Re: simple & understandable

On Thu, 24 Jun 1999, Anne Pemberton wrote:

  I still have much to learn about style sheets, so I'm not clear what
  advantage they have.

CMN:
Basically they allow you to specify the way objects in your pages should be
presented. You specify it in a single style sheet, according to the type of
object. The great benefit they have is that users can then add a stylesheet
to override yours if they have particular needs (such as a border around each
graphic, if you are not using an imagemap, or particular font sizes and
colours).

AP  
  I'm using Publisher 98, with a final finish in Front Page to alt tag the
  large image. I can tag the smaller images in Publisher, but I can't tag an
  image map, perhaps haven't discovered how yet...
  
CMN
I don't know if FrontPage98 lets you do it. The actual code you want to end
up with goes

<AREA COORDS="1,2,3,4" SHAPE="RECT" HREF="somewhere.htm" ALT="go to
somewhere">

it is the ALT="something useful" that is the critical bit. You can always put
i in using Notepad to edit the document.

AP  
  It's not Front Page ... the extraneous code is done when Publisher converts
  it to html (Publisher doesn't let you edit the html like Front Page does).
  When I understand what the code does, and know I don't want it, I'll take
  it out. How much loading time is saved? in seconds? milliseconds? 

CMN

rendering tables is one of the slowest things that browsers do, and when the
tables get complex they do it slower. Many authoring programs instead make
fixed-size tables, which means they don't display well on any window which is
not the size you used when you made it.
  
Kynn:
  >* The links in your imagemap are repeated as text header links 
  >  lower in the page, which is good.  I would place a copy of the
  >  picture next to each textual link, though, because it will
  >  increase comprehension for "baseline" users as well as non-
  >  textual users by associating the graphics above with the fuller
  >  descriptive text used later in the page, increasing comprehension.

AP:  
  I'd thought of doing that, but not sure if it was helpful and/or would be
  another stumbling block for non-graphical users. I do have the picture by
  the text on another page on the site: http://www.enabling.org/staff.html
  ... but wanted to try this one with a simpler graphics & word content for
  the opening screen. 

CMN 
I would take a slightly different approach, of having the ALT for each area
match the text used in the links. I don't think it is a critical decision,
but associating the links is helpful if there is a nice way to do it.

Charles McCN

Received on Thursday, 24 June 1999 20:02:25 UTC