Left Justified
FeedsCleaning Up the Sawdust
∞ | August 24, 2004 | Category: Site News
“It’s the little things…”
Oh so true.
When I designed this site I had grandiose plans for the functionality as well as the design. Somehow I’ve only found time for the design plans and about three quarters of the functionality - that stops now.
Structural changes are afoot.
Please watch your head for loose debris.
No Soup For You!
The first change that should have happened long ago was serving up real $XHTML$ (content=application/xhtml+xml). This site is now XHTML 1.1 in modern browsers, with old fashioned SGML tag-soup being fed to lesser equipped browsers. I’ve nervously decided to also serve all my posts and comments as XML, which means that one bad bit of code in a comment will bring on the Yellow Screen of Death for the whole post. That was never going to last long!
Not Everyone Uses a Mouse
Too often designers/developers set link styling for a:link, a:visited and a:hover, and think that is enough. That is not enough. Many users, myself included, like to ditch the mouse while reading a long article and navigate via the keyboard (*gasp*! What is this, 1986?!). Jumping from link to link using the tab key is fast and easy, but irresponsible design decisions can make the experience akin to driving blind. Try it out now.
No problems, because I have set visual changes on the :focus pseudo-class. That’s all well and good, until IE comes to the party. IE doesn’t support :focus, but in traditional IE style one of its bugs can be played against another. In this instance it is the :active pseudo-class that comes to the rescue. Microsoft decided to interpret :active as :focus, meaning that any changes set on :active will be applied when that link receives focus.
Automated Testing - Home Delivered Lies
As a standard practice, I run my sites through the Cynthia and Bobby automated accessibility tests. The results for Left Justified are quite good, with only a minor warning or two in the Priority 3 (WAI-AAA) section.
What a crock.
I know for a fact that I don’t even meet all the Priority 2 requirements.
3.4 Use relative rather than absolute units in markup language attribute values and style sheet property values. [Priority 2]
That alone is enough to disqualify Left Justified from anything higher than a WAI-A rating. Yet if I wanted to, I could stick up a big ugly “Bobby AAA” button and have it link to a positive test result - but I won’t, because being a responsible web designer/developer/person (I’m using the term web person from here on in) means that automated tests are just that — a test. It’s nowhere near an equivalent to human testing, let alone a replacement.
So now all of the T’s are crossed and i’s are dotted, where are the XHTML 1.1 and CSS buttons on the footer of every page? Not here, folks.
Validity isn’t an accomplishment, it’s a requirement.
Have Your Say
Sorry, comments are closed on this post.
I had not thought of people who scroll witht the keyboard so I tested it out on my blog. FF places an unsightly dashed box around my links and yours regardless of focus.
Quite true David, but that isn’t a bad thing. Without the dashed border what would there be?
Nothing… not desirable at all.
If you really feel the need it is easy to remove that border with JS, but I wouldn’t advise it.
I use the keyboard to scroll, and the mouse for links… oh well…
I planned on making my site “real” XHTML and never got around to changing the content type. Your post on CodingForums has finally prompted to make that change on my site. I’m planning on uploading it later today.
I guess I’m a little different, I like just using my wireless mouse when reading a long article.
Brave step to serve pages as XML
It broke last night not sure for how long, but IMO it’s a kinda bad idea. It’s possible your site could break daily thus losing visitors just to maintain real XHTML.
Also your site/email was down today for a short period, problems?
Great point about browsing with tab, and especially the reminder about IE, though I’m afraid that(The IE :active exploit) will not make it into version three of my site.
v3 waits for no IE, but degrades oh so gracefully!
>:]
It has broken daily so far, all because of:
Auto <acronym> Plugin (I’ve since converted it to an <abbr> plugin)
Faulty weather data and poor server caching on my part.
Microsoft Word
I like to think of it as a challenge…and I can always load up IE when it breaks
lol your call :p
is it just me or has the site revered to text/html?
Glen: I’ve reverted the individual posts back to tag soup for two reasons:
1) A single bad comment and the page is borked.
2) document.write doesn’t work in XHTML 1.1 (application/blah blah…) so that borked my ‘gogoGadgetPreview()’ function on the comment form.
Well i’ve been puzzling over the comments problem for a while now and i’ve yet to find a really good solution. Atm i have a function that strips out any html, then does a BB code style thingy but also checks the BB code for nesting errors.
As for the document.write, can you not use element.innerHTML?
I’m not trying to be picky or anything, it’s just nice to see sites using the proper mime type. I’m using it on my latest project and so far so good, although my fancy javascript tend to be nothing more technical than a classname swap.
Glen said:
As for the document.write, can you not use element.innerHTML?
Yes, I could, but that would require that an empty element exists in the markup. The current setup creates everything on the fly.
I’ve had a bit more of a think about validating comments and the main issue isn’t dodgy html, but instead quotes.It’s funny that you should want to continue this discussion Glen, as it was one of your comments that was first to invalidate a post. When someone copies and pastes any part of a previous comment/post that contains true typographical quotes (& #8220; etc), these are not re-converted and get passed through. Obviously a regular expression could be written to find and replace these, but I’m not sure how/if the browser’s character set affects this. It is my understanding that the character set of form submissions is controlled by the character set of the page, but I’ve seen some very different results while testing, so I think I’ll leave it be for now.