[111Design.ca]

111Design Consulting

Supporting Industry Standards and Accessibility [Navigation]

Menu

93 and welcome

111Design is a Standards-oriented Web Design and Web Accessibility Consultancy based in Burlington, Ontario, Canada. We are proud to be a member of GAWDS (The Guild of Accessible Web Designers) and W3CSites.com.

Our graphic design services include photo editing/retouching and complete vintage photo restoration.

news and updates

2008/12/08
Finally we are back up and running. It's been one problem after another these past couple of years thanks to B-u-r-l-o-a-k Systems Inc. Their faulty power supply literally blew up and fried my P4's motherboard. The power supplies in our other computers just suddenly died (3 in a row? I have lost count). Not the first time Burl-joke has sold me faulty/used hardware & peripherals claiming they were new. Don't get me started about their clueless technicians. Why did I keep going back to them?? Because I had paid for the parts and service and expected them to make things right. Sometimes it's better to cut your losses and go elsewhere. Though I was tempted to sue them and had just cause, it would not have been worth the time and bother. One day Mr. Gil T. (read "guilty") Smith's karma will catch up with him. Sorry for the rant.
To make a long story short, I bought a brand new system from Nigel Computers and had them replace the power supply in poor old "Hal". These guys are great. Trustworthy, competant and a pleasure to do business with!
2007/04/08
Happy B.O.T.L. Day! So far this has only been tested on Firefox/Windows, but I've increased the line-height (leading) for paragraphs and lists in the Content div. This change effects the entire Site. Percentages are used in the style sheets. Will do more testing on Tuesday.
2007/04/07
111Design is not taking on new Site projects at present though we are available for Site testing, re-design work and training. This does not effect Photo Service clients. Several previously offered services were removed from the Site today: Graphic Design and Custom Style Sheets. I'm too tired to go into the reasons why. Let's just say, it was not bringing me joy.
2007/04/06
You may have noticed that we made some changes to the style sheets, and the graphic header has been pared down. Some folks were of the opinion that the design was "too busy". Well, that wasn't my reason for editing the graphic, though it did get me thinking. The text may have been difficult to read at high screen resolutions.
One of the new CSS features added was the a:focus element, a keyboard equivalent for a:hover. When tabbing through links and form fields now, these elements are highlighted so you're less likely to get lost on the page. The a:focus element is supported in Standards-compliant browsers only. That means Internet Explorer users will not be able to benefit from it. We were hoping IE7 would support it, but sadly, it does not.
Extra navigational support has been added for hand-held browsers and people who use their keyboard instead of a mouse. The "skip to" Navigation link (top of each page) is visible on all desktop browsers. A second Navigation link is hidden except when the Handheld style sheet is applied. A new "Top of Page" link was placed at the bottom of the Navigation Menu to help these same users get around more easily.
2006/12/20
Well the jury is in and it seems Accesskeys are out. They simply cause too many conflicts—in other words, problems for the end user. So for now I've taken them off the Site and stopped pitching them to my clients.

Top

why the standards exist

[XHTML - eXtensible HyperText Markup Language]

Author: Shari A. Scott

The following article is a bit on the technical side, but its aim is to educate designers as well as the average Site owner. It explains why valid, semantic, and purely structural markup is important, and why most Sites on the Internet today are in jeopardy of becoming obsolete. I wrote this back in 2003. Some of the information is dated but general "good practices" and "don'ts" still apply. It's a good place to start for those who are new to the concept of Web Standards.

semantic web dreams

I still have a dream that the Web could be less of a television, and more of an interactive sea of shared knowledge. —Tim Berners-Lee

Just over a decade ago when Tim Berners-Lee invented the hyperlink—a miraculous little piece of code from which the World Wide Web was born, it would have been difficult to imagine what the Internet of today might look like. In retrospect, the commercialization of the Web, like any technology capable of conveying information was inevitable. Though that, in itself, was not necessarily a bad thing, shortly after the first graphical browsers arrived on the scene, an unexpected trend emerged—a trend that began with the infamous center tag, and resulted in a large part of the Web being inaccessible to many of its users.

The abuse of HTML tags—using non-semantic markup to achieve some presentational effect on the user's screen, creates problems for user agents that read text aloud or render it with a different default styling than the author expected. h1, for example, indicates the main heading on a given page. It should never be used just to make text appear large. Nor should the table tag be used to create a columned page layout. Tables are meant for organizing tabular data.

Semantically non-sensical Web pages are difficult or impossible for machines to make sense out of... because HTML was meant for structuring data, not styling it!

It's a sad fact that out-of-date browsers do not render HTML styled with CSS correctly or consistantly. As a result, many designers give up trying to implement the standards. Times have changed though, and the new browsers do get it right. The percentage of people using a legacy browser (like Internet Explorer 4) is probably less than one percent.

Crafting a Web page should not feel like a mystical operation. One has to "cross the Rubicon" and vow to write valid code regardless of how that small percentage of broken browsers might render it. When in doubt, serve them unstyled content—which would be legible even in a text-mode browser like Lynx. Stop obsessing over pixels and concentrate on what's important: the content. Information should come first and foremost.

Most users can upgrade their browsers far more easily than people with disabilities can 'upgrade' their eyes, ears, or limbs. —Jeffrey Zeldman

It's important that documents make sense semantically—as well as being technically correct or "valid". This requires human intelligence. Just because the markup validates (and most Sites don't) does not mean that it is semantically correct.

If you're already using CSS, the ultimate goal should be to separate completely the framework and content of your pages from all the presentational stuff. That means eliminating every font and center tag and attributes like bgcolor. It will make for easier editing too because the amount of source code has been drastically reduced.

Re-designing a Website used to mean editing each page, each table cell, each font tag one at a time. And for a large Site, it was a painstaking and costly task that could take weeks or even months. With CSS, you edit a single text file—the stylesheet. Every page referencing it reflects the changes instantly. Additional style sheets targeted to specific media can be linked to the document with a single line of code. This is far more efficient than writing duplicate HTML pages.

Web Standards are aimed at simplifying our methods, while at the same time giving designers and end users more control over rendering. When writing valid code becomes second nature, your creative juices will begin to flow. Take away the style sheet, and the content is still readable. It doesn't even look too bad. Now that is progress. »*

Top | Next » (Page 2 of three)

Copyright © 2003-2009, 111Design.ca