Current ALA: Fixing Your Site With the Right DOCTYPE
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15 April 2002
[4 pm]
The following is technical, and will only interest those who design and build websites. Feel free to skip down to more entertaining fare.
The Browser is an Ass I: MSIE/Win
Redesigning our book site in CSS over the weekend reminded us how great this technology can be. The work consumed only a few hours; bandwidth was reduced; achieving compliance with Section 508 was a breeze, as the site consists of nothing but functional markup styled by a few rules.
Redesigning in CSS also reminded us how inept browsers can be. IE/Win (versions 5, 5.5, and 6) added ugly vertical space to the nav bar because of a long–standing white space bug.
We fixed the display problem in IE/Win by deleting carriage returns and other white space from the markup that creates the nav bar—a simple, bulleted list that works as “skip navigation” in screen readers. View Source beginning with <ul id="nav"> to see the fix.
Browsers should ignore white space in markup, but at least this problem was fixable.
The Browser is an Ass II: Opera/Mac
A bug in Opera 5 for Mac hides the nav bar behind the title graphic and photo, rendering the site impossible to navigate. A screenshot displays this train wreck along with less significant problems:
- inaccurate font size
- misrendering of horizontal space in text
- inability to respect specified top and bottom margins for the main content area
- lack of support for float
No wonder the kids love Flash. We now return you to our regularly scheduled broadcast. :::
15 April 2002
[2 pm]
Today we Americans celebrate traditional U.S. values by giving our money to the government.
Netdiver has published the results of its Pay for content? survey, in which visitors were asked if they would willingly pay a small fee to continue enjoying their favorite independent sites. As expected, most wouldn’t. In a related vein, Evolt’s End of the free content ride? comments on the move by large commercial portals to stop giving all their content away for free.
A note on the flat mode used in the new ALA forum, and another in response to a recurrent forum user question. Unnoticed by many ALA readers, as of Issue 142 we’ve quit loading external links in a new window, and replaced the fine coffee we normally serve with 11px Georgia. The font change is visible in all recent articles under the default CSS settings.
What Do I Know, the daily site of Todd Dominey, has also switched to 11px Georgia. It’s the new orange.
Yoh-Chu-Sha (Larva House), a Japanese girl group, makes unusual music that falls somewhere between pop, noise, and techno. You can stream three of their albums at IUMA.
Davezilla is not dead, just temporarily obscured by incompetent DNS registrars. Hmm, where have we heard about that before?
Harrumph redesigned last week. Still clean, still pretty, still simple and impactful.
Also redesigned: Glish, a three–column job done entirely in CSS that manages to work even in Netscape 4. IE5.x/Mac has a problem displaying the right–hand column. No wonder the kids love Flash.
Thanks to all who’ve pimped the new Photo Contest or submitted mugshots. Keep ’em coming. As time permits, we’re adding content to the redesigned book site and fixing various browser bugs. (More on the bugs and fixes above.) :::
13 April 2002
[7 pm]
“Talent” Photo Contest
To complete the redesign of our book site, honor the community, and (cough) drum up additional sales, we’ve launched a Photo Contest. Send us your mug!
:::
12 April 2002
[4 pm | midnight]
In Issue 142 of A List Apart, For People Who Make Websites: Fixing Your Site With the Right DOCTYPE, by Jeffrey Zeldman. You’ve done everything right, but your site is breaking in the latest browsers. A faulty DOCTYPE is likely to blame. This essential ALA article will provide you with DOCTYPEs that work, enabling you to fix your site with just one tag. (When you finish reading, don’t forget you can also discuss the story.)
On 4 May, the arts and literary ’zine Savoy (“Words are food for thought”) will celebrate five years of original, independent content on the web. Congratulations to editor G.K. Nelson and all contributors.
Here is a lovely icon site, and here is a site that lists others—and includes some snazzy icons of its own.
Network Solutions is now doing to Leslie Harpold and her excellent personal site, Hoopla, what one hopes his cellmate will one day do to the president of Network Solutions.
Perhaps because people were actually opting out, Doubleclick has changed the location of its opt–out page. Hat tip: Grant Perry. :::
9 April 2002
[2 pm | 10 am]
ALA’s Discussion Forum Software, Generation III, is now online. (Modifying Dreamweaver: Article | Discussion. Accessibility and Authoring Tools: Article | Discussion.) Thanks to Waferbaby for building the newest generation of ALA Discussion Forum software and for joining ALA as Community Director/Admin.
Note: So far, the new forum software has been implemented only for the two articles above. Previous discussions have not yet been ported to the new forum software, but we hope to be able to do so soon, and are working with Waferbaby and Webcore Labs to make it happen.
Tomorrow morning, we’ll once again be lecturing at Columbia University, this time on best practices in web architecture and navigation. Not that we always follow those practices on this ancient wreck of a site, but on client work and indie projects we try our best. Most folks reading this page will not be at Columbia tomorrow, but Chapter 3 of Taking Your Talent to the Web covers similar ground, and is available for your downloading pleasure. (Zipped PDF file, 1.1 MB.) Heck, you might even want to buy the book.
New at Favelets.com: the Multivalidator is a clickable Favorites bar bookmarklet that simultaneously submits any web page to W3C’s HTML, CSS, and HREF validators. Check your work with just one click. Favelets is a production of Tantek Çelik, who also brought us the Box Model Hack, the High Pass Filter, and the Tasman Rendering engine in IE5/Mac. :::
