Kieren’s techie blog

I must admit I was surprised when the Email Standards Project (http://www.email-standards.org/) launched recently. The project aims to explain why Web standards are important for email. To any techie worth their salt the whole idea must grate horribly. After all, the Web is not email and email is not the Web.

I, and I can’t be alone, just want plain text emails rather than the bloated rubbish punted out by the marketing department (because they can and not because they should). I read my mail on a variety of different devices from my mobile to a desktop PC and using a number of different clients from Thunderbird to Pine. I don’t want to waste time/money by downloading HTML email to my phone (by paying for the extra bandwidth) and is my experience of reading an email really enriched by having it rendered in whatever colour/font the sender thinks I need to see?
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Recently I had a discussion with a Web developer external to the University of Bristol. The discussion centred on the issue of Web accessibility and what became clear was that the developer was under the impression that his employer, a small charity, was in some way exempt from disability discrimination law in the UK.

The developer believed that Web accessibility was of lower concern to his organisation because: Continue Reading »

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Last month I read with interest an article on the BBC Web site stating “‘Most websites’ failing disabled“. The article referred to work commissioned by the United Nations to assess the accessibility of leading Web sites in five different sectors across 20 countries.

The results make depressing, but not unexpected, reading. However, the BBC article also included this quote:

Building dull, technically compliant websites is easy but building commercially successful sites that are also accessible is not

I think the quote can be misinterpreted as a “Web standards == dull Web site” argument. Most developers and designers (should) know that this argument simply doesn’t hold water and is an opinion disseminated by designers stuck in the dark ages of the 1990s.

However, if you read the full quote you realise that it is actually a request for developers and designers to share experiences and resources. Personally I’ve always found Web designers and developers to be a fairly altruistic bunch and many practitioners share their knowledge and resources freely and openly. Continue Reading »

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Every year seemingly sane people decide that the best way to celebrate Christmas is to cover their houses in a multitude of Christmas lights, animatronic Santa’s and 8ft inflatable snowmen. See: http://www.houseblinger.com

A much more worrying trend is that of “Web site blinging”. This year saw many online retailers record record sales and yet, at a time when retailers should be making it as easy as possible to make a purchase, many make life difficult for consumers by blinging their Web sites.

When I talk about Web site blinging I don’t mean a subtle change of logo as you might see on Google, a Christmas message or even a few Christmas-related images replacing other images on your site. No, I’m principally concerned with the likes of JavaScript snowstorms that cover the homepage of a site or the fantastically annoying rendition of “Jingle Bells” that is looped to play incessantly for the entire time a user is visiting your site. Continue Reading »

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