Earlier this year I discussed progressive enhancement, and proposed that a web site should perform the core functions without any frills. Last night I had a discussion with a friend, regarding this very same topic. It came to light that it wasn’t clear where the boundaries should be drawn. Interaction needs to be a blend of server- and client-side technologies.
Ultimately, it is rarely clear where boundaries are in a project. What is too much, what is too little? Somewhere between too much and too little is just right, much like what Goldilocks wanted in her porridge. We know that even the most limited of users should be able to access our sites within certain considerations. A photo gallery is, ultimately, little use to a blind person, but alt tags should still be in place. Sound clips of the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra would be useless to a deaf person, though a caption or indication as to what each sound clip is would be quite handy.
Coming back to the point, finding a balance point is critical to providing rich, meaningful interaction between your user and your site. Perhaps the first question which should be answered is “can this be done without Technology X?” Continue Reading »
There has been a lot of talk about graceful degradation. In the end it can become a lot of lip service. Often people talk a good talk, but when the site hits the web, let’s just say it isn’t too pretty.
Engineers and designers work together, or divided as the case may be, to create an experience that users with all of their faculties and a modern browser can enjoy. While this goes down, the rest of the world is left feeling a bit chilly.
What happens is, the design starts with the best of intentions and, then, the interactivity bug takes hold. What comes out is something that is almost usable when slightly degraded, but totally non-functional when degraded to the minimum. Continue Reading »
I’ve been working on a project for an internal client, which includes linking out to various medical search utilities. One of the sites we are using as a search provider offers pharmacy searches. The site was built on ASP.Net technology, or so I would assume as all the file extensions are ‘aspx.’ I bring this provider up because I was shocked and appalled by their disregard for the users that would be searching.
This site, which shall remain unnamed, commits one of the greatest usability crimes I’ve seen: they rely only on Javascript to submit their search. In order to give you, dear reader, the scope of the issue, I always test sites like these by disabling Javascript and testing the function again.
The search stopped working. Continue Reading »
Something that I have learnt over time is how to make your site accessible for people that don’t have your perfect 20/20 vision, are working from a limited environment or just generally have old browsing capabilities. Believe it or not, people that visit my web sites still use old computers with old copies of Windows. Personally, I have made the Linux switch everywhere I can. That being said, I spend a certain amount of time surfing the web using Lynx. This is not due to the fact that I don’t have a GUI in Linux. I do. And I use firefox for my usual needs, but Lynx has a certain special place in my heart. It is in a class of browser that sees the web in much the same way that a screen reader does. For example, all of those really neat iframes that you use for dynamic content? Yeah, those come up as “iframe.” Totally unreadable. Totally unreachable. Iframe is an example of web technology that is web-inaccessible. Translate this as bad news.
Let’s talk about HTML and XHTML. These are both derivatives of SGML which is a generalized markup language that is used to describe data. That’s it. SGML doesn’t make things “look” a certain way. You won’t find it hanging around the local bar trying to pick up girls. It’s just data description. Kind of geeky, like that kid that sits in the back of class playing with his… calculator. So, then HTML was developed with it’s own DTDso that people could describe the information contained in their HTML documents. Early HTML was easy to interpret if it was coded well, however most people are sloppy with their code. This led the W3C to create a code validator. Now, based on the DTD that you use your document may be standards complient or it may not. Personally I really like to stay within the bounds of strict XHTML, though onMouseOver is deprecated, so Javascript kind of hoses the whole complience thing. Continue Reading »
Being that this was an issue just last evening, I thought I would share something that I have encountered when writing Javascript scripts. First of all, let me state that Javascript syntax is extremely forgiving. You can do all kinds of unorthodox declarations of variables as well as use variables in all kinds of strange ways. You can take a variable, store a string in it, then a number, then an object and then back again. Weakly typed would be the phrase. The one thing that I would like to note, as it was my big issue last evening, is scope of your variables. So long as you are careful about defining the scope of any given variable then you are ok, if not, you could have a problem just like I did. So, let’s start with scope and how it works.
Scope: A mouthwash. Yep. There you have it. Brush and floss every day and you’ll be a better programmer.
That’s useless.
Scope: In computer programming in general, a scope is an enclosing context. Continue Reading »