These are older articles. Please bear in mind the further back you go, the more dated the material may be — in some cases.
Mike Cherim’s Blogging Past
Heading the Wrong Direction
I made some silly mistakes when making Green-Beast.com. I just didn’t know then what I know now… stated without shame or embarrassment. One was the over-use, call it abuse even, of acronyms. I had defined too many of them and had done so in the most redundant way (e.g. the same one defined ten times on a single page), as was pointed out to me when I had experts perform Jaws testing — the specifics of acronym use will be the subject of its own up-and coming web log article. Another mistake, which, too, will soon be an article unto itself, was the lack of proper list use in my navigational menus. Another mistake, as I’ll write about here, is the misuse of proper headings as discussed by the W3C in articles such as “Use headings to structure your document” and “The global structure of an HTML document.”
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Experts Perform Jaws Testing
I would like to thank Tom Glasson and Steve Green of Test Partners Ltd., User Experience Experts, of the United Kingdom, for kindly testing Green-Beast.com v.2 with the Jaws screen reader and identifying the site’s issues.
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Chat Beast
So he tells me: “Mike, check out what I’ve made in his usual modest way.” I do, and “Wow” is all I can say. The “he” I refer to is my friend Jonathan — who I consider a PHP guru of sorts. The thing he asks me to check out is a tidy little web application he made which he calls Chategory.
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Web Accessibilities
“Web Accessibilities” is something you’ll see and hear more often nowadays as it pertains to web design. It’s becoming a popular way to differentiate oneself from the masses from a business perspective, of course, but it goes further. It’s about accommodation to your website visitors. Most developers, you see, haven’t really considered this, or at least as it concerns folks with disabilities. Many developers think access has do to with your average Joe being able to see the content. Some, the truly ignorant, don’t consider that much. They figure that if their website is viewable on Microsoft’s Internet Explorer then they’ve done their job.
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GBDC Permformance
Since I wanted to make sure Green-Beast.com v.2 was accessible as possible, I extensively optimized the pages. The high-styles, like the default “Beast” style all run about the same. For that style I am posting the perfomrance numbers here, by page (Please note that optimum performance is 8 seconds or less at 56kbs.):
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SEO Optimization
SEO or Search Engine Optimization is something which should be taken into consideration when focusing on accessibility. Not for the impaired visitor or anything like that, but for all visitors (access is access after all). To optimize a site for search engines and access the following should be considered, listed in no particular order as all are important:
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Allowable Exclusion?
An interesting discussion is going on at the GAWDS Organization Web Site that I feel may be of interest here:
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HTML or XHTML+XML
XHTML 1.0, or Extensible Hypertext Mark-up Language, is a reformulation of HTML (Hypertext Mark-up Language) as an XML 1.0 (Extensible Mark-up Language) application. It is presently a working draft. The final will be XHTML 1.1. XML is an extremely simple dialect of SGML or Standard Generalized Markup Language. The goal is to enable generic SGML to be served, received, and processed on the Web in the way that is now possible with HTML. XML has been designed for ease of implementation and for interoperability with both SGML and HTML.
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GBDC & Standards
On GBDC or Green-Beast.com I touch on web standards and how they are applied on that site. Here I will tell you more, in some detail, as that is was my “portfolio” site, whereas this site is for more lengthy discussion on these matters.
The big push nowadays is to separate the code or markup from the presentational styles. Want to see what I mean? Just look at the source code for Green-Beast.com. You will find no tables organizing things and no font tags declaring the color or type-face. That’s all done on a separate — and very easy to change and maintain — document called a CSS.
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