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what's wrong with the web?
I'm not setting myself up as an expert, here, but I am concerned about the number of web sites which seem to be determined to make their content inaccessible to anyone who can't or won't use the latest whiz-bang browser on a fast PC, complete with a million plug-ins and a broadband connection. Everywhere you look on the web you find sites which need this or that browser to function. The web is supposed to be universal, yet so many sites use poor techniques and design, coupled with proprietary coding, which excludes large numbers of people.
This affects people using alternative platforms (which is where I initially came in, being a long-term Atari user and enthusiast, though these days I use a Mac (having done the PC thing for about a decade), alternative browsers (eg those of us who've switched to Firefox, Opera or Safari due to Internet Explorer's security problems), people using older computers, people using newer machinery such as PDAs with small screens, smart mobile phones, set-top boxes, "internet appliances" in general etc. And in particular, people who have a variety of disabilities who may be using specialised browsers or equipment, for example a visually-impaired person using a text browser with a speech synthesizer reading the screen to them, or a specialised speech browser.
Even more ridiculous is the UK government, which has publicly stated it wants to get the whole population online, though they're a bit hazy as to how. And then it sets up government web sites so that any secure features will only work with one browser (MS Internet Explorer, natch), and will only work with that browser on one computer platform (Windows, natch x 2). So much for e-democracy. For more on this, check out this article from The Register.
accessible web sites
Fortunately, the W3C have been working hard on this one and there are already available standards and examples of good practice, including a set of guidelines for creating accessible sites. There is no particular mystique to this, though reading the guidelines can be an eye opener if you haven't thought about this kind of thing before. Although the language can be rather opaque at times, it's worth ploughing through this documentation.
Even if you can't afford the time to read all of it, you can do a lot by following a few simple rules:
- Always include an ALT attribute for graphics (if the graphic is just eye candy, give it a blank ALT attribute, ie ALT="" - this will make text browsers such as Lynx ignore it completely).
- Avoid frames if possible, and if you do use them provide alternative
navigation arrangements. It's what the NOFRAMES tag is
for - not for smart alec remarks telling the user to upgrade their
browser.
I apologise to those of you who've been subjected to such a message when using this site, thanks to the frame-based redirection my domain forwarding service (Clicknames) uses: I have asked them to re-word it in a more friendly fashion, but to no avail. On the other hand, it's a cheap service, so you get what you pay for... - Use simple HTML markup and do all fancy formatting using Cascading Style Sheets. Used sensitively, CSS will make your site look good with newer graphical browsers yet stay usable when using others.
- You can get away with tables for some layout problems (in particular backwards-compatibility with older graphical browsers) as long as you keep them simple so they degrade useably in browsers which can't render tables. But if you can, avoid using tables for anything but tabulated information. Feeding older browsers with little, no or broken CSS support an unstyled version ofyour site frees you of a whole load of restrictions.
- Don't rely on JavaScript, Flash, Shockwave or other such technologies
without providing alternatives for people who can't use them. A site
which is only navigable with a JavaScript-enabled browser is effectively
closed to a lot of people.
Some JavaScript can be helpful, though, eg the script that makes this site unframe itself on loading. Anyone using a browser without JavaScript just has one extra click to make to get full functionality, though I admit this is only necessary due to the clunky redirection mechanism mentioned above!
validate your web site
If you can, start using standard, validated HTML. This really isn't as hard as it sounds as there are plenty of tools available to help you produce good pages. If you stick to standardised HTML and validate it, and code your pages sensibly, your site will stay compatible across browsers and accessible to as many people as possible. The links page of this section has links to authoring software and validation sites.
web page creation software
See the links page of this section for links to some of the software mentioned here.
Unfortunately, most what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) web page editors encourage poor HTML, mainly through trying to be page layout packages rather than document authoring packages.
Some of the worst HTML I have ever seen was produced by Serif PagePlus, which is an excellent budget DTP package for Windows. It's great for printed documents, but it produces appalling web pages. The whole approach seems to be to try to replicate print layout, which is foolish as you can't actually do it. It purports to use HTML 4 and CSS but you can't validate its output as it doesn't include a Document Type Definition, and it doesn't use external style sheets so all the style information is repeated in each page (and there's a lot of it, slowing down downloads). It also uses CSS positioning with fixed measurement units which renders crazily when unstyled, with the text coming out in the wrong order and graphics all over the place.
This is one reason why you find large numbers of web authors who prefer to write HTML manually as you can then control what you do. WYSIWYG editors can be really useful for novices and general maintenance, but for initial design I think manual coding is still the way to go, and I still don't think you can really do without knowing enough HTML to be able to fix the output of WYSIWYG software when it goes wrong.
This applies even if you have a good package, hence you find professional software such as Dreamweaver still has a code editing view. I use Dreamweaver to maintain our web site at work (which I designed), and it can produce good pages, but you have to watch it like a hawk! I don't use it for design work, though. I design using a code editor and use the likes of Dreamweaver to make site management and editing by colleagues easier. Dreamweaver's templating system is the best I've come across for managing large sites, especially where you have people editing content who are less skilled at coding: being able to lock down the main page features is extremely useful!
An exception is Amaya, the W3C testbed editor, which produces valid HTML conforming to the latest standards, or at least it does most of the time - it occasionally hiccups a little, but rarely. It's not perfect, as it doesn't display some attributes. However, Amaya will not generally let you write duff HTML, and for routine editing seems fine: I'm getting along with it pretty well considering my aversion to WYSIWYG editors! I have had to go back to Arachnophilia a few times, when Amaya has succeeded in driving me potty (or where I need to make similar changes across multiple pages: Amaya doesn't really have site management facilities), but over time I'm finding this happens less and less.
Another reasonable WYSIWYG editor is KompoZer, which I've recently tried out for editing this site. Again, I wouldn't use it for design work, but once your design's sorted it's good for editing, as long as you stick with HTML 4. I've personally dumped it rather quickly after it mangled horribly my XHTML pages. Much fixing required: I was not amused....
The aforementioned Arachnophilia is a cross-platform code editor, written in Java since version 5. The latest version (5.3) has become an XHTML editor rather than just HTML, which is good (for me at least), and it still retains some killer features. For example, it can do a search and replace job on multiple open pages, which is a great help for site management.