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May 15

Accessibility is not always about people with disabilities, just as often it is simply about “People accessing the web” regardless if it is a disability or a software, hardware or user agent.

Now many Web Developers in the US and Canada feel we need only deal with normal browsers. But all web sites are international and can be visited by any one any where. Cell phones can not be ignored, for instance in Germany 97% of Germans have cell phones and 72% of those do use them to enter the net.

Same goes with PSP (Play Station Portable), it may not be really common here yet but it is in Asia and the richer areas/people of the Middle East and getting really popular in Germany. I am finding more references to Yuppies using them to surf as well as play games.

Just before leaving Germany I saw a German test that placed PSP against a PDA, Cell Phone and a organizer. As far as surfing PSP beat them all, the PDA only managed to be better in writing emails.

So for your info I offer you a few articles on designing for PSP and will add portable agents in general. PSP, cell phones, PDAs and internet capable game consoles are not going away, but they will get better and more wide spread.

Sony PSP

General Info

Date May 15th, 2006 Filed in Web Development No Comments »
May 4

Here are a series of articles discussing Ajax and Accessibility. AJAX articles now come a dime a dozen, but few have gotten into how accessible it will be.

This will be double posted to the Ajax board as well, question if you wish to know about accessibility and use AJAX or just want to use AJAX but should know about accessibility issues.

Date May 4th, 2006 Filed in Accessibility, Web Development No Comments »
May 2

This is not a right or wrong thread, just two way of doing things and the reason for that.

So hacks are bad - most of us agree. A hack is a code style that takes advantage of bugs and mistakes in browsers. If the browser is fixed, the hack does not work and the site is likely broken.

Discussing this in another forum a comment was made that rings true and should be mentioned here. So a few points to consider:

Hack

Con - Requires a mistake or bug in a browser to work, it that is fixed the hack fails.

Con - Makes the CSS not valid

Pro - A hack is placed alone in the CSS, when the CSS is external this means you need but remove it from the style sheet to be rid of it.

Condition Comments

Con - They have to be placed in your markup, every single page…

Con - They muck up pure structured code & invalidate your code

Con - You are playing to the whims of the most popular browser yes, but you are writing incorrect code due to one single user agent out of the dozens that you may have visit your site, logical to cater to one single broken user agent?

Pro- You are creating styles for IE in a form that only IE will read leaving your CSS pure for standards based browsers.

Conclusion

The choice is yours, would you rather have pure structure or pure CSS? [Edit: I now believe Conditional Comments to be the better option.]

Would you rather write a hack in a single document or would you rather write a comment/s in every page of your site? Course with the smart use of Templates or includes you can limit this.

So this is not a do or do not, simply consider this and what comments will follow and make an informed decision whether to use Hacks or Comments. IE7 has improved but there are still some problems with IE7 and Opera 9 and a whole new series of Hacks will be needed. IE7 has blocked the * html hack which was often used to correct Layout problems in IE, however those layout problems have not been corrected, they still exist bit the hack does not.

Date May 2nd, 2006 Filed in Web Development No Comments »