This article could perhaps be renamed America Is Not The World: International Sites: Minimum Requirements (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox). Seriously, I thought everyone realised that you have to be explicit about measurements and so on... apparently I was giving people too much credit.
Joe Clark's post Opera: Still hard to defend! may not actually have anything to do with Opera, but it sure does illustrate the sad state of mobile browsing.
Handhelds, mobiles and other small-screen devices are still steaming piles of manure when it comes to viewing web content. The handheld media type is ignored in nearly all of the software laughably being called 'browsers' on handhelds, suggesting an industry-wide disregard for standards... even including the ones that would massively benefit the industry.
It's hardly surprising that mobile phone browsers suck, of course. Mobile phone manufacturers realised years ago that consumers don't care if it's easy to use, so long as it's prettier and smaller than the next guy's phone. Why improve the software when they can just jam in a shitty pinhole camera and sell another million units?
Handhelds are a pain since every single one seems to have a different operating system (or version), each with an entirely different interface. Of the four different handhelds we tested at work, only one was capable of running Opera - the boss's Sony Ericsson P900. That's the only one anyone really wants to play with during meetings.
Frankly, creating handheld stylesheets is a waste of time. There is absolutely no consistency between any of them and unless a client specifically asks for it, they won't get anywhere near a requirements list.
It's not that I don't think handhelds could be great. Quite the contrary - I'd love a fully net-ready wireless device in my pocket. But currently they're unreliable, unusable and incredibly overpriced.
UltraNormal > Help The CSS Working Group With Backgrounds and Borders: At our last CSS Working Group meeting, I volunteered to ask the design community what y'all want as far as backgrounds and borders go. We spent some time talking about the CSS3 Backgrounds & Borders module and we need some feedback (because none of us are designers).
Not sure I have much to add to existing comments, but you might have a brainwave. Head on over there!
The frequency of colorblindness is fairly high. One in twelve Caucasian (8%), one in 20 Asian (5%), and one in 25 African (4%) males are so-called 'red-green' colorblind. ... There are always colorblind people among the audience and readers. There should be more than TEN colorblinds in a room with 250 people.Not only covers what not to do, it suggests what you should do. Includes a short but full explanation of colourblindness.
Vischeck simulates colorblind vision. Daltonize corrects images for colorblind viewers.What more need I say?
By the way, in case you ever wondered... colourblind drivers can tell the difference between red and green traffic lights by their position on the pole.
Le blog personnel de Joe Clark | Footnotes are like unicorns, continuing a discussion on how to mark up footnotes. Clark briefly mentions Gruber's thoughts on whether they are footnotes at all; or endnotes. I have to say, they are endnotes. On the web, we do not have have “pages” in the same sense that a book does; so all notes will be at the end of the document. So they're endnotes.
As for a glyph... I wonder how many people truly know what most glyphs mean. But in any case, the hooked arrow reminds me of the Enter key on my keyboard. Meaning start a new line, or submit something and go elsewhere. So, while it might look nifty it doesn't really describe what's happening. Up arrow seems a little “iffy” to me since I'm not totally convinced it has semantic meaning along the lines of “return to a specific place”. To me it just says “go up in a nonspecific way”.
Perhaps an up arrow with a horizontal line would work. Like |← but vertical. I'm afraid I have no idea what that is actually called, nor whether there's a glyph.The glyph is “Upwards Arrow to Bar” (as Zeldman would say, hat tip to Joe Clark :)). However, I've seen that sort of notation used to describe the precise limit of a measurement (my father was an architect so I saw lots of plans) and that does seem to describe the concept of “return to a specific place above”.
On an unrelated note, I cannot understand why people think we standards advocates are obsessed with minutiae.
Journal of CmdrTaco (1): If you visit Slashcode.com you will notice that it is now running a brand spanking new CSS template ... I expect that soon after [implementing it for slashdot] we'll actually be ready to give the tired old design a facelift.
Slashdot is one of those sites that evangelists have frequently recreated in CSS/XHTML as a proof of concept, along with Google, Amazon, etc. For a geek website, it's been slightly surprising that they never actually accepted any of those designs for use; or at least did it themselves.
But then, it's not really that surprising. It seems that the /. crew are mostly coder types and not designers or web developers (or journos, for that matter). Coders are not web developers and rarely produce best-practice markup since their attention is on the application. The markup their applications spit out is generally an afterthought so that the plebs who can't just read the source code can actually see something.
There is nothing actually wrong with that so long as there is a web developer working alongside the coder. But, sadly, most of the world's management is yet to understand that they need to pay someone to do the interface.
So anyway, well done to Slashdot for coming around the CSS way of life. I hope they reduce page weight, save bandwidth and get better search ranking; not to mention all the other benefits :)