Accessibility kick.

Some things I'd like to know about web accessibility:

• The average length of an email address:
  When you're designing layouts that scale to tiny resolutions it's important to get static areas like an <input> tag as small as possible.
• Text size as a relative measure to sceen elements.
  I used to know the answer to this. Text size is rendered poorly in older "user agents"† on Macs and Linux because of that whole pixels per inch thing (76ppi on Windows, 96ppi on most everything else). Modern browsers of course don't have this problem. I wonder if it's worth addressing?
  † I'm only borrowing that insipid W3C term to demonstrate how foreign it is even to developers. I mean, lemme fire up my "user agent" and check the sports scores. Whatever.

The weblogs I'm working on right now (two) are my first professional functioning works. That is, they are standards compliant and accessible. As I've expressed to others in private I've had my fill of flashy do-nothing sites. Infact, a long time ago. I've found that excitement about design and development again, this time being a content queen.

Ok, I'm not quite Joe Clark yet. Nor do I want to be, I think he's filled that niche in the world quite nicely.

(no subject)

Yay, it's friday. What do I have planned? Rehearsal.

Then I'm coming home and sleeping.

Next Tuesday is the concert for the school strings program at Hamilton Place. I will of course be there helping Mrs. Braun's group. What I do is basically play really easy music up front and look overly emphatic about every important feature of the music as to cue to kids. It's called "leading", but in an absurd "for kidz" way. Then there's the mass group. About 600+ kids on stage playing a simplified version of the 1812 Overture Finale arragned for string orchestra. Now, that sounds like it might be painful.. but suprisingly the sounds always comes out pretty darn good. I think it's some property of human sound perception, that if you have tones off phase of each other they're preceived as the median. Or something like that.

Oh, and the chamber orchestra is performing too. We're doing our Grieg Folk Dances and the Hoe-down from Copland's Rodeo.

PS: We got a schoolarship from Toronto Kiwanas for our Grieg piece. One of five awarded out of like a few hundred ensembles playing. Pretty cool eh?