soledad penadés

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If you read my Thurday's post, I was terribly undecided about what to talk about (doesn't sound too good, heh!), but after forcing myself to revisit all the special and interesting issues or topics I have been involved in lately, I finally decided that I really needed to talk about communicating and more specially, making yourself understood. So here they are… the slides for Being Understood by Soledad Penadés. (I presume they are not self explanative so I'll probably extend them in an article soon).

The presentation itself wasn't nothing spectacular but I think it went terribly well, given that it was the first time I spoke to strangers and in english. We were a reduced number of people so we could have some interesting chat instead of being a traditional speech, which was pretty cool.

I tried to use keydoob for making the slides; keydoob is a little thingy that (obviously) mr.doob prepared for a couple of presentations he did, but as I couldn't manage to find certain files and also I was beginning to feel the panic attack at 3AM I decided to go for some HTML+Javascript+CSS. I used Script.aculo.us and Prototype for the little Javascript involved, which could be thought of as absolutely overkill but anyway, it was a quick hack ;-)

The good thing of this is that as the slides are HTML with a css style sheet only for screen, if you try to print them they will appear as raw HTML with all the content still looking meaningful. In fact, if you use Firefox and have the Web Developer Toolbar installed, try deactivating all the linked styles - it should do :-)

BarCamp itself was great. It was very very motivating to see so many active people, so many presentations lined up, on so many different topics. I really liked that willing-to-share atmosphere. And in a way, it also confirmed that dream idea we had once of organising an event like that, where people could organise themselves and their timetable, wander around the spaces and join whatever they liked more. And the next half an hour, maybe present something.

So, congratulations and thanks to all the organisers and attendees for the insane amount of work required for bringing it all up and running :-)

So following this post by torresburriel (in spanish), I decided to deactivate the style sheet of this blog for a couple of days. It will reveal its not-perfect-semantic-markup-yet but at least it will be useful to demonstrate that accessibility it's not incompatible with good looking websites.

Long life accessibility!

I had been mumbling around this topic, trying to explain it to myself in a way I could write it here and let you know what I have learnt about css and web design, but I have found this great article: CSS Is not Hard - If you recognise for what is it, via 456 Berea Street's Flexibility makes working with CSS easier.

This expresses exactly the feeling I had about web design: If you try to make it look exactly the same in all browsers, you're dead, dude. You know the usual issues:  it looks nice and cool in safari and firefox (or camino) but you need to make lots of tricks for it to look the same in internet explorer because its standards support is, being polite, poor. But by doing that you dirty the code, add non-semantic content (presentational) to the page. And then you've lost the whole point.

We need to be flexible, accept the differences between rendering devices and enjoy them. As the article points, it's stupid to create a web for Internet Explorer 6.0 on Windows XP2 with a screen size of 1024×768 and full window with the font setting to medium. Leaving apart the fact that not everybody stays on that operating system, and even in that hypothetic case, not everybody has that resolution or even a maximized window, we need to think about this recent myriad of internet capable devices. First example which comes to my mind is trace's PSP browser. And that's just the beginning: pda's, mobile phones…

I personally love to see how my page changes the appearance depending on each browser. I really have reached a point in which I don't mind at all if it looks weird with internet explorer. I am not going to lose any second of my life to fix that for my personal web. And well, I won't propose everybody to get such a radical approach but would suggest to start trying to pay less attention to the "rendering equalness" and more to a good content which is easy to present in every device.

Which is the goal of the world wide web, by the way.

Estaba yo navegando por ahí tan tranquila y apacible, cuando abrí una página (no voy a decir cuál, no quiero ser acusadora esta vez :P). Estaba usando Safari. Lo primero que me encontré fue un alert de Javascript dándome la bienvenida a la página. Bien vamos, me dije. Luego, unos frames como una casa. Mejorando lo presente, me seguí diciendo. Tras ello, todos los links estaban hechos con javascript, una de esas grandes estupideces que abunda tanto en internet. Sí, para ir a las diferentes páginas utilizaba el famoso <a href="#" onclick="…">, etc, etc.

¡Aquello empezaba a tomar tintes totalmente inaceptables! Pero me dije, calma calma, que no cunda el pánico. Sí, sí, emperatriz. Con tanta parafernalia estúpida, y aparte de la basura del javascript para los enlaces, había como millones de etiquetas sin cerrar, etiquetas montadas unas con las otras (del palo de <b><i></b><font></p>… ay… me estremezco cada vez que lo recuerdo), etc, etc, y el caso es que al final, la página sencillamente no iba. De la primera página no pasaba.

Y mira que nunca escribo a la gente quejándome de que no saben escribir html como es debido y de que su página realmente da lástima (nótese la ironía :P), pero esta vez no sé por qué me decidí a mandarle un mensajito educado, supongo que dado que había anunciado la web en un foro de mac, imaginaba que la habría probado en un mac:

Hola, he estado mirando (o intentandolo) la web ———, llegue
al enlace desde macuarium, pero no puedo pasar de historia, las demas paginas me salen todas en blanco con Safari 2.0.
No lo he probado con mas navegadores porque me da mucha pereza
encender un pc.
Por si te sirve de algo, un saludo.

Y bueno, no me esperaba nada más diferente de lo que recibí:

Muchas gracias por tu mensaje y la información, pero actualmente todas las Webs que se realizan se hacen para que sean vistas en su inmensa mayoria por internet explorer y netscape en todoas sus versiones mas recientes y la verdad es que otros navegadores son muy poco usuales, no obstante esto es como el sistema operativo de microsoft, xp, 98, 200, etc, quien utiliza aun el 95 ó msdos ó simplemente el atari para la creacion musical, todo evoluciona y hay que evolucionar a la vez y si la mayoria trabaja con ciertos programas habar que hacerlo asi, aunque nos pese a algunos y me incluyo en el pack, mucahs gracias y suerte.

En fin, que ahí hay uno que necesita de un lavado de cabeza por la cssecta… ;)

• don't tell someone which uses firefox to use internet explorer "because everybody else does it"
• don't think of designing pixel wise, don't expect people to have your screen configuration so they don't see scrollbars when you don't see them
• don't automatically resize the window of the site to fit the maximum width and height - your 1024 x 768px which seem absolutely great may be absolutely stupid if the user has 2048 or 1600 pixels wide screen
• don't use javascript for input validation only. what if user's browser has not a javascript implementation working properly (or not working at all)?
• don't use <i> and <b> - they are deprecated and you don't want to look like obsolete. use <em> and <strong> instead
• don't use <br>, &nbsp; and <img src="spacer.gif"> to position elements - that's designing pixel wise and absolutely demode…
• don't even pronounce the words "optimized for…"
• don't open pop-up's to view a site
• don't open javascript alerts without justification