I just happen to be able to write a little PHP (very little, but it's a start)

Here's what I did. I think it is pretty straight forward, but I've added copious comments. It's pretty slick. I love PHP.

I created a separate text file with PHP code to set MIME type based on IP and HTTP_ACCEPT.

[update: this entry has been editing/updated since the original. See later entries for explanation]

†

Posted by TjL at 11:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Wired.com goes XHTML and CSS

This is really big news. A major site, heavy traffic, highly styled.

And the execution is excellent.

You can find plenty of other folks talking about this:
DiveIntoMark,
Zeldman,
EricMeyer,
and no doubt others.... so I'm just going to put out the URL for anyone who missed it, and you can get more news from others.

Meanwhile I'm just hoping someone doesn't manage to turn nit picks into a molehill.

[update: several did, on several lists. *sigh*]

†

Posted by TjL at 06:09 PM | Permalink

What began as a simple comment has turned into an adventure.

It started the other day with a thread on opera.wishlist about a validation mode in which the browser would stop and inform the user when there was a problem with their webpage.

Continue reading "application/xhtml+xml" »

Posted by TjL at 07:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

Martin Schrode had a great suggestion on the opera.wishlist group the other day.

Basically he was talking about 'ultra strict' mode, where Opera would stop rendering a page when it comes across a mistake.

Continue reading "Validation Mode" »

Posted by TjL at 09:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I suspect everyone will be reading about this anyway, but in case you missed it, a blind man has sued Southwest Airlines over their inaccessible website, citing ADA.

If you would like to continue to design websites and not have to worry about getting sued over this issue, you might want to checkout my Section 508 / WCAG sidebar which will put the accessibility information that you need at your fingertips.

Zeldman posted a great link to a lecture he gave on accesibility which may help folks start to think about these issues in more useful ways than the narrowminded "I don't design for the blind."

†

Posted by TjL at 11:57 PM | Permalink

I don't know exactly how old Opera4 is now (current version is 6, and 7 is due soon) but it was the first version with CSS support.

The current version of WASP is so well designed that it looks equally good in Opera4 and any recent browser.

How did they accomplish this? By using a dozen nested tables for the design? Heck no. It is XHTML 1.0 strict and CSS.

Related reading:
Opera 4 release notes

Screen shot of WASP site in Opera4

†

Posted by TjL at 10:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

When considering the use of Cascading Style Sheets in your website, one if often asked to consult browser statistics to see which browsers most people are using.

Posted by TjL at 10:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Most people who know even a little about PHP & MySQL have heard about Luke Welling and Laura Thomson's book PHP and MySQL Web Development. The book has a 5.5/6 star review at Amazon.com.

About my only criticism of the book is that it, like most, does not include XHTML examples. The book came out in March of 2001, so we'll excuse that.

A lot of PHP books are now out of date because the new version ships with register_globals set to OFF which means that a lot of scripts that used to refer to global variables will have to be re-written. How fun. But it was necessary due to security precautions.

Anyway, the book is awesome... if you want to get going with PHP and MySQL, pick it up.

In about 10 minutes I wrote a web page that adds information into a database. Too cool.

For those of you who have no idea what I'm talking about, here's a fun link for you: A Male Thesaurus.

Amazon.com's listing for the Welling/Thomson book

Posted by TjL at 12:43 AM | Permalink

Inspired by an entry in Mark Pilgrim's great blog on 30 days to a more accessible weblog, I have been playing around with the Site Navigation Bar on Mozilla. Now Internet Explorer and most other browsers do not (yet) support this feature, but it is fast becoming a favorite of mine.

Continue reading "Site Nav Links for Validation" »

Posted by TjL at 09:54 AM | Permalink