Re: [WSG] form from hell - difficult redesign
On Thu, Jul 31, 2008 at 1:09 PM, kevin mcmonagle <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hi I've been asked to redesign the gui on a hotel booking engine / room > allocation web app. > > Its basically the busiest example of tabular data ive ever seen - most data > in the cells is input. I think you'll need to give us more information. Is it just a very long form for booking rooms? .. is there a textbox for every room or something? If so could you just replace it with an ajax search for rooms and an "add" button? Is there any kind of grouping or hierarchy in the data? You could try hierarchical table rows (also known as multi-column treeviews)... I recently wrote a blog post that detailed lots of ways of representing tablular data: http://holloway.co.nz/blog/?p=17 .Matthew Holloway http://holloway.co.nz/ *** List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm Help: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ***
Re: [WSG] Why css settings a background image in the body tag wouldn't work plus 2nd issue of space between divs
On Wed, Jul 30, 2008 at 11:29 AM, Michael Horowitz <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Sure happy to give you my current css. Missing semi-colon at the end of the line? .Matthew Holloway http://holloway.co.nz/ *** List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm Help: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ***
Re: [WSG] Why css settings a background image in the body tag wouldn't work
On Wed, Jul 30, 2008 at 10:48 AM, Michael Horowitz <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I am finding I am having to put this info instead in my div's > Im sure it is some silly problem Could you post some HTML/CSS? If it's a silly problem then it's probably syntax, or that relative paths are different from the HTML to CSS, etc. .Matthew Holloway http://holloway.co.nz/ *** List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm Help: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ***
Re: [ADMIN] THREAD CLOSED [WSG] XSLT: looping through ancestors looking for a specific node
On Mon, Jul 28, 2008 at 4:07 PM, Matt Fellows <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Sorry, Grant, this is off topic for this list. No it's not, "The mail list is for web designers & developers who are interested in web standards (HTML, XHTML, XML, CSS, XSLT, Javascript, EcmaScript etc.)" -- http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm Grant was talking about XSLT, thanks :) .Matthew Holloway http://holloway.co.nz/ *** List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm Help: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ***
Re: [WSG] XSLT: looping through ancestors looking for a specific node
Hi Grant, On Mon, Jul 28, 2008 at 3:48 PM, Focas, Grant <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Is there a way in XSLT to loop through the ancestors until I find > the first instance of a node called "foo"? > > For context what I'm trying to do is see if a "bookmark" is in the same > "section" as the link/@href (and to find this out when I'm processing > the link). First I've just got a few questions... you've got nested section tags so what if the bookmark was in the parent section? Is that the same as if it's in a following section? (if not then can you give a few more XML file examples). If the first ancestor section is all that matters then an approach would be to compare the generate-id()s of an ancestor section of the link to the ancestor section of the bookmark. So you'd do something like (from memory, untested code) it's the same section it's not the same section .Matthew Holloway http://holloway.co.nz/ *** List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm Help: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ***
Re: [WSG] Please unsubscribe me
On Tue, Jul 1, 2008 at 4:47 PM, Polly Templeton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Many thanks > Polly Templeton > National Museum of Australia > I don't know about you all but I'm maintaining a spreadsheet called "People not to hire based on their ability to use the WSG list". .Matthew Holloway http://holloway.co.nz/ *** List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm Help: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ***
Re: [WSG] Scaling a background image
On Tue, Jul 1, 2008 at 7:04 AM, Matijs <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > SVG is not really suitable for photos though. > Which is mostly true but SVG can contain bitmaps and as the goal is to scale the bitmap to 100% anyway then using SVG as a container format would be appropriate (or at least identical to bitmaps, aside from file size). Unrelated, but here's an example of using SVG vectors for a background image... http://holloway.co.nz/wellypug/svg/svg-test2.html .Matthew Holloway http://docvert.org/ http://holloway.co.nz/ *** List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm Help: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ***
Re: [WSG] Scaling a background image
On Mon, Jun 30, 2008 at 12:12 PM, Chris Pearce < [EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Has anyone been able to successfully scale a CSS background image to the > current window size? I've done some research via Google and it appears this > can't be done purely with CSS (at least not yet), maybe some JavaScript? > > Here's a CSS and HTML way of doing it for those browsers that understand position:fixed, http://holloway.co.nz/mefi/fullscreenbackground2/ For those browsers that don't you'd need to emulate it with JavaScript... window.onscroll to move the #background down the page with the scroll position. *** List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm Help: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ***
Re: [WSG] IE6/7 not rendering an H1 correctly
Lynette Smith wrote: > I've been staring at if for ages and I don't understand this at all > and was wondering if this was the reason IE won't render it as intended. Just above the there's a broken "http://holloway.co.nz/ *** List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm Help: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ***
Re: [WSG] HTML special characters coding
Andrew Cunningham wrote:
> a slight correction: NCRs by definition are always know.
Ah, we seem to actually agree but we're talking about what's known to
different things. Unknown when I used it was in terms of the ability to
render it sucessfully (known to the browser as a whole) not just in
terms of expressing characters accurately (which seems to be what yours
is "known" to). And as said NCRs for my use are for HTML *and* XML, not
just HTML.
Regarding missing glyph characters like boxes or boxes with
codepages/codepoints or ? ...different platforms and browsers display
different fallbacks. Or as Wikipedia says,
> Systems that do not offer a fallback font typically display black or
> white rectangles, question marks, or nothing at all in place of
> missing characters. Symbols in a fallback font can contain annotations
> such as the relevant Unicode block and the script system used.
Entity errors vs encoding errors like "’" errors are completely
different errors, that was the point -- to contrast two completely
different ways of encoding characters and the errors that result ("’"
vs ? vs missing glyph boxes). I have a slight preference for entities
because they don't tend to get mangled by stupid non-unicode-aware tools
but that's about it.
Cheers :)
--
.Matthew Holloway
http://holloway.co.nz/
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Re: [WSG] HTML special characters coding
Andrew Cunningham wrote: > LOL, i enjoyed the wording. > > Considering the document character set of HTML4 is Unicode, if it > can't be displayed in UTF-8 in a browser, then it can't be displayed > using entitiies or NCRs either ;) Generally I agree, although one good thing about entities (including NCRs of course) is that it'll typically come up as a "?" when it's unknown rather than mangled as ’. So it'll break more gracefully. Also there can be other things involved other than the browser when writing HTML, such as bad proxies. I can't remember the name of the software but a few years ago an adblocker proxy that I installed on my parents machine would break UTF-8 horribly... of course that's the proxy's fault but entites would work around their bug. (I don't really have strong opinions either way though) -- .Matthew Holloway http://holloway.co.nz/ *** List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm Help: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ***
Re: [WSG] HTML special characters coding
kevin_erickson wrote: > Hello, > I am looking for advice on if the best way to code for special characters is > to use the actual character or the attribute value or the alt code? > i.e. for the ampersand should one use & or &? Does it matter? I know that > Dreamweaver automates some of this but what is the best practice? > You're always supposed to encode & as & (even in hrefs) and that's what standards compliance requires. (I use XHTML and I also want to be parseable as XML so aside from XMLs inbuilt entities of < > & " and ' I tend to use NCRs...). -- .Matthew Holloway http://holloway.co.nz/ *** List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm Help: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ***
Re: [WSG] Clarification: Is RTF accessible?
Rae Buerckner wrote: The following is from the AGIMO website. [...] The preferred format is HTML, followed by Word/RTF, and text. They should change this from "Word" to "doc" (because Word 2007 also includes docx and so "Word" is ambiguous). And obviously they should specify the version of doc (if they don't already) such as doc as implemented in MS Word '97. As with PDF they should encourage the most widely understood version of the format... with some exception to the rule for features only available in later versions of the format (Eg, for accessibility use Microsoft Office 2010, don't use RTF). -- .Matthew Holloway http://holloway.co.nz/ *** List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm Help: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ***
Re: [WSG] Clarification: Is RTF accessible?
Jessica Enders wrote: Also, if it helps, I'm thinking about RTF for /forms/, not general text documents. Oh, ok -- it certainly cannot represent accessible forms. Even the latest RTF 1.9.1 (March 2008) does not appear to support form field labels, for example. -- .Matthew Holloway http://holloway.co.nz/ *** List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm Help: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ***
Re: [WSG] Is RTF accessible?
Hi Scott Scott Barnes wrote: How do folks find the new OOXML format in regards to this line of thinking? Ah, now this is something I know about... Firstly there is no new OOXML format yet. No one, not even the voting bodies that represent each nation, saw a final OOXML spec when voting. Here's a blog post describing what meagre information nations had due to the ISO process: http://holloway.co.nz/blog/?p=12 . The current state of OOXML is unknown and despite several ISO deadlines that demand a final text (some up to a month ago) there are still no signs of it[1]. The OOXML format is in such a mess <http://tinyurl.com/4x7skt> that Microsoft have postponed supporting OOXML until at least 2010 and -- in the meantime -- they're implementing ODF. Now I don't like describing it that way but it's important to include that information as a disclaimer of sorts about my following guesses about what will appear in the final text. .rtf and .doc DO NOT have, but OOXML will probably have: * form-field labels * table summaries and captions * multi-level table cells (albeit with some limitations, see http://iso-vote.com/technical-issues-in-ooxml.pdf ) * Image Maps by way of drawing transparent vector graphics overtop of bitmaps/vectors. Eg vector graphics with opacity:0 (actually rtf/doc may allow this via VML) Within the ISO process that produced the new OOXML I think it's fair to say that New Zealand and Canada were the primary advocates for accessibility. I was involved in the New Zealand process with Standards NZ and if there are any particular accessibility features that people are curious about please let me know and I'll see whether they're in OOXML. One weird thing is that OOXML promotes making webpages with VML instead of SVG. See the VML section in: http://iso-vote.com/technical-issues-in-ooxml.pdf Further... Scott Barnes wrote: In that I'm curious to see what WSG thinks of it and how it fits in with future potential. Microsoft Office is joining OpenOffice.org, KOffice and Abiword and all the rest in supporting ODF. Here are some guidelines for producing accessible ODF documents, http://docs.oasis-open.org/office/office-accessibility/v1.0/cs01/ODF_Accessibility_Guidelines-v1.0.html The nice thing about reading these guidelines is that it helps people think about accessibility in a more abstract sense, in that you can see the overlap between ODF and HTML. ODF is a ZIP file of XML, and its choice of technology is much more aligned with that of the web than OOXML (ODF builds upon SVG, MathML, SMIL, XForms, etc) and so web developers can pick it up more easily. So I imagine that the future of Office Suites is in web developers integrating office suites with the web (and vice-versa). Or in other words -- better publishing cycles, with more automation. And if people are interested in ODF I can talk about that quite a bit too ;) [1] http://www.openmalaysiablog.com/2008/05/the-south-afric.html#more which reads in part: "There is no indication when the final DIS text might be expected, but has not been distributed within the one month period prescribed. Given the magnitude of the specification and the number of identified edits required it was clear that this directive could not have been met. This is the clearest possible indication that DIS 29500 as submitted by Ecma and as modified by the BRM is not ready for fast track processing. It was not incumbent on the participants of the BRM to modify this clearly stated requirement." -- .Matthew Holloway http://holloway.co.nz/ *** List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm Help: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ***
Re: [WSG] Is RTF accessible?
Jessica Enders wrote:
I am trying to work out whether a Rich Text File is considered
accessible, to the extent that Australian federal government agencies
must provide electronic documents in an accessible format.
Is there a list of accessibility features that a format must allow, or
does the Australian federal government merely require "accessible"?
I am not particularly familiar with RTF however it's my understanding
that RTF may be considered a different serialization of the binary .doc
format, and by "different" I mean plain text:
{\rtf1\ansi{\fonttbl\f0\fswiss Helvetica;}\f0\pard
This is some {\b bold} text.\par
}
Yet another different serialization of .doc is into XML and this is
called ECMA-376 a.k.a. OOXML, or at least OOXML as it was in 2006 (and
from here on when I write OOXML I do mean OOXML as of 2006).
It's my understanding that RTF is only as accessible as OOXML and
therefore one could take the approach of looking for OOXML accessibility
reviews.
So, taking that approach, here is some criticism of OOXML accessibility
that apply equally to RTF:
http://tinyurl.com/yo6q4y
http://holloway.co.nz/ooxml-accessibility.pdf (an article of mine)
http://blogs.sun.com/korn/entry/talking_with_microsoft_s_gray
http://blogs.sun.com/korn/entry/cotinuing_the_conversation_with_gray
--
.Matthew Holloway
http://holloway.co.nz/
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