That Standards Guy



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That Standards Guy is the online persona of Karl Dawson, a web developer living and working in Ipswich, England.

I'm a member of the Guild of Accessible Web Designers and the Web Standards Group and team member at Accessites—an awards site to recognise accessible and usable websites.

I specialise as a front-end developer and worry about the minutae of semantic (X)HTML and CSS, accessibility, microformats, typographic rhythm and grid design. I also care about the user experience and remind myself constantly of visitor site goals when working with clients and their aims.

That Standards Guy is proudly powered by WordPress using my own “StrictlyTSG v3.0” theme. Site Policies.

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Archive for April, 2006

Improper use of blockquotes

Friday, April 28th, 2006

After hearing that 37 Signals have released a new jobs portal, I noted a London design agency had a vacancy so I followed the link out of idle curiosity. Further random link-clicking found me at the portfolio page and onwards again to the website for Dr. Ian Gibson MP.

Bearing in mind that Checkpoint 3.7 of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines states:

Mark up quotations. Do not use quotation markup for formatting effects such as indentation.

Marvel at this code snippet:

<blockquote><blockquote>&nbsp;</blockquote>
</blockquote>
<div id="center">
  <blockquote>
    <blockquote>
      <blockquote>
        <blockquote>
          <blockquote>
            <blockquote>
              <blockquote>
                <blockquote>
                  <blockquote>
                    <blockquote>
                      <p>&nbsp;</p>
                    </blockquote>
                  </blockquote>
                </blockquote>
              </blockquote>
            </blockquote>
          </blockquote>
        </blockquote>
      </blockquote>
    </blockquote>
  </blockquote>
  <div class="image_left" id="wrapper">

It’s somewhat ironic that a British MP has commissioned a website that fails to meet web standards and accessibility guidelines with all the documentation and guidance offered to government departments from the Cabinet Office.

To me, this perfectly highlights the need to raise awareness of the recently-released PAS 78 Guide to good practice in commissioning accessible websites. Given a week, Google will display this article alongside the website in question in a search for Dr. Ian Gibson MP so I shall wait and see whether I get any comment on the professional markup.

Update: This markup was corrected within 2 weeks (the next time I visited) so although you’ll find some user-generated tables for layout it’s not all doom and gloom. Apologies for not getting this update out in a timely manner—as teacher used to say: “could do better.”

Posted in Failed Redesigns | 2 Comments »

Web Standards and Small Businesses

Thursday, April 27th, 2006

Andy Higgs was somehow tempted to switch his final year dissertation from essentially “Why don’t grannies like using mobile phones?” to “An enquiry into the acceptance of accessible web content and web design standards by UK small businesses.” With only four weeks to spare.

The dissertation approaches some key accessibility questions in the UK; do small businesses know that they are expected to provide accessibility and are they prepared to bite the bullet and shell out for an upgrade? There are also a few more findings and the statistics could be particularly useful if you are doing any work in the area yourself. If you want a one-page overview of the whole project including some key findings, you can read the abstract.

At 9000 words with an underlying online questionnaire Andy devised to base his findings on, it’s a good piece of work, especially given the timescale. Kudos Andy.

Read his full dissertion here.

 

Posted in Accessibility, Applause | 1 Comment »

Developing Microsoft CMS Solutions

Tuesday, April 25th, 2006

Last week I attended a 4-day, on-site course for developing Microsoft Content Management System (CMS) solutions. Which was nice (to quote from The Fast Show).

With no previous asp.NET skills it was quite a challenge developing server and placeholder controls so lots of frenetic cutting and pasting of examples were the order of the day. I’m not sure I learnt anything in this regard but at least I know what to consider and ask of our trained developers if needs be. However, the biggest interest for me was of course the outputted markup — out of the box the markup from asp.NET 1.1 is pretty ugly. Only the “arrogance” of Microsoft could provide a “label” control that does not output label tags for example.

Bad markup first-hand:

  • Visual Studio 2003 has the nasty habit of altering your markup you wrote in HTML view when you switch to design view.
  • Element names in uppercase.
  • Incomplete DOCTYPE.
  • MS_POSITIONING attribute on the body element (causing horrid in-line CSS styles or tables depending on target browser schema — another dumb thing).
  • Everything after <body> is enclosed in a form tag.
  • Potentially huge viewstate variable for no reason whatsoever.
  • Horrid, inline JavaScript and event handlers.

I understand that Visual Studio 2005 has fixed some web standards and accessibility issues but unfortunately, we have an upcoming project that will pre-date the upgrade. Those of you subscribed via RSS will notice today that I’ve tagged a few asp.NET links today in my del.icio.us bookmarks as I start my research into creating standards-compliant and accessible templates.

Hopefully by the end of the summer I’ll be able to write about a successful implementation of web standards and accessibility in an asp.NET 1.1 environment.

Further reading:

Posted in ASP.NET | 1 Comment »

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