…aka Web Resource Blog 101.

Every week I receive a respectable email newsletter containing a bunch of links on topics related to making me a better web developer. Yes, even I am not perfect (you heard it here first).

In amongst a handful of genuinely useful articles, there are an increasing number of clone sites which at first glance appear to offer their readers The Elixir of Life in one short, easy to digest post.

Too often though, they just recycle content and rely on visitors to fill in the blanks.

Because they’re becoming something of a cliché I thought I would expose them for the money grubbing ‘entrepreneurs’ that they are (IMO).

It goes something like this. Follow along to make some extra cash:

1. Set up a blog.
2. Give your blog a nice Web 2.0 skin. If you can’t design, get a crack designer. Don’t worry if it costs a bit (see 11).
3. The title should have something to do with web development, and make you appear to be benevolent and only concerned with the welfare of other developers.
4. Read other blogs, copy their content. It doesn’t matter if you’re somewhat short on content, see 12.
5. Add ads. This is the real reason for your blog, but no-one will know except you (and me). Also, try and keep the total number of ads down to 10 or less, scattered around the page – or someone else might cotton on to your scam.
6. Create a blog post.
7. Give your post a totally unbelievable title – this will guarantee that you will get lots of trackbacks from people wanting your magic content on their site – or in their respectable mailing list.
8. Add a dash of content. If you know there’s something that’s missing, don’t bust your ass to learn about it – see 12.
9. Post it and they will come – developers I mean.
10. The NKOTB will read your post and thank you, thank you, THANK YOU!!!
11. Because the NKOTB now trust you they will probably blindly click your ads. Ching ching.
12. The experienced devs, on the other hand, will critique your content, tell you where you stole it from, and – most importantly – tell you what you should have posted, supplying links to some real gems that only real developers would know about. In short they will spill their secrets to you.
13. Now you have lots of good content from people that know what they’re doing. Plus you have loads of trackbacks from people keen to show that they too know what’s hip and cool, and that they are also benevolent and only concerned with the welfare of other developers.
14. Rinse and repeat.

‘Oh, great’, I hear you say – ‘another bill’.

Well ok, yes, if it’s from Telecom, it probably is another bill.

But it’s what’s different about this month’s bill that got my attention.

You see, I’d just returned home, after spending the best part of the day picnicing with friends in Dunedin’s botanical gardens (which incidentally were planted by my partner’s great grandfather. He did a splendid job and on a beautiful summer’s day they look great – respect.)

Anyway, our picnic friends were a couple, Tom, who works in the web department down at Otago Polytechnic, and his partner Francis, who had recently returned from Australia after finishing her PHD. It was the first time we had seen them together, and they made a lovely pair.

After the initial introductions and a bite to eat, the girls and the guys paired off, and the conversation between Tom and I naturally turned to web accessibility. It’s something we both feel strongly about and try to incorporate into our working life as much as possible. Unfortunately with the conflicting priorities of marketing people, designers, and those holding the purse strings, accessibility often comes off second best, so we inevitably found ourselves moaning about the state of commercial websites in NZ, and our desire to make them better.

Lightening our combined consciences by airing these issues, and seeing the sun disappear behind some grey clouds, we agreed to meet up later to share techniques and knowledge, said our goodbyes and headed our separate ways.

Returning home afterwards, then, I was actually quite relieved to retrieve this bill-like envelope from the letterbox.

And why was that? Check it out. This corporate communication just has ‘Accessibility’ written all over it.

Now I’m not sure if Telecom are suddenly making an effort to reclaim marketshare, or whether they’d simply outsourced their mail design to a different printer, but two things jumped out at me:

1. the size of the typeface, and
2. the size of plastic window.

As an ex-postal-worker, I can immediately see a number of benefits in the updating packaging:

1. older people can read the address without donning their spectacles, so they won’t open your bill by mistake (your 0900 call logs are safe and sound).
2. the postie can get the bill to the right person the first time.
3. the address can’t slip down out of view of the plastic window.
4. it looks professional, but not in a we-want-to-sell-you-something kind of way
5. the envelope is, naturally, white, but within the plastic window there is also a lot of whitespace.

Now let’s assume that Telecom were thinking about the end-user here, and figured that they could make their bills more accessible to older people by increasing the size of the address text. This, despite the fact that they’d probably prefer to funk up their correspondence so that it appealed to the younger crowd, you know, the potential customer base that are going to be around longer, and thus make them more money. No, instead they considered the communication needs of the secondary, older audience. Brownie point #1 granted. The envelope is more readable and more appealing.

But look at the flow-on benefits. The NZ Post sorters can read the envelope more easily, which helps efficiency when they’re processing thousands of letters a day. And some of those mail workers are probably pretty old too… but even for the younger ones, it’s a welcome relief from 12pt type and of course the scribbly hand-written nonsense that many non-corporates are responsible for. The end-result here is that the sorter’s job is easier and the letter gets to the correct delivery branch quicker. Brownie point #2.

And the postie (read: ‘Postal Delivery Officer’) also benefits. These guys street sort the mail after it’s been zone sorted at the mail centre. They spend the early hours of their day sorting and bundling mail, before heading out on the fun part of the job – delivering it. Despite the well-known risks of territorial dogs, lonely old people, and impatient shop assistants, there are also the less well-publicised annoyances, like addresses slipping down below ‘the fold’ in transit.
So instead of rapid fire delivery into suburban mailboxes, posties find themselves constantly stopping and tapping envelopes to unhide the last few lines of the address. And when it’s that time of the month, and there are thousands of bills to deliver in a short timeframe, your local postie definitely appreciates any extra thought on the part of the product designer. So Telecom score brownie point #3 for making the messenger’s job that much easier.

Now, maybe Telecom didn’t think about the flow-on effects, or maybe I’m barking up the wrong tree and picked the wrong NZ corporate to pin my moral hopes on. Maybe they don’t give a toss about old people, and they just wanted to save money by getting the mail out more efficiently. But no matter what the goal was, the point is that they put it a certain amount of considered effort, for X return, and they got X+Y+Z real-life benefits out of it.

And it’s the same for web accessibility. For example, you might code in Alt attributes and skip links to add blind users to your potential audience, and inadvertently the sighted yuppie on the mobile device also benefits. Or you could increase the size of the typeface for customers with poor eyesight and actually make your design seem friendlier to new customers.

The message is: you put in a certain amount of considered effort for one user group and inadvertently you increase your appeal to other user groups.

So, next time your Project Manager or client tries to pooh-pooh your attempts to incorporate universal accessibility into your site build, have them consider that money well-spent now translates to added value in the future.

And corners cut now – well they might just cut you out of some very lucrative new markets in a couple of years time.

Postscript: Upon opening the envelope it turns out that Telecom are actually running a ‘Bigger is better’ broadband campaign… so only time will tell whether they keep their brownie points or go back to 12pt type.

How often have you seen ads for Front End Web Developers where they advertise that, upon accepting employment, the applicant must ‘hand code’ their sites, without the aid of Dreamweaver or HTML editors?

Here’s one I saw a few months back, in the Webstockers Friday jobs edition:

• Modern, efficient X/HTML and standards compliant hand written coding (we don’t use Dreamweaver or other WYSIWYG editors, etc)
• Photoshop – ability to originate/manipulate graphics for web

I see this far too often, really, and it always bugs me.

Why are they so pro-Photoshop? Why not write “we hand draw our graphics pixel by pixel (we don’t use Photoshop to originate/manipulate graphics)”.

Come on people, that anti-Dreamweaver attitide is so 2000. Dreamweaver is a development tool, and as such it’s up to the developer to use it correctly.

I build standards compliant sites, and I use Dreamweaver. I handcode in Dreamweaver, no less. Go figure.

I use Dreamweaver for its ability to introduce efficiencies into the coding process, e.g.:

• auto tag completion,
  to save me typing out the same code over and over
• code colouring,
  to help my tired eyes scan for mistakes
• built-in reference material (as well as Google)
• file organisation,
  in particular the file linking and the FTP synching
• Dreamweaver templating,
  for clients that do not have a budget for CMS development
• automatic code formatting,
  (indenting etc)
• find and replace,
  across multiple files
• integration with a test server
• fast preview in multiple browsers

Using Dreamweaver does not mean that:

• I am going to build every site using tables
• I am going to drag and drop all manner of Adobe JS/AJAX widgets that I do not understand into my site
• I will rely on the little browser checker to do my testing for me
• I will rely on the design view to do my testing for me

When it comes down to it, you’re advertising for a person to do a coding job because you can’t do it yourself. Why not let them decide which tools they want to use?

P.S. I handcoded this myself in the Blogger editor. Woohoo.

As a conscientious web developer, I build web pages that endeavour to be accessible to as wide a range people as possible.

Inevitably, this means that every now and then I have to pull a project manager, client, or designer up on inaccessible content or a poorly thought out design.

So, I might say things like, “is there an HTML alternative to this Flash content?” or, “the Web Guidelines Web Standards* say that you can’t use colour alone as an indicator of x“ (*the Web Guidelines Web Standards are great for enforcing personal beliefs and they’re pretty much the main reason why I code the way I do today).

It never ceases to amaze me that nine times out of ten their default response is something along the lines of ‘But blind people can’t do that’.

It’s not even a question (‘But blind people can’t do that, can they?’), it’s just an automatic statement – one that the speaker feels totally justified in sharing with the world.

Because ‘blind people can’t do that’, there is thus no need to implement my suggestion, and another piece of partially (or totally) inaccessible content joins its friends in the matrix.

The thing that bugs me, is that we’re supposed to be living in some kind of über information age. Why then, are otherwise well-meaning people, with the power to make a difference in the lives of others, so ignorant of the needs of their fellow citizens?

In the case of today’s ‘stand-off’, a couple of quick and fruitful visits to Google gave me the virtual ammo I needed to prove that ‘yes’, blind people could indeed partake in the activity in question. Armed with this I managed to bug the project manager in question enough that he bugged the client in question into finally accepting my recommendation So, all’s well that ends well, this time..

Checking my Gmail inbox this afternoon, I noticed one of those newsletters for an airline whose air miles scheme I don’t actually belong to, but that I signed up for in expectation, last time I went somewhere exciting..

They had a feature on India, and because my partner rates India I thought I’d check it out. Well whatever else I found faded into nothingness when I discovered this gem of a webpage, for the

.o:O:o. Delhi Tourism and Transportation Development Corporation .o:O:o.

Yes, those wonderful circles were already in the page title (I wonder how they help their Google ranking?) Now, we all know that most clients like a bit of animation and movement on their otherwise corporate homepage, but come ON, isn’t seven counts going a bit far? Or does the average Indian web surfer have an even shorter attention span than that of his over stimulated Western counterpart?

Or, “The eighteen steps of stupidity.”

You know what they say about fixing things that ain’t broke?

Well, I spent most of today chasing an elusive Safari 2 bug (I thought it was a bug anyway). My text resizer tool setup scripts were failing and taking the rest of my onload scripts with them. It was the final day of testing and I really wasn’t happy to have an otherwise compatible site breaking in such a common browser.

Of course, my install of Safari 2 was the default version that came with OSX 10.4. I’d recently had to reinstall OSX, as the previous install was doing some funky things which I didn’t like, such as randomly resetting the password used to access the login account every now and then.

So Step 1 was to try my page out in some slightly newer versions of Safari. I downloaded Michel Fortin’s self contained versions of Safari 2.02, 2.03 and 2.04 from his Multi-Safari page, and loaded ‘em up .. but was still having issues. Plus, I couldn’t launch 2.04 because my version of OSX was too old.

By a stroke of luck, the Mac’s updater box burst into life, informing me that there was an OS upgrade available. I upgraded from 10.4 to 10.4.10 (Step 2), and after a restart Safari 2.04 launched fine. But, I was still having issues.

After a bit of cursing, I headed on over to Apple’s site to download the beta of Safari 3. Interestingly this is now also available for Windows, but, as someone wise commented: “Do we really need another browser [for Windows]?”

I know the answer to that question, and if you don’t then I’d suggest that you head on down to evolt.org and check out the plethora of browser wannabes sometime.

Now, hate is such a strong word, so I’ll simply say that I dislike beta browser releases, just as I dislike the people who download beta browser releases and then visit sites that I build and expect them to work flawlessly in their version x beta browser release. If it has the tag ‘beta‘ officially appended to its title, then that should tell us that it’s not a final release, and it’s probably in beta for a reason.

But, I was stuck – if it was a version issue, and my code was going to work in a newer version, there was only one way to find out. So I did the deed, and after a restart, and with Safari 3 beta installed, I was still having the same trouble.

Now, to be honest, at this point, I really didn’t have any idea what was going on, so Step 3 was to enlist the help of Safari’s helpfully hidden Javascript debugger tool, the ‘Debug’ menu. Thanks Apple.

Once I got that up and running, I knew right away what the problem was. It was a case of the ol’ DOM Exception 8. Hang on. The what? I turned to Google for help (Step 4), but all Google gave me was links to forum posts containing knowledgeable comments like: “..a wonderfully usless error message..” and “..try not to raise DOM Exception 8, whatever the f**k that is.”

Having nearly exhausted all three pages of results for the (exact) search phrase “dom exception 8″ I finally found a link to blech’s del.icio.us ‘error’ bookmark (Step 5) for Webkist (Step 6), only that link was broken, so back to Google (Step 7), then via the ErrorZilla add-on (Steps 8 and 9), and shortly thereafter to the wayback machine (Step 10).

As a side note, I love it how the current AJAX craze hit NZ in 2006/2007 but this old, deleted, forgotten post, was from way back in ’05…

Anyway, after congratulating myself on my small search victory, I quickly realised that the Webkist post, while helpful, really wasn’t all that helpful as it wasn’t actually the same issue as I was having after all. But, it was a lead of sorts.

And then, at some point, a light went on and I discovered that Safari’s ‘DOM Exception 8′ was one and the same thing as Firefox’s Node was not found” code: “8 (Step 11). Given the importance of this discovery it’s a real shame that I can’t actually remember exactly where I got this from. Perhaps my brain started working at this point, but it’s unlikely. Anyway, although it seemed like the-key-to-everything at the time, it later eventuated that it was actually the-key-to-nothing. Well, not quite, but read on for more stupidity..

So, armed with my newfound knowledge, I set up a local test page (Step 12), to test appendChild() and removeChild(). My theory was that my text resizer node couldn’t be removed because I was trying to remove it from its DOM grandparent rather than its immediate parent {insert wisecrack about grandparents and grandkids..}.

My grandparent vs parent tests worked as I had hoped, and I validated my findings after reading this helpful post here which lead me to the relevant docs here and here (Steps 13, 14, and 15). In due course I resolved the bug by using removeChild() to remove my text resizer element from its immediate parent, div#tools (Step 16).

And then I realised.. that my removeChild() issue was just a red herring. Lo and behold, the script proceeded to fail at line 146. Woo hoo.

Line 146 was the cookie test. Now, in the past I have had problems with this particular cookie script, in particular it has appeared to fail in my Safari and IE5 test browsers, and I often wondered if the reason was that said test browsers were perhaps somehow somewhat less than fully functional. But this time I looked to the code for salvation.

Now, I didn’t write the particular cookie script in question, rather I did what any good developer worth his salt would do – I ripped it off Quirksmode. Unlike me, the author of Quirksmode, ‘PPK’, is a proper Javascript developer, and he capably writes his own scripts from the ground up, rather than chopping together others’ snippets with snippets of his own. On the other hand, like me, PPK likes to test very throughly. And I respect a man that takes the time to test his assumptions. Believe me, not everyone does..

I doubted very much that the trustworthy PPK was to blame. And so, in Step 17, I compared PPK’s scripts with my own scripts, aka PPK’s scripts. Now, even though I am an evil guy, in that I take more scripts than I make for others to take, I still like to understand how the scripts I am taking actually work. And, once these scripts are integrated into my scripts, I like them to look the same, ie they have the same formatting, the same style of commenting, etc. This way everything is readable, or not, depending on whether you like a(n) (un)healthy amount of white space in your javascript, like me, or not.

So, back to Step 17, and comparing the code. At a glance everything seemed in order. But, I did notice a little extra whitespace in my cookie script, aka PPK’s reformatted cookie script. Surely this could not be the culprit?

I removed the whitespace, and uploaded the script to test in Safari, (Step 18).

Problem solved, Safari happy, Dan happy, Project Manager probably happy, and I’m pretty sure this will resolve my IE5 cookie issues too.

Lesson learned.

It’s true, I *am* a mental patient =P. For some unknown reason my lobotomised brain thought that once you set position:relative; on an element you couldn’t override it. Overuse of position:relative can create tricky aneurysm-causing IE5 and 6 bugs, but now, thanks to my new found knowledge (courtesy of css-discuss and w3 schools) that in fact position actually has a possible, nay default value of ‘static’, I can finally override position:relative when I need to