Farlops Industries

Making the Future Hideously More Complex Since 1963

Web stuff link roundup

This is another one of these lab-notebook, thinking-out-loud entries.

So it's been a while since I had a rant about Web standards. I think this is for a few reasons:

Continue reading "Web stuff link roundup" »

Posted by Pace Arko at 12:36 AM on July 26, 2007

Net Neutrality, Aero and Linux screen readers

So this is really a bunch of random computery things thrown together into a post. Yes, another boring, "Pace is thinking out loud post."

First, I continue to strike tiny blows to protect network neutrality from the lobbyists of telecommunications companies. I phoned Senator Patty Murry's office to ask her to vote for Byron Dorgan and Olympia Snowe's legislation to protect network neutrality.

Secondly, at work I'm now using Vista and Office 2007. Grumble, grumble.

Continue reading "Net Neutrality, Aero and Linux screen readers" »

Posted by Pace Arko at 3:04 PM on June 9, 2007 | Comments (3)

Testing pictures and Ecto's abilities

This is an aggregate rock from Australia

I know my new CSS rule works but I just wanted to inform some of you of it. IE6 should see the pictures I have here now. Also I wanted to see just how sophisticated Ecto's image editing and addition facilities are. If all goes well, I shouldn't really have to mess with MT's somewhat clumsy file upload function.

I also tested Ecto's style retention when pasting data tables from MSWord. Yep. It works. I won't paste an example here; the markup is just too hideous for words. Most every ugly inline style and bizarre psuedo-XML tag appears to be retained when pasting into Ecto. Ay, yi, yi, I've given a loaded gun to my latest customer. With Ecto he should be able to just cut and paste every ugly thing in the MSWord files he has. Oh well, less work for me.

Okay, let's see if this works. If all goes well, Even in IE6, you should see the picture of a rock I have inserted here. All my older picture entries should work too.

Continue reading "Testing pictures and Ecto's abilities" »

Posted by Pace Arko at 12:20 AM on February 10, 2007

Blog Clients for Linux Stink

I envyed envied Ecto on Macintosh and similar solutions on XP (And I guess now Vista.). I wanted a WYSIWYG blog client in Linux. I've tried out Drivel, gnome-blog, KBlogger and BloGTK (Which I think is the best of the cited lot.) but not one of them has a WYSIWYG editor. The closest I came was a Firefox extension given the ugly name of Performancing. I'm using that extension now to knock out this entry here on the site.

Performancing has a few things going for it:

But it also has several drawbacks:

As it stands, blog clients for Linux still stink. Look, there is already talk of adding WYSIWYG to blog clients for PDAs! Come on you FOSSdevelopers, get on the clock!

Posted by Pace Arko at 10:54 PM on February 8, 2007 | Comments (6)

Xenon, Neutron and Nvu

Oh, and by the way, the previous post was the first I've made on our new iron.

The mighty, mighty Farlopsian bubble is now being generated by some serious hardware: a Dell PowerEdge 2950, running the Red Hat distro and named Xenon. This in turn sits behind a Cisco ASA 5505, which turn sits on a big, rather expensive, pipe in climate controlled closet in a co-location facility somewhere in the California Bay Area. We're talking industrial grade here. The Fish, myself and a couple of his friends have all chipped in to rent and buy this stuff. It's almost as if we are tiny little ISP now.

Continue reading "Xenon, Neutron and Nvu" »

Posted by Pace Arko at 12:21 AM on January 29, 2007

Mine is a dying art.

Over the last 8 or so years, blog scripts, site content management systems, site hosting, and desktop web publishing clients have grown so sophisticated that authoring and administering a personal site is trivial these days. If you can deal with Microsoft Office, you can do this.

Microsoft, spotting an area to dominate, has already made many significant strides in this direction. Many hosting services, often on some flavor of unix, offer by default FrontPage extensions. Most of Office has ways to export data and content from Microsoft's proprietary formats into sleightly less proprietary XML and HTML.

Purists like me may sneer at the dreck Word generates and claims is HTML but it's on dreck like this that a medium is democratized.

I just got a opportunity from a current customer of mine. He lead me to another fellow who described something that would be ideal for a blog tool. So I told him, the potential customer, that instead of paying me, he should look up TypePad hosting and the Ecto desktop blog client. Sigh. Mine is a dying art.

Posted by Pace Arko at 10:38 PM on December 4, 2006 | Comments (5)

Sigh, standards support, yet again

There were images in my last post but, many of you probably didn't see them because Internet Explorer 6 doesn't support cascading stylesheets as well as it should.

Now, you really shouldn't worry about this because Microsoft Vista is coming out soon. If you buy a new computer with Vista, many of you out there will get your browser upgraded whether you want it to be or not. The rest of you have already migrated to Firefox, Opera, Safari, Galeon and so on or have already installed Internet Explorer 7 on XP. So, one way or another, this problem will soon solve itself.

This site was never really known for being the cutting edge aside from the fact it has used semantically pure, accessible markup and cascading stylesheets for more than six years--long before those things became hip. And yet, supporting the broken implementation of IE6  has proved tedious. Henceforth, on my personal site, I'm hiding all my stylesheets from versions of Internet Explorer earlier than 7. I'm consigning IE6 to the same bin as Netscape Navigator 4 and other browsers with bad support for cascading stylesheets.

Of course my site will still be entirely readable and usable in all browsers. It's just that Internet Explorer 6 will get unstyled markup and fewer client scripts from now on. Which is probably a good thing actually.

JKLKJIILJIJIL;IJIJIJLIJOP   

 

Posted by Pace Arko at 8:49 PM on November 16, 2006

Makin' the Big Bucks Now!

So I just recently learned that my domain name is worth $10,400 but my actual site is only worth $564.54. I also learned that I can reasonably demand $30 for each and every text ad that appears on my site.

Do you find those numbers hard to believe? Well, they aren't that bad. Let's see what Malda could charge for Slash:

Continue reading "Makin' the Big Bucks Now!" »

Posted by Pace Arko at 4:34 PM on August 30, 2006

Yes, more stuff about accessibility

By way of Amor Mundi, I found a link to this really interesting site called, the Open Prothesthics Project. This is nifty to me on several levels.

In a vaguely related sense I have some other accessibility links.

Posted by Pace Arko at 7:11 AM on August 15, 2006

AJAX and other web accessibility stuff

Like I said, I've been out of the loop for a while and, apparently some folks out there are designing some bad interactivity because, there's been a tonne of articles over the last seven months on how to make AJAX accessible:

Posted by Pace Arko at 4:47 PM on July 26, 2006

While we are on the subject of accessibility--

So I've been out of the loop for a while and, during that time, there have been a few good articles about web accessibility that I figured I'd link to for posterity.

If you're web designer, you've probably run into several reasons why your clients don't care about web accessibility. Even the better informed clients suffer from some myths about web standards compliance. But, if you're good, you probably have some answers for them.

I don't think accessible web design is hard. All you need is a little experience, some thought and a good source of tips. Take things slowly and progressively improve each facet of the site in steps:

Well, actually sometimes Web access is hard.

I've recently discovered to my horror that Firefox uses number keys to allow the user to access various open tabs. This breaks my attempt to use numbers as accesskey values on many of the sites I've built. Accesskey has always been really messy and poorly implemented idea. Some have proposed using server-side logic to hand out customized key values for different users. It's a kludge but maybe we don't have any choice considering how badly the W3C dropped the ball on standards and accessiblity recently.

Posted by Pace Arko at 6:20 PM on July 23, 2006

Tips on how to create accessable javascript

So in this world of hype about AJAX, how do you design client-side scripts so they actually enhance accessibility and degrade gracefully when scripting is turned off for accessibility reasons?

Posted by Pace Arko at 5:41 PM on July 23, 2006

Movable Type 3.31 and Ubuntu 6.06

So there's been a lot of extensive, yet subtle change over the last few weeks here at the mighty, mighty Farlops Industries:

  1. After a period of stasis for 7 months, I moved all of my site's legacy content into Movable Type. MT now manages nearly every aspect of my site.
  2. I've spent the last 7 month's working almost entirely within the Ubuntu distribution of Linux.

Anyway, there are a lot of implications that stem from these two points.

Continue reading "Movable Type 3.31 and Ubuntu 6.06" »

Posted by Pace Arko at 10:28 PM on July 19, 2006

So what's the hold up?

So I'm working transferring nearly all of my site pages into MT3.2 and abandoning GM and the Google search form entirely. Most of this migration is being done on my test server and it's not ready for primetime yet. This why I haven't posted here in over a month. When it's ready, probably before MLK Day in January, I move everything here. This change will break some links to me but, this is not that many. I think I can take that risk.

Anyway, expect things to change after the holidays in early January.

Posted by Pace Arko at 2:27 PM on December 21, 2005

A few links and a rant about Web applications

First:

 Recently I've been reading much about AJAX, treating pages as applications, rich interactivity, and hype about the top ten tools of Web 2. As long as these AJAX scripts are designed properly with accessibility in mind, they won't be consigned to the bad old days of DHTML.

Continue reading "A few links and a rant about Web applications" »

Posted by Pace Arko at 7:00 AM on September 9, 2005

Problems with print media style

My redesign continues as I merge some of the very detailed usability suggestions given to me by Greg Lowney.

In the process of exploring these issues, he discovered some major problems with the way Firefox, Opera and Internet Explorer handle printed media stylesheets. His argument was that sometimes users want to print the page out just exactly like it appears on the screen and the aforementioned browsers won't let them have that choice.

Under the current implementations:

  1. If you want print the page out just exactly as it appears on the screen, you forced to take a screenshot with the PRNT SCRN key and then print out the captured image from an image editor.
  2. You are not given any choice to select different print stylesheets. You have to accept the author's decisions. There really is no way to fix this without confusing other users with older browsers that don't support stylesheets.

Perhaps I should file this as a bug with the various browser makers and raise the issue with W3C. Also we discovered some strange rending bugs in Firefox's print preview function that mysteriously go away when the page is actually printed--another bug to file.

Posted by Pace Arko at 7:00 PM on August 24, 2005

Taming those pesky SWF files

This one is primarily for my benefit. In my line of work, I spend a lot of time converting proprietary file formats to other, usually open, formats. This I try to do without actually having to buy any software. Why should I buy Adobe products when all I want are the images from a silly Acrobat file?

I spend a lot of time searching for high quality open source tools do what I want. Just recently my nephew wanted some help to--groan--embed a sound in his web page. The proprietary method he chose wasn't working in Firefox. To fix this I recommended he convert the file to a Flash object and then use the the satay method to put it in the page markup. To make this work, I had to convert from MP3 to WAV and then finally to SWF. To do the last step, I found a nifty suite of open source command-line tools for working with Flash and Shockwave. Phew! Problem solved.

Posted by Pace Arko at 7:38 PM on August 17, 2005 | Comments (2)

Gutless search solutions

So I've inserted a site specific Google search form on most of my pages. Since I have a lot of legacy content built with other tools and no easy way yet to incorporate it into my current CMS without breaking all the URLs, I can't use the CMS' search function to sweep my entire site. This is the only easy solution I have at this point. In other news, I've added a alternative link to the old stylesheet. It's labeled "Old School."

Posted by Pace Arko at 6:30 AM on August 13, 2005

New layout

So what do you think of this new layout? Yeah, it's still very simple; I said it would be simple. It should be easier to read and easier on the eyes.

The masthead image is something Jean-Charles Marteau generously allowed me to swipe and slice. Even though it looks like a real scanning electron microscope image, it's false. The cell repair machines it depicts don't exist yet. He made it with POV-Ray and GIMP. Pretty cool, right?

For those who miss the old look, I'll provide it as an alternate stylesheet. In most recent browsers you can switch to it as your preferred sheet. For users of Internet Explorer, I'll include some scripting soon to allow that browser to swap stylesheets too.

So this new layout, love it? Hate it? Leave me a comment! Or mail me!

Posted by Pace Arko at 6:35 AM on August 12, 2005 | Comments (3)

To avoid meaningless divisions

There are a lot of beautiful and clever things you can do with CSS but, because of poor support in the browser that most people use, some of these things require that you insert DIV elements in markup that serve no purpose but to be a container that style can be applied to. The Piefecta Layout hack for example, while clever, results in markup cluttered with almost as many meaningless tags as layout tables. Many of the fancier designs at the CSS Zen Garden require the same level of div-ery. This is not what I'm looking for.

Jay has asked me to update the style of my site. He's sick of my mild variation on FrontPage's zero theme. I have to agree with him. Once, back in 1999 when only IE5.5 and Opera 3 supported CSS with any seriousness and Moz 1 and Mac IE5 where just fevered dreams, it was futuristic. I've only made slight changes to my site layout ever since. I'm long overdue for style update.

But because I don't want to insert a bunch of meaningless markup into my pages, this limits how stunning my new design will be. Plus I don't have the best image manipulation and generation programs in the world. Mostly I've been focusing on what sort background I'll have for the masthead. I have done some research on fonts that look good and are commonly installed on most Linux boxes, so the typography shouldn't look too shabby. I've decided to move to a two column layout with the content on the left and all internal navigation, save my accessibility bar, on the right. My markup is ordered so content comes first. This means I have to do a lot of positioning in CSS to make things look like they aren't ordered that way. This another limitation which is compounded by poor support in the browser that most people use.

So I may end up with something that looks pretty bland.

Posted by Pace Arko at 6:33 PM on August 7, 2005

Internet Explorer 7, First Beta

Well, everyone else is talking about it and, me being a webmaster, I really should say something but, I really don't have much because I'm not a MSDN subscriber so, I can't get a legal copy. Today, I've been reading reviews on sites of designers and developers whom I respect and the consensus is that the first beta of IE7 is disappointing. It's looking pretty clear that programmers at the Lazy M Ranch have really only been at it since a year ago when they finally got scared of Mozilla.

This leads me to a design decision. When IE7 rolls out for XP and Vista, I'm going to install stylesheet hiding tricks on all the sites I maintain and drop presentational support for all releases of Internet Explorer before version six. This will help me maintain sanity.

Posted by Pace Arko at 11:17 AM on July 29, 2005

Expanding the mission of my blog script

One of the dilemmas I had to face in migrating to my new blog script is that all my old blog entries were no searchable except by the old blog script. This bothered me until I found an article that showed me how to bring all my site pages under the management of my new blog script without breaking their current URLs. Over the next few days, I'll work on this.

Posted by Pace Arko at 5:01 PM on July 19, 2005

sIFR and Web Typography

Well--the "Yes, we know the Web is not print but it should be," crowd finally achieved their grail: A means of injecting uncommon fonts into in pages without sacrificing accessibility, losing semantics or confusing search engines. sIFR does it all.

Except it's proprietary, it's not fully supported yet in Opera and it's occasionally buggy.

I guess this really isn't a problem. I mean, I use GIFs on my own site so, I can hardly claim some kind of open source purity. But it seems like this method will delay better support for the venerable old rule, @font-face. sIFR works well, right now, so why bother?

But while we're on the subject, there are still lots of old fashioned ways to make your web typography look good on as many platforms as possible.

I've been studying this stuff today because I'm still in the process of creating a new look for the site.

Posted by Pace Arko at 7:19 PM on July 18, 2005

Let's write better JavaScript!

Over the past few months I've been collecting many articles about JavaScript coding practices:

Maybe in the next few days I'll provide a link roundup of fun things (Although perhaps inaccessible--) to do with the DOM.

Posted by Pace Arko at 7:59 PM on July 16, 2005

What divisions and spans are meant for

Argh! I have a too many things to link to! I've decided to declare a moratorium on opening my feed reader or adding more bookmarks until I've cleared out some of these old, unclassified links out. Perhaps I'll turn some of them into posts here, provided they inspire enough of a rant. Many of them are about web accessibility, design and programming techniques. That's always good for some commentary.

For example, Gez Lemon wrote a good essay, back in the beginning of June, about the abuse of generic containers like div and span. I strongly agree. After reading the W3C's specifications, I got the idea that these containers, along with the id and class attributes, were meant to add more semantic meaning to a web document. But some folks, having finally been convinced that the using table markup for layouts is a bad idea, are now repeating the same mistake with inefficiently designed CSS and meaningless, micromanaging containers.

I suppose some of this is necessary:

  1. As kludges to get around poor CSS support in some browsers.
  2. As kludges to duplicate positioning tricks only possible with layout tables.
  3. As kludges to get a look that just isn't possible in any other way.

So, with a rueful smile, I am willing to let some of it go. But some of this is just from ignorance, bad markup editors and generators or willful dismissal of the semantic idea.

I try to avoid using generic divisions as much as possible and, I can't even think of a time I've used spans. When I do, I try to assign that markup identities and classes that have meaningful values that make sense in isolation and out of context. I think that's what wiser heads wanted us all to do when they wrote the specifications back in 1996.

Posted by Pace Arko at 7:36 PM on July 9, 2005

Final blog mergings and source-ordered markup

So what I need to is to tweak my blog script so that it searches the entire site, including the entries built with my old blog tool. That way, I can put one form on all my pages that will sweep the whole site.

I guess I could do this on the cheap by enlisting Google's help but the results won't look like my site and I'd rather keep things within my server.

I still have to think a bit on how to merge my old blog's archive pages with my new blog's archive pages. and make the navigation of my old blog pages look a lot like my new blog pages. I think once I do this everything will look very seamless. But first I must settle on how I want my new pages navigation to look.

In other webbish news, source-ordered markup is once again vindicated for accessibility. Current screen readers mostly ignore the CSS, as they should, and recite the content in markup order. This is why you should always put content first and navigation last in order of increasing generality. The only navigation that should come before content should be the skip links.

Posted by Pace Arko at 11:43 PM on July 5, 2005

Not finished but it is mostly stable

So I've got the blog script mostly tuned. There still a zillion little details I will have to correct over the coming days:

Aside from these, everything more or less works. I've got trackback, though I wonder what the utility of this is. I've got syndication in a number of XML feeds, atom, RSS and others. I've got sophisticated e-mail functionality--ah! It feels good to get on to some modern technology! (Although, if the Fish would let me, I'd probably do all this in python or ruby.)

Expect a non-webbish post in the next few hours.

Posted by Pace Arko at 5:30 AM on July 1, 2005

The New Tool

So there are a lot things that I have to change. Luckily, I've figured out how to correct the MT's URLs so that each directory terminates in an index page. But I've decided to move all my old Greymatter pages into the new directory tree. This will break a lot of internal links and a lot of external links. Some of these external links I want broken. There are spamdexes and link farms out there that reference strings on my pages as a means to boost their importance in Google's page ranking. If I break their links, it will take them some months to spider my site and recover their ranking. But other folks I should warn.

Expect additions to this in a few hours.

Posted by Pace Arko at 6:52 PM on June 26, 2005 | Comments (3)

Refurbishing this site

Okay--anyone who's bothered to read through the all the entries here at Farlops Industries has probably noticed several nagging doubts that have been gnawing at me for the last few years.

To that end, refurbishing steps are in the following order:

  1. Changing some content on older pages to make them clearer and to use my real nameThis has been done. I've revised my contact page and my biographical pages and added my resume.
  2. Changing my main site navigation link text so their destinations are more obviousThis has been done for my GM pages. I have to do it now for the old static pages.
  3. All old files, hopefully, should remain in their same locations. Not many people link to me but, I don't want to break the few links there are.
  4. Defaulting to a new layout and typography which is hopefully easier to read. I plan to offer the old layout for nostalgia's sake plus other layouts to play with.
  5. Installing the latest version of Movable Type. Word Press does have some attractive features but my host doesn't have the PHP interpreter or MySQL installed. I've learned how to fix MT's URLs. And I plan to leave all my old GM entries in that tool and in the same place to avoid breaking links for other people. My first post in MT will be under my real name.
  6. I will have to change the navigation in my old GM pages to seemlessly fuse with my new navigation. Ideally, aside from the URL, people shouldn't notice any difference.
  7. I may roll back to the strict fomulation of HTML 4.01 since my host won't let me serve XHTML as XML. I have to talk to The Fish about this. For now, I'll stick with strict XHTML 1 served as HTML because this is allowable, if frowned upon.I've decided to stay in XHTML 1 strict.

I plan to revise this entry as this process progresses. This should be my last entry in GM.

Posted by Pace Arko at 4:44 PM on May 30, 2005 | Comments (4)

I have decided I don't like MT

On March 13th around 5:55 in the morning, I had just finished installing MovableType.

It's actually a well written piece of software, at least by my naive technician's eyes, but, I simply don't like the way the URLs are implemented. Some of directories MT creates don't terminate in an index page. To me that's a no-no in URL design. GM has ugly URLs too but at least their more friendly than MT's. After languishing for a week or so, I restored a backup of my site.

Sigh. It looks like I'm just going to have to keep hacking GM beyond all recognition.

Posted by Pace Arko at 4:29 AM on March 22, 2005

Well, so long GreyMatter

It's been fun. It's been nearly 4 years since I installed Greymatter and then extensively changed it to meet my needs. But now that I see that the Fish was able to install version 3.1 of MovableType and we share the same server, it's time for me to explore this.

I've read that it has a restrictive license so, there really isn't a community of people contributing code to it. But we'll see how neat it is. If I don't like it, I can always put my GM installation back.

Posted by Pace Arko at 2:07 AM on February 8, 2005

The Bakafish Joins the 21st Century

With a small amount of help from me, Baka has been working on a layout-table-free, semantic and pure CSS facelift for his site. He had just sent his penultimate draft to me last night. I looked it over and it looks nearly perfect! It renders just fine in Firefox and even IE6 on Windows. Opera 7.54 still looks a little dodgy but I think that can be compensated for with the right hiding tricks. He still has to optimize things a bit for Safari but he's very close to finished.

I'm really happy to hear this! I've been doing things this way for the last six or so years. It's just nice to see more and more people find the enlightenment of a better way of web design.

Baka has done it! He's gone purely semantic and valid! Plus he's added a blog! Hooray!

Posted by Pace Arko at 7:54 AM on February 4, 2005

MSN takes the plunge into standards

As I've mentioned repeatedly, back in the late Nineties I was the webmaster for Microsoft's accessibility pages. Back in those days IE for Windows was really the only game in town for CSS support but, I'd read about the WaSP, saw where the future was headed and became a true believer. But rather than repeat that story, I want to note that MSN's latest facelift is apparently attempting to validate as XHTML 1 strict.

Hm. If my former employers are finally apprenhending why web standards matter in terms of ease of maintenance, ease of development, reduction in server bandwidth and improvements in usability and accessibilty, then perhaps it is time for me to come in from the cold. If I ever really was out in the cold.

I never really started to toot my horn about my time at Microsoft until recently. This was mostly because I was afraid I didn't know enough. My time as a freelancer during the bust years taught me a lot but I still haven't design web applications entirely from scratch. I think I have to start doing that.

Ah. I am just second guessing myself again. The decision I made back in the summer of 2000 was the correct one. It may have been an emotional hunch but sometimes that's all you've got. I felt I was stagnating. I knew this would be bad for the team. I knew or at least felt that the only way to force myself to learn things is to throw myself into freefall. That's what I did. I made the right choice.

Posted by Pace Arko at 8:03 AM on February 3, 2005

For Future Web Design Reference

My news feeds are getting out of hand. I now have more wonderful stuff to read than I have I have time. So in a effort to follow these things up later, when the Web hits a dry patch, I plan to save the links here with brief descriptions. This is mostly for my benefit as a web technician.

Posted by Pace Arko at 11:27 PM on January 31, 2005

Is this some horror unknown?

So let's see if I can add a new entry with the XStandard editor!

Yes, I can.

Later, upon entry revision, I see that if I add something to the extended area but later erase it, XStandard retains a nonbreaking space bounded by paragraph tags. Sigh. Still, much better than my javascript hack that I've been using to generate entries for these last 4 years.

Continue reading "Is this some horror unknown?" »

Posted by Pace Arko at 11:40 PM on January 28, 2005

A justification to learn new stuff

So in relation to my earlier post about XHTML, yesterday I was reading what Jacques Distler had to offer for justifications for serving XHTML as application/xhtml+xml. But it's easy for him--many of his entries serve up MathML. Unlike him, I am only humble ex-physics major but, I'll use any excuse to justify learning something useless. And his page pointed me to something that may justify my dangerously futuristic web design: Syncato.

Syncato, as near as I can tell, is a content management tool, written in python, to work entirely in XML. This means it can start with XHTML but it can start tying into many other things so long as you define things in XSLT or XPath. At last I can blog and do XML at the same time!

But there are barriers in front of me:

  1. I don't know python, XSLT or any of that new fangled stuff. But I could use this as an excuse to learn it.
  2. This site sits in a server that doesn't have python or any of the other requirements Syncato needs. However this could change. Baka tells me he plans to move things to a safer machine in a colocation company. Perhaps I'll have access to more modern tools there.
  3. I'll have to painstakingly merge all my old Greymatter pages into Syncato. Luckily since they are almost all well-formed and valid, this shouldn't be too maddening just laborious.
  4. Syncato really isn't ready for prime time. But as I recall, when I installed Greymatter over three years ago, it wasn't really ready either and since then I've forked very far from Greymatter's current trunk.

Anyway, I intend to explore this gadget in my carefully planned and efficient life.

Posted by Pace Arko at 8:41 AM on December 10, 2004

Back to HTML 4

Nearly three years ago I converted all the markup on this site from strict HTML 4 to strict XHTML 1. Fairly soon after this, I discovered that, to be kosher, I had serve this with the MIME format set to "application/xhtml-xml." For a long time I ignored this, noting that I could get away with serving this as "text/html as long as I didn't try to embed any real XML in it.

Recently though, in the process of trying to send content with the correct MIME on the site of a customer of mine, I discovered that I was dodging a lot of issues just for the sack of bogus bragging rights. Yes, it is cool that I am trying to be as futuristic as possible in my web development but, it's pointless if I am not doing it right and if I don't really have a reason to do so. I don't plan to embed MathML, SVG or ChemML in any of my customer's sites soon, so what's the point? Here, on this site, which is hosted on two Solaris boxes in the basement of Baka's parent's house in Alameda, I have to do a lot of back and forth with Baka before I try anything really exotic, like play around with mod_rewrite. So in the end, the XHTML experiment may have to be called to a close.

Posted by Pace Arko at 1:51 AM on December 9, 2004

Why I am a standards fanatic

Professor Dragovich wrote to me:

"I don't think web sites have to be ADA compliant. Do publishers have to publish books that are ADA compliant? Digital versus analog information. Why one and not the other."

Actually all major book publishers now have to comply with several laws, both national and international, concerning accessibility, including the ADA--namely large print editions, Braille transcription and audio cassettes of books must be available. This is often handled by third party companies and organizations.

But that's beside the point.

Just because a law is vague on one or two points doesn't mean that legal precedence doesn't apply. If we were strictly literal about the Constitution, all our current government would be illegal and invalid. If we interpret the Bill of Rights narrowly, we don't have any right to privacy or a whole range of other rights that we now take for granted. Is that literalism what we really want? Maybe some would say yes, but I am glad I don't live in country founded on those principles.

Private or personal websites, like private housing, don't have to comply with the ADA or Section 508 or similar rules in FCC code. I haven't really argued that private sites should, or if I have, I have only argued that it's the right thing to do and that it's easy to do, not that it should a be a legal requirement.

Commercial sites, on the other hand, are essentially places of business, just like brick and mortar places of business. Governmental sites are just like government offices; people go there to conduct their taxes, licensing, notarization and so on. The ADA applies to places of business and government offices in hardspace (On these points the law is generally clear even though there still some sticks in the mud that argue about it.) so, by the same reasoning, they should apply to places of business on the Internet.

It is true that the ADA was written before the rise of the Web but it does mention and apply to telecommunications technology. There are several sections in the law where the exact technology is intentionally vague. I think they did this for a reason: They tried to anticipate new technologies that might arise and tried to make the law as broad as possible.

This is basically the argument made by lawyers who currently claim that the ADA and other similar laws do apply to the Web and most software in general.

So now we are faced with a choice:

  1. Do we rely on legal precedence and just slowly extend and evolve current law by court ruling?
  2. Or do we go through the expensive process of forcing city, state, federal and international legislatures and bodies to create brand new laws that essentially say, "Oh yeah, we meant the Internet too," when that much should be obvious already?

Seems to me that the first option is cheaper and more flexible but, in truth, legislatures, courts and deliberative bodies are now doing both.

The Internet and the Web have the potential to be the great enablers for people with disabilities. True, the retrofitting of existing sites and web applications is expensive. Retraining webmasters to do things right in the first place is expensive. But to design web applications from scratch to be accessible is easy, cheap and has many other benefits totally unrelated to accessibility so why not make them accessible now instead of being forced to?

Professor Dragovich continued in his letter about the metric system:

"In your rant about metric, you say engineers are the worst violators. BS, man, the problem lies in the manufacturing sector, where the cost of re-tooling and re-labeling is prohibitive. Engineers routinely work in both systems."

Well, yes, that's probably true. Most belabored engineers, such as yourself, are just trying to make things work in a perverse system. They realize that converting back and forth is a necessary horror for the time being. Actually I wrote that rant, which is partially tongue in cheek, as a response to an dispute you and I had one day many years ago about metric. As I recall, you said the same thing then too.

Of course it's expensive. But at what point does the expense of total conversion ever become smaller than the expense of the status quo, never?

The main thing I object to is fact that we have to have two systems. This just increases the chance of error. It was precisely this that destroyed that Mars probe I cited back in the Nineties. Being forced to convert back and forth is a needless complication. As an engineer, you well know that it's best, if possible, to sweep away any needless complications.

Either we should never convert to metric at all and ban all metric from this country for the sake of expediency. Or we should just stop dragging our heels, stop wasting money of the status quo and drop the traditional system entirely. Having two just wastes money and time.

But I agree that the US is never really going to go whole hog into conversion until its leadership in GDP is knocked aside by the EU, China and India.

Realistically, I know that converting web sites and applications to be accessible and that converting fully to metric and dropping all use the traditional system is only going to happen very slowly and it's going to be expensive.

But I can dream, can't I?

Heck, maybe I should take up the use of Dvorak keyboards just to really be perverse!

Posted by Pace Arko at 3:55 PM on October 11, 2004

A big setback for accessibility in the US

I just read that an appeals court has ruled that the ADA does not apply to websites. This is amazingly stupid and the judges who made this decision should turn in their robes. The whole point of the ADA and Section 508 was to be an anticipatory set of laws to apply broadly in an wide range of unexpected circumstances. The Web was just an idea in 1991 but I am certaint that the authors of the ADA would have vehemently asserted that the law does apply to the Internet and the Web. I, being a webmaster who specializes in accessible and standards-compliant design, will continue to build accessible sites.

Posted by Pace Arko at 1:39 AM on September 28, 2004

Making the switch to Firefox

As a webmaster, I'd been using Mozilla since version 0.7 and Opera since version 3 to design and test with. I'd build for Mozilla first and then tweak things so they worked in Internet Explorer vesion 5, which at the time most people had. This has been my pattern until the present day: design in the browsers with better CSS support first, then tweak to adjust for IE5+. All during this time I was still using IE6, and earlier, as my main working browser.

I had tuned my systems and a lot of my tools to work with it as the default browser. I was able to escape all of the popups, page highjacking, spyware and trojans because I generally know what I am doing and knew not to trust Microsoft's default settings in IE. I would always browse with scripting and Active X support turned off. I put IE6 behind Privoxy to block ads, spoof my headers and generally micromanage the hell out of my HTTP stream. This kept me safe for the last four years and longer.

But yesterday, I finally bit the bullet and set Firefox as my default browser. Not because I was worried about IE's wanton libertine of a security model, I already had that in hand, but because I finally decided to tune my tools and such to work with it. I had been using it so much in my daily work that I figured that I should finally go all the way. I've heard that Microsoft is beginning to get worried about loosing browser share and they may reverse their decisions made about Longhorn and IE7. At least they are more open to developer feedback now, so I am hopeful.

But until the Lazy M Ranch gets off its collective rear, I'm staying in a modern browser. I will of course still continue to design my CSS conservatively to support IE5+ for my client's sites but here, at FI, I think I am finally going to try some, really advanced CSS-fu.

Posted by Pace Arko at 6:02 PM on September 23, 2004

YAWDR: Yet another Web design roundup

Posted by Pace Arko at 12:51 AM on September 23, 2004

An Introspective Design Moment

I've been a serious web technician since 1997 and an unserious one since 1996. So why is it that my CSS designs still appears so bland to me? It's not the fault of CSS. If anything, as will be made plain, I'm not using cascading stylesheets enough.

I think the fault lies in two things:

  1. I don't use enough divs and spans.
  2. I don't use enough images

With generic containers like divs and spans I could engage more intricate position and background color schemes. With more divs and spans I could place more images as backgrounds or use a variation of Fahrner's image replacement.

This could be problematic though. It would slow my page serving as images loaded and having all those divs and spans dilutes the semantic markup, even if I name them with classes and ids that have semantic meaning.

The other thing is I am not very practiced in the finer arts. I haven't done much branding or logo design. This is something I have to work more on.

Posted by Pace Arko at 1:21 AM on July 31, 2004

Proprietary formats stink

Chris Phillips over at Curb Cut Learning has a rant, which I agree with, that HTML is better than PDF for accessibility.

In fact, I go further than he does, HTML is already good enough for most people. Maybe professional printing houses still need PDF or MSWord but John Public, who merely wants to print a flyer for his lost dog, can do that just fine in HTML with a little CSS on the side.

I remember when I was a temp at Microsoft and some W3C guys came by to give a presentation about web standards and web accessibility, which mostly fell on deaf ears. It was telling to me, when my boss converted their presentation, which was in nice simple HTML into PowerPoint. My boss' fear was legitimate. He was afraid other staff in the company wouldn't read the W3C presentation if it remained in HTML on some file server someplace--people stick with what they know.

That incident stuck with me though. I realized that most of my job as the webmaster for the Microsoft Accessibility site was simply converting Microsoft Word files into something that could reasonably be called HTML 3.2. To this day, as webmaster for several customers in my own business, most of my work consists of converting Acrobat and Word files into XHTML 1 strict. This is work that shouldn't exist.

The problem is that semantic purity requires thought on the part of an author. Most people don't want to think about whether a piece of text is a book title, a programming variable, an author's contact information or emphasis and intonation. They just italicize it, at least in anglophone countries, and let the world figure it out.

Somehow we have to make authoring tools that handle this semantic stuff automatically for people who have better things to do. Otherwise Berners-Lee's dream isn't going to manifest.

Even still, HTML is already good enough to suplant most proprietary document formats for most people for most purposes.

Posted by Pace Arko at 10:08 PM on June 25, 2004

Cognitive Disabilites Shortchanged?

So my news aggregator captured an essay from Juicy Studios about how people with learning and cognitive disabilities got shortchanged by the WAI. After reading it, I have to say that Mr. Leitch is a little too confrontational. It is true that for some people with illiteracy, dyslexia or other learning disabilities, the Web is hard to deal with. For these people multimedia, represented by Flash objects, java applets, video clips and so on, is probably better than ordinary text and hyperlinks. And that's one of Mr. Leitch's points.

However I disagree with him that balancing visual disabilities with learning disabilities is always a zero-sum game. For example, improving how a site recites in a screen reader is also better for people with dylexia because that means they too can have sites read to them in a non-confusing manner. Improving accessibility doesn't mean the categorical removal of all Flash objects. It means replacing badly designed Flash objects with ones that are fully keyboard accessible and that recite in a manner that makes sense in screen readers.

It is possible to have accessible Web design withouth pitting one type of disability against another. It is possible have improvements for one benefit another. I don't think Mr. Leitch understands that. Juicy Studios has a followup on this issue, specifically using markup to aid information chunking

Posted by Pace Arko at 9:18 AM on June 8, 2004

Accessible since 1998

It's gratifying to see web designers getting organized about accessibility--gives me a sense of vindication. I discovered accessible web design when a friend hired me to do the Microsoft Accessibility Site back in 1997. In 1998, I discovered the work of Zeldman and the WaSP. At that point, browser support for W3C standards was poor, but I saw where the future was going. Every site I've built since going indy in 2000 has been accessible and standards compliant.

Posted by Pace Arko at 1:41 PM on May 26, 2004

Just added trackback to my site

It still has a few bugs and I may decide to remove it if spam starts linking to my site, but I've installed Movable Type's trackback module to supplement my Greymatter installation. In theory this means I've joined the hip kids but we'll see. Mostly I did it to see what I can do with it.

Who knows? Maybe I'll add a syndication feed via atom and RSS in the days to come. Ooh wow! XML man.

Posted by Pace Arko at 8:44 PM on February 24, 2004

I'm such a cheapskate and stuff about Greymatter

So I bought myself an electric trimmer today and cut my hair. No more 15 bucks for Supercuts! Considering it's my first self-inflicted haircut, it doesn't look too bad. In truth it's hard to mess this up, because ever since the Eighties, I've had my hair cut real short (between 9 and 12 millimeters.) and now that I'm bald there ain't too much hair left to cut badly. Maybe in a couple weeks I might follow the trends and go down to 6 millimeters.

So unlike January, this month has been pretty quite for posting. I've been pretty busy and I've also been thinking of installing a few new things into my log script. I decided to hold off on upgrading to GM1.3 because I've customized my own installation of GM so much that I don't want to give all that work up by upgrading. I have been looking over the code in 1.3 though to see what I can do to transfer over things I need, like better security and modularity, versus things I don't, like smilies and other such frippery. Hmm. I've forked so bad that I don't think I'll ever get back into development track with Greymatter.

Posted by Pace Arko at 11:43 PM on February 20, 2004

Converting JavaScript to VBScript

Now obviously VBScript isn't standard but, it seems that there are so many client-side scripts these days to overcome IE6's increasingly plain shortcomings on Web standards. Most of these scripts are DOM compliant and are in JavaScript but since they should only apply to IE why not put them all in VBScript since it's Microsoft's browser that's broken? Thus we can avoid the sniffing since all other browsers can't parse VBScript.

I've been building a file to fix IE's broken standards support, all of these hacks are in JavaScript (Actually a lot of it is in MS's dialect, jscript.) so far. But since they are all for IE, why not just code them VBScript? When Microsoft finally gets a better browser out, the file can be scrapped. So this is my new project, if I ever get around to it.

Posted by Pace Arko at 5:57 PM on January 27, 2004

Gentlemen and Ladies--

The Business Case for Web Accessibility.

Posted by Pace Arko at 4:59 AM on January 24, 2004

More shop talk.

Continuing in a similar light as yesterday's post, Mr. Pilgrim points me to more Webbish jiggery-pokery.

Posted by Pace Arko at 5:38 AM on November 28, 2003

Forcing FrontPage to generate valid markup

Again this is mostly for my own benefit. Years ago, when I worked at the Company That Shall Not Be Named, I started using FrontPage simply because I didn't know any better.

Go ahead, laugh! We all had to start somewhere. I'm sure you weren't born spouting regular expressions and shell scripts either, weenie.

Anyway, in the middle of 1998, thanks to some inspiring articles by Web design gurus, I began to learn better. I started using all sorts of outside tools (perl-based page assembly scripts, Funduc's SR, TidyGUI, Liam Quinn's ARV, etc.) to correct the garbage that FrontPage and Word called markup. As the iterations of FrontPage advanced, I became very able at cleaning up the messes it made. FrontPage is terribly, tragically broken, but at least it breaks markup in a consistent way, which means it's fixable.

Now a Dane, by the name of Michael Suodenjoki, has written some VBA code that forces FrontPage to generate valid XHTML. I just wish I'd seen this page a year ago before I commented at WDIK.

Posted by Pace Arko at 8:30 AM on November 27, 2003

Web Accessibility

This entry is really for my benefit. My RSS news feeds seemed to be full of stuff about web access these past few days so I figured I'd tie all the links together here.

Posted by Pace Arko at 1:45 PM on November 15, 2003

The New Greymatter

I just discovered that Greymatter 1.3 is out, copacetic! Since I've made very minor contributions to that, I guess I got to try it out.

Posted by Pace Arko at 8:33 PM on November 11, 2003

Extensive site revision

Over the last few hours (Hey when you're in the tao, you work late!), I've made extensive revisions to this site.

Plans for the near future include:

Posted by Pace Arko at 5:37 AM on October 23, 2003

Presentation, semantics and structure in markup

Smarter people than me have been thinking about the separation of presentation and structure in Web documents in the last week. Some of these arguments seem like angels dancing on pinheads. For me it's simple. The goal should be to organize and assemble your Web documents with the least amount of markup and code possible. I think that elegance in markup and code is a goal we can all agree with. Layout tables are semantically meaningless bulk that can now be done without, thanks to the elegance of using a separate markup specifically designed for presentation, CSS. If this makes your documents semantically pure and more accessible to assistive technology, so much the sweeter.

Posted by Pace Arko at 3:07 AM on October 18, 2003

Installed the style switcher I promised.

There are still a few bugs to work out. For example, it's not planting a cookie in my browsers. This needs to happen for the selected style to persist. I also have to install it for all the pages that are outside my web log script. Anyway, it works, sort of, Just invoke the link text, "Turn Off Style," to see this site as Netscape 4 or Arachne sees it.

The whole point to this is to provide a way to make my site more accessible to people with mobile phones, screen readers or screen magnifiers. Turning off the style snaps my pages into a linear, content-first, navigation-second layout. Combined with keyboard shortcuts to quickly jump to navigation, if needed, this should make my site more accessible for people with motor impairments too. Once I get the bugs out here, I plan to transfer this code to the sites I maintain for others.

Posted by Pace Arko at 6:53 AM on October 10, 2003

Verisign breaks the Internet

This news is a few days old but still important. Verisign, which owns Network Solutions, has added a wildcard record to the .COM and .NET top level domain DNS zones. What this means is that fighting spam is harder, e-mail address resolution is harder and Web domain typos give Verisign free advertising. This stinks, right?

Posted by Pace Arko at 6:10 AM on September 17, 2003

The hard road towards semantic purity

There were two articles on Web today that inspired a long story in me. One was about the implications of semantic Web design and the other was about Web accessibility and standards. For me, the tone of the articles was positive; they seemed to say that persistance pays. Anyway, here's my story.

Back in 1997, after dabbling with designing my own Web pages off and on for over a year, I was hired by a friend to design Web document that were accessibile to people with disabilities. Specifically, he wanted my help to redesign a corporate site to be a model of accessibile design. I didn't yet know how to design Web documents accessibly, but he gave me the chance to learn. This started a learning process that still hasn't left me today.

Continue reading "The hard road towards semantic purity" »

Posted by Pace Arko at 11:10 AM on August 28, 2003

Search engines reveal secrets

Search engines reveal yet another reason why Word and Acrobat formats are not appropriate for the Web. Documents on the Web really should just be ASCII text, HTML or XHTML.

Posted by Pace Arko at 4:41 PM on August 16, 2003

A CSS technique, sadly, to be avoided

Many of the beautiful designs at the CSS Zen Garden rely on a trick that's been dubbed Farhner Image Replacement. In the best of worlds, this trick would actually enhance accessibility, but the reality is that at least one screen reader (JAWS, the market leading screen reading tool.) breaks it. As such, I have to avoid using the trick myself and I will have to advise customers to avoid it as well.

Posted by Pace Arko at 10:44 PM on August 8, 2003

Adding a stylesheet-switcher to my site

In the best of worlds, ECMAscript-driven stylesheet-switchers wouldn't be necessary; browsers would load and parse all linked stylesheets and then give the user the option to choose one that suits. In the real world this isn't true, so I gotta kludge to cope. Allow me to explain what I mean.

Continue reading "Adding a stylesheet-switcher to my site" »

Posted by Pace Arko at 12:05 AM on August 8, 2003

I doubt Microsoft will bend

So the WaSP has issued another manifesto now that Microsoft has declared that it will no longer build standalone, free browsers for Windows and Apple machines. Now I say this as a long time supporter of the WaSP, but I doubt Microsoft is going to issue a few last patches to fix the broken XHTML, PNG and CSS support in IE 6 or Macintosh's IE 5.

Five or so years ago it was easier because Netscape had already lost marketshare to a, let's be honest, technically superiour browser given away for free by a powerful company. At that time Mozilla was still a very novel idea. It was easier for WaSP to light the fires under Netscape and, by proxy, Mozilla for standards support because at that time their browsers were behind and their share was small. This time, Microsoft will be much harder to push around.

I say this with great sadness and irritation because this means that, like it or not, broken IE 6 for Windows and IE 5 for Macintosh will be the baseline for design for several product upgrades to come. Luckily the tactics we used to hide nifty CSS from buggy Netscape 4, can be used to hide nifty CSS from buggy IE 6.

Posted by Pace Arko at 8:06 PM on June 27, 2003

I know it's bloody pointless

So I have just spidered my site and, oh man, I have a lot of dead links. One of the drawbacks to using your web log as a hot link list is that a lot of stuff dies or gets lost as the web shifts around. It was especially brutal to remove all the New York Times and Technology Review links. I have to massively edit my old content just remove those links and still have entries make sense.

So I've learned some lessons:

  1. Don't link to the NYT or TechReview ever again. Actually I stopped doing this months ago when they started forcing us to register to see old content. Stupid. Old media is stupid. I'd figure since TechReview is a magazine from MIT, they'd be smarter than this but oh well.
  2. Stop using my log as a link lister. It's boring and these links can be found on zillions of other web logs.
  3. Put more of my own content on my own site
  4. Only link to things that are at the domain level. Sites may reorganize constantly but hopefully the big domains won't disappear.
  5. Spider my site more often to reduce the load of removing or changing dead links.

Posted by Pace Arko at 4:28 AM on June 19, 2003

The REAL reason support for print media CSS is so poor

Imagine if people didn't have to use Acrobat or Word to print out legible, neatly organized documents? Well, they almost can. They almost could if there was good support of CSS rules and attributes related to print media. Mozilla does the best job in support of CSS in printed media and Opera isn't too shabby either but they still fall short in key areas. I wonder how long this is going to remain so. As a matter of course I put all my documents in XHTML or text now, but I am sure veterans from the print media can spot all kinds of shortcomings in using HTML and CSS in serious production of magazines or books and such. It's a pity because HTML is pretty darn cross-platorm, very simple, open and lightweight and could be more than adequate from most people's needs. One only has to look at Word's zillions of unused features to realize that.

Posted by Pace Arko at 10:20 PM on April 30, 2003

How the semantic Web influenced my writing style

Other folks have probably written essays on how hypertext has influenced writing style in other media. Here I'd like to briefly discuss how working with and correcting document markup to make it conform to the semantic intent of the W3C standards has influenced and is influence my writing style.

When I write in e-mail, I tend to use a lot more bullets (No, I make them by hand using the * character. I avoid using HTML-based mail for good reasons.) to summarize and focus my points. I think more about why I am bolding or italicizing something--is it a book title or am I quoting someone famous? On long documents I think about using headings and subheadings; this helps me to focus my thoughts and cut away the inessential or emphasise it and bring it into focus. Dealing with the meaning of markup has really made me think about how I organize own writing and thoughts. It's weird.

Posted by Pace Arko at 6:43 PM on April 24, 2003

Accessible data table attributes

Even though many screen readers and Web browsers don't support them yet, I put accessibility attributes in all the data tables I put on sites. (Don't know how to build an accessible data table? Use the accessible table builder.) The thing that still confuses me about the W3C standard is that it defines two ways to organize table rows and columns behind the scenes. This organization is supposed to help screen readers recite tables in a nonconfusing manner. But if there are two ways to do this, isn't it a little counterproductive? Isn't it likely that different tool makers will support one method and fail on the other? Just in case, I mark with both sets of attributes. Anyway, I should pose this question to their accessibility mail list one of these days.

Posted by Pace Arko at 2:08 PM on April 22, 2003

Another Big Company adopts Web standards

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!

Posted by Pace Arko at 6:30 PM on April 21, 2003

Editor progress and lack thereof

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.

Posted by Pace Arko at 10:41 AM on April 8, 2003

Building a better editor for Greymatter

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.

Posted by Pace Arko at 11:22 PM on April 4, 2003

More javascript trickery

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.

Continue reading "More javascript trickery" »

Posted by Pace Arko at 10:33 PM on April 3, 2003

Making ABBR work in IE

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

Continue reading "Making ABBR work in IE" »

Posted by Pace Arko at 10:40 PM on April 2, 2003

Learning about SALT

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.

Continue reading "Learning about SALT" »

Posted by Pace Arko at 4:58 AM on April 1, 2003

My own mod of Greymatter

Well, it's a work in progress. After removing some bugs that people have found, plus the ones I already knew were there, I think it's ready for prime time. Feel free to try it out (If you want to look at and mess with the code in one of the children of unix, try this one). I no longer support Greymatter in any form. I have removed, these code archives from my site.(Wednesday, July 19th, 2006)

Continue reading "My own mod of Greymatter" »

Posted by Pace Arko at 2:34 PM on March 12, 2003

Back buttons, client-side and server-side code

Posted by Pace Arko at 6:08 PM on December 30, 2002

User defined CSS and accessibility, why IE 6 still sucks

Argh! Why can't IE 6 support this?

table, tr, th, td, thead, tbody, tfoot  
 
{ display: block !important; }  
 
* { 
 
    position: static !important; 
 
    float: none !important; 
 
    left: 0em !important; 
 
    right: 0em !important; 
 
    top: 0em !important; 
 
    bottom: 0em !important; 
 
  }  
 
* { border-style: none !important; }

These CSS rules linearize all tables, turn off all CSS positioning and remove all borders on a page. Doing this would make pages recite in a less confusing manner in screen readers and braille output devices. This would be a great style sheet for users with screen readers to define in IE 6. But alas, no dice.

Posted by Pace Arko at 7:17 PM on December 2, 2002

Using search engines to enforce accessible markup

I just had a good idea. Why not put a few modules of code in Google (Or name your favorite engine.) that parse the spidered pages and checks them for DTD and CSS validity? Then people could compile search results on pages that truly validate as strict XHTML 1. If you could combine this with normal search strings and then make a point of only visiting or referring your own visitors to sites with valid markup, it could be a very powerful way of forcing the web to clean up their act.

The idea goes further. Suppose you could take something like A-Prompt, Bobby or Crunchy's Page Screamer and hook it into a search engine. The user could then enter search strings but only get back pages that meet certain minimum accessibility guidelines. This is better than badges because you can get proof of the page author's claims.

I'll have to tell my friend to submit this idea to the kind folks over at the WAI.

Posted by Pace Arko at 5:34 PM on November 30, 2002

Accessible data tables

If, like me, you are in the vanguard of the Semantic Web revolution, if, like me, you believe in web accessibility, then layout tables are anathema. On the other hand, using table markup for what it was originally meant to be used for--data organization--is good. Evolt has an article on how to design accessible data tables. Accessify has an accessible data table generator for you.

Posted by Pace Arko at 9:44 PM on November 22, 2002

Wireless security, GUI cruft, Web accessibility and the law

Posted by Pace Arko at 3:41 PM on November 8, 2002

Backlinking, is there are better way?

Happy Halloween!

Anyway, while reading the redesigned Blogdex, I came across an article about backlinking and web logs. This interested me so I figured I'd add a little heat and noise to the conversation.

Continue reading "Backlinking, is there are better way?" »

Posted by Pace Arko at 12:52 PM on October 31, 2002

Announcing a new policy here at Factory Floor

As you may see, looking over the archive, I am not a very frequent poster to my log. I want to change this. I hereby promise to write at least one entry every weekday from here in. I may even throw a few weekend entries in for extra measure. This will be hard to do and I am sure that most entries will be utter junk but, I think I need to do this. Besides, this is the new century. I can always change my mind later.

Posted by Pace Arko at 11:00 PM on October 11, 2002

Microsoft, Wired and Standards

Personally I am hoping that the rest of the big companies, in redesigning their own sites, follow Wired's example as opposed to Microsoft's.

Posted by Pace Arko at 10:52 PM on October 11, 2002

XHTML looks terrible in WebTV

All the sites I've built look terrible in WebTV. At least I know it's WebTV's fault. If everything I make validates as strict XHTML and CSS, then it's not my fault.

Today is a pretty slow day. Yesterday I just sent out a mail to my friends and co-workers to do a little informal usability testing on the shopping script I built for one of my bosses. Hopefully this will improve my stuff.

I've also worked out that I average about 11 entries per month in my web log.

Posted by Pace Arko at 12:39 PM on July 10, 2002

Take back the Web!

Or at least the dot-org part of it. Over last 5 or so years, ICANN has allowed, without any struggle, the Domain Name System to be dominated by large corporations who use it to enforce, some would say in a repressive manner, trademark and intellectual property. To counter this trend, two non-profit organizations have proposed that they take responsibility for administration of the dot-org top level domains.

If you want to support this bid to take back control:

spread the dot

Posted by Pace Arko at 9:18 PM on June 28, 2002

Mark Pilgrim Continues to Drop Science

I know I cited his pages a few days ago but, it just keeps getting better. I feel like an idiot. Mr. Pilgrim is writing about the gritty aspects of improving web accessibility much better than I ever could. Please, go an read his essays about web accessibility and improving the accessibility of web logs.

Posted by Pace Arko at 3:22 PM on June 21, 2002

Accessibility technology

Posted by Pace Arko at 6:40 AM on May 12, 2002

Yes, I know it's late

Macromedia is planning an evangelizing tour to tout the new accessibility features of Flash MX. Considering the legions of Flash designers out there that probably may never learn how to design Flash objects accessibly one wonders if an upgrade and a few tutorials will help. It is true that Flash finally supports MSAA (Microsoft's Accessible Technologies API) and that should improve things a bit on Windows platorms. I don't know about other platforms though and, considering some of the rather egotistical statements about Flash replacing ordinary Web pages entirely, I am not too hopeful.

Posted by Pace Arko at 3:44 AM on March 21, 2002

The W3C Rejects RAND!

The World Wide Web Consortium today rejected the RAND proposal I spoke of here a few months ago. This means that key Web protocols, standards and technologies will remain royalty free and open for all users. The little folks win out against the corporate organisms!

As such I have taken down the protest badge that I placed over my validation badges.

Posted by Pace Arko at 1:56 PM on February 26, 2002

Yes, CSS-based layout is better

Despite what older and supposedly wiser heads say, layout tables are evil.

Posted by Pace Arko at 7:44 AM on February 24, 2002

Reducing the Chance of Greymatter Script Hacks

The Greymatter script, while excellent in almost every aspect (A tip of the Farlopsian hat to Mr. Grey!), needs a little help so that, after installation, it runs in a secure fashion. For example, many of the forms it uses send the author's username and password as unencrypted text between client and server. Actually this is problem that many perl server scripts have, and if you don't take precautions, you're one packet sniff or hack away from getting your script and maybe the rest of your server, owned.

Continue reading "Reducing the Chance of Greymatter Script Hacks" »

Posted by Pace Arko at 10:00 AM on February 17, 2002 | Comments (2)

The Economics of the Internet

Jake repeats his claim that micropayments are the way to go however, Adam Barr disagrees. Cory Doctrow writes an enthusiastic screed (Perhaps in stark denial to what's happened in the last two years.) about how the Internet is going to revolutionize everything.

[Sigh.] Same ol' same old. Nothing to see here folks, move along.

The odd thing is I've got two friends who are trying to enlist my help in their own Internet scheme. I've designated myself as their official worrier and skeptic. It's the only role I feel comfortable with. Venture capital is not really my cup of tea.

Posted by Pace Arko at 7:48 AM on January 23, 2002

More on Accessible Web Design

Posted by Pace Arko at 7:33 AM on January 23, 2002

Web Accessibility Update

Zapping around on the Web, I came across an article on improving the accessibility of web logs. Because the Farlops Industries site is built to W3C standards, I would argue that my log, Factory Floor is already AA compliant with WAI guidelines. Still, as far as the rest of the Web is concerned, accessibility appears to be an afterthought.

Posted by Pace Arko at 5:30 PM on December 29, 2001

Why Pander to Netscape 4.x?

A List Apart has a good article this week that pretty much sums up why all the sites I build look bland in Netscape and IE 4.x (all platforms).

Posted by Pace Arko at 8:52 AM on December 9, 2001

Site Update Tonight

As my file server grinds through a big defragmentation, I'm updating many of my older pages, some of my style rules and removing some link rot tonight. Probably the most significant changes will be my links page as I have added a fair number of new links there.

In other news, the folks over at Shiny Blue Grasshopper read "Zip the Commercials!" and pointed out their own screed against mental pollution. The Law Man recommends The Little City, which appears to be a sort of photo diary, travelog and poetry journal--not really a Farlopsian cup of tea but there may be potential fans out there.

Posted by Pace Arko at 8:35 PM on November 30, 2001

More rants about page design and the server-side

I may come back to tweak this essay repeatedly in the coming months. If, in this work in progress, I get a good groove going on, I may move those parts of the essay into my developer section to exist as permanent documents.

Continue reading "More rants about page design and the server-side" »

Posted by Pace Arko at 8:30 AM on October 18, 2001

Added a Protest Badge

To protest the W3C's proposal for "reasonable and non-discriminatory" patents, I have added a dark cloud over my validation badges. This means that I support W3C standards but only if they are royalty-free. The idea and badge came from the Userfunded Organization.

Posted by Pace Arko at 4:35 PM on October 2, 2001

W3C, Tool of Corporate Masters?!

What the hell? Just a few minutes ago I learned that the World Wide Web Consortium, probably bowing to pressure from some of its corporate members, tried to pull a fast one on us by submitting a proposal to patent key Web technology. This proposal was announced in the middle of August with a very suspicious lack of promotion. They only allowed a month of comment, which hardly anyone made because hardly anyone was aware of this policy move.

Perhaps it was an oversight but considering the controversial nature of this policy it looks like deliberate evasion. The corporate members of the W3C were hoping to slip this by us.

Well, we of the web development and design community say NO! We aren't going to stand for this!

Posted by Pace Arko at 7:47 PM on October 1, 2001

W3C alternative that might be better than Flash

Actually Macromedia did contribute to the SVG standard so I am hoping that it might be more accessible than the current generations of Flash, Shockwave, etc.

Posted by Pace Arko at 8:26 PM on September 17, 2001

And the Internet Did Not Fail

For much of yesterday I watched the poorman's broadband, television. Today I have it turned off. It's just getting repetitive now. Yesterday and today I was able to send e-mail, chat with friends and make changes to the sites I administer. The Net did not fail. It's true that some major news sites crashed under the weight of hits, and that video clips were hard to find but, thousands of amateur images and clips were posted on personal sites and news sites less traveled. I was able to find the information I needed. The Net did not fail.

Posted by Pace Arko at 5:09 PM on September 12, 2001

The Battles That Remain, A Reprise

Now that the browser makers are finally playing by the rules, we must see to it that HTML editing programs generate W3C valid markup. It's time for round two of the standards wars.

Posted by Pace Arko at 6:22 PM on August 15, 2001

You Learn Something New Everyday

There turns out to be a valid way of hiding style rules from Internet Explorer 4 for Windows. I just tested it myself last night as I installed Windows 98 for the umpth time. You just write:@import "filepath/filename.css"; as opposed to @import url("filepath/filename.css");

The only problem is it shuts out Konqueror 2.1.2 as well but, I imagine later versions of Konqueror will fix this and, as I've reiterated many times, the site is still readable and functional without the style, it just looks bland.

Anyway I intend to implement this on all my sites.

Posted by Pace Arko at 3:12 PM on August 13, 2001

CMS, Web annotations

Web content management systems are usually a set of server scripts and applications that automate many of the tasks of adminstrating and updating a web site. eGrail is a company based on the premise that these tools will one day become as common as word processing programs--probably true, but not at the price they are asking for.

I have three pages about about web annotations. One is about Foresight's CritSuite and, the now defunct, Third Voice. Another is about Microsoft's smart tags. And the last one is about TOPtext. The idea has become so common that the W3C is now finally issuing standards for this facet of Ted Nelson's strange idea.

Posted by Pace Arko at 7:25 PM on August 10, 2001

Explaining my linking policy

Perhaps some of you have noticed that when I link to stories on the big media sites like Ziff-Davis, the BBC or the New York Times I tend to link to the printer-friendly, single-page low-bandwidth versions. I do this for serveral reasons:

Posted by Pace Arko at 4:37 PM on August 1, 2001

Tweaks and hacks for Greymatter

So now there is a repository for Greymatter tweaks. For example, now there is a way to fix the unescaped ampersands Greymatter generates. Since I know perl, I fixed the ampersand thing on my own but it is good to know that other functionality is there should I want to try it.

Posted by Pace Arko at 9:51 PM on July 31, 2001

My tiny contribution to open-source

I just posted my first bug to Bugzilla!

Posted by Pace Arko at 9:37 PM on July 31, 2001

Smart Tags Revisited

A growing number of software companies are making web tools that use something very similar to Microsoft's recently removed smart tag technology.

All these things, since the now defunct Flyswat and Third Voice onwards, seem to use JavaScript or JScript to do this. Yet another reason to keep scripting turned off until you need it.

Posted by Pace Arko at 12:24 PM on July 30, 2001

The Battles that Remain.

For over 3 years the