/devel

I still haven’t managed to write my promised or planned articles, including framestack technique, but I’m still optimistic to finish them before the end of month. Well, sort of anyway, since time is not on my side.

The thing that probably hit me most at @media was accessibility and issues surrounding it. I’m still one of those evil people, pushing Javascript too far. But hey, I do care and I’m trying to find good, accessible solutions for what I’m building and failing behind schedule as result. Not far enough to worry yet though.

It seems same thing is on other people’s minds as well and they wrote a lot of good stuff about it. Andy Clarke would like to see more education and tax breaks for developers for money spent on learning and developing assistive technology. Andy Budd thought about why legislation is necessary and Veerle has a good suggestion of actually awarding good behavior. As far as I know such incentives worked quite well for ecological issues.

I’d just like to add a word or two about situation in Slovenia, where to the best of my knowledge we don’t have such legislation and almost nobody cares about it. What I found encouraging in London was the number of people who cared and I believe legislation has played a part in making people notice.

It’s been really great talking to Andy, Jeremy, Stuart and Derek at javascript get-together and they certainly convinced me that I could and should do more to make my web applications accessible. However after a few days of thinking, I still have issues that seem to lack a good solution.

First of them is window.onload. Ppk already explained the problem quite well. There’s also a workaround, which I admit I’m using right now, and that is to have an inline event handler on body tag. There are only two problems with this approach:

1. inline event handlers are even more despised than inline CSS styles
2. we are mixing XHTML/HTML with Javascript, which is a no-no as well
3. it doesn’t really work if you don’t have at least a simple function to check and handle, if external javascript code has been loaded yet

Personally, I think all points make a lot of sense when not taken to extreme. I sincerely doubt that webpage/application suffers a lot, if this is the only inline event handler in the whole document and inlined code in head is kept to minimum. We often use CSS to add behavior (a:hover), where it just makes sense and I think we should be able to use inline Javascript on occasions as well.

In my case, I’m living in a country, where majority of users are still on a dial-up and most of them will stay there for a while. Since parts of my application can fetch 20 or more 5-10K sized images on a single page, I don’t want to force users to wait 20 seconds or more before application starts to behave reasonably. I also can’t rely on x/html layer behavior because of framestack javascript technique and their problems, about which I plan to write more in the following few days.

The only other alternative I see right now is to hide UI by default and display it using Javascript, which is hardly an improvement. If anything, it’s a step back.

I guess I’m in this mess because I didn’t build an html version first and upgraded it with Javascript. Why this happened and how come I don’t think it was necessarily a bad thing, is a topic for another day. But it certainly left me with a puzzle to solve.

So, any ideas, apart from obvious one of having a working html version with added javascript?

Update: Ppk does.

This is a first post on my new development oriented blog.

I returned from @media2005 yesterday, where I got the feeling that either you have a blog on which you share your thoughts and possible insights or you have no good way to join the discussion except few times a year on conferences like the last one, which certainly can’t be and isn’t enough.

Therefore I decided to make a new start, this time in English and about subjects where I might have a bit more interesting things to say than what happened to my non-existant cat.

So, welcome to anyone who happened to come to this place and I hope you’ll find it at least mildly useful, if not entertaining.