On 1/16/06, Jeff Keller <jrk_om@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> Seems like the old ... if a tree falls in the forest but no one is around,
> did it make any sound ...
> Designing to the standards is good in that hopefully the browsers become
> more compliant with time. The goal is to communicate though. If 80% of the
> people are using browsers that don't implement the standard that you code,
> then the effort is for your own amusement. Although both IE and Opera
> display the page title, probably not many people notice it. I guess I amused
> myself ...
True. But I try to design my site in such a way that it breaks
gracefully. I do get some odd behaviour with IE at times (and Netscape
4.x is pretty much a joke for CSS) but the site is still completely
useable. That's mainly because the other thing I've done is focus on
the content rather than the design. I tend to write text-heavy
content-based sites so then when certain browsers do have problems
with the CSS it's not much of an issue.
For that matter, it's still ingrained in my head that I should design
things with Lynx compatability in mind. Now most of the time I don't
check it because I know how it handles pages but sometimes I will take
a quick peek just to see that things are looking right.
> A surprising thing I found is that if you put the DOCTYPE statement in the
> page, Msoft's IE actually responds differently. When I put the strict
> DOCTYPE statement in, IE ignored some of the older align tags. This should
> help me move html towards strict 4.01 compliance! That's nice.
Yes, I think a lot of browsers do that. I makes a certain amount of
sense since different DOCTYPEs do have different code that's
considered valid. What I find annoying with IE is that if I do view
source, I see the actual HTML code for the page, if I choose to save
the page though I get what IE's html parser does to the source code. I
made that mistake once when I didn't have ftp access from where I was
working and wanted to save my website to work on another machine.
Still a useful exercise though if you want to find out how IE actually
"sees" your site.
> It would have been nice if other browsers displayed the ALT tag. The info
> should be relevent. Why insert it both for an ALT tag and a CAPTION tag (if
> the caption tag existed)?
Because they aren't the same thing. What I mean by a caption is to
have text displayed with the picture (such as above or below,
preferably definable in your CSS), not text that's displayed when you
hover the mouse over the image. Here's an example, at the top of my
webpage (http://www.tildefrugal.net/) I have my tildefrugal logo. The
ALT text for that image is "~Frugal", which would be displayed in a
text-only browser (or read by a screen reading program) and acts as a
good substitute for the image. That logo doesn't need a caption.
However, for a photo I might include ALT text which provided a good
description of what is in the photo and not want that information
displayed when viewing the page graphically. However, I might still
want to include a caption providing information about where the photo
was taken and maybe technical details. There are plenty of valid ways
that I can make that text appear near the photo in a graphical
environment but no way that I can associate that text with the image
for a non-graphical environment. Whereas with a form for instance, I
can do something like:
<label for="name">Name:</label> <input type="text" id="name" />
In that example I've defined "Name:" as being a label for the text
input for the form. For a graphical environment that doesn't really
make much of a difference but, in a non-graphical environment it makes
sure that the text is associated with that input in some meaningful
way. This is particularly useful for if someone is using a screen
reader as now the reader "knows" that the input box's label is "Name:"
and it will assist in navigating the form.
It also goes back to the whole original concept for HTML where the
HTML is supposed to only describe the structure of the document and
visual rendering is left up to the browser or, more recently, is left
up to CSS. If you have a caption tag then you're able to define that
part of the document's structure. If you don't have that then it's
just arbitrary text.
Then again, at times my preferred word processing environment is a
good text editor and doing all of the formatting in LaTeX so I think
that puts me squarely in the "crazy ideas" camp.
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