[thelist] Site Check

[Bill Moseley]

On Fri, Jan 09, 2009 at 12:56:04AM +0000, Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis wrote:
> * No keyboard focus indication on the Login button, the Tour tabs, or 
> the "Contact Us" button on the Tour page.
> * Keyboard focus on homepage "Take a Tour" and "Contact Us" buttons and 
> Login page "Contact us" button includes their drop shadow. 
> Implementation is nicer on "Send Request" button on the Contact page.
> * Would be nice if the focused tab in the main navigation were 
> emphasised by mimicking the hover highlight.

Excellent points.


> + Progressive enhancement
> 
> While JS might be required for using the service itself, I'm not really 
> clear why it's required for the tour. It's best not to send users off 
> configuring their browser settings when you're trying to sell them 
> something. ;)

Beats me -- I think that's a copy-n-paste problem from the tour
javascript utility.  The point of doing the tour with js is so it
would degrade just fine.  I'll kill the <noscript> section.

A number of people worked on the site, so do have some mix of
developer styles.



> + CSS background-image text replacement
> 
> You get bonus points for using a technique that displays the text when 
> user colors are enforced or images are off in Firefox, but it still 
> breaks in Opera's High Contrast View (since this applies a background 
> color to the positioned div over the logo).

I'm not that up on background image replacement.  Last time I
researched it I came away more confused than I went it as every
solution seemed to have some down side.

Overall, I'd like to redo the css from scratch.  Seems to happen as
sites are developed over time, but I think there's a bit of
"classitis" in this one.  My guess is I could reduce the amount of css
a bit.

I just did another set of pages where I did the "print" styles first
to render all the text and basic layout (for print, of course), then
use my "screen" sheets for positioning that is web-only.  It seemed to
really help keep the css clean and reduced the number of classes and
ids used.  I notice that there's a page that doesn't validate because
two includes on that page share an id.

Thanks very much for your comments.

-- 
Bill Moseley
moseley at hank.org
Sent from my iMutt