Goodies to Go ™
May 6, 2002–Newsletter #179
This newsletter is part of the internet.com network.
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Goodies Thoughts – W3C Wants You
Recently, the W3C
released a working draft of WCAG 2.0 for the public to review and provide input
to the W3C. That’s a lot of acronyms don’t you think?
Here’s what it means in
plain English. If you are fairly new to web development you may not know what
the W3C is. Well, W3C stands for the World Wide Web Consortium. Get it? W3 for
the three W’s in the name.
Whether you may have
realized it or not, the W3C has had quite an impact on the web as we know it
today. It has helped to shape the development of the web through a series of
guidelines designed to bring order and conformity to what would otherwise be the
chaotic web.
The W3C was founded in
1994 by Tim Berners-Lee, the "inventor" of the web. The intent was to make the
web more standardized which would in turn make it more accessible as well. In
order to achieve their goals, the W3C seeks input from both industry
professionals and
users. By seeking input from both ends of the spectrum they can hopefully help
professionals add standardization and universal accessibility to the web without
stifling technological advancement or creativity.
Just in case you were
wondering, the guidelines that the W3C produces are not any sort of
international law and you don’t have to commit to memory any of their
publications in order to develop in HTML or anything else for that matter.
However, many of their publications are definitely worth reading and may give
you some insight on how to improve the web sites that you develop. Set aside
some time to read the W3C documentation, though. Much of it is written in
borderline legal-ease and you may end up reading through the documentation
several times.
If you want to learn
more about the W3C go to
http://www.w3.org/Consortium/.
In W3C’s effort to make
the web more accessible to everyone, they are revising their WCAG guidelines,
which stands for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. In short, the WCAG are
intended to help make content on the web more accessible to everyone including such
groups as the
sight and hearing impaired.
Many web designers,
whether they realize it or not, are already assisting "impaired" users. For
example, each time you use the ALT attribute with you graphics and images you
are making it possible for visitors that are visually impaired to know what the
graphics and images are via your ALT text. This is just one way that you can
improve ALL of your visitors’ web experience.
What the W3C is
attempting to do is set a list of criteria that a web site would have to meet in
order to be classified as WCAG compliant. It would also have several levels of
compliance so that a site could possibly be visually impaired compliant but
maybe not compliant for the hearing impaired.
Once a site has achieved
some level of compliance they would then insert some specific meta data that
would alert certain software and/or browsers that the site is compliant. This
way impaired visitors will know immediately if the site they are visiting will
be useful to them.
Currently, the origianl WCAG is
going through its first complete overhaul. The original WCAG document was
published in 1999 and is available at
http://www.w3.org/TR/WAI-WEBCONTENT/. Being that 3 years is a very long in
internet time, the W3C is revamping this document and asking for input. If you
are interested in making your websites more accessible and giving your thoughts
on the subject to the W3C, you can review the WCAG 2.0 document at
http://www.w3.org/TR/2002/WD-wcag2-req-20020426/ and submit your comments
there.
Thanks for reading!
Quiz Goodies
Here’s an easy one for
you this week. What HTML tags to you use to get superscripts and subscripts to
appear in your text?
Read answer below.
Q & A Goodies
Questions are taken from
submissions to our Community Mentors. You can ask a Mentor a question by going
to
https://www.htmlgoodies.com/mentors/.
Q. I’m using HTML
to teach some students how to use HTML, but need to display the HTML code
without the browser interpreting it as code. Is there a way to do this without
embedding an image of the code? Example: We will now discuss the <B> </B> tag. I
want that tag to appear in my HTML code. I need a way to tell the HTML code to
ignore the code and simply display "<B> </B>".
A. You have to
use the ASCII code equivalents of the less than and greater than signs. The less
than is < the greater than is > So here is how to do it. Just put it in a
paragraph and it reads like text and does not execute:
<P><B> </B></P>
*** This question was submitted to our Mentor Community. The answer was provided
by Marty Bozeman, one of our HTML Mentors.
Q. I would like
to make an un-editable text box, can this be done?
A. This is
done by adding the word disabled inside the tag for the text box.
EXAMPLE:
<INPUT TYPE="text" NAME="textbox"
VALUE="This
is text" disabled>
*** This question was submitted to our Mentor Community. The answer was provided
by C.L. Smith, one of our JavaScript Mentors.
Q. I tried
making the white background to an animated GIF transparent (it was sitting in a
square white box which I didn’t like!) and the animation stopped working!!! I
noticed that the file size had reduced from 10 KB to 4 KB although I saved it as
a Compuserve GIF format. What went wrong / what did I do wrong??
A.
The reason it’s smaller and it stopped working was you somehow took out all but
one frame. Not all graphics applications handle animation, so I’m guessing you
worked on it in one that didn’t. Most of your basic image software packages like
Microsoft Paint will not handle animations.
*** This question was submitted to our Mentor Community. The answer was provided
by Eric Ferguson, one of our HTML Mentors.
News Goodies
All of you Linux fans will be glad to
know that the newest version of Red Hat is due to ship the middle of this month.
Click here to read the article
Not a good time for Macromedia
lately. They’ve just found a security bug in Flash and they got smacked for $2.8
million in a lawsuit by rival Adobe.
Click here to read the article
So, where are the best IT job
prospects these days? Have you considered Canada?
Click here to read the article
Quiz Answer
Superscripts and
subscripts are very easy to implement within your text. They work just like the
bold and italics tags in that you simply place a tag before and after the character(s) that you want to superscript or subscript.
A superscript uses the
<SUP> tag like this:
<P>a<SUP>2</SUP>+b<SUP>3</SUP></P>
A subscript use the
<SUB> tag the same way:
<P>H<SUB>2</SUB>O</P>
Be sure to always close
your <SUP> and <SUB> tags or you will have some very odd looking text.
And Remember This . . .
Do you know that today
is the birthday of the postage stamp?
It was in 1841 that the
British Postal Service first issued their "black penny" stamp. Obviously, the
idea quickly caught on and stamps are now used all over the world and have even
become collectible items for some.
Thanks for reading Goodies to Go!
