[thelist] RE: The need for IE-only sites?

Diane Soini dianesoini at earthlink.net
Thu Jul 8 20:57:00 CDT 2004


1. Some folks may not feel a need to adhere to accessibility 
requirements, such as Section 508, but almost nobody with a commercial 
website can claim they have no disabled users. Our most coveted visitor 
is exactly that: blind, deaf, javascript disabled, and unable to click 
a mouse. That would be Google. So it helps everyone to practice a 
little bit of the accessibility requirements, and lean, clean code is a 
plus to that user, too. Or don't do it. I like my search engine 
rankings.

2. I'm relatively new to the web universe. For the longest time I 
thought the web was just usenet groups and email. I didn't know there 
was more than that until 1998. I can write tag soup ok, but actually, 
I'm horribly ignorant about how to do a lot of it. I mean, when I sit 
down to write code what's in my brain are descendent selectors, the 
DOM, the box model and all that stuff. It never occurs to me to write 
<div id="blahblah" class="blahblah" style="blahblah"><span 
style="blahblah"><font 
class="blahblah"><b>Heading</b></font></span></div><br>, and I do not 
know why anybody would ever write that. I don't know how to make web 
sites look and behave the same in all the browser-war era browsers, and 
I feel ashamed, slightly lesser.  But that's what I'm supposed to do 
when writing for our corporate web site. I don't do it, of course.

3. Which leads me to my third point. I appreciated some of the comments 
yesterday and today, and decided I should look at it another way. I 
make a lot of little one-off web pages where I do the design, layout, 
html and javascript. I write those in as standards-compliant, 
accessible a manner as I am able (without being too bleeding edge so my 
co-workers won't freak out.) I can take pride and comfort in that. I 
can also take pride in the fact that I've given two presentations at 
work now about how to use CSS the real way (not the tag soup way) and 
people, when they've "gotten it", get this light in their eyes like 
"Now I get it! This is so powerful!"

Gotta see this as a process.

Diane

On Thursday, July 8, 2004, at 09:59 AM, thelist-request at lists.evolt.org 
wrote:

> Re: [thelist] RE: The need for IE-only sites?
***
Don't be afraid to try something new. An amateur built the ark. 
Professionals built the Titanic. -unknown



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