Another great post on accessibility from Mark Pilgrim. Good follow-up to my last rant post.

Part of my responsibilities for SharePoint these days involves markup cleanliness and accessibility, so over the last couple of years I have educated myself on the ins and outs of these issues, and have managed to learn a lot about browser behavior, the history of markup, etc. I am far from an expert, but I know a heck of a lot more than I did when I started.

One school of thought I come across quite frequently is that web content whose markup is not well-formed or is missing required attributes or something just fail to render completely, in order to ensure that all content on the web is gorgeous, standards-compliant markup. This ridiculously draconian viewpoint loses sight of the fact that the ultimate goal of delivering content over the web is just that – delivering content. It seems bad form for a browser to just “give up” when markup is badly formed, because the end-goal of the person building the page – and the person consuming it – is to deliver content. Much of this debate has been chronicled by the IE team; they have a tough job – bring the standards compliance of IE into this century without breaking their customers/users pages. Hence compatibility mode, legacy rendering, etc. etc.

In the past, I’ve always heard this argument from the standards-compliance standpoint. For example, if a page claims to be XHTML but isn’t fully compliant, it should fail to render in a browser. No “best-effort” rendering, just fail. This of course ignores the fact that even the W3C can’t create a parser that can completely validate a page against the spec, but that’s a rant for another time… Assuming the browser can detect that a page is non- compliant, it should just stop.

Anyway, this is a long and winding intro to a post Mark Pilgrim wrote talking about this viewpoint as it applies to accessibility. I had never heard these arguments before, but apparently they’re out there. A choice quote from Mark’s rebuttal (emphasis mine):

I think it would be wise for people who truly care about accessibility to take a closer look at the so-called “experts” who are participating on their behalf, and to understand exactly what these people are proposing. It’s true that some of their proposals have not been adopted, but it’s not because some cartoonishly monocled villain enjoys being mean to them. It’s because the proposals are insane.

Agreed.

Loren Brichter, the guy behind the fantastic Twitter application Tweetie, has a post over on his blog talking about how and why he chose to put specific items on the bottom bar of Tweetie’s UI. The post is a quick read, so go take a look; I’ll wait.

Welcome back. One of the things I found interesting about what he said was that he chose the items for the bottom bar based not on what was most common, or most popular, or most used, but rather another characteristic that they all share: they’re all personalized features about the user.

This isn’t really earth-shattering, but I found it interesting because in most cases, UI designers try to make sure the most commonly used things in the UI are surfaced. The problem with that approach, as Loren points out, is that you can’t always do that. Sure, Copy and Paste are super-common, and should get first-class treatment, but where do you go from there? At some point, you’re splitting hairs, and if you try to rationalize why one function is surfaced in a prime location and something else isn’t, how do you explain your choice? “Well the data we collected said 51% of people used A and 49% of people used B, so we went with A.” Unsatisfying, isn’t it? At least if you take Loren’s approach, your answer has a bit more meat to it.

Anyway, at the very least this should get us all thinking about our rationalizations for putting stuff in specific places in our UI. Maybe there are alternative methods for making these decisions that we haven’t considered yet…

The rename of the Sci Fi cannel to SyFy Syfy strikes me as completely stupid. Gargantuan stupidity. http://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/archives/weird_syence.php

Update: Turns out it’s Syfy; no capitalization of the “f”. This makes it even worse. Stunning.

Some fan art of Calvin and Hobbes with Calvin a little older. Very interesting. I think it’s time to give my Complete Calvin and Hobbes another read-through.