Bruce Lawson’s personal site

Archive for July, 2005

WAI redesign

Joe Clark asked us WaSP ATF tykes what we thought of the beta version of the W3C’s Web Accessibility Initiative redesign of their pages.

I agree with Joe, and also think

  • The design is a bit boxy. A bit pre-ZenGarden. Lose some of the borders.
  • Links should change when hovered
  • Footer text should be centred.
  • The picture of the bridge in the branding doesn’t need alt text of “bridge”. It’s purely decorative, so lose the alt. Lose the picture, in my opinion, but I’m no designer. I just dislike the way it fades on the right, and the perspective seems distorted to me.
  • ids and classes should be named semantically and not presentationally. I need to implement this myself: turn the div “header” into “branding”, footer to “colophon”, “sidebar” to “menu” or somesuch nomenclature that describes what it is, not where it is positioned.

What’s your take on it?

(In a related note, the WCAG 2.0 Working Draft 30 June 2005 is available for public comments, and the CSS 2.1 working draft is on a “last call” for comments by 15 July 2005. Baffling to me, these w3c documents; they seem to be written in a foreign language).