want to make a short story long?

Back in 1995/6 when I purchased my first ISP account, I was browsing with IE3. Shortly thereafter, I found the Opera browser (I seem to recall it was 2.12 at the time), downloaded it, loved its speed and features and purchased it. I have continued to purchase upgrades to Opera since then and, for the most part, it has been my primary browser.

For web development purposes, I have always had multiple browsers installed on my Windows PCs — Netscape, IE, Opera — and every once in a while, I would search the Internet for new browsers to see what was up and coming. I read with interest the changes to Netscape and the appearance of the Mozilla browsers. I downloaded and liked Mozilla but its initial slowness was a little disappointing. I downloaded and liked Phoenix 0.6 and witnessed its evolution through Firebird 0.8 to finally Firefox 1.0. I had heard of other spinoffs from the Mozilla project such as Camino for the Mac. However it wasn’t until the other day that I read the release notice of K-Meleon 0.9.

What I don’t like about Opera is that it seems to be (to me anyway) the type of browser that must fill the full screen of a monitor whereas Firefox is more suited to use as a floating window. However, in Opera’s favour, it beats all browsers hands down at what I call “open from cache” speed. When I use either the back button (rare) or mouse-gesture (99.999% of the time), the previous page is boom just there — no delay. Another thing I like about Opera are the mouse gestures although I really only use the back and forward gestures. My third loved feature of Opera is its MDI, otherwise known as tabbed-browsing. Again, like display speed, there is no other browser that comes close to Opera’s implementation of tabbed browsing. Sure, you can open links in new tabs in other browsers but there are times when a link forces a new window to open. I have never examined the code of these pages to figure out why this is happening but it never happens in Opera unless I right-click on a link and select “Open in a new Window". None of Firefox’s options or extensions seem to prevent all links from opening in new windows.

From my perspective, there is a new browser on the block — the one with the weird name. K-Meleon is based on the Gecko rendering engine just as Camino, Mozilla and Firefox but in many ways it is more like Firefox in that it fits nicely floating on my desktop. However, the main reason I am writing this article is because of its rendering speed — just like Opera, it is blazingly fast. As a beta, there are features that don’t work properly — type ahead in the address bar for example — but I can live with this deficiency for a while until that has been fixed in a future release.

Why K-Meleon is so fast whereas Firefox and Mozilla are so much slower is a mystery to me because K-Meleon is based on the same Gecko engine as Mozilla 1.7.5. I seem to recall reading that Firefox is slowed by XUL but I don’t know much about that. Firefox does have some features that K-Meleon may not ever have such as Extensions (my favourites are the Web Developer Toolbar, Mouse Gestures, and FoxyTunes) but when I just want to browse, currently, K-Meleon is my favourite.

I received a phone call today from a friend who said I read your blog today, … which floored me. Other than the one comment from Molly Holzschlag, I didn’t know that anyone was reading my recently created blog. Perhaps few are, but even if one or two are reading it, I feel the need to improve the design.

I do not consider myself to be a designer so I won’t be competing with anyone from the design perspective but I know that I can make it better than it is now (January 4, 2005) so if you see changes over the next couple of months, it is not your eyes or head playing tricks, it is me, tweaking.

Scene: On the stairs of Cirith Urgol

Sam: So, what were you doing?

Golem: Sneaking.

Update: Just after I posted this item, I noticed that Joe Clark had posted to my “Guerilla Accessibility Reviews” item so that makes 3 people reading my blog.

I am not the first person to perform guerilla accessibility reviews, but, given that my contract with MNDM was, unexpectedly, not renewed, I decided to use guerilla accessibility reviews to try to drum up some work.

Guerilla accessibility review is the process of performing an univited accessibility review of a web page. I have extended this process to include providing the results for free to the web site owner along with a “contact me for more” letter. When I decided to try this, I realized that the results must be kept private unlike the messages we constantly hear about IIS or IE security flaws. If the web site owner decided that my efforts were a slap-in-the-face, at least it was done privately.

This idea is not unique: Joe Clark and Craig Saila had done something similar by reviewing the web sites of the Canadian political parties and Matthew Somerville had created an accessible version of the Odeon Cinemas UK web site. In both of these cases, the efforts were public. Joe, Craig and Matthew were trying to tell the web site owners that they could lose customers/voters with inaccessible web sites — the reverse also is true: they could gain customers/voters with accessible web sites.

My inspiration came several months ago when the Webby Awards for 2004 were announced. I was initially pleased to learn that a web site of my provincial government, HealthyOntario.com, received the award for government web site. However, when I reviewed the criteria for the award and read WebStandards.org’s review of the winners, I learned that valid HTML and Accessibility were part of the criteria and only two of the winners met these standards.

It was then that I considered performing a guerilla review of the HealthyOntario.com web site and was most of the way through it before I decided that, as an employee of the same government, I should temper my temper and let it go. I also spoke with a friend of mine, another accessibility advocate, and although he thought that there was merit to the idea of guerilla accessibility reviews — the term hadn’t been conceived at that time — great care must be taken in the delivery of the results so as to prevent angering the web site owner thereby eliminating any chance of being hired to help them fix the problems.

In my review, I could have simply provided the web site owner a URL that links their web site to Bobby or any other web accessibility automated check but that approach simply informs the web site owner that there is a problem with their site and ultimately, they might thank me for recommending the purchase of Bobby services rather than hiring me to do the work for them. Secondly, as many readers will know, accessibility reviews cannot be automated: most WCAG Checkpoints require manual review. My intention is that my guerilla accessibility reviews will be complete: I will point out errors and provide a solution for them and, additionally, I will recreate the page for the client so they (or their staff) can review the changes and see that accessibility does not necessarily mean a complete redesign of the web site.

Given that I am now looking for work, I decided to take a chance and complete a guerilla accessibility review of …, oh yes, I can’t tell you otherwise the review would no longer be private. I am curious as to how others feel about this process. Is it any different than a windshield salesperson walking around parking lots looking for cracked windshields?

Recently, Molly Holzschlag and Ethan Marcotte presented a talk entitled The Marriage of Presentation and Structure at Web Design World 2004 (Molly’s Summary). In this presentation, they discussed the reversal of a commonly used phrase — separation of structure and presentation — whereby presentation and structure go hand-in-hand.

In their discussion, they recommended against the naming of classes (and ids) based on the style or presentation that would be delivered by the class or id. For example, class="red" may appropriately describe the colour used when the class was first created but in the future, the colour may change: this class name would then become confusing at best. They recommended naming classes and ids based on either the function or content of the tag such as id="navbar" or class="firstparagraph". In doing so, the purpose of the style is revealed without locking the CSS into a particular style.

When I heard this, I had a Lightbulb Moment in which I realized that what they were talking about was Semantic CSS: a means of naming classes and ids based on semantics and not style. I am not the first person to understand that many designers/developers use class and id names that represent the semantics rather than the style. It struck me that the title of their talk was somewhat of a reversal of the “separation of CSS from HTML” and I thought that the naming of CSS based on semantics also was a form of reversal because CSS is for presentation, not structure but structure may be used to name classes and ids.

I suppose that one could suggest Structural CSS instead of Semantic CSS as a name for this method of naming classes and ids but the idea and result would basically be the same.

For any of you who know me, I can be quite wordy and chatty. My editor and publisher both have trouble keeping my books within the maximum page counts. My friends know that when I tell a joke, they might as well sit and grab a drink.

My wife has the knack, as many wives do, of cutting through the swath and getting to the truth of the matter and once she said of me,

… if you want to make a short story long, let Jules tell it.

I haven’t any plans for this blog at this time and unlike my friends Malarkey, Feather, and TOOLman, it may not be an example of jaw-dropping design either.

Have a good day.