Archive for March, 2004

Webgraphics points to this short article detailing the elements and attributes used to create structured tables. It takes a simplified table and add structural and logical markup, introducing one element at a time.

Brian Kromrey points to this “Nifty archives and historical reference of just about every graphical user interface you can imagine: http://www.aci.com.pl/mwichary/guidebook“. Sections on Interface, Components and Icons organize an impressive number of screenshots, including 136 Dialog Components such as file>open.

Access-USA http://www.access-usa.com/Welcome_1.htm will print Braille on your business cards. We don’t have an official vendor relationship with them. Our business card folks were pretty clueless on Braille, but you can order your cards the normal way and send them to Access-USA for Braille printing. It’s about $65 for 250 cards.

The next BayCHI-Web talk will be by Tantek Celik from Microsoft speaking on “Emerging Semantic HTML”. Tantek’s a CSS pro, and this talk on semanatic html and development is quite relevant and parallel to our notion of Layered Semantic Markup

Here’s the abstract posted on the BayCHI calendar

There are many ways to say the same thing in HTML. With the increasing diversity of devices and readers (e.g. desktop web browsers, cell phones, robots), it is more important than ever to use mark-up for semantics and leave the presentation to media-specific stylesheets. Tantek will illustrate the emergent use of semantic XHTML as a sweet spot between old-style presentational HTML and dreams of the Semantic Web.

Tantek Çelik serves as Microsoft’s diplomat to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and HyperText Markup Language (HTML) working groups. In his spare time, Tantek keeps a blog and tinkers with semantic Extensible HyperText Markup Language (XHTML), Favelets, and CSS examples. He also led the development of Tasman, the browser presentation engine at the heart of Internet Explorer 5 for Macintosh and MSN for Macintosh.

Digital Web does a year-after interview with Doug Bowman, author of the redesigned (and all xhtml/css) wired site. Nothing ground-shattering, but I took some notes while i was reading it.

Even common word processing apps make use of global style-formatting features, and have for years. So the base concept of CSS is already a familiar one to many people. Once you realize that you already know what a style sheet can do (and why it’s advantageous to set up in advance), it’s just a matter of learning the cascading part of Cascading Style Sheets.

The Web as a medium is already much more accessible than a printed corporate brochure, movie poster, or product catalog. Better support for CSS enables us to create incredible designs that are even more accessible to a vastly wider audience. Unless a brochure has an audio equivalent that travels with it, or comes pre-embossed with a direct Braille translation, it can’t be compared with a well-constructed site on the Web.

Jeffery Veen writes a nice piece on his blog called I don’t care about accessibility. (It’s from his speaking notes at SXSW-04.)

He uses a term spectrum of degradability, which is very similar our thinking that has lead to

Their designs are explicitly intended to work in what we call the spectrum of degradability — that is, consider the current Mozilla in the middle, with less advanced and broken browsers like Blazer, Netscape 4 and IE6 on one end, and more advanced browsers like OmniWeb, screen readers, and other accessibility devices on the other.

Veen’s dead on though, and we XXXXXXXXX’s have been touting this too:

…when Web design is practiced as a craft, and not a consolation, accessibility comes for free.