Web Development
by rkdbruyn
Editors and copywriters entering texts through content mangement systems often have no or little knowledge of html and content management systems dont have the tools to add this kind of functionality. Should copywriters and editors be forced to learn html? How do others feel about this.
A similar problem plagues the academic community. I worked at the University of Leiden for a while involved in setting up a project to implement an sgml markup language to encode academic texts. The problem being the people writing the texts and with the semantic knowledge were not interested nor willing to learn the markup languages, nor take the time to add the markup code.
This goes futher than the topic posted here I realise but the core issue as I see it is adding valuable markup to the texts. Will this pose an even greater problem with xml encoding texts, its got all these great features but are the majority of writers and editors going toknow there even there?
by catsinspace
I think people are going to have to learn some html - whether they like it or not. It is a skill that is becoming a necessity. With the publication of information via the web, it is going to be hard to avoid.
I'm currently working on a project with a staff person to move some documentation to a searchable, organized web site. All she had before was a document of loosely connected and unorganized information. While I can do some things to format her information, I'm not a mind reader. The biggest complaint I hear from this person is that the text doesn't look like how it looked in the Word document. Short of her learning a basic set of html tags, I can only take this so far and it will never look the same.
by catsinspace
I think this article was a good start - I'd like to see more.
I get so immersed in the application code that I often forget about the presentation. We have a visually impaired person on my team who does use my web sites. I need to be more tunedin to what makes an application easier for him to use.
by cadetd
I used to pride myself on writing pages that were readable by any browser. I guess I was not doing enough.
I'll have to enhance them a bit.
Thanks.
The author comments that using the alt attribute is not necessary for every image, only for those that are 'pivotal' to your web site.
Wrong, according to the HTML 4.01 specs. The alt attribute is mandatory.
Good article though, it's about time that we web developers without impairments take others into account. I do disagree with the fact that developing for two or more browsers is necessary. I find that Netscape 6 and 7 and Opera come close enough to IE to live with the minor differences is visuals.
by loucasa
A trick I had heard about was to put useful information
into important alt tags, and to put a single blank space
into the unimportant ones. The reason for this is that
browsers for the sight-impaired will speak the alt tag,
but if it's missing they will say "image" over that
image--very annoying if it conveys nothing else.
by webscribe
Yes, use the alt tag and make a duplicate attribute title="". This provides meta information to new browsers probably in the form of tooltips. You can also use the title attribute for hyperlinks (and just about anything) to let those with accessibility issues know more about a link so they can decide whether to follow it.
The ACRONYM tag is great for meta information also.
What other meta info do you site builders use?
by sapcgrad
by swathen
by webscribe
The W3C lists "Descriptions and links to over 35 different kinds browsers and assistive technologies for accessing information on the Web."
by pjbun4u
"You want to make sure that your Web site
is accessible to the largest possible group of people"
My question is: How do you do that? Is there a code that you can place at the top of your webpage that allows for major
Web browsers: Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator?
by webscribe
The accessibility guidelines are at W3C:
http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/WAI-WEBCONTENT-19990505/#validation
There aren't any shortcuts, just use good html 4 for the CONTENT and CSS for LAYOUT. Put a link to your stylesheet in the head of the page. Incorporate the WAI guidelines and then the site will be much more accessible. If you want to go further, check your pages with Bobby www.cast.org/bobby/. Then check your pages in old and current browsers to see how they display.
by romerogt
With IE at 95%+ of users, but having accesability a must, we opted to go for W3C WAI inniciative.
You can visit http://www.w3.org/ and read oct.17th news on WAI. It has all the info, it defines levels of accesability that you can follow. I don't have the page, but the Canada Gov has an inniciative to adopt WAI on all their sites, so far, we are on our way, but it is work to do.
In my opinion, one must support standards to force MS, NS, Opera, etc to support them as well. So far, it seems to me IE has got the market because it supports fairly W3C standards, and the discussions goes where they implement tag beyond standards, but that make the web a little easyer.
Mauricio Romero
IT R&D @ www.sat.gob.gt
by webscribe
The Mozilla engine best supports CSS2 and HTML 4.01. (Netscape 7 is a huge improvement over NS 6, Compuserve uses it, and of course the Mozilla open source browser). Glad to finally be able to do it right, I rewrote my front pages, got them html 4 validated at W3C, got the CSS validated.
With logical markup and CSS for formatting they are accessible to alternative browsers and backwards compatible.
EXCEPT!!!!!
The revamped pages wouldn't even open in IE 6 unless I added the html 3 obsolete
tag. I get a message: Char: 1 Error: Syntax error Code: 0. MS IE has trouble with CSS-2. In order to publish for MS IE I need to hack the code and ruin validation. I have not found a satisfactory solution, but will probably have to use TABLES to format the page and make it thereby harder for accessibility.
On interior pages I will not make any concessions to table layout nor deliver separate pages (yet an alternate simpler stylsheet helps ), in order to make people aware that they can upgrade to a standards compliant browser for the full show yet still access content with alternative/older browsers.
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