A Few Links...

Thursday 15 April, 2004 ( 1:24PM GMT)

I don't normally like making an entry on the Dog Blog just to post links, but a few things have come up that I think are worth mentioning...

Zen Garden 100

CSS Zen Garden marks its 100th design with a cool Eric Meyer / Dave Shea collaboration. It's like those classic comic book team ups - Spiderman vs. Superman or something.

On a side note, although I seem to keep unnecessarily banging on about the Zen Garden (you go there anyway, right?), number 98 is a corker. Has this one been saved up? Is it exaggerating to say this is the best in the 100?

Developing With Web Standards

Roger Johansson of 456 Berea Street has published an English translation of Developing With Web Standards, a thorough overview of the whys and hows of using web standards. This is a great introduction - it's worth keeping an eye on this man.

Oh...

...and the UK's Disability Rights Commission have published their report into web accessibility. It's a PDF. Very accessible.

It says things like a vast majority of websites are inaccessible, the Government isn't doing enough, blind users are the worst affected and the WAI Content Guidelines are insufficient (to which the W3C has responded).

Comments

Comment 1

http://www.csszengarden.com/?cssfile=099/099.css is pretty impressive too.

So said Andy on Thursday 15 April, 2004 at 2:27PM GMT.

Comment 2

i did love the irony in the DRC's comment but sadly the BBC did exactly the same with it's Focussing on Accessibility report. (http://www.bbc.co.uk/commissioning/bbci/websites.shtml). And when people commented, a Word version got posted!

Thankfully some people do publish reports in pure HTML instead of pdfs. But Ofcom (http://www.ofcom.org.uk) seem to be a rare example.

So said andrew on Thursday 15 April, 2004 at 5:21PM GMT.

Comment 3

From the BBC document:

Most designers are aware of the difficulties posed to disabled people by the use of frames and poorly worded ALT tags. But there are many other areas where accessibility problems can arise, including:

* Use of portable document files (PDFs);
* Tables;
* Colour schemes;
* JavaScript;
* Flash.

Does it strike anyone as particularly ironic that they are criticizing the use of PDFs, when the report is published as a PDF? Why not offer it is a .txt file also? Surely the now accepted use of asterisks and slashes to symbolize bold and italic text means that the formatting is not 100 per cent necessary.

So said Mark Harmstone on Thursday 15 April, 2004 at 10:06PM GMT.

Comment 4

Big "coincidence" that the Shea/Meyer one was 100. In fact I find myself starting to dislike Dave Shea. It's not out of jealousy. I feel it's the IMAGES that make the designs pretty, not the ACTUAL styles, like font colors and other typographical thingies.
Meyer and Shea teaming up seems kinda self-indulgent to me. It's one of those things that makes you hate someone, but you don't want to hate them. Odd.
I hate PDF files. Pathetic Dumbass Files.

So said Dante Evans on Saturday 17 April, 2004 at 11:11PM GMT.

Comment 5

I'm not a fan of the Edo and Tokyo design. I do however like number 89, mainly due to loving minimalistic/dark interfaces. I also like number 27. I have a strange taste.

As for Dante: If typography and other such "small elements" of design are pointless, why do most companies spend more money on those features/researching those features than anything else?

Imagery does one thing, it attracts the users attention for no more than a minute.. once that's over you have to have content - which is displayed in a logical and "beautiful" way.

Of course they were going to be number 100. 1. It's his site and 2. Eric Meyer is a CSS guru so 3. It makes sense.

On another note: There a hundreds of sites that claim they are AAA these days or they "validate", yet they remove the links from the icons claiming this, so you "supposedly " can't check. Little do the know.

I've never really bothered with posting on blogs, though I probably will once I get my own one - Nistril - up and running.

So said Robert on Friday 23 April, 2004 at 7:22PM GMT.