SkillShare Forum - CSS Beauty - General Web Standards

Testing website accessibility?

justsean — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 08:24:59 -0500

I have recently been doing alot of work for government sites and schools, which all need to pass a certain accessibility level.
Recently (1st of Feb) watchfire's automated accessibility test system was made unavailable to the public. does anyone know of another good/reliable automated accessibility test? reliability being the key as ive found plenty they tend to not give a true idea of how accessible the page is.

SSL, Gateway, Merchant Account...

Bleulemon — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 16:42:52 -0400

What would you recommend for a small site. I am trying to set up a small online store.

Any section 508 compliance open source forum ?

anblik — Thu, 13 May 2010 23:24:28 -0400

We are working on a project where we need a forum based social networking site, where users can communicate ideas with designated moderators. There will be 2 classes of users. Basic and administrator. Basic will have access to post questions, administrator can reply to posted questions and delete questions. Site will include about 10 other information pages that will consist of the main web site. ie: home, about the program, what we do, etc.

Must be a section 508 compliant. Is there any open source section 508 compliance forum available ?

What is web 2.0 technology?

navireet — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 03:46:11 -0400

Can anybody tell me what is web 2.0 technology in a simple way...Help!

Opening pages in new tabs.

gogogob — Sun, 05 Dec 2010 10:49:39 -0500

I would like to learn how to make web sites open in new tabs.

IE Bug - Last resort question

humainmtl — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 16:44:05 -0400

Hello all,

I’ve been at a loss trying to figure the erratic behavior of IE 6 (haven’t been able to verify IE 7 yet).

Basically, the links stop working and collapse, as if the <a> was getting stripped. Looks perfect on Firefox and Safari.

http://eatinkitchen.net/cmsms/

Any hint or help will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

Use Specific Font

CHOCHO — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 14:50:39 -0400

If I want to use a specific font that I know it is not available in most of the user's computer, is it possoble to embed the font in my web site in some way? I have gone to some web site using special fonts as text, but not as image. I wonder how it works.

How do you balance between load times and good graphics?

kari.patila — Sat, 18 Aug 2007 08:52:46 -0400

The Bus Full of Hippies theme from the archives of Joshuaink as well as the recently applauded Web Designer Wall deliver some very nice and complex visuals and are clearly broadband material. The latter is also kind of heavy on the script side.

How concerned are you about your load times as an end-user or as a designer/coder in general? While I'm not criticizing either of the designs I mentioned, I can't help but notice some similarities between the PC game industry at the late 90's and the way we design the web today. My point being, that faster processors, increased memory and storage space didn't necessarily result in faster or better games, just like broadband didn't mean faster load times as the sites got redesigned and bloated with images, video and javascript. The advances in technology tend to promote laziness.

What would you consider to be the acceptable size for a javascript library (when one is required) or a set of background images and at which point would you sacrifice visuals or speed for the benefit of the other? The standards for writing semantically correct html are getting close to being understood well enough, but I have seen very little discussion about the best practices of delivering the semantic web fast enough.

Best Practices for HTML forms with required fields based on a conditional

aconnor — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 09:38:59 -0400

I have a form where, based on the users input to one field ( a checkbox) the user must complete one of two groups of fields.

I'm looking for best practices for the implementation of this - both design and markup. I need something standards based, and any use of JavaScript needs to be unobtrusive.

I know I've seen this before, heck, I've probably done it before myself - but I'm drawing a total blank. Does anyone have any examples of this being done well. Anyone have any recommendations, suggestions, best practices?

Design v. Usability

VinojZ — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 17:28:08 -0400

I was told by my boss to put together a presentation for work regarding Usability on the web.

Basically, I work with some very talented graphic designers, but they're not altogether well-versed in the nuances of the web, hence we (the web developers) have to try to code whatever is in their PSD file, and see if it's even possible, because limitations of coding don't necessarily cross their minds when designing.

I suggested that it might be a good idea to talk about the fact that a site with high usability and effectiveness doesn't necessarily have to be one that is flashy, or a "piece of art". I'd like to get them thinking about load times, accessibility between different browsers, etc also so that we can all live on a commune somewhere spreading love. :)

If you guys/girls know any links that could provide some good insight into this, I'd greatly appreciate it.

PS Oh and I don't believe that design and usability have to be 'enemies' by any means. There are tons of wonderful CSS sites that have great simplicity and usability intertwined

Changing Line Height when Text Resized

varland — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 09:33:45 -0400

I'm working on a design where I have some list items vertically centered in a box (an image that's 33px tall). To do so, I've made the list items display: block, float: left, height: 33px, and line-height: 33px. This works exactly like I want.

All of the text on the page is relatively sized using ems. I was hoping that since I defined the line-height in absolute terms (pixels), the items would remain vertically centered when I resize the text, but this is not the case.

Is there any way to do what I'm asking (without javascript, which can do it, but it's a pain)?

Fixed size window resolution

kugelis — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 04:35:02 -0400

Hello, currently i'm working on a dating portal (http://www.jungle.lt/portfolio/web/draugai1_v5.jpg)

The main windown is 800 px wide, but the client told me to change it to 1024, because he thinks that its a new standart. I think it will look worse, what do you think? What is the current standart for fixed window wide? Any ideas?

Kugelis

Increase Your CREATIVITY with Web Designs Inspiration Gallery

dime01 — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 02:56:54 -0500

ProWebArt are giving you the most inspirational web designs that can increase you CREATIVITY, IDEA, INSPIRATION for your web site.
prowebart.net

Need advice for development of an event site.

pixellounge — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 15:30:21 -0500

Hi Everyone,

I'm creating a local gig site, and being more a designer then developer, I wanted to get advice on the best way to implement my site design to make it easy for me to update the information. Here's an example of what the site would be doing:

http://your-weekend.net/

At the moment it uses a contentFRM, so when you click on the artists name it loads another html page onto the page. It's too time consuming to create a seperate html page for every gig. I would also like the months to automatically update and the gigs to update once that date has passed.

So whether there is a CMS that would work well with this, I've played around with Wordpress but I don't think it's the best way. Or would it be easier for a developer to program the site to just load up plain text files with the gig info into the site?

Thanks for your time.

Joanna.

Canadian Web Standards Practicing Agencies

eerie — Fri, 20 Jan 2006 18:28:12 -0500

pHEW, that was a long title. I am currently doing some research into companies to potentially recommend to my group for re-designing our website. I would love to hire a company who understands the importance of web standards and can implement them flawlessly.

Please post links to companies, in Canada who fit this description. Thanks :)

moved to the right category by droppyale...

XHTML / CSS best practices document

Luc — Tue, 01 Aug 2006 07:07:06 -0400

Hi all,
I'm on the verge of writing a best practices document for XHTML/CSS to give out with any briefs to freelancers - guidelines on what/how to structure a modern website. But before I spend the time I was wondering if anyone has written something similar in the past that I can plagiarise. Apple have something here > http://developer.apple.com/internet/webcontent/bestwebdev.html < but it seems a little out of date - I need something focused on the very latest techniques and practices.

Anyone gone through anything similar?

TIA!

Experiences with Expression Web?

kari.patila — Fri, 29 Dec 2006 00:31:17 -0500

This is a quote from Channel9:

"[Expression] Web has support for many industry standards, outputs XHTML, has some fantastic CSS editing capabilities, and generally just rocks."

I have two questions for those of you who have had the pleasure of taking a look at the trial: Does it rock, and if not, is it at least a bit more usable than FrontPage? What I'd also like to know is that will it flip out if I edit the CSS with, say, TextMate, and then take it back to EW.

The reason I'm asking, is that I'll probably be stuck with it at work, since we're a part of a Microsoft-based educational network trial program.

Furthermore, it'd be fun to see how it renders existing and valid code. I'm thinking about taking code from an existing site and pushing it through Expression Web to see what comes out.

responding to people who refuse to/doesn't know web standards exist

jnh — Fri, 15 Dec 2006 05:54:15 -0500

Hello everyone, =)

First of all, I'm new here and it's really a pleasure browsing CSSBeauty.
This post kinda won't be an ordinary post and would rather sound a little awkward. But to satisfy my curiosity, here it goes...

As we know, web standards is no arbitrary thing. Many have been into discussions, and some into arguments, to "preach" to web developers/designers who have yet to realize the standards' value. I too have been into several conversations trying to explain, for example, why they should not use table for presentation(although there isn't much to explain). Unfortunately, many feel comfortable with their primitive way of developing websites and are reluctant to adapt to the correct practices.
They think so long as they can get something up on the web that looks the way they want it to, everything is fine.

I'm just wondering, have you guys been to conversations where people just refuse to believe with what you say and think "using tables makes the life easier"?
How did you respond to their arguments?

cheers,
jnh

Front-end Developer vs. Back-end Developer

JohnRiv — Wed, 06 Dec 2006 06:27:10 -0500

When building a web application, what do you consider the duties of a "Front-end Developer" and what are the duties of a "Back-end Developer"?

I have my own feelings on this based on my experience, but I'm curious what everyone else's experience is.

A good read

dirtyrobot — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 08:04:41 -0500

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6210068.stm

Good to see the general media reporting on this.

Serving an alternate stylesheet if the user has JavaScript disabled

christopher — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 03:46:40 -0500

Right, what has this got to do with the category Web Standards, well in XHTML you cannot use the

edg3.co.uk

Now unfortunately that doesn't validate as XHTML, so I needed to find a different way of doing this. Instead of loading a stylesheet for users without JavaScript, I tryed the reverse, using my non-JavaScript css as default, then loading in a secondary stylesheet if the user has JavaScript enabled, I thought this could be simply done via this:

But that doesn't validate either, turns out that the "document.write" function isn't correctly parsed when using XHTML, I found that out here:

http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/2004/xhtml-faq#docwrite

Does document.write work in XHTML?
No. Because of the way XML is defined, it is not possible to do tricks like this, where markup is generated by scripting while the parser is still parsing the markup.

You can still achieve the same effects, but you have to do it by using the DOM to add and delete elements.

So I couldn't do that.. great, so now what? Well you may not be able to serve the JavaScript document.write inside of the XHTML, but you can serve it from an external JavaScript file, like so:

Within the tag of your XHTML document

Contents of script.js

document.write('');

..and that works! So after many hours of figuring out a way to serve a different stylesheet I finally worked out a way to do it, and to get it to validate, well I'm happy anyway, and I'm sure anyone browsing my site without JavaScript will also be happy now.

Using my site as the example here, edg3.co.uk

With JavaScript, you get a JavaScript image preload screen, it's a 100% width by 100% height div that covers the screen, then fades in after the images are loaded, now without JavaScript, you would just see the 100% by 100% black div and no content.. because the JavaScript that fades it in after the images are loaded cannot function!

So users without JavaScript could not get into my site, hence needing the solution, all that I needed to do was to serve a stylesheet that set the preload div to "display: hidden" so it doesn't appear, yet I needed to go through all of the above to get it working, how frustrating!

--

Did the above help anyone, or could anyone have told me this yesterday before I spent a few hours sorting this out, just curious how others do it / would have done it.

Also any comments on my site, edg3.co.uk, whilst I'm discussing the solution I used for it? Thanks

IE7 for WinXP now available

JohnRiv — Wed, 18 Oct 2006 22:32:34 -0400

It's official now. IE7 has been released. The push of the updated browser via Microsoft Automatic Updates is supposed to be "a few weeks after it’s available for download".

So go download it, and let's see if they roll out any security patches for it before they push the browser out to the masses :P

standards reboot

g5604 — Sun, 22 Oct 2006 08:03:28 -0400

Hi,

got a great looking, standards compliant site? add your site to the the November 1st standards reboot:

http://standardsreboot.com/

cheers,
G

FREE Standards Compliant Apps?

admin — Tue, 26 Sep 2006 10:43:30 -0400

Hey guy, need your help!

I’m looking to put together a list of applications which are built to be standards compliant, and are also free.

A few I know:

* Side Job Track * Scooch * Vanilla

Any others out there that care about web standards?

Any help appreciated.

Alex.

setting content-type kils google map (just firefox?)

ahicox — Tue, 05 Sep 2006 19:03:58 -0400

Hello everyone:

I'm trying to use XHTML 1.0 Transitional for a page that also contains a google map.
Everything works fine in all browsers, as long as the Content-type is (incorrectly) set to text/html.

When I change the response header to (correctly) specify 'application/xhtml+xml' for the Content-type, my google map completely dissapears, but only in Firefox. Safari, and I.E. seem to roll with it just fine.

Has anyone seen this before? Know a fix?
I'd prefer to send the correct Content-type.

Internet Explorer 7 RC1 Released

adjustafresh — Sat, 02 Sep 2006 10:59:18 -0400

The official IE7 Release Candidate has been released and is available for download.

From the IE Blog:

The RC1 build includes improvements in performance, stability, security, and application compatibility. You may not notice many visible changes from the Beta 3 release; all we did was listen to your feedback, fix bugs that you reported, and make final adjustments to our CSS support.

Looks like this is it folks. Time to start bug testing any sites you maintain with this release of IE7.

Supporting IE 5.0-5.5?

eplawless — Sun, 27 Aug 2006 09:33:30 -0400

I'm wondering whether I should bother actively supporting ie5? It seems like it'll be a hell of a lot of work to get a pure CSS layout to display correctly, for less than 5% of a potential viewing audience... I was thinking of just displaying an "upgrade your browser" message, but I don't want to piss off my client too badly. What should I do?

form code doesn't validate

hebel — Thu, 17 Aug 2006 23:03:59 -0400

Can someone please tell me why this doesn't validate:

I am a real amateur at php and couldn't make head nor tail of the W3C comments.

Designing for IE7?

eplawless — Wed, 16 Aug 2006 12:36:23 -0400

One of the designers at a firm I've been doing some freelance work for insists on having his layouts fully tested in IE7, more so than in Firefox. From what I understand, the CSS support hasn't been finalized yet, so I've been ignoring it. Should I be testing sites in IE7 yet?

Problem with UTF-8

verb — Sun, 30 Jul 2006 12:35:20 -0400

Hi,

I’m working on a template at the moment, and I’d like to use UTF-8 as charset.

I’ve got this inside the head section:
@<meta http-equiv=“content-type” content=“text/html; charset=utf-8”>@

And I’ve got this at the top of the document (PHP):
@header(“content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8”);@

Now, when I type something like “é” in the HTML code I get a “?” in the browser and the validator says it’s an invalid character. However, if I use ISO-8859-1 as charset, the browser can display the character correctly.

A while ago I’ve worked with the CMS called Textpattern, and it used UTF-8. When I typed “é” in my template the browser could display it correctly. I’ve taken a look at the PHP files of Textpattern to look for the code which made this work, but I can’t find it, unfortunately…

Maybe someone here knows what I should do?
(By the way: I’m using HTML 4.01 Strict, don’t know if this is of any value, concerning solving this problem.)