Re: SEUL: Multiple Replies

[Mark Dunnett <mdunnett@citilink.com>]

Just my two cents. For those of you that don't know me, I've been around for
awhile working on SDOC (not actively for the past month). In my other life, I
am the technical lead for Northwest Airlines Internet Group, and I will be
joining a major software company doing Java work in the near future.

When a browser has graphics turned off and there is no ALT tag, the browser
ignores it. It is always good practice to have an ALT tag, not only for those
unfortunate enough to still use Lynx, but because the latest browsers use these
tags as "mouseovers", displaying the text over the image (or the loading image)
when the mouse passes over it..

It is always a good idea to check your pages. Netscape catches more
non-standard HTML than IE, but no tool catches everything. The HTML validators
attempt to. The perl program weblint is a decent checker, and there are many
more on the web. As mundane as it may seem, if you want a majority of people to
see your pages, it is necessary to cater to the lowest denomination (until the
browser people standardize). If you feel we have an audience that is web
articulate, they probably have the latest browser. The idea is to find out who
is looking at the page, and make sure they are provided for.

As far as colors go, there is a palette of "web safe" colors. Any combination
of those should probably be used if you want people to see pages the way you
design them. The browser safe palette may still be at
http://www.lynda.com/hex.html. Whatever you choose, don't put light colored
text on a light background (a guideline you have adhered to in your examples).

As far as counters go, I personally think they degrade any site. It was cool 3
years ago; it's not necessary now. If you need to analyze traffic, we should
use the server logs.

I am still looking at XML. Sun has XML classes for use in Java programs now.
XML is picking up steam, but still now quite there yet.

Sorry for being abrupt and absent. I'll be around a little more during my job
change, and I'll help out where I can.

Mark Dunnett





Chuck Huffman wrote:

> Will all of the messages, I'm getting behind... Something for everybody...
>
> 1) Text browsers (i.e. Lynx) and W3C validation
>
> These are good topics that you bring up, Doug. We need to keep them in mind
> when we go to put the live page on the site. How many Lynx visitors do you
> think this will impact? I honestly didn't think people still used text only
> browsers, because of graphic intensive web sites and graphical links that
> are so common these days. What does the browser do when a link can only be
> obtained through a graphic image?
>
> I ran a few pages through that W3C validator... To put it bluntly, I wasn't
> impressed. I think that it would be good to run pages through it if you
> have a bug or something, but when it tells me that an ALT tag is REQUIRED
> for an image, I start to think of other things to worry about. However, I
> do believe that the ALT should be there though. Along with always
> specifying the exact size of the image you are displaying. Not that I will
> start giving HTML lesson now. He He He
>
> 2) New SEUL
>
> Bob, I read you emails today and saw many good ideas in them. I put the
> links you suggested into the test site that we have all been playing with.
> I hope I got most of them right, but let me know what needs tweaking. I
> didn't know what a 'message box' should look like, so I winged it!
>
> I am not quite happy with the colors yet, so I put up 5 sample color
> schemes on the page. I like 4 then best and then 5 after that. Keep in mind
> that I can easily darken or lighten any text or background that you request
> me to. Just let me know which sample and which part you wish me to tweak.
> These sample only use one base color currently. I can find colors that
> compliment each one later on for added variety. First we need to find a
> sample to start with and stick with. Obviously, there are many more color
> schemes i could make, PLEASE LET ME KNOW WHAT COLORS YOU'D LIKE TO SEE IF
> YOU DON'T LIKE THE ONES I MADE.
>
> http://cvs.seul.org/~cbhiii/
>
> 3) Counters
>
> Roger, I think that counters will do more for us than the user. When I
> place one on a page, it's usually at the bottom, small and out of the users
> way. I just use them to track were people are hanging out at. If you have
> other ways, that's cool too. Just something that we can add later on if we
> want to track out visitors.
>
> 4) Latte
>
> I went to the Latte site and looked at the HTML examples that they 'picked
> on'.  The examples they gave were valid, but you rarely run into those
> situations. I also can't see why I would want to learn another language
> that is so incredibly similar to HTML. Now if I was telling someone about
> learning to program a web page, I might recommend that they learn Latte
> from scratch, instead of HTML. But for those who know HTML already, it
> won't benefit. (My opinion)
>
> 5) Moving Forward
>
> My job is picking up more steam this week, so I might be replying every
> other day for a bit. Will know more as the week progresses.
>
> I think first we need to finish deciding on the (1) color scheme, and (2)
> the data layout, before we move forward on content much more. Does anyone
> else agree?
>
> -Chuck