IE quirk, web management, Lt3 blogs
Today someone pointed out a really odd font display in windows XP and IE 6. Seems the font sizes are displaying as large (body text was nearly the same size as the 28pt graphic text). I have not seen it before and couldn’t reproduce it with the same settings, but if anyone notices the web development site being odd in IE please let me know. I tend to think it has something to do with the percentages but sheesh. While on the topic of odd IE things, check out Quirky percentages in IE6 from poisitioniseverything.net which says nothing about font sizes but loads about box model fun.
Two decent articles popped up today that were rather interesting… IT is from Mars; web content is from Venus and Is communications up to running intranet? They probably deserve some comment but I will let the articles speak for themselves.
…and finally. Just before lunch today I had the pleasure of sitting in on a LT3 presenation on blogging and wiki’s. It was really encouraging to hear the whispers in the room and the ideas being tossed about. Lt3 has set up an experiemental blog (but i won’t link to it, if you want to check it out let me know) and another follow-up session in April-ish. I think there was but one tool missing in the suite of web apps available to educators… but that is an idea better explored in its own post 
Could be I was sore this blog wasn’t mentioned..
Much ado about Web Standards
With the announcement of a new Common Look and Feel for UW web pages came a solid week of presentations. There was a lot of talk about web standards and, look at that, the current UW web developers page didn’t validate. Funny enough, I forgot to add some quotes on some links that appear from parsing RSS with PHP. When validating the page it didn’t tell me the exact problem though but it helped narrow down the problem by spitting out errors about one part of the page. A little forward slash and a quote into my PHP and all is good again. See, you can’t have it valid all the time but it is fun to try.
So lets talk standards, Mike Davidson has a nice mention about why his site is not valid. He makes a good point, read it.
It is good to strive for standards and do your best to follow them, but please, please, please do not put a “valid XHTML 1.0 strict or whatever code” on your web site. It will soon be as passe as “best viewed in” – save yourself from the web page mullet.
What does have to do about UW’s CLF?
Well the template you get (yes I will post it today), starts off with standard code but the CSS, the CSS does not validate.update: now it does validate! Do I get worried about it? Nope. Is it the end of the world? Nope. Why is it still invalid, don’t you know better you muppet (favorite Brit term of the moment)? Suppose I do and I am not going to justify my lack of valid code with anything other than I just am not that bothered to track down what is the cause of the problem, 1.0 had to be made public and the site works in IE, Firefox, etc. I would prefer to spend my time helping move things along. When time allows I will revisit the problem.
Make sense? Btw, if you figure out how to get that CSS to validate I will give you a cookie
New Common Look and Feel for UW
After a long year and a half of development UW finally has a new Common Look and Feel to follow. This is just a short ‘yeah it has been announced.’ Also I would like to point people to the information sessions listed on UW’s Web Developers site for more information. Those that read this site might be particularly interested in the more technical sessions on Wednesday and Thursday afternoon of this week in MC 2009.
You can comment away on here about the new look or go to the forum and discuss it there.
IE 7 is going to be real? Who woulda thunk it?
It looks like a beta or test version of Internet Explorer 7 will be coming out this summer. Oh joy. I just picked it up from the Web Standards Project Buzz which also as a couple interesting links. I wonder what will happen to all those IE hacks? Lets see if they really listen to what users want in IE 7.
More from (update links as I find them):
Heading Elements, Semantics, and the XHTML template
In the XHTML template that has been proposed to the UW Web Steering Committee there is a recommended document structure that bascially goes like this:
- Header 1 is the department title in the top left-ish area and currently is an image in the template.
- Header 2 is the ‘title related to left nav’ which doesn’t have to show up on every page and it doesn’t on the home page… it is just an option.
- Header 3 is the top level in the content.
- Header 4 is the top level for the right column and can be used in the content area.
- Header 5 to whatever is for document structure at the content creators preference.
Basically what happens now is that Header 1 and 2 are not to appear in the content. I realize that could cause some difficulty with the few people that are actually using H1 and H2 in their content right now and I don’t think there is anything wrong with using the H1 and H2 in the content. In Heading Elements, Semantics and the Spec according to Andy Budd, I think, H1 and H2 used as they are is fine.. and using H1 as your first content header is probably better.
If you go through the comments and the article, there are some interesting points brought up. With a University web space how do you approach it? Is each department and faculty a volume of the larger book collection or a chapter? Or are academic support departments (Registrar, etc) a chapter of the University of Waterloo site, Each Faculty a volume and departments within the Faculties a chapter of those volumes? You could really get into splitting hairs and pulling them out if you tried to classify this place.
How would I apply it here?
My thought is this: Each site is folder that collects many stand alone documents under a general heading that should be structured as proper documents. This will help search engines rank pages at UW better and ultimately help the people that are looking for information on your web site. That is not to say you should not approach each page with the thought ‘is this a document or a series of pages within a larger document?’
Which I think means that if a page is a document in itself then it should be structured with H1 as the most important header in the document, then H2, H3, etc. If it is a collection of pages that are part of a larger document than the only page that should have a H1 is the first in the series. I am not 100% sure that makes any sense. I am very interested in hearing thoughts on the topic.
