Category: Accessibility

Make it work!

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Accessibility Adobe Advocacy Apple Design HTML HTML5 ipad The Essentials

Flash, iPad, Standards

Lack of Flash in the iPad (and before that, in the iPhone) is a win for accessible, standards-based design. Not because Flash is bad, but because the increasing popularity of devices that don’t support Flash is going to force recalcitrant web developers to build the semantic HTML layer first. Additional layers of Flash UX can then be optionally added in, just as, in proper, accessible, standards-based development, JavaScript UX enhancements are added only after we verify that the site works without them.

As the percentage of web users on non-Flash-capable platforms grows, developers who currently create Flash experiences with no fallbacks will have to rethink their strategy and start with the basics before adding a Flash layer. They will need to ensure that content and experience are delivered with or without Flash.

Developers always should have done this, but some don’t. For those who don’t, the growing percentage of users on non-Flash-capable platforms is a wake-up call to get the basics right first.

Whither, plug-ins?

Flash won’t die tomorrow, but plug-in technology is on its way out.

Plug-in technology made sense when web browsing was the province of geeks. It was a brilliant solution to the question of how to extend the user experience beyond what HTML allowed. People who were used to extending their PC via third-party hardware, and jacking the capabilities of their operating system via third-party spell checkers, font managers, and more, intuitively grasped how to boost their browser’s prowess by downloading and updating plug-ins.

But tomorrow’s computing systems, heralded by the iPhone, are not for DIYers. You don’t add Default Folder or FontExplorer X Pro to your iPhone, you don’t choose your iPhone’s browser, and you don’t install plug-ins in your iPhone’s browser. This lack of extensibility may not please the Slashdot crowd but it’s the future of computing and browsing. The bulk of humanity doesn’t want a computing experience it can tinker with; it wants a computing experience that works.

HTML5, with its built-in support for video and audio, plays perfectly into this new model of computing and browsing; small wonder that Google and Apple’s browsers support these HTML5 features.

The power shifts

Google not only makes a browser, a phone, an OS, and Google Docs, it also owns a tremendous amount of video content that can be converted to play in HTML5, sans plug-in. Apple not only makes Macs, iPhones, and iPads, it is also among the largest retail distributors of video and audio content.

Over the weekend, a lot of people were doing the math, and there was panic at Adobe and schadenfreude elsewhere. Apple and Adobe invented modern publishing together in the 1980s, and they’ve been fighting like an old unmarried couple ever since, but Apple’s decision to omit Flash from the iPad isn’t about revenge, it’s about delivering a stable platform. And with HTML5 here, the tea leaves are easy to read. Developers who supplement Flash with HTML5 may soon tire of Flash—but Adobe has a brief but golden opportunity to create the tools with which rich HTML5 content is created. Let’s see if they figure that out.

Discussion has moved to a new thread.

Categories
Accessibility Advocacy Blogs and Blogging business Community content strategy data Formats glamorous HTML Ideas industry Publications Publishing Respect State of the Web The Essentials The Profession W3C work writing

Posthumous Hosting and Digital Culture

THE DEATHS of Leslie Harpold and Brad Graham, in addition to being tragic and horrible and sad, have highlighted the questionable long-term viability of blogs, personal sites, and web magazines as legitimate artistic and literary expressions. (Read this, by Rogers Cadenhead.)

Cool URIs don’t change, they just fade away. When you die, nobody pays your hosting company, and your work disappears. Like that.

Now, not every blog post or “Top 10 Ways to Make Money on the Internet” piece deserves to live forever. But there’s gold among the dross, and there are web publications that we would do well to preserve for historical purposes. We are not clairvoyants, so we cannot say which fledgling, presently little-read web publications will matter to future historians. Thus logic and the cultural imperative urge us to preserve them all. But how?

The death of the good in the jaws of time is not limited to internet publications, of course. Film decays, books (even really good ones) constantly go out of print, digital formats perish. Recorded music that does not immediately find an audience disappears from the earth.

Digital subscriptions were supposed to replace microfilm, but American libraries, which knew we were racing toward recession years before the actual global crisis came, stopped being able to pay for digital newspaper and magazine descriptions nearly a decade ago. Many also (even fancy, famous ones) can no longer collect—or can only collect in a limited fashion. Historians and scholars have access to every issue of every newspaper and journal written during the civil rights struggle of the 1960s, but can access only a comparative handful of papers covering the election of Barack Obama.

Thanks to budget shortfalls and format wars, our traditional media, literature, and arts are perishing faster than ever before. Nothing conceived by the human mind, except Heaven and nuclear winter, is eternal.

Still, when it comes to instant disposability, web stuff is in a category all its own.

Unlike with other digital expressions, format is not the problem: HTML, CSS, and backward-compatible web browsers will be with us forever. The problem is, authors pay for their own hosting.

(There are other problems: the total creative output of someone I follow is likely distributed across multiple social networks as well as a personal site and Twitter feed. How to connect those dots when the person has passed on? But let’s leave that to the side for the moment.)

A suggestion for a business. Sooner or later, some hosting company is going to figure out that it can provide a service and make a killing (as it were) by offering ten-, twenty-, and hundred-year packets of posthumous hosting.

A hundred years is not eternity, but you are not Shakespeare, and it’s a start.

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A List Apart Accessibility development Happy Cog™ Publications Publishing

A List Apart Arabic

A List Apart Arabic

Since 1998, A List Apart has sought to serve the international web design and development community with educational, insightful, and sometimes visionary articles on web standards, emerging ideas and technologies, and best practices in content, usability, and design.

One barrier has long prevented us from fulfilling our goal to the utmost. But today we transcend it. Introducing A List Apart Arabic—an authorized A List Apart publication. Thank you and congratulations to Mohammad Saleh Kayali and his partners.

Look for additional international A List Apart editions, coming soon.

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A List Apart Accessibility Design Markup

ALA 288: Access & semantics

In Issue No. 288 of A List Apart, for people who make websites: Margit Link-Rodrigue advises us to integrate accessibility with front-end development instead of treating it as an afterthought—an item on a checklist. And Joe Clark analyzes why some forms of writing resist being expressed as semantic HTML.

A List Apart, for people who make websites.

Unwebbable
by JOE CLARK
It’s time we came to grips with the fact that not every “document” can be a semantic “web page.” Some forms of writing just cannot be expressed in HTML—or they need to be bent and distorted to do so. But for once, XML can help. Joe Clark explains.
The Inclusion Principle
by MARGIT LINK-RODRIGUE
To make accessible design an organic element of front-end development, we must free our thinking from the constraints we associate with accessible design and embrace the inclusion principle. Margit Link-Rodrigue tells us how.

[tags]alistapart, semantics, accessibility, design, webdesign, markup, XML, link-rodrigue, joeclark[/tags]

Categories
Accessibility Design HTML HTML5 industry spec Standards State of the Web W3C Web Design XHTML

HTML 5 is a mess. Now what?

A few days ago on this site, John Allsopp argued passionately that HTML 5 is a mess. In response to HTML 5 activity leader Ian Hickson’s comment here that, “We don’t need to predict the future. When the future comes, we can just fix HTML again,” Allsopp said “This is the only shot for a generation” to get the next version of markup right. Now Bruce Lawson explains just why HTML 5 is “several different kind of messes:”

  1. It’s a mess, Lawson says, because the process is a mess. The process is a mess, he claims, because “[s]pecifying HTML 5 is probably the most open process the W3C has ever had,” and when you throw open the windows and doors to let in the fresh air of community opinion, you also invite sub-groups with different agendas to create competing variant specs. Lawson lists and links to the various groups and their concerns.
  2. It’s a “spec mess,” Lawson continues, citing complaints by Allsopp and Matt Wilcox that many elements suffer from imprecise or ambiguous specification or from seemingly needless restrictions. (Methinks ambiguities can be resolved, and needless restrictions lifted, if the Working Group is open to honest, accurate community feedback. Lawson tells how to contact the Working Group to express your concerns.)
  3. Most importantly, Lawson explains, HTML 5 is a backward compatibility mess because it builds on HTML 4:

[I]f you were building a mark-up language from scratch you would include elements like footer, header and nav (actually, HTML 2 had a menu element for navigation that was deprecated in 4.01).

You probably wouldn’t have loads of computer science oriented elements like kbd,var, samp in preference to the structural elements that people “fake” with classes. Things like tabindex wouldn’t be there, as we all know that if you use properly structured code you don’t need to change the tab order, and accesskey wouldn’t make it because it’s undiscoverable to a user and may conflict with assistive technology. Accessibility would have been part of the design rather than bolted on.

But we know that now; we didn’t know that then. And HTML 5 aims to be compatible with legacy browsers and legacy pages. …

There was a cartoon in the ancient satirical magazine Punch showing a city slicker asking an old rural gentleman for directions to his destination. The rustic says “To get there, I wouldn’t start from here”. That’s where we are with HTML. If we were designing a spec from scratch, it would look much like XHTML 2, which I described elsewhere as “a beautiful specification of philosophical purity that had absolutely no resemblance to the real world”, and which was aborted by the W3C last week.

Damned if you do

The third point is Lawson’s key insight, for it illuminates the dilemma faced by HTML 5 or any other honest effort to move markup forward. Neither semantic purity nor fault-tolerance will do, and neither approach can hope to satisfy all of today’s developers.

A markup based on what we now know, and can now do thanks to CSS’s power to disconnect source order from viewing experience, will be semantic and accessible, but it will not be backward compatible. That was precisely the problem with XHTML 2, and it’s why most people who build websites for a living, if they knew enough to pay attention to XHTML 2, soon changed the channel.

XHTML 2 was conceived as an effort to start over and get it right. And this doomed it, because right-wing Nativists will speak Esperanto before developers adopt a markup language that breaks all existing websites. It didn’t take a Mark Pilgrim to see that XHTML 2 was a dead-end that would eventually terminate XHTML activity (although Mr Pilgrim was the first developer I know to raise this point, and he certainly looks prescient in hindsight).

It was in reaction to XHTML 2’s otherworldliness that the HTML 5 activity began, and if XHTML suffered from detachment from reality, HTML 5 is too real. It accepts sloppiness many of us have learned to do without (thereby indirectly and inadvertently encouraging those who don’t develop with standards and accessibility in mind not to learn about these things). It is a hodgepodge of semantics and tag soup, of good and bad markup practices. It embraces ideas that logically cancel each other out. It does this in the name of realism, and it is as admirable and logical for so doing as XHTML 2 was admirable and logical in its purity.

Neither ethereal purity nor benign tolerance seems right, so what’s a spec developer to do? They’re damned either way—which almost suggests that the web will be built with XHTML 1.0 and HTML 4.01 forever. Most importantly for our purposes, what are we to do?

Forward, compatibly

As the conversation about HTML 5 and XHTML has played out this week, I’ve felt like Regan in The Exorcist, my head snapping around in 360 degree arcs as one great comment cancels out another.

In a private Basecamp discussion a friend said,

Maybe I’m just confused by all the competing viewpoints, but the twisted knots of claim and counterclaim are getting borderline Lovecraftian in shape.

Another said,

[I] didn’t realize that WHATWG and the W3C’s HTML WG were in fact two separate bodies, working in parallel on what effectively amounts to two different specs [1, 2—the entire thread is actually worth reading]. So as far as I can tell, if Ian Hickson removes something from the WHATWG spec, the HTML WG can apparently reinsert it, and vice versa. [T]his… seems impossibly broken. (I originally used a different word here, but, well, propriety and all that.)

Such conversations are taking place in rooms and chatrooms everywhere. The man in charge of HTML 5 appears confident in its rightness. His adherents proclaim a new era of loaves and fishes before the oven has even finished preheating. His articulate critics convey a palpable feeling of crisis. All our hopes now hang on one little Hobbit. What do we do?

As confused as I have continually felt while surfing this whirlwind, I have never stopped being certain of two things:

  1. XHTML 1.0—and for that matter, HTML 4.01—will continue to work long after I and my websites are gone. For the web’s present and for any future you or I are likely to see, there is no reason to stop using these languages to craft lean, semantic markup. The combination of CSS, JavaScript, and XHTML 1.0/HTML 4.01 is here to stay, and while the web 10 years from now may offer features not supported by this combination of technologies, we need not fear that these technologies or sites built on them will go away in the decades to come.
  2. That said, the creation of a new markup language concerns us all, and an informed community will only help the framers of HTML 5 navigate the sharp rocks of tricky shoals. Whether we influence HTML 5 greatly or not at all, it behooves us to learn as much as we can, and to practice using it on real websites.

Read more

  • Web Fonts, HTML 5 Roundup: Worthwhile reading on the hot new web font proposals, and on HTML 5/CSS 3 basics, plus a demo of advanced HTML 5 trickery. — 20 July 2009
  • Web Standards Secret Sauce: Even though Firefox and Opera offered powerfully compelling visions of what could be accomplished with web standards back when IE6 offered a poor experience, Firefox and Opera, not unlike Linux and Mac OS, were platforms for the converted. Thanks largely to the success of the iPhone, Webkit, in the form of Safari, has been a surprising force for good on the web, raising people’s expectations about what a web browser can and should do, and what a web page should look like. — 12 July 2009
  • In Defense of Web Developers: Pushing back against the “XHTML is bullshit, man!” crowd’s using the cessation of XHTML 2.0 activity to condescend to—or even childishly glory in the “folly” of—web developers who build with XHTML 1.0, a stable W3C recommendation for nearly ten years, and one that will continue to work indefinitely. — 7 July 2009
  • XHTML DOA WTF: The web’s future isn’t what the web’s past cracked it up to be. — 2 July 2009

[tags]HTML5, HTML4, HTML, W3C, WHATWG, markup, webstandards[/tags]

Categories
Accessibility Advocacy content copyright creativity CSS Design development DWWS Fonts Ideas industry links Real type on the web Standards State of the Web Tools Web Design Web Standards webfonts webtype

Web fonts now (how we’re doing with that)

THE WEB Fonts Wiki has a page listing fonts you can legally embed in your site designs using the CSS standard @font-face method. Just as importantly, the wiki maintains a page showing commercial foundries that allow @font-face embedding. Between these two wiki pages, you may find just the font you need for your next design (even if you can’t currently license classics like Adobe Garamond or ITC Franklin and Clarendon).

The advantages of using fonts other than Times, Arial, Georgia, and Verdana have long been obvious to designers; it’s why web design in the 1990s was divided between pages done in Flash, and HTML pages containing pictures of fonts—a practice that still, bizarrely, continues even in occasionally otherwise advanced recent sites.

Using real fonts instead of pictures of fonts or outlines of fonts provides speed and accessibility advantages.

Currently the Webkit-based Apple Safari browser supports @font-face. The soon-to-be-released next versions of Opera Software’s Opera browser, Google’s Webkit-based Chrome, and Mozilla Firefox will do likewise. When I say “soon-to-be-released,” I mean any day now. When this occurs, all browsers except IE will support @font-face.

IE has, however, offered font embedding since IE4 via Embedded OpenType (.EOT), a font format that enables real fonts to be temporarily embedded in web pages. That is, the reader sees the font while reading the page, but cannot download (“steal”) the font afterwards. Microsoft has “grant[ed] to the W3C a perpetual, nonexclusive, royalty-free, world-wide right and license under any Microsoft copyrights on this contribution, to copy, publish and distribute the contribution under the W3C document licenses,” in hopes that EOT would thereby become a standard. But so far, only Microsoft’s own browsers support EOT.

Thus, as we consider integrating real fonts into our designs, we must navigate between browsers that support @font-face now (Safari), those that will do so soon (Opera, Chrome, Firefox), and the one that possibly never will (IE, with a dwindling but still overwhelming market share).

The person who figures out a designer-friendly solution to all this will either be hailed as a hero/heroine or get rich. Meanwhile, near-complete solutions of varying implementation difficulty exist. Read on:

CSS @ Ten: The Next Big Thing

“Instead of making pictures of fonts, the actual font files can be linked to and retrieved from the web. This way, designers can use TrueType fonts without having to freeze the text as background images.” An introduction to @font-face by Håkon Wium Lie, father of CSS.

Real Fonts on the Web: An Interview with The Font Bureau’s David Berlow

Is there life after Georgia? To understand issues surrounding web fonts from the type designer’s perspective, I interview David Berlow, co-founder of The Font Bureau, Inc, and the ?rst TrueType type designer.

The W3C: @font-face vs. EOT

A discussion that shows why the W3C may not be able to resolve this conflict. (It’s kind of like asking the Montagues and Capulets to decide whether the Montagues or the Capulets should rule Verona.)

sIFR 2.0: Rich Accessible Typography for the Masses

Mike Davidson’s scalable and accessible remix of Shaun Inman’s pioneering use of Flash and JavaScript to replace short passages of HTML text with Flash movies of the same text set in a real font. The Flash movies are created on the fly. If JavaScript or images are turned off, the user “sees” the HTML text; text set in sIFR can also be copied and pasted. sIFR was a great initial solution to the problem of real fonts on the web, but it’s only for short passages (which means the rest of the page must still be set in Georgia or Verdana), and it fails if the user has a Flash block plug-in installed, as half of Firefox users seem to. It’s also always a pain to implement. I don’t know any designer or developer who has an easy time setting up sIFR. In short, while sIFR is an awesome stop-gap, real fonts on the web are still what’s needed. Which also leads us to…

Cufón – Fonts for the People

Simo Kinnunen’s method of embedding fonts, regardless of whether or not a browser supports @font-face.

Combining Cufón And @Font-Face

Kilian Valkhof: “Everyone wants @font-face to work everywhere, but as it stands, it only works in Safari and the upcoming versions of Firefox and Opera. In this article I’ll show you how to use Cufón only if we can’t load the font through other, faster methods.”

Adobe, Web Fonts, and EOT

Why Adobe supports Microsoft’s EOT instead of @font-face.

Introducing Typekit

Update May 28, 2009: Working with Jason Santa Maria, Jeff Veen’s company Small Batch Inc. introduces Typekit:

We’ve been working with foundries to develop a consistent web-only font linking license. We’ve built a technology platform that lets us to host both free and commercial fonts in a way that is incredibly fast, smoothes out differences in how browsers handle type, and offers the level of protection that type designers need without resorting to annoying and ineffective DRM.

Read more

  • Web Fonts, HTML 5 Roundup: Worthwhile reading on the hot new web font proposals, and on HTML 5/CSS 3 basics, plus a demo of advanced HTML 5 trickery. — 20 July 2009
  • Web Fonts Now, for real: David Berlow of The Font Bureau has proposed a Permissions Table for OpenType that can be implemented immediately to turn raw fonts into web fonts without any wrappers or other nonsense. If adopted, it will enable type designers to license their work for web use, and web designers to create pages that use real fonts via the CSS @font-face standard. — 16 July 2009

[tags]fonts, webfonts, webdesign, embed, @font-face, EOT, wiki, css, layout, safari, opera, firefox, chrome, browsers[/tags]

Categories
Accessibility Browsers business CSS Design development DWWS Layout Standards

A new answer to the IE6 question?

In “Universal Internet Explorer 6 CSS,” Andy Clarke proposes a novel approach to the problem that has vexed standards-based designers since time immemorial (or at least since we could quit worrying about Netscape 4).

The problem is IE6. Outdated but still widely used, especially in the developing world, its inaccurate and incomplete CSS support forces web designers and developers to spend expensive hours on workarounds ranging from hacks, to IE6-only styles served via conditional comments, to JavaScript. Some refuse to serve CSS to IE6 at all; others stop IE6 users at the gate. In some situations (personal site, web app used by first-world hipsters), ignoring IE6 may work; but mostly it doesn’t.

After a brief but thorough tour of current IE6 solutions and their limitations, Andy unveils his zinger. He proposes to serve IE6 users a set of universal styles completely unrelated to the design of the site in question. Not unlike Arc90’s awesome Readability plug-in, the styles Andy has designed concern themselves with typographic hierarchy and whitespace. Here’s the theory: make the page easy to read, make it obvious that somebody designed it, and the IE6 user will have a good experience.

(By contrast, block styles from IE6, as some developers suggest, and that user will have a bad experience. Most likely, in the absence of styles, the user will think the page is broken.)

No hammer fits all nails, and no solution, however elegant, will work for every situation. But if we’re open minded, Andy’s proposal may work in more situations than we at first suspect. Where it works, it’s what business folk call a “win, win:” the visitor has a good reading experience, and client and developer are spared tedium and expense.

Check it out.

[tags]IE6, workarounds, design, development, webdesign, hacks, legibility, styles, CSS, andyclarke[/tags]

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A List Apart Accessibility Advocacy An Event Apart Appearances art direction creativity CSS Design development events experience Web Design Web Standards Zeldman

Your Guide to An Event Apart Boston

The complete schedule for An Event Apart Boston is now online for your reading pleasure.

Join Eric Meyer and your humble host with truly special guest speakers Jason Santa Maria, Jeremy Keith, Joshua Porter, Whitney Hess, Dan Cederholm, Daniel Mall, Derek Featherstone, Aarron Walter, Scott Thomas, Heather Champ, Andy Clarke, and GoodBarry’s Brett Welch for two days of design, code, and content.

An intensely educational two-day conference for passionate practitioners of standards-based web design, An Event Apart brings together thirteen of the leading minds in web design for two days of non-stop inspiration and enlightenment. If you care about code as well as content, usability as well as design, this is the one you’ve been waiting for.

Educational discounts and group rates are available, and everyone saves $100 during the early bird registration period.

Comments off.

[tags]aneventapart, AEA, webdesign, conference, webstandards[/tags]

Categories
A List Apart Accessibility Advocacy Design HTML5 Markup mobile Standards Web Design Web Standards

ALA 275: Duty Now For The Future

What better way to begin 2009 than by looking at the future of web design? In Issue No. 275 of A List Apart, for people who make websites, we study the promise and problems of HTML 5, and chart a path toward mobile CSS that works.

Return of the Mobile Style Sheet

by DOMINIQUE HAZAËL-MASSIEUX

At least 10% of your visitors access your site over a mobile device. They deserve a good experience (and if you provide one, they’ll keep coming back). Converting your multi-column layout to a single, linear flow is a good start. But mobile devices are not created equal, and their disparate handling of CSS is like 1998 all over again. Please your users and tame their devices with handheld style sheets, CSS media queries, and (where necessary) JavaScript or server-side techniques.

Semantics in HTML 5

by JOHN ALLSOPP

The BBC’s dropping of hCalendar because of accessibility and usability concerns demonstrates that we have pushed the semantic capability of HTML far beyond what it can handle. The need to clearly and unambiguously add rich, meaningful semantics to markup is a driving goal of the HTML 5 project. Yet HTML 5 has two problems: it is not backward compatible because its semantic elements will not work in 75% of our browsers; and it is not forward compatible because its semantics are not extensible. If “making up new elements” isn’t the solution, what is?

[tags]HTML5, mobileCSS, webstandards, alistapart, johnallsopp, W3C, Dominique Hazael-Massieux[/tags]

Categories
A List Apart Accessibility architecture Code Design development User Experience UX Web Design

ALA 272: Accessible web video, better 404

In Issue No. 272 of A List Apart, for people who make websites:

This is How the Web Gets Regulated

by JOE CLARK

As in finance, so on the web: self-regulation has failed. Nearly ten years after specifications first required it, video captioning can barely be said to exist on the web. The big players, while swollen with self-congratulation, are technically incompetent, and nobody else is even trying. So what will it take to support the human and legal rights of hearing impaired web users? It just might take the law, says Joe Clark.

A More Useful 404

by DEAN FRICKEY

When broken links frustrate your site’s visitors, a typical 404 page explains what went wrong and provides links that may relate to the visitor’s quest. That’s good, but now you can do better. With Dean Frickey’s custom 404, when something’s amiss, pertinent information is sent not only to the visitor, but to the developer—so that, in many cases, the problem can be fixed! A better 404 means never having to say you’re sorry.

[tags]alistapart, closedcaptioning, captioning, captions, webvideo, video, accessible, accessibility, 404, error, reporting, usability, programming, design, webdesign, webdevelopment[/tags]

Categories
Accessibility Applications architecture art direction Browsers bugs business Code Community content copyright creativity Fonts Ideas industry Layout links spec Standards stealing Tools Typography Usability User Experience W3C Working

Real type on the web?

A proposal for a fonts working group is under discussion at the W3C. The minutes of a small meeting held on Thursday 23 October include a condensed, corrected transcription of a discussion between Sampo Kaasila (Bitstream), Mike Champion (Microsoft), John Daggett (Mozilla), Håkon Wium Lie (Opera), Liam Quin (W3C), Bert Bos (W3C), Alex Mogilevsky (Microsoft), Josh Soref (Nokia), Vladimir Levantovsky (Monotype), Klaas Bals (Inventive Designers), and Richard Ishida (W3C).

The meeting started with a discussion of Microsoft’s EOT (Embedded OpenType) versus raw fonts. Bert Bos, style activity lead and co-creator of CSS, has beautifully summarized the relevant pros and cons discussed.

For those just catching up with the issue of real type on the web, here’s a bone-simple intro:

  1. CSS provides a mechanism for embedding real fonts on your website, and some browsers support it, but its use probably violates your licensing agreement with the type foundry, and may also cause security problems on an end-user’s computer.
  2. Microsoft’s EOT (based on the same standard CSS mechanism) works harder to avoid violating your licensing agreement, and has long worked in Internet Explorer, but is not supported in other browsers, is not foolproof vis-a-vis type foundry licensing rules, and may also cause PC security problems.

The proposed fonts working group hopes to navigate the technical and business problems of providing real fonts on the web, and in its first meeting came up with a potential compromise proposal before lunch.

Like everyone these days, the W3C is feeling a financial pinch, which means, if a real fonts working group is formed, its size and scope will necessarily be somewhat limited. That could be a good thing, since small groups work more efficiently than large groups. But a financial constraint on the number of invited experts could make for tough going where some details are concerned—and with typography, as with web technology, the details are everything.

I advise every web designer who cares about typography and web standards—that’s all of you, right?—to read the minutes of this remarkable first gathering, and to keep watching the skies.

[tags]web typography, typography, standards, webstandards, W3C, fonts, embedded, @fontface, EOT, workinggroup[/tags]

Categories
A List Apart Accessibility art direction Design development industry maturity Standards Survey Usability User Experience Web Design Websites wisdom work writing

A List Apart is changing

A List Apart, for people who make websites, is slowly changing course.

For most of its decade of publication, ALA has been the leading journal of standards-based web design. Initially a lonely voice in the desert, we taught CSS layout before browsers correctly supported it, and helped The WaSP persuade browser makers to do the right thing. Once browsers’ standards support was up to snuff, we educated and excited designers and developers about standards-based design, preaching accessibility, teaching semantic markup, and helping you strategize how to sell this new way of designing websites to your clients, coworkers, and boss.

Most famously, over the years, writers for ALA have presented the design community with one amazing and powerfully useful new CSS technique after another. Initially radically new techniques that are now part of the vocabulary of all web designers include Paul Sowden’s “Alternative Styles,” Mark Newhouse’s list-based navigation, Eric Meyer’s intro to print styles, Douglas Bowman’s “Sliding Doors,” Dave Shea’s “CSS Sprites,” Dan Cederholm’s “Faux Columns,” Patrick Griffiths and Dan Webb’s “Suckerfish Dropdowns,” Drew McLellan’s “Flash Satay,” and so on and so on. There are literally too many great ones to name here. (Newcomers to standards-based design, check Erin Lynch’s “The ALA Primer Part Two: Resources For Beginners“.)

Web standards are in our DNA and will always be a core part of our editorial focus. Standards fans, never fear. We will not abandon our post. But since late 2005, we have consciously begun steering ALA back to its earliest roots as a magazine for all people who make websites—writers, architects, strategists, researchers, and yes, even marketers and clients as well as designers and developers. This means that, along with issues that focus on new methods and subtleties of markup and layout, we will also publish issues that discuss practical and sometimes theoretical aspects of user experience design, from the implications of ubiquitous computing to keeping communities civil.

The trick is to bring our huge group of highly passionate readers along for the ride. My wife likens it to piloting the Queen Mary. (Q. How do you make the Queen Mary turn left? A. Very, very slowly.)

The slow, deliberate, gradual introduction of articles on business and theory has not pleased all of ALA’s readers, some of whom may unrealistically wish that every issue would present them with the equivalent of a new “Sliding Doors.” It is possible, of course, to publish one CSS (or JavaScript or Jquery) article after another, and to do so on an almost daily basis. We could do that. Certainly we get enough submissions. The trouble is that most articles of this kind are either edge cases of limited utility, or derivatives that do not break significant new ground. (Either that, or they are flawed in our estimation, e.g. relying on dozens of non-semantic divs to create a moderately pleasing, minor visual effect.)

We review hundreds of articles and publish dozens. Some web magazines seem to have those proportions reversed, and some readers don’t seem to mind, and that’s fine. But any content you see in ALA has been vetted and deeply massaged by the toughest editorial team in the business. And when you see a new “design tech” article in our pages, you can be sure it has passed muster with our hard-ass technical editors.

Moreover, the fields of meaningful new CSS tricks have mostly yielded their fuels. We’ve done that. We’ve done it together with you. While a few new lodes of value undoubtedly remain to be tapped, we as a community, and as individuals who wish to grow as designers, need to absorb new knowledge. ALA will continue to be a place where you can do that.

When we began focusing on web standards in 1998, we were told we were wasting readers’ time on impractical crap of little value to working designers and developers. But we kept on anyway, and the things we learned and taught are now mainstream and workaday. While we apologize to readers who are again being made irritable by our insistence on occasionally presenting material that does not fall directly within their comfort zone, we hope that this experiment will prove to be of value in the end.

[tags]alistapart, webdesign, magazine, editorial, content, focus, change, publishing, standards, webstandards, css, design, layout, userexperience[/tags]

Categories
Accessibility Apple Applications bugs Design people

Communication Marches On

The Chat that wasn't

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[tags]apple, ichat, firewall, hivelogic, danbenjamin, zeldman[/tags]

Categories
Accessibility John Slatin people

Save the Accessibility Institute

Join Knowbility in urging the University of Texas to reconsider its decision to close the Accessibility Institute, founded and led with distinction by the late Dr. John Slatin. Keep John’s work alive. Sign the petition.

[tags]accessibility, johnslatin, accessibility institute[/tags]

Categories
A List Apart Accessibility Community Design development Publications Publishing work writing

ALA No. 265: better experience

In Issue No. 265 of A List Apart, for people who make websites: The web is a conversation, but not always a productive one. In “Putting Our Hot Heads Together,” Carolyn Wood shares ways to transform discussion forums and comment sections from shooting ranges into arenas of collaboration. Plus: Because of limited awareness around Deafness and accessibility in the web community, it seems plausible to many of us that good captioning will fix it all. It won’t. In “Deafness and the User Experience,” Lisa Herrod explains how to enhance the user experience for all deaf people.

P.S. The Survey for People Who Make Websites closes Tuesday, August 26. Don’t miss your chance to help educate the world about the practice of our profession. Please take the survey and encourage your friends and colleagues who make websites to do likewise.

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[tags]alistapart, deafness, user experience, UX, accessibility, collaboration, discussion, comments, community [/tags]