Buzz Archives for September 2002
IE Only? Not necessarily.
KPMG Canada recently earned the wrath of Mozilla and Opera users for blocking the latter and presenting the former with incomprehensibly unusable visual garbage in place of a layout. Though the site’s markup is poor, that’s not the problem; the problem is outdated, brain-dead browser detection and related scripting. Eric ...
By Jeffrey Zeldman | Filed in Browsers
- XHTML 2 and You
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Among the unknown but probably smallish percentage of front-end designers who know and care about and use web standards, the announcement that XHTML 2.0 will not necessarily be backward compatible with XHTML 1.0 has caused some alarm. An article in IBM’s development zone claims this lack of backward compatibility is ...
By Jeffrey Zeldman | Filed in HTML/XHTML
- Kentucky!
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The Commonwealth of Kentucky is making a serious effort to Do The Right Thing as regards their Web presence. Check out the templates page. It's good to see the public sector being public-spirited.
By Tim Bray | Filed in Web Standards (general)
- Extinct: IE for Unix
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Cam Barrett reports that Internet Explorer has been discontinued for Unix. Pity. If you can't bear to part with the *nix, perhaps now is a good time to take Mozilla 1.1 out for a test drive.
By Scott Andrew LePera | Filed in Browsers
- Standards and Usability
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The W3C and the National Institute of Standards and Technology have issued a call for papers for the NIST Usability Workshop. The workshop is interested in the usability of W3C specifications, how W3C specs affect the usability of software based on them, and how to improve the overall usability of the web.
By Jeffrey Zeldman | Filed in Usability
- Flash for XHTML?
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Here's some weird convergence: DENG is a W3C compliant XHTML/CSS/XForms rendering engine written entirely in Flash MX Actionscript. Accessibility issues aside, the concept of an embeddable, standards-compliant browser that renders XHTML and CSS with better accuracy than most desktop browsers is an exciting one. A week ago I had the ...
By Scott Andrew LePera | Filed in HTML/XHTML
- One Man’s Journey
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Randal Rust's Alphabet Soup: A web designer's journey to standards and accessibility describes how one man came to understand markup, css, and accessibility techniques. An informative, enjoyable read, especially for those new to standards.
By Molly E. Holzschlag | Filed in Accessibility, Web Standards (general)
- Yay Lycos! (We Think)
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This showed up on a public W3C list back in July and just came across our radar. Obviously good news if true. I can't find an example deployed anywhere else but jscript.dk. Anyone have an update for us?
By Tim Bray | Filed in Web Standards (general)
- Browser Upgrades, Netscape Style
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Visit Netscape’s homepage using Netscape 4, and you may be asked to download Netscape 7 before proceeding.
By Jeffrey Zeldman | Filed in Browsers
- It has architecture?
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W3C has a Technical Architecture Group (TAG) that's supposed to worry about corner cases and consistency. Last week marked the publication of the TAG's first cut at an overview of the Web's architecture. It's not light reading, and it doesn't say a thing about design or style or HTML, but those ...
By Tim Bray | Filed in Web Standards (general)
- WaSP at Digital-web
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Digital Web, a darn fine webcentric pub, has WaSP stuff this issue, including a state-of-the-art Zeldman rant and a nice three-way conversation with Steven Champeon and Shirley Kaiser. Check it out!
By Tim Bray | Filed in Web Standards (general)
The Web Standards Project is a grassroots coalition fighting for standards which ensure simple, affordable access to web technologies for all.
Recent Buzz
WCAG 2.0 is a W3C Recommendation
By Matt May | December 11th, 2008
After 9.5 years of work, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 have reached W3C Recommendation status. On behalf of the WaSP Accessibility Task Force, I’d like to welcome WCAG 2 officially into the pantheon of Web standards.
I think this tweet by caledoniaman sums up the level of anticipation:
WCAG 2.0 and a new Guns ‘n’ Roses album in the same year. What’s the world coming to.
Interesting comparison. They’ve each had about as many pre-releases. In any case, I can say, having spent over 8 years with it, that WCAG 2 is not as entertaining as Chinese Democracy. But I do think that it’s better equipped to stand the test of time.
If I had to pick one thing I’m most happy about, I’d say it’s that the HTML- and text-centrism in WCAG 1 is largely gone. In its place is a much more flexible (dare I say robust?) concept of accessibility-supported technology. So when newer technologies can show themselves to be directly accessible, they too can be used in WCAG 2-conformant content.
Over the years, many people have conflated “WCAG-conformant” with “accessible,” and that’s led to people making statements like: “Don’t use JavaScript–it’s inaccessible.” That’s bad for everyone, from users with disabilities who actually can work with JavaScript (which is to say, the vast majority), to Web designers and developers, to policymakers, to those developing new technologies.
With WCAG 2, “Don’t use x” is no longer valid. (Was it ever?) It is now up to you, the developer, to work on the direct accessibility of your content, no matter what technology you choose. I believe we’re about to experience a new wave of accessible design techniques, as a result.
But first, we need to flush “Don’t use x” out of our system. Some are accustomed to saying it about anything they’re not comfortable with. That’s only holding accessible design back. It’s time to learn what’s out there, today, and use it in everyday Web design. It’s time to make everyone’s Web more accessible. Have a look at the WCAG 2.0 Recommendation, and its supporting material. Then, start thinking about what a more accessible Web could be. We still have a lot of work to do.
Filed in Accessibility, Accessibility TF, W3C/Standards Documentation, Web Standards (general) | Comments (8)