Accessibility kick.

[nfotxn]

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.

Comments

[abbazabba.livejournal.com]

Actually, user agent is a term usually reserved for a part of a software package that you never see. It is the user agent that gets the email, and then presents it to the mapi client. It's also the user agent that handles the html and presents it to the browser. Classically, user agents have existed at OSI layer 6.


Good god, who ever thought that damn class would come in handy.

[notofthisworld.livejournal.com]

Just for the record, I had never heard the term "user agent" before either, outside of the HTML specification. And I swear I studied the OSI layers in uni... I think.

It didn't strike me as a bad term, though.

Re:

[abbazabba.livejournal.com]

for the purposes of our class, it was primarily concerned with the SMTP and POP email functions, though it was stated that a user agent exists for each type of TCP/UDP / IP application.

Who knows though, adjuncts can be wrong.

[cub4bear.livejournal.com]

User agent != browser.

A user agent can be a media player like QuickTime or Windows Media Player, or it could be a plug-in to another piece of software, or even a text editor like Microsoft Word or TextEdit on the Mac.

It's not just browsers that render HTML.