Farlops Industries

By way of Evolt, I just learned that Cingular Wireless redesigned their site to validate as strict XHTML 1. Progress is being made comrades! They will eventually come to understand the vanguard of the revolution!

So looking at the Kevin’s editor, I see that it uses Mozilla’s midas component. As my ignorance slides away, I discover to my horror that Midas and MSHTML both generate markup differently from each other and they both generate markup that I am unhappy with. MSHTML puts everything in caps, Midas doesn’t even bother with semantics at all and does everything with inline style applied to spans and divisions. This needs a rethink–perhaps we can use Greymatter to clean the junk up before building the page or comment in the page.

So upon seeing Kevin Roth’s cross-platform WYSIWYG editor, I decided that would be a great thing to replace the JavaScript editor on Greymatter’s entry and revision forms with. I’ve been very busy and plan to be pretty busy through the weekend, but I plan to start tweaking it on Monday. The plan is to bring it in line with the Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines. I want to tweak it so that it won’t allow the naive to generate non-standard markup as they generate their entries. I haven’t yet taken a close look at the code so I don’t know if Mr. Roth has already anticipated this, I’ll have to speak with him anyway before I add it as component of the next version of Greymatter.

Yesterday, while sifting through blogdex, I found a link to a javascript authored by Merek Prokop that fixes Internet Explorer’s lack of support for the ABBR tag. Looking for further I discover that the source that introduced this link into the churn of Blogdex was Mark Pilgrim. I have been a lurker at Mr. Pilgrim’s site for many months now ever since he dropped massive science about web accessibility.

Anway, after reading about Merek Prokop’s hack, it occurred to me that one could use a similar trick to fix Explorer’s bad implementation of Q so I decided to mail Mr. Prokop about it and decided to mention this on Mr. Pilgrim’s site. Mr. Prokop replied quickly, I guess it was midday over in Czechia at the time, saying that the idea did occur to him right off but then two problems arose:

1. How will the script deal with double quotes?
2. And how will the script deal with quotes in different languages? Czech quote symbols don’t look like English quote symbols.

Also, the following day, (Thanks Mark!) Mr. Pilgrim posts two links to javascript hacks that attempt to fix the quote issue by Simon Willison and Stuart Langridge.

Isn’t the Internet great?

The abbr tag doesn’t work in Internet Explorer for Windows, but, using client-side scripting, you can make it work.

It occurred to me while reading Marek’s article, that a similar trick could be used to avoid messing up your pages mark up just render quotations properly in IE. The usual trick to make quotations work in IE is to do the following in the page markup:

<q>"[...some text...]"<q>

And then put the following rules in your style sheet to keep the browsers that work right from rendering two sets of quote marks:

q:after{content: no-close-quote }q:before{content: no-open-quote }

But this has the disavantage of messing up your otherwise semantically correct markup just to support IE.

So why not use Marek’s trick to keep the special entities out of the markup and only insert them when IE is sniffed? Granted, if the user has scripting turned off, the quotes disappear, but the markup is still correct.

So the other day, on one of my jobs, I get a sales pitch from a company telling me that they’ve built some development tools that work with stuff called SALT.

I am skeptical, so I do some research and learn:

• SALT is not yet a W3C standard. It has only been proposed as such since last summer and it is not clear as to what the W3C will finally propose.
• I learn that SALT does work with MSAA and Flash MX to support Web accessibility.
• I also learn that there is a group working on an open version of SALT that will work in Mozilla and other browsers but work isn’t finished.
• One thing that irritates me about these newly proposed standards, VoiceXML and SALT, is that they don’t really bother to improve browser support for the accessibility features that already exist in current W3C standards, like all the speech properties of CSS2.

Conclusion: I want to wait until the industry standardizes. I don’t want to be an early adopter, even if Microsoft is behind all this stuff. If everybody starts doing it and supporting it, I’ll do it.