Archive for the ‘WWW’ Category

Election: each to their own

Posted on in My Life, The World, WWW.

My local candidates, assessed on the quality of their web sites.

Tessa Jowell, Labour

http://www.tessajowell.net/

IA and Design: Nice use of YouTube and Google Maps (don’t re-invent the wheel, use the market leaders where suitable). Two equal width content columns means the user doesn’t know which piece of content is more important. Labour Party banner ad at the top looks like a banner ad. Accessibility and Privacy links go to labour.org.uk so how can we tell whether they apply to this site?

Technical: Claims to be XHTML 1.0 Transitional, has 10 validation errors. Layout breaks in Opera 10.53. Email sign up things doo.doo is a valid domain name and dfsfsfd a valid postcode. JavaScript for TinyMCE and something call admin-interface.tao are loaded on every page – maybe these should only be loaded on admin screens?

Kemi Adegoke, Conservatives

http://kemi.adegoke.com/

IA and Design: Best looking site, not much else to say about it – simple but efficient.

Technical: Based on WordPress. Claims to be XHTML 1.0 Strict, has 85 validation errors. Kemi claims to “enjoy web development and writing the occasional bit of code”. Layout breaks very slightly in Opera.

Jonathan Mitchell, Liberal Democrats

http://www.jonathanmitchellsblog.com/

IA and Design: It’s a Blogger blog – with commenting disabled. Only been blogging since February apparently. Black text on a mid-green background. All the text is in bold.

Technical: It’s a Blogger blog – claims to be XHTML 1.0 Strict, has 363 (!) validation errors.

Shane Collins, Green Party

Couldn’t find an individual site, so http://www.greensarecoming.org.uk/ShaneCollins

IA and Design: Video should probably be instead of mugshot instead of tucked away at the bottom. Otherwise clean and efficient, if a bit basic.

Technical: Claims to be XHTML 1.0 Transitional, has 41 validation errors.

Elizabeth Jones, UKIP

Couldn’t find an individual site, so http://candidates.ukip.org/index.php?pg=show&eid=578

IA and Design: Photo looks like it came from MySpace. Nice use of UGC in the Q&A section (but … how can blood sports be “a matter for the individual to decide”?)

Technical: Claims to be XHTML 1.0 Transitional, has 131 validation errors. URL is terrible from an SEO perspective.

So, we’ve learnt that the big parties spend more on web sites than the little ones; that no candidate can make a site that actually validates; that XHTML is hands down winner over ye olde HTML 4 or bright shiny new HTML5. Not much help in actually deciding to vote for. :-(

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PPK on Apple

Posted on in Blogs, WWW.

I always enjoy Peter-Paul Koch’s blog posts even though currently I’m only on the very distant edge of the mobile world (as a user I use my phone for making the occasional phone call and nothing much else, as a developer I’m dipping my toes in the world of mobile web and couldn’t care less about apps). Today’s seems to sum up the situation with Apple perfectly:

Is it a good idea for Apple to go to war against several major players and piss off developers all at the same time?

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Screen readers, HTML5, ARIA – all happy together?

Posted on in WWW.

This week I converted a site from XHTML 1 to HTML5, and as part of this I moved the ARIA landmark role attributes from generic div elements to various new elements. And I got to wondering whether this could have unforeseen consequences.

I know from feedback that the ARIA landmark roles have proved useful for some users of this site, so it would be a bad move if this stopped working because their screen readers didn’t recognise the role attributes on “unknown” elements.

<div role="banner"> vs <header role="banner">

I guess what this boils down to, are there any user agents that (a) support the role attribute and (b) use the DOM as generated by a browser engine that fails to recognise HTML5 elements?

Firefox 2 and Internet Explorer won’t style HTML5 elements (though IE will after applying a little JavaScript magic) but styling isn’t the same as recognised at a basic level.

This seems like an edge case, as most of the reports I’ve found whilst searching have indicated that HTML5+ARIA is a good thing and works, but most of the reports don’t specify versions of user agents used. Does anyone have any links to first hand research into this issue?

Very True Mood: (curious) curious
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Top 10 Films

Posted on in Films, Memes, My Life, Work.

As a follow-up to Desert Island Discs, the team at work have been doing our top ten films, and this week was my turn. The only condition was that one of the ten had to be set in London. Once again, I’ll be buggered if I’m writing all this lot up and not turning it into a blog post.
( My Top Ten Films... )

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“Steampunk” Meme

Posted on in Memes.

Via [info]lonemagpie

Your result for The Steampunk Style Test…

The Citizen

25% Elegant, 17% Technological, 67% Historical, 56% Adventurous and 29% Playful!

( more... )

Try our other Steampunk test here.

Take The Steampunk Style Test at HelloQuizzy

Obsessively skinny code

Posted on in WWW.

I’ve started using Google Closure Compiler instead of JSMin to reduce the size of my JavaScript files. It’s an obsessive piece of software, finding savings such as replacing the number 1000 with the one byte more compact form 1E3. But those bytes all add up as it’s reduced an 80Kb file to 44kB compared with 51Kb from JSMin.

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JavaScript and me

Posted on in Books, My Life, Work, WWW.

I’ve been writing JavaScript for almost as long as the language has existed. My first “script” was a simple onMouseOver="window.status='Hello World'" affair back in the days of Netscape 2. I spent the dot.com years writing popup windows and hover images and scrolling boxes and other basic stuff. Then I took a break from doing much JavaScript – this almost exactly coincided with the years that some “proper” programmers took a a look at the language and applied a bit of rigour to it. So when I got back into JavaScript a few years ago I was way behind the curve.

I’ve managed to catch up a little and by using the jQuery library plus a few plugins I’ve done some quite cool things despite not having the sort of knowledge that real JavaScript pros have these days.

I’m a front end engineer, I’m not a “proper” programmer, I don’t come from a programming background and have had close to zero formal training. I only vaguely understand the principles behind object oriented programming and design patterns and so on and I think that I think that they are good things, but I have no real idea of how to apply them to my code.

Speaking of which, unminified it’s 70Kb, 1500 lines and growing. There’s a big refactoring job that needs doing there before it becomes impossible to maintain. But how to start?

Bookwise, I have Jon Resig’s Pro JavaScript Techniques and Douglas Crockford’s JavaScript: The Good Parts and a few others. Are there any others that I should be looking at? What about training? Web sites? Blogs I should be following? Where do I go from here?

Very True Mood: (cranky) cranky
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Any other Tuesday…

Posted on in Music, My Life, TV, Work, WWW.

Today I …

  • Had my photo used in a (gay) mockup of a what our Valentine’s Day homepage could look like.
  • Had lots of fun combining Ajax, JSON, RSS, JSP and jQuery in various combinations.
  • Moved the breadcrumb trail from just inside the main content area to just before it … in many, many templates.
  • Wondered whether any of the ARIA landmark roles was suitable for a block that contained a breadcrumb trail, a print button and an RSS feed button. contentinfo or nothing seem to be the options.
  • Told my boss that I needed to refactor all the JavasScript (that I had written in the first place) on the whole site.
  • Wasn’t ill enough to go home to bed, maybe tomorrow. (Damn this really quite good immune system!)
  • Boggled at the photos of Ben Dalby in a straight jacket!
  • Spent most of Survivors thinking about the benefits of CGI vs something actually decent looking when it came to collapsing buildings.
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More skipping to broken accessibility

Posted on in WWW.

A few of you may remember this sterling piece of work from last year. Well today I found a very similar case on another site.

<a href="#mainsection" class="skip">skip to content</a>
<a href="#topnav" class="skip">skip to main navigation</a>
<a href="#topnav" class="skip">skip to main navigation</a>

  1. “skip to main navigation” is repeated twice…
  2. but does nothing as “topnav” is not present anywhere on the page
  3. The skip links aren’t wrapped in any form of structure (thus also requiring the class=”skip” on each link)

The site claims to be XHTML 1.0 Transitional but has 76 validation errors, including a character encoding mismatch between the HTTP header and the meta tag. It calls in 8 external CSS files and 23 external JavaScript files and contains large chunks of commented out HTML (so it will be slow as well as inaccessible).

Compared with this, some of my stuff is not so bad after all.

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My Decade Meme

Posted on in Blogs, Memes, My Life, The World, Work, WWW.

2000

At the start of the year I was working Wicked Web in Clerkenwell, living in West Norwood and had been going out with [info]pink_weasel for six months. We went on holiday to Boston and Tennessee. WW moved office to Old Street in the spring. I went to Las Vegas for Andy’s stag weekend.

2001

I took Lettice to Budapest for her birthday. WW started laying staff off towards the end of the year.

2002

WW went into liquidation and hence I was made redundant. I became self-employed and started freelancing for many ex-WW clients. Went to the south of France with Lettice’s family – first time I’d ever seen the Mediterranean.

2003

I spent the first part of the year working on a site for the BBC. Towards the end of the year I started doing contract work via an agency which meant that I got a large refund from the tax man, eventually. I went on a falconry day and flew a Harris Hawk. I asked Lettice to marry me.

2004

I started this blog and spent several months working for the Home Office.

2005

I gave up freelancing and started work at Visit London. I started cross posting this blog to LiveJournal and joined LibraryThing and Last.FM. I moved house to larger flat, ten minutes down the road from the old one, and Lettice moved in. We got married and went on honeymoon in Canada. :-)

2006

I learnt XSLT. :-( Lettice also started to work at VL. I joined Flickr

2007

Relaunched visitlondon.com with a new CMS, clocking up a stupid number of days off in lieu in the process. I did jury duty. I joined Facebook. We went to Dublin and Amsterdam.

2008

We went to Venice. I learnt JSP and jQuery. I joined Twitter

2009

We went to Barcelona and tried to buy a house. I grew a moustache for charity.