Buzz Archives for September 2003
Standards Benefit Business
New or old, reading or reviewing the benefits of using standards for business, developers/designers, and users may give many extra incentives or ideas about how to help promote change or learn why it is important. On September 18, 2003 Jeffrey Veen offered up an essay The Business Value of ...
By Holly Marie Koltz | Filed in Web Standards (general)
- Client-side XSLT is bad for accessibility
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Ian Hickson, who was a standards guru before you were a standards newbie, talks about the problems with client-side XSLT. This is a technique which is supposedly supported by all modern browsers -- at least, all modern graphical browsers. But in this case, there is no fallback provided ...
By Mark Pilgrim | Filed in Web Standards (general)
- You Mean There’s More to Life than Web Standards?
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Shock, horror! Some people out there think that 'Web Standards' are not the single most important thing to worry about when crafting a web page or site. Well, I can certainly see the argument here: Web standards can help, and go hand-in-hand with everything else that makes a site ...
By Ian Lloyd | Filed in Web Standards (general)
- TBL on the Future of the Web
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If you missed Tim Berners-Lee's lecture to the Royal Society, The Future of the World Wide Web, that was webcast earlier this week, it's now available on demand. (Requires RealPlayer plug-in.) He starts out by examining how we got to where we are today and then moves on to look ...
By Porter Glendinning | Filed in Web Standards (general)
- A table, s’il vous plaît
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Tables have received so much bad press that some people think they're completely out. Which, of course, is true for last centurie's hodgepodge of spacer-gif-sliced-images-dozens-of-nested-tables nonsense.But there is a perfectly good use for them, too: Tabular data! And if you want to make your tabular data tables not only standards ...
By Matthias Gutfeldt | Filed in HTML/XHTML
- Just Some Stuff About Web Standards
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This is one of those 'clearing out your bookmarks/favourites' type posts - a selection of useful articles spotted over the last few days: CSS-Based Design - Jeremy Keith of Adactio puts up his notes from the Skillswap talk he gave back in March (better late than never, and it's ...
By Ian Lloyd | Filed in Web Standards (general)
- ISO Plans Could Harm Web
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While everyone is trying to take in the implications of the Eolas vs Microsoft case, there are other clouds forming on the horizon that could either develop into a full-blown hurricane or dissipate quietly. Over-dramatic? Only time will tell. The cause of this storm - a tentative proposal from the ...
By Ian Lloyd | Filed in Legal, Web Standards (general)
- Web Standards Are Not Web Accessibility
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In response to the recent BBC accessibility BUZZ, Isofaro writes: “To meet level A priority does not require a completely valid website, and does not require CSS for layout.” All true. The WasP on BBC Accessibility critique is very thorough and worth a read as it delves more deeply into the ...
By Molly E. Holzschlag | Filed in Accessibility
- More Booty Than You Can Shake a Cutlass At
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Arrrrr! There's new booty for all you land-lubbin' accessibility types out there. Old Silver Beard 'Dodgydom' accepted a challenge and with a toot on his hornpipe announced his victory. Avast, me beauties! Here be favelets! These lovelies will tell when your page has form elements that are missing <label> tags. ...
By Ian Lloyd | Filed in Accessibility
- A Closed Mouth Gathers No WaSPs: BBC Conformance Problems
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The scrutiny began earlier today when a fellow WaSP posted the URL to a BBC article, Website owners face prosecution. The article discusses how the Royal National Institute for the Blind is beginning to crack down on Web sites not conforming to accessibility guidelines as described by the DDA and ...
By Molly E. Holzschlag | Filed in Accessibility
- Where’s the Money, Honey?
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Today over at Adaptive Path Jeff Veen makes the case for converting to standards compliant, semantically expressive site production. Many points are left out because of the need for brevity, but at the close of the essay Veen makes an important point: when design and development communities can quantify a ...
By Ben Henick | Filed in Web Standards (general)
- Why Zilla, You Are Blossoming
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When Watchfire bought out the industry-standard accessibility checker, Bobby, a few notable things happened: The online service was restricted such that only a small number of validation tests could be performed online by any given user within a certain timeframe The free downloadable application (Bobby 3.2) was removed ...
By Ian Lloyd | Filed in Accessibility
- When is a List Not a List?
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When it's a horizontal navigation strip, perhaps? The Listamatic is a collection of examples of real-world CSS adaptations of the unordered list (<ul>) that demonstrate just how powerful the concept of separating presentation from content can be. Want to see a horizontal navigation scheme with rollover effects? Or maybe a more ...
By Ian Lloyd | Filed in CSS, HTML/XHTML
- Skip Link Test Suite and Patent Greed
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If you've been following the news about hiding skip links using the CSS declarations display: none or visibility: hidden, you'll know that screen readers may or may not be picking up the links. If you have a screen reader, you'll want to see (and hear) the test suite What do ...
By Molly E. Holzschlag | Filed in Accessibility
- Paging Media
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As many WaSP readers are aware, CSS3 is modularized. Part of the benefit of this is that each module can be worked on independently, placing focus on the development of those options that are proving especially useful without having to revise an entire draft. This week, the W3C announced an update ...
By Molly E. Holzschlag | Filed in CSS
- Bonza! Standards-based Training for Free?
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There's good news from Bondi Beach in Australia, where the lucky people at Westciv have their office. Summer's not yet upon the residents of New South Wales, so Westciv have shut themselves in an office to come up with a new set of standards-based web training (an issue that is close ...
- Screenreader Invisibility
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Bob Easton reports that the popular method of hiding accessibility-friendly "skip navigation" links from visual browsers also hides them from many screenreaders.Oh bloody hell.From a technical point of view, those screenreaders actually get it half right: display indeed applies to all media; but visibility applies to visual media only. Bob ...
By Matthias Gutfeldt | Filed in Accessibility
- Gearing up: a few odds and ends
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Those of you who have an interest in RDF as a W3C-sponsored complement to RSS and Echo should note that on Friday the W3C released six Working Drafts related to RDF. Elsewhere, tomorrow and Tuesday the WaSP’s Molly Holzschlag will make a number of standards-focussed presentations at Seybold SF, and will ...
By Ben Henick | Filed in Web Standards (general)
- Revisiting XHTML
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Ever since XHTML was introduced in January of 2000, arguments as to its use and rationale have been flung about in numerous XML, markup, and Web design forums and lists. Publishing our recent WaSP coverage on serving XHTML with the proper MIME type helped stir up the old pot once ...
By Molly E. Holzschlag | Filed in HTML/XHTML, W3C/Standards Documentation
- Serving up the Right MIME Type
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Q: Which MIME type should XHTML be served with? A: The short answer is application/xhtml+xml, of course. But this MIME type isn't recognized by a number of user agents, Internet Explorer included. So, what to do? In our long-awaited return to the WaSP Asks the W3C series, we ask ...
By Molly E. Holzschlag | Filed in WaSP Asks the W3C
- Device independence and its challenges
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The W3C Device Independence Working Group has published two new Working Group Notes: Device Independence Principles describes Web access "anytime and anyhow" from user, authoring and delivery perspectives. Authoring Challenges for Device Independence are considerations and implications for building universally accessible Web content and applications.
By Steph Troeth | Filed in Web Standards (general)
- Euroaccessibilty
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Euroaccessibilty has updated its Web site with more information about its mission. EA has been founded to avoid a risk of fragmentation in Europe and to answer demands from governmental organisations. Apparently, there is a risk that the W3C/WAI guidelines may be promoted differently in different countries.
By Meryl K. Evans | Filed in Accessibility
- Evaluating for Accessibility
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How do we know if our sites are accessible? Even if we follow Standards and Guidelines for Markup and Accessibility websites may still be inaccessible to some users. Automated checks, following guidelines, and using specific applications have limitations. Lynx is a great tool to evaluate the accessibility of content delivery ...
By Holly Marie Koltz | Filed in Accessibility
- ReUSEIT Contest
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ReUSEIT is a contest for designers and coders to create a redesign of Jakob Nielsen's useit.com that must use valid tableless XHTML 1.0, CSS, and it must meet WAI Accessibility level 1. JavaScript, GIF, JPG and PNG images may be used. Eric Meyer's quote says it all, "Design Eye for ...
By Meryl K. Evans | Filed in CSS, Design
- A new set of JAWS
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Well, with all this talk of free copies of JAWS, it seems timely that today Freedom Scientific are offering a public beta of JAWS 5.0. Correction - they were offering a free download, but because of some issues that people reported Freedom Scientific "made the decision to postpone the public ...
By Ian Lloyd | Filed in Accessibility
- New Browser Updates Announced
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New versions of Mozilla and Opera Web browsers have been announced by the Mozilla.org open-source project and by Oslo-based Opera Software ASA, respectively. For Mozilla's part it was another beta release - version 1.5 and among the new features are a spellchecker for MailNews and Composer an overhaul ...
- New Accessibility Resource from RNIB
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The Royal National Institute of the Blind (RNIB) in the UK has launched a set of new accessibility information pages on its site today. The Web Access Centre was developed with the support of Standard Life who also support the RNIB's 'See It Right' campaign. Sections in the site include: ...
By Ian Lloyd | Filed in Accessibility
- Who Needs JAWS?
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So, web developers need to get a copy of JAWS to know that their web site sounds right? As covered in a previous post, this is not necessarily the case (although it is undoubtedly a 'nice-to-have'). As Mark points out, we should develop to standards, not to specific technology (otherwise ...
By Ian Lloyd | Filed in Accessibility
The Web Standards Project is a grassroots coalition fighting for standards which ensure simple, affordable access to web technologies for all.
Recent Buzz
A New Direction and a New Project
By Aaron Gustafson | February 2nd, 2010
In an effort to increase adoption of web standards, we’re going to try something new.
A lot of you are probably wondering where the WaSP of the late ’90s or even the early ’00s has gone. Where are the actions? Where is the advocacy? Who should we be mad at today?
The truth is that this organization is evolving. For the last two years, a large amount of our focus has been placed on education, realized in our creation of the InterAct curriculum framework and the birth of the Open Web Education Alliance. With the lion’s share of our talent and energy devoted to these efforts, things have been noticeably quiet on this blog, but that’s not an excuse…we can and should be doing more to promote the understanding and use of web standards. After all that’s what we were formed to do.
For the last two or three years, WaSP’s relevance has definitely diminished. With a few exceptions, browsers are doing a darn good job of promoting standards. Techniques we championed, such as Unobtrusive JavaScript and Progressive Enhancement, have become engrained in the methodology of many great web agencies and in-house web teams. In many ways, it seems WaSP has won the war for web standards, but has it really? There are still a ton of small web companies and small to mid-sized businesses building websites with little or no regard for cross-browser /cross-device compatibility. Inaccessible sites and applications, especially in this age of Ajax, seem to pop up every few seconds.
These projects have been put together by web designers and developers we’ve never reached and, for the last few years, we’ve been trying to figure out how to change that. Sure, our education effort is a logical means of teaching the next generation of web designers and developers to do things the Right Way™, but what of the practicing professionals who either have not been exposed to web standards or have been reluctant to upgrade their skill set? How do we reach them?
One way we hope to move this group in the right direction is by doing an end-run around them in reaching out to small businesses.
Small businesses drive our national economies and are responsible for millions of websites worldwide. Of course, most small businesses don’t know (or even want to know) about the technical aspects of web standards, but they do want to know what will save them money and help them run their businesses more efficiently.
As the first project in our small business outreach effort, WaSP will be developing a resource to be used when interviewing individuals and teams to do web work. The focus of this effort will be a series of questions that, when asked of applicants, will help a small business determine whether or not they have the skills necessary to build a modern website. Each question be coupled with background on the associated topic that outlines why it is important and tips for determining how well the question was answered.
Our goals for this project are two-fold:
- To support small businesses by protecting them from bad developers and making sure they get the best websites possible; and
- To expose individual designers and small web shops to web standards when they go out to bid on projects in hopes that they will choose to upgrading their skills in order to continue getting work.
In order to make this project a success, we need your help. Whether you are interested in helping us collect and organize the content or are keen to promote the resource once it’s complete, we want you to be involved. If you can lend a hand, please say so in a comment on this message and I will be in touch at the beginning of next week.
Filed in Education, Outreach, Training, WaSP Announcement | Comments (38)