HERE is a certain stigma or two among Web designers. Blaming of Web design be attributed to miscomprehension of design principles. Take for example some astigmatic accessibility issues, among other key factors such as browser ‘racism’. These mistakes illusrate clumsiness in Web design and infuriate minorities, which comprise equally-important Net citizens.

Pedagogues in the field of design are either unaware of accessibility matters, or they cannot be bothered with them. In due time, they recommend Flash, user-agent (Web browser/reader) sniffing and the like — all of which are bad practices for the large majority of sites, if not all. It is dishonourable to many users who must suffer due to such cretins, owing to laziness in learning and implementation.

Then comes the issue of content, which can assume user proficiency at times and thus leaves many surfers baffled. The author must escort the less technically-inclined hand-in-hand. For example, one should always abstain from equivocal text that does not attempt to clarify the main points made. In my sites, I tried to incorporate a full ‘acronym striping’ facility, using style sheets. Those of us to whom English is not the mother’s tongue should hopefully be able to digest the key points.

In summary, there seems to be dissociation and estrangement when it comes to the small majority of visitors or customers, i.e. there is no desire to give contentment to all. This is one of the biggest crimes committed in Web development, authoring and design, more so in cases where the site gives exclusive information, e.g. where it serves as a gatway to governmental agencies.

Mockup of a more futuristic GNOME (source)

HE GNOME desktop environment for Linux appears to be losing its prestige due to KDE, despite some eye-popping video demonstrations that include transparencies, wobbling windows and a 3-D Cube in desktop switching. Looking at some mockup images of GNOME, one gets an idea of future directions. The GNOME developers camp might have to live with the damaging insults from Linus Torvalds nonetheless.

More examples of GNOME eye candy can be found in a
previous eclectic item.

friend has just sent me the following mock-up image. He occasionally has a play with graphical software and other people’s photos are used in the process.

So apparently I am responsible for one terrible disaster. I had never realised it until he told me.

recently volunteered to take browser compatibility more seriously. I never truly believed there was a place for platform discrimination. However, refusal to upgrade from Internet Explorer to Firefox is not quite so excusable. Web standards should be fundamental enough to be supported at the very core of a browser and behave reliably. And yet, I realise that my attitude must change.

The context of this post is WordPress, a blogging platform whose development and community I have been a part of for over a year. In fact, I have put my name down among the Roles in WordPress Wiki page. To quote:

Testing / QA

Browser Testing – Testing Firefox, IE, Opera, and Safari against major WP functionality; documenting bugs; coding workarounds.

• I have a large variety of browsers which are built for Linux (including old versions), so I will continue to test nightlies and report inconsistencies and incompatibilities whenever time permits. I can use emulation to test under Safari and IE, but I have WinXP and an iMac at work. –[[User:schestowitz|schestowitz]] 3:38, 13 Jan 2006 (GMT)

The idea of roles in WordPress was introduced less than a fortnight ago. While editing the Wiki, I also decided to bind a vague personal description to an empty placeholder page which carries my name. I chose:

An ordinary guy who is overly fascinated by ‘anything Linux’ and ‘anything PHP/MySQL’.

My role involves using a large variety of browsers, especially exploring the Administration Panel (/Dashboard) side. Due to Safari and Internet Explorer, I will have to work on alternative platforms, too. Mac OS X is powerful, but rarely has the ‘expessivability’ of GNU/Linux. Also, it has commercial strings attached to it. Many of its applications bear a cost. To test cross-Web browser compatibility, I can disengage from the 3 Linux that I regularly use and take advantage of the iMac and Windows XP machines at the office. These operating system definitely have a place; just not in my house [smile]! They have not been switched on for months, but now there is a reason for a small change. I love WordPress! As matter of face, it was love at first sight and the affair carries on.

I have reported a few bugs already and some have been resolved:

• Published Articles for Future Appearance Get Counted in Categories
• Unbalanced quotes break RTE structure
• Opera Uploads iFrame Issue
• Char Encoding in inline-uploading.php

In my own mind, there is one golden rule for design with Flash:

Non-Flash browsers should miss no information. Their users should only miss out on the flash (no capital ‘F’ here), but never any content. If proprietary formats like Flash are made a requirement for information extraction, the outlook for the Web seems grim.

It has been a long time since I last designed with Flash. This goes back to 2001, in fact. At the time, little did I know about the SEO impact, which is why I no longer bother with Flash. Originally, its use was not my choice either; it was the client’s.

As a final word of advice (or caution), menus and text should remain in pure-text form, never embedded in something that requires pattern analysis or closed-source software. The same rules apply to graphics (images) where the alt attribute must be used as a surrogate, just in case images are not (or cannot) be displayed.

A mixed message is delivered to site visitors

S time goes by, the needs of the disabled are better realised. The Web becomes not only a mainstream phenomenon, but it is also a necessity. To many, banking, shopping and even social aspects or life are dependent on the Internet. Currently, search engines tend to concentrates on content, not on style and graphics, let alone validity of code or issues pertaining to accessibility. Might this change?

It would not be surprising if a search engine emerge , which only bothered with pages that are pure text or are built to possess good accessibility traits. Blind and handicapped people, for example, could opt for this niche-serving search engine. Large players such as Google have already catered for specific types of searches such as localised search (Google Local) and blog-exclusive search. Accessibility-type search may soon become a reality.

Tools such as The SEO Analyzer would perhaps be valuable for ranking sites. Perhaps incorporating modules such as these into crawlers is a worthwhile move. Moreover, rather than separating the engine types altogether, the user could tick a box that says ‘display only lean, stripped-down pages’¹ or ‘rank pages for accessibility and sort by quality’. This will encourage better Web standards and open ‘HTTP cyberspace’ to a larger audience.

¹ This exists already, I suspect. Page size in the results page provides a clue as well.

Earlier today (and/or yesterday), both the GNOME Web site and the KDE Web site published promotional essays, or pointed to them rather.

KDE – Why KDE Rules

I wrote this document to tell everybody why KDE is great, why it’s worth using (great functionality), supporting (great development platform) and hacking (great design) and why you can expect many other awesome features from KDE 4.

GNOME – Vive La Desktop Difference!

If you, dear reader, wrote in asking whether I think you should drive a Mini Cooper or a Hummer, how should I respond? My best bet is to offer no opinion. I know nothing of your preferences or your needs. Either vehicle will get you where you want to go. The difference will be in the experience of getting there. It’s the same deal with KDE and Gnome.

I do not believe this to be a coincidence given some news we have recently heard. KDE’s strengths have been pointed out by no-one other than Linus Torvalds.

Related items:

• KDE and Ease-of-Use
• The User Interfaces of Tomorrow
• KDE Pushed to the Limit
• KDE to Reach Africa
• KDE Versus GNOME