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 »
By this I don’t mean that you should fill every pixel on the screen with text, information and blinking, distracting graphics. What I really mean is that you should give yourself more time to accomplish what you are looking to do on the web. Sure, your reaction to this is going to be “duh, of course you should spend time thinking about what you are going to do online. All good jobs take time.” I say, oh young one, are you actually spending time where it needs to be spent? I suspect you aren’t.
First to the hard-core graphic designers in the crowd: Just because you spent extra time looking online through iStockPhoto finding that perfect picture does NOT mean that your design will encourage even one new customer. When it comes down to it, your average web user doesn’t care what your design looks like. It should fit the theme of the product being sold and the tone should be appropriate, but they really don’t care if you use one perfectly appropriate graphic or another. The nuance is generally totally lost. If you are going to consume days or even weeks coming up with that perfect design, it better slap my dad’s dentures right out of his head and make him spend 50% more than he otherwise would. If this isn’t the case, the ROI on those last few days or weeks that you spent is going to be painfully low. Think “solution” not “pretty.” Spend you time actually solving your customer’s problem. 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 »