Archive - January 2003
Silently singing a song of accessibility
2003-01-31 23:36
On Norwegian TV2’s I’m-a-wannabe-popstar show Idol, I saw one of the perhaps finest examples of accessibility ever.
A deaf guy singing.
In silence.
I mean, this deaf guy wasn’t making one single sound. His body language and lip movement said it all, I think he did a better job at performing Sissel Kyrkjebø’s “Vestland, Vestland” (a tribute to the western parts of Norway) than she originally did back in the eighties.
One member of the jury cried. I can understand why. I’m still in shock.
Hilarious
2003-01-30 16:29
One of Norway’s largest advertisement bureaus, New Deal, have gone all retro. Should they, by the time you read this have reverted to their more normal look, I’ve made a screenshot available.
I fell of my chair, at first from laughing. Then in amazement. This is genius at work. You figure out why.
Alt and title for images
2003-01-30 00:39
In an ideal world, people would have gotten it right by now. Providing proper alt and title for their images. Sure. Many people have learned that alt="something" should be present when they present an image on the web. What that something is, isn’t always too clear.
I’ve written a short tutorial on the correct use of alt and title. I hope at least one person benefits from this.
Please remember that all of my work is a result of iterative writing, so if you feel something is horribly wrong with what I write, I’ll look into it
Opera 7 release today?
2003-01-28 00:42
According to CNet News.com, Opera Software will release the final version of Opera 7 for Windows.
Most of the changes since the last public beta is supposed to be stability fixes. I, for one, am looking forward to taking it for a test drive.
application/xhtml+xml? Take care
2003-01-26 06:56
Update/change: I originally wanted to serve these pages with application/xhtml+xml as it's MIME type. At one moment, you might want to do this, too. There are a number of things you should know.
I tried (I'll tell you how), and I ran into so much trouble I eventually went back to serving tagsoup text/html.
Prefetching with <link> harmful
2003-01-24 15:36
I’ve noticed that Mozilla wants to add prefetch as an attribute value for <link rel="..." /> - and I’ve also noticed that it is even mentioned in the current XHTML 2.0 draft.
HTML validity factor: 0.007
2003-01-23 14:15
Norwegian Dagfinn R. Parnas has written a Master thesis on How to cope with incorrect HTML (it is also available as Postscript).
One of the more interesting facts of his thesis is this: He sampled a total of 2 500 000 documents from the Open Directory Project, and found that only 0.7 % of these documents were valid HTML.
The three most common errors was missing DTDs. Then followed specifying invalid attributes, and missing required attributes.
Transparent PNG
2003-01-23 00:28
I’ve just created a simple demonstration on how one can use PNG images with alpha channels. No, it doesn’t aim to look perfect in Internet Explorer, but results are functional in that browser, and fairly visually pleasing in Opera 6, Opera 7 and Mozilla.
The demo, although it doesn’t aim to emulate Eric Meyer’s Complexspiral, achieves some of the same effects, using a different approach.
Ignoring browsers
2003-01-21 14:48
I’m having a dilemma. In creating this site, one of the things I wanted to do was to create a repriosity of designs and techniques that work well in standards-supporting browsers - browsers that have more than decent CSS support, that have proper support for file formats and MIME-types. Browsers that we will be using a couple of years from now.
One of the problems I know I’m going to run in to here is MSIE’s lack of proper CSS2 support. No generated content, no fixed positioning. No tinkering with using CSS to create table-like layouts. No advanced selectors. Not to mention some of the nifty things I want to do with Alpha-channel PNGs
So, the main problem comes with laying out the main templates: should I start treating IE6 like I used to treat Netscape 4? Which basically means creating a design that degrades gracefully, but not take into account that it should look right in MSIE, just work? Views, anyone?
The browser wars are here (again)
2003-01-20 20:29
Whether we like it or not, MSIE is, by far the largest browser. And you will need to check your results in that browser. But which browser should be considered the #2 browser? Netscape based on the version 4 core? Gecko-based browsers? Does the server logs, and fancy log-analysing tools tell us the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth?
A sort of welcome
2003-01-20 02:35
This is a sort of welcome to my more technolgically minded blog. Since many of you do not know me, and might feel you need to if you want to read on: Arve Bersvendsen, around 30, web developer, Oslo, Norway. I also write a personal weblog in Norwegian.