Sunday, 12 October 2008

Bad Coding can be Unlawful

This is interesting.  RNIB's campaign for web accessibility:


Another one of the many reasons for good, clean code.  Synthesised speech and braille display technologies won't work correctly without it.  This could be considered unlawful it says, I presume on discriminatory grounds.  


Tuesday, 7 October 2008

Div Span

Validated my div span code and it passed, but only a little bit. Came back with this:

No Character Encoding Found! Falling back to UTF-8.
None of the standards sources gave any information on the character encoding labeling for this document. Without encoding information it is impossible to reliably validate the document. As a fallback solution, the "UTF-8" encoding was used to read the content and attempt to perform the validation, but this is likely to fail for all non-trivial documents.
Read the FAQ entry on character encoding for more details and pointers on how to fix this problem with your document.

Anyone know what this means?
I missed the Span and Div HTML stuff on Saturday cos of London Transport. I hope the Victoria Line, South West Trains and Silverlink are proud of themselves....I blame Bojo.

However, I have done my site structure, wireframes and storyboard (and logged my work). Ready to start writing the content now. Yes, any minute now. Honestly, I'll be reading away like billy-o before I know it...just better check Facebook first. Oh then my email. And then better update myself on the news.

Oh look, I've run out of teabags... Can't read without tea.

Wednesday, 1 October 2008

Questions...Questions....

Hmmmm...OK, not having too much trouble with the HTML part so far (that's to come).

My brain is whirring over the content of my site.  Wondering what I should include...what I should leave out.  Best thing I have read on this (about a year ago so mostly forgotten) is Steve Krug's 'Don't Make me Think!' which is mostly about usability.  Does usability alone make a good website??  A website might be easy to use and be 'fit for purpose', but it could still potentially look awful and beneath the 'surface' have streams of messy, illicit, non-standard code (but nonetheless functional in terms of the user experience - I assume it's possible to do both?).   

So tomorrow night, in an attempt to achieve even a flimsy grasp of 'Good Website Design', I shall be doing a lot of reading and notetaking to get an idea of some sensible topics to cover on my site. This will hopefully point towards some sort of structure/hierarchy for my site (which is currently 'homepage/stuff/more stuff.html') .

I suggest we make a website about how to make a cracking cup of tea.  I know all about that :0)