Bruce Lawson’s personal site

An Event Apart Boston is going swimmingly, but I’m taking a break to post this story from a BBC site that explains that the BBC has taken the decision to remove the hCalendar microformat from /programmes until

• either the BBC accessibility group does further testing and declares the abbreviation design pattern to be safe to use
• or the microformats community settles on an accessible alternative to the abbreviation design pattern

More at BBC radiolabs blog.

(More detail and backstory)

I’ve long been worried about the accessibility of microformats, so experimented and found that the way that dates are marked up is inaccessible to users of the big two screenreaders, and began writing an article to that effect.

James Craig, who is 97 times more helpful than I am, decided to research a better way to embed machine-parsable dates in content.

We jointly wrote up our results in an article called “hAccessibility“, which James published today.

Comment there, please.

The Friday joke

Q: What’s black and white and brown round the mouth?
A: A nun sucking a turd.

At last, the podcast audio and transcript of the talk Patrick Lauke and I gave at Geek In The Park.

Riddled with swear words (all Patrick), rambling at times (that Patrick again), you might nevertheless find it useful. (Summary)

Initial transcript provided by CastingWords, with subsequent editing by me and Patrick. Patrick did nearly all the work, and paid for the transcription. What a guy. Released under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0.

Yay for the Geek in the Park meeting. I missed the picnic, as I was returning from monstrous partying for my kid brother’s birthday, but got there in time to actually have a pre-speaking run-through with my partner-in-crime, Pat Lauke, to make sure the two-handed presentation we’d jammed by phone and mail worked.

It was splendid to meet old mates like Matt Machell, the excellent Jim O’Donnell, as well as meet more people (and a shame I couldn’t meet others - who were these people, for example?)

My notes, combined with some notes Patrick gave me, are reproduced. These are dense, as we talked for two hours, as this is just our crib sheet rather than a full transcript (if you want the full thing, we are available for weddings, barmitzvahs and satanic orgies. Especially satantic orgies).

Continue reading Geek in the Park: Pragmatic accessibility

Pretentious introduction

In the world of religious loonies, there are two main kinds of nutter. One is the fundamentalist - someone with the attitude that a tract is the work of God, perfect and unquestionable; if it’s mentioned in the Book, it’s beyond doubt no matter how daft. The second sub-genre of nutter is the exegesist: someone who believes that extra, unwritten information may be teased out of the text with enough insight and critical reading.

Web Standards evangelist types will all recognise both type of adherent to that Holy of Holies: the w3c specs.

Continue reading Breaking news: w3c specs are not the Word of God

Andy Budd recently posted that he wants min-padding, max-padding, min-margin and max-margin in CSS 3. My wishes are much more modest.

I want the ability to display poetry correctly on the Web.
Continue reading What I want from CSS 3, part 1

My last post explores in detail why you can’t rely on a title attribute to warn a user that a link opens in a new window, as you’re required to under checkpoint 10.1 of WCAG 1.0.

Here’s Gez Lemon’s script that opens any link marked rel="external" and opens it in a new window without being invalid. He’s just too damn modest to post this himself.
Continue reading Opening links in new windows in xhtml strict

Sun 18 Sept, 8.30 p.m. This post is already marked “considered harmful” as the script does not give maximum accessibility, nor fill the browser with nourishing valid code. The comments are good, though: thanks Gez and Lachlan. A proper script will appear in a couple of days, so watch this space. (Hey, does that mean I’m a script-tease artist?). There’s also a good discussion of the subject on the Accessify forum.

target=”_blank”. We’ve all done it - whether because the boss says “open external links in new windows so our site is still open”, or for non-html documents, or just because we want to drive Jakob into an early grave.
Continue reading New windows in xhtml strict

… the three legs of the Stool of Truth

As the thickest member of the WaSP ATF, I’ve been having a bit of a think about what the terms Accessibility, Standards, Semantics mean, trying to reach a working definition of the three terms, and how they inter-relate (while the other ATFers do hard work).

A good, modern website is like a stool. (The wooden kind. An inaccessible website is like the other kind.) The most stable stool is the one where each of the three legs is the same length, carries equal weight and supports its load well. Of course, it’s perfectly possible to sit on wobbly stool - but if it’s too wobbly, you’ll fall flat on your arse, in much the same way as this metaphor does.

Gurus need read no further; here’s my beginner’s guide to the Stool of Truth.
Continue reading Semantics, Standards, Accessibility …

I decided to show a message about why Internet Explorer is shite, and a link to get Firefox on the main page, but obviously only wanted to show it to IE users.

Initially, I had a div named #firefox, and defined it in the css as display:none, then overrode that definition with the * html hack that only IE understands. Therefore, non-IE browsers wouldn’t display it, and IE would accept the over-ride, and display the browser upgrade message:

#firefox{display: none;} /*don't show the Firefox ad in good browsers */
* html #firefox {display:block;} /*show Firefox ad to IE */

Thinking about it, though, I realised that I was switching content on and off rather than styles, so should be using the xhtml rather than the css for that, cause xhtml is about content and CSS is for style.

So, I changed the CSS so that #firefox was displayed to all browsers, and surrounded the html code with an IE-only conditional
comment:

<!--[if IE ]>
<div id=”firefox”>
blah blah blah
</div>
<[endif]—>


The html content is only parsed by IE (and thus takes the default style in the CSS). Non-IE browsers never use that CSS, as they never see the #firefox markup.

Now, the content is controlled by the markup, rather than the CSS. Anally retentive, moi?