Web Standards on Kind of Idea

Web Accessibility — Thesis

Thu, 08 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000

My 2008 specialization thesis was about Web Accessibility.

I was greatly inspired by the work of the Acesso Digital team, which some time ago popularized the slogan “Real Accessibility”, the combination of accessibility, web standards, and usability.

In the thesis, I expand on that idea by developing the following teaching formula:

Resources = (Information Architecture + Web Standards + Accessibility + Usability + Keeping Up with Trends)

Real Accessibility = Resources + User Focus + Common Sense

Updating the TinyMCE Editor

Wed, 12 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000

The TinyMCE is the WYSIWYG HTML editor I use in my applications. Its purpose is to replace textarea fields with an editor that offers a variety of features. You can get an idea of its capabilities from the size of the toolbar below:

There are 94 buttons in total. In one of my applications, I used 41 of these buttons. While updating, I decided to trim down the number of buttons, since it is easy to see that most of them are rarely used. After briefly reviewing the features, I reconfigured the toolbar as follows:

Tables on the Web Should Be Super Lean!

Thu, 28 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I know! The days of nested tables for creating layouts are long gone. Thank goodness! But we also need to be careful with the tabular information we publish on the web, whether it’s database queries, data stored in spreadsheets, or a simple table an office secretary created in a word processor (BrOffice or Word).

Here’s a scenario: you’ve just received a spreadsheet (Excel or Calc) with the table below, and you need to put it on a web page as quickly as possible. The following fictional image shows an event schedule in the form of a monthly calendar table. Since it needs to be published immediately, your first thought is to use Excel’s Save as HTML option. That’s very inappropriate, though, because it generates a file with an absurd 311 lines of code. If we look at the code, we’ll see that most of it is unnecessary. In part two of this post, we’ll see how to eliminate all that unnecessary code with as little effort as possible.

Web Standards and the Importance of Semantic Markup

Fri, 23 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +0000

In this first post about web standards, I’d like to discuss a topic that may seem overdone and has been discussed extensively. Unfortunately, some developers do not follow the principles, perhaps out of convenience or lack of knowledge. So I will try to help at least some of them see the light.

I’ll start with two basic concepts, according to Jeffrey Zeldman:

Valid Markup: markup that contains no errors (for example, forgetting to close tags) and no illegal tags or attributes (for example, using the height attribute on tables, which is not allowed).