Buzz Archives for July 2005
Sortable Lists
Nifty demo of drag’n'drop sortable lists using JavaScript and CSS.
By Chris Kaminski | Filed in DOM, DOM Scripting TF
- IE7 Beta 1 and Standards
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In a must-read post on IEBlog, Chris Wilson lays out some of the web standards fixes planned for IE7. While it doesn't hit everything we might like, and we won't see most of it until Beta 2, it's a pretty impressive list for a release that by all accounts is primarily ...
By Chris Kaminski | Filed in Browsers
- JavaScript and Screenreaders
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What do you get when you cross JavaScript with a screen reader? James Edwards, Bob Easton, Mike Stenhouse and Derek Featherstone find out.
By Derek Featherstone | Filed in Accessibility, DOM Scripting TF
- That’s why it’s Called Beta
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I woke up this morning to find countless emails and IMs pouring into my accounts asking me about the IE 7 beta. Some developers are expressing relief at seeing some of the bug fixes and improvements, but of course as I've been expressing all along, this is a process with ...
By Molly E. Holzschlag | Filed in Browsers
- Best Practices
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A nice round-up of best practices for using JavaScript.
By Jeremy Keith | Filed in DOM, DOM Scripting TF
- Collaborative bug squashing
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Lucian Slatineanu is putting together a DOM script to replace the default form widgets supplied by the browser with other, more customisable elements. He calls the script Niceforms.
By Jeremy Keith | Filed in Accessibility, Bugs, DOM, DOM Scripting TF
- Accessible Event Pairs
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In order to keep our pages accessible to non-mouse users, we must use non-mouse events like focus or keydown in addition to mouse events like mouseover and click. On QuirksMode.org I created the new Event pairs page to study this problem.
By Peter-Paul Koch | Filed in Accessibility, DOM, DOM Scripting TF
- Meeting Microsoft
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Since the announcement of the WaSP / Microsoft Corporation Task Force we’ve had two face to face meetings. The first was held in Portland, Oregon at WebVisions ‘05. WaSP members DL Byron and myself met with Microsoft’s liaison to the Task Force, Brian Goldfarb. In this meeting, we brainstormed potential ...
By Molly E. Holzschlag | Filed in Accessibility, Authoring Tools, Browsers
- Calling all CSS-Savvy Designers
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Kevin Lawver, AOL's representative to the CSS Working Group, is making a plea to the design community to give the Working Group feedback on the CSS3 Borders and Backgrounds module. It isn't often one gets the opportunity to help define the tools you'll be using in your job, and this is ...
By Chris Kaminski | Filed in CSS, Design, W3C/Standards Documentation
- Unobtrusive Flash Objects
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Bobby van der Sluis just published a new article: Unobtrusive Flash Objects (or UFO). His script allows you to specify a placeholder DIV for a Flash object with a message meant for noflash browsers. The script then silently checks if the user has the proper Flash version, and if so replaces ...
By Peter-Paul Koch | Filed in DOM, DOM Scripting TF
- Image Previews with DOM and CSS (and a dash of PHP)
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Sometimes it might be a good idea to give visitors an insight of what is lurking behind a link. Normally this is achieved via a thumbnail, but what about inline links?
By Christian Heilmann | Filed in CSS, DOM, DOM Scripting TF
- Mehr Presse
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Jo Bager has written a short-but-oh-so-sweet blurb on our humble Task force for Heise Online. Vielen Dank, Herr Bager!
By Chris Kaminski | Filed in DOM Scripting TF, General
- Accessible Alternative vs. Direct Accessibility
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The progressive enhancement approach, also called the ‘accessible alternative’ approach, is indeed the most common and best-understood. It’s not the whole shooting match, though. There’s a second approach to making ECMAScript-enhanced pages accessible: direct accessibility.
By Chris Kaminski | Filed in Accessibility, DOM, DOM Scripting TF
- Presentation Slides with DOM and CSS
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Eric Meyer’s S5 standards based presentation slides system is used quite a lot by webstandardismos for their presentations. My personal challenge was to come up with something that is as cool as Eric’s system, but much easier to use and more lightweight when it comes to creating your own slides.
By Christian Heilmann | Filed in DOM, DOM Scripting TF, General
- JavaScript and WCAG2.0 progress
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The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (or WCAG) is a series of pointers and tips on making web content accessible to people with disabilities (with a useful side-effect of making the content more accessible to practically all devices). JavaScript has a bigger profile within the current WCAG2.0 work.
By Mike Davies | Filed in Accessibility, DOM, DOM Scripting TF
- The DOM Scripting Task Force
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In an effort to boost the quality of scripting on the world wide web, the Web Standards Project today announced the formation of the DOM Scripting Task Force.
By Jeremy Keith | Filed in DOM, DOM Scripting TF
- Welcome
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Here it is: the website of the newly formed DOM Scripting Task Force, set up under the auspices of the Web Standards Project.
By Jeremy Keith | Filed in DOM Scripting TF
- WaSP Interviews Dr. Vito Evola
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The web has long since moved out of the IT and design departments and become a pervasive communications medium. As a result, top-notch minds from other disciplines have begun to help make it more robust, vibrant and just plain useful than before. Dr. Evola has one of these minds. He's applying ...
By Chris Kaminski | Filed in Education, Education TF, WaSP Announcement, Web Standards (general)
- SiteMorse: Not making friends or influencing people
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You might imagine that accessibility specialists are slightly odd folk. Close your eyes and imagine them sitting quietly in the corner of a pub, sipping mild and wearing Hush Puppies. On a crazy night they might break out the box of dominoes and make remarks about how wonderfully accessible those ...
By Andy Clarke | Filed in Accessibility
- Accessibility Discussions: Article and Commentary Roundup
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Ever since we announced the WaSP Accessibility Task Force, quickly given the sticky nicky “ATF” the recommendations, requests and even a few ragings have been storm-trooping 'cross the Web. Here's a round-up of reading associated with ATF activities. Requests and recommendations The following articles focus on requests from the ATF, recommendations, and general ...
By Molly E. Holzschlag | Filed in Accessibility
- WaSP to Collaborate with Microsoft to Promote Web Standards
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The Web Standards Project (WaSP) is collaborating with Microsoft to promote Web standards and help developers build standards conformant Web applications. Today we formally announce the WaSP / Microsoft Corporation Task Force. WaSP's goal is to provide technical guidance and advice as the company increases Web standards support in its products ...
By Molly E. Holzschlag | Filed in WaSP Announcement
The Web Standards Project is a grassroots coalition fighting for standards which ensure simple, affordable access to web technologies for all.
Recent Buzz
UK government browser guidelines: good sense prevails
By Bruce Lawson | January 19th, 2009
You might remember that I published a post called UK government draft browser guidance is daft browser guidance last September, calling out a draft document outlining some UK government browser testing guidelines.
These suggested that for government web sites, webmasters need not test in less popular browsers (those with less than 2% in that site’s usage statistics) and that there should be a page on the site listing the popular browsers which had been tested with the message “We advise you to upgrade your browser version as far as your computer allows and if possible to one of those listed above”.
I called on readers to email the consultation address and object that the guidelines did not advocate web standards and methodologies like progressive enhancement to ensure that all browsers were served. The Register carried the story, and two days after I made that call, the author of the guidelines, Adam Bailin, commented that over 400 people had already emailed him.
Last Friday, 16 January, Adam published the revised browser testing guidelines, and he’s done a great job of including best-practice development. The guidelines point to the BBC’s support table as a good example of graded browser support, and notes the importance of supporting standards-compliant browsers (paragraphs 17-18):
Coding a site to web standards should ensure that any browser that supports web standards will render and behave as intended. Therefore your browser testing matrix must include browsers that support web standards.
You should follow a progressive enhancement approach to developing websites to ensure that content is accessible to the widest possible number of browsers.
The importance of valid code is noted (paragraphs 21-23):
All (X)HTML content must validate with respect to your chosen DTD.
You must use valid CSS for the presentational layer of your website including layout and styling. (X)HTML tables should only be used for presenting tables of data.
Code used for adding richness to the user interface (e.g. JavaScript, ActionScript) must be ECMAScript-compliant.
The guidelines now emphasise functionality over identical layout across browsers (paragraph 39):
You should check that the content, functionality and display all work as intended. There may be minor differences in the way that the website is displayed. The intent is not that it should be pixel perfect across browsers, but that a user of a particular browser does not notice anything appears wrong.
Graceful degradation without scripting/ plug-ins and accessibility are required (paragraphs 41-42)
You should also test your website to make sure that it works with scripting and plug-ins turned off.
Some users will be unable to use pointing devices so you should verify that the site works using a keyboard only.
I could be churlish and quibble about a couple of points in the document that I personally disagree with, but I won’t; the philosophical framework of the new Guidelines is a scalable, future-proof one that will properly serve taxpayers, web visitors and government webmasters in the UK.
I’d like to congratulate Adam Bailin and the team who revised the guidelines, and I’d like to congratulate every one of the 400+ readers who took the time and the trouble to write and support web standards.
It’s a job well done.
(Disclosure: I work for Opera, the browser vendor, and wrote the Opera consultation response).
Filed in Accessibility, Action, Browsers, General, Web Standards (general) | Comments (9)