Accessibility and why should I care
Wednesday, August 16th, 2006
I decided to make this site accessible. Wonderful resource for this matter. In the beginning I said: “I don’t care if not everybody can read my website”. So selfish, and incomprehensive. You have to put yourself in the shoes of others to understand. Of course, for most people it would be safer not to encounter this site. (^_^) But this is great as an exercise. I clearly see myself using accessibility in the near future. o.o”
Doctype
WP uses XHTML 1.0 Transitional.
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd”>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd”>
Language
I mostly use english (en), and spanish (es).
For XHTML 1.0 Strict
<html xmlns=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml” lang=”en” xml:lang=”en”>
For XHTML 1.1
<html xmlns=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml” xml:lang=”en”>
Meaningful page titles.
WP accomplishes this fine.
Providing additional navigation aids.
In WordPress this is implemented by a plugin. From the ones listed at the WP forum, and the trac ticket; the most appealing to me is META Relationship Links. You can dowload it.
Presenting your main content first.
Hehe, with CSS, this is truly easy!! And since my navigation div is using absolute positioning: no worries!
To be continued…
Proper Writing I
Wednesday, August 16th, 2006
One of my goals, by having this site, is to learn how to write proper english. It’s my second language, and it’s specially dear to me, because most of the things I’ve learned that have shapen the way I am, my work and my process, were written in english. It really is an awesome language to grasp the meaning/message of text since, as a basic comparison, you can get the idea in less words than if it were written in spanish (for example).
I’m starting with The Economist Style Guide. My first area of focus is punctuation. Major missunderstanding I have is with the semicolon (”;”).
Semi-colons
Semi-colons should be used to mark a pause longer than a comma and shorter than a full stop. Don’t overdo them.
A “fun” and interesting exercise would be to go through my posts and fix the errors. >.>
Learning AJAX
Friday, August 11th, 2006
Why did you decide to learn AJAX? For the hype, I guess. It just popped out everywhere, and I got this old application (in JSP) with some serious design problems (which when you make an app in just a weekend as part of school homework, but that will be used to solve a real problem, it’s pretty obvious that there will be not problems but nightmares…) needing solving ASAP (red flag warning).
I remember some years ago watching a XMLHttpRequest demo: the object graph dictionary. And I said: “Nice, looks cool”. Then, at some point in the space-time dimension (I need to do something about my memory problems…sigh) google maps came out. My impression: Wow! But that was it. Still didn’t knew much about why using AJAX was a good thing ™ and I did not see a need to use that kind of stuff in the applications I was working on.
The Web Development Process
Thursday, August 10th, 2006
Without doubt, taking a website from zero to a successful one is yet another adventure in the experience catalog of a web developer. The key for failure or success lies in the beginning of the project. The plan created to build a website, whether a redesign or from scratch, and the actions you take to implement it, are known as the web development process (from now on WDP).
In turn, an excellent WDP is the combination of common sense and accurate creativity. Developing for the web is not rocket science, however, visionary creativity will be always in high demand. Web development has technical aspects: either 0 or 1 (using a database or xml), and subjective like: information architecture, graphic design, usability, and a big ETC.!
I want to mess with it. ^_^ Continue reading »
Visual Editors?
Wednesday, August 9th, 2006
Do you want an embedded WYSIWYG editor for your web applications?
NO!!! Just let me input —pure— HTML. Thank you very much.
Unfortunately, yourself is not the only client you are going to have…erm, hopefully. So what are your guidelines for dealing with this matter? Assuming your development process is almost bulletproof, the reason to include a Visual Editor like this one:
should be backed up by a need to solve a crucial problem. And what you want is probably a modified “light” version of an existing solution.
- Browser compatibility. It was going beautifully, until I used Opera. If it doesn’t work in all major browsers look for another solution, or implement it yourself.
- If you have a basic editor, turn the rich editor off by default.
- Clean markup output.
- Provides the usual feeling of standard rich editors (i.e. MS Word).
- If you go with it, please do make extensive testing.
Without having much experience, it is hard for me to imagine a reason why somebody would need (in all the extent of the word definition) a rich editor. Avoid at all costs should be the immediate response. If you succeed in doing this, a feeling of happiness, and tranquility will be your reward.
Good luck!