Re: Web Magazine featuring Accessibility issues

At 07:12 AM 10/19/1999 , Brian Kelly wrote:
>    Many thanks for the comments.  Have now fixed all but 2 of the HTML
>errors (still need to add a doctype

Hi, the doctype should be HTML 4.0 Transitional for most people,
HTML 4.0 Strict if you are using _no_ presentational markup at all.
(I advise, for now, that Transitional be used; in fact, this is
what's used on the HTML Writers Guild site _and_ the W3C site.)

The doctype statements are:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0//EN"
         "http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/strict.dtd">

...for 4.0 Strict, and

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN"
         "http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd">

...for 4.0 Transitional

These go as the very first thing in your HTML document.

>and not sure what to do about the
>URL encoding which the validator doesn't like).

The problem here is that you have something that looks like

      ...nfp.htm&ref=&a=1&name.x=83&name...

You need to encode all the ampersands (&) properly, or else
it thinks &... is the start of an HTML entity, such as &lt;
or &copy;.  The way to do this is to use the &amp; entity
wherever you have used & above.

Now, that may sound wrong, and you may worry that it will break
things, but don't -- it will work fine!  So the snippet of
text above would instead be:

      ...nfp.htm&amp;ref=&amp;a=1&amp;name.x=83&amp;name...

>The CSS has now been tidied up.
>Unfortunately the display bug still appears in Netscape :-(
>I guess I'll have to get into how browsers support CSS parse trees, or
>provide some user-agent negotiation.

Netscape is very buggy when it comes to CSS, but fortunately many of
these bugs are known and publicized.  For a list of CSS implementation
issues, please see:

      http://webreview.com/pub/guides/style/mastergrid.html


-- 
Kynn Bartlett                                    mailto:kynn@hwg.org
President, HTML Writers Guild                    http://www.hwg.org/
AWARE Center Director                          http://aware.hwg.org/

Received on Tuesday, 19 October 1999 15:19:09 UTC