Some people mix all their styling in with the HTML, often because that’s how their WYSIWYG editor does it for them. But I don’t think that is a good way to produce web pages. The main reason is that What You See Is Definitely Not What You Get. OK, you may get it, but someone else using a different browser may not. So I think that the best way to produce web pages is to hand code them.

And the best way to style them is to use CSS. There are a thousand reasons to go this route. Read Eric Meyer or Jeffrey Zeldman or Molly Holzschlag or a thousand other web gurus to find out why.

So, let’s take it for granted that you are using CSS to style your web page. How do you edit the CSS? You go and get yourself a copy of Style Master, which is a product of Western Civilization, an Australian company which, I think, is located in Bondi, home of Australia’s most famous, although not its best, beach.

Should you use Style Master because it is Australian? Absolutely not! You should use it because it works, and it works very well. They have very satisfied users all around the world. Along with TopStyle it is, in my opinion, the best CSS editor that I have found. TopStyle and Style Master will both do what you want. I have tried both and have stuck with Style Master now for the last couple of years.

I don’t, in fact, do a lot of web development. That means that when I get back to it, like I am now, there are many things that I have forgotten. Style Master fills in the gaps in my knowledge. There are wizards for creating sites from scratch, using valid CSS. There are on line tutorials, good documentation, and even a related product called Layout Master. Layout Master is no longer a supported product, you can read why at their site. However, while I don’t use it for building sites, I found it to be a good tool to help me learn about absolute positioning of elements on web sites. It is a free download and could be useful if you are starting out in web design.

You will also find a number of courses available for download at very reasonable prices. I went through these courses a year or so back and they were invaluable.

The final thing to say about Style Master is that Maxine Sherrin and John Allsopp, the two people behind the company, are committed to web development and web standards. They conduct a number of international conferences, all of which are well attended with great speakers.

Disclaimer – I have no connection with Western Civilization and have never met or spoken to either Maxine Sherrin or John Allsopp, although Maxine did respond to an email I sent to her about 18 months ago.

Other things got in the way and it never seemed to get done.

But two things spurred me into action. First my business site Midnight Software got broken – I don’t know how, and it doesn’t really seem to matter anymore. One day it was working, and the next I got PHP error messages. And I don’t know why.

The second thing is that I was asked to build a blog site for someone else. And I thought that if I am going to build one for them then I may as well build my own. And so I have.

Most of the articles from Midnight Software have been moved here. The Midnight Software site has not been fixed, rather I have replaced it with an old version using static html.

This means that there are some links on the midnight software site that don’t work, but I hope very few, and I will go through those soon and fix them. There are also some links here that are likely to be broken because the site structure on this blog is different from the old structure. I will fix those in the coming days. There are also a few things which are incomplete at the moment.

This site uses WordPress which I think is probably the best blogging software available. It helps if you know a bit of PHP, or at least are comfortable with monkey-tail programming languages – that is, any language which uses { and }, like C or Java, or PHP. But you don’t need to know much, just enough to understand what the different templates are doing. A knowledge of HTML and CSS is also invaluable.

What about the old site? Well I am unlikely to leave it as it is. Even though it is now likely to remain much more static than in the past I don’t think I want it to remain a static, purely HTML site. I am likely to move to a Content Management System (CMS) once again.

Previously I used Xaraya, and I am more than happy with it. I have recommended it to clients, and I will continue to do so. But it might be a bit big for my needs. There is also the possibility that I will try out another CMS. Drupal is one that I have wanted to use, but the latest version requires PHP version 5, and I am only using 4.3 here. So I am unsure.

The other possibility is to build my own, and that is certainly tempting.

More on this when I make a decision.

Yesterday I was doing some research for another site I am working on and came across the well known Lorem Ipsum words.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

There has been much debate about the origin of these words. Some claim that they are just gibberish. Others, including The Lipsum Site maintain that they are words from Cicero’s de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum (The Extremes of Good and Evil). For most of us, myself included, that would still qualify them as gibberish. Although I did study (perhaps study is putting it too strongly) Latin at school I failed miserably and the words would have made no more sense at the height of my linguistic prowess than they do now.

Whether they are, in fact, a quote from Cicero who apparently wrote them down in 45 BC, or merely made up words, they are nonetheless ubiquitous in the printing world and these days as part of most web site developers’s arsenal.

The words are used as filler. When you design a site you need something to fill in the space to see how your site will look. The beauty of these words is threefold. First, they represent a more or less normal distribution of letters and word lengths so that their appearance is very much that of normal text. Second, a reader is not distracted from the design by the content. And third, you don’t have to make up any gibberish yourself.

The problem is that you have to remember to remove the Lorem Ipsum text and replace it with something a bit more useful before you publish your web pages. And this is something that seems to be forgotten by some developers. The site where I saw it yesterday had it on a page entitled “Disclaimer and other Legal Mumbo Jumbo”. Well, they got that half right. But it is the sort of page that it is easy to put together in a hurry and forget about. And that is what I assumed happened in this case.

I did a Google search of Lorem Ipsum and was rewarded with a result of “about 661,000″ links. Now I didn’t check all of these out – if I can get a government grant to conduct this important research then I would be happy to do so. But I did look at some. There a quite a few, and by that I mean a lot, of sites which are about Lorem Ipsum. So many, in fact, that Cicero could claim to be one of the world’s most successful bloggers. Now that would be an area worthy of a research grant – A Study into the Relative Ranking of Cicero Amongst Bloggers on the World Wide Web.

But a number of sites, and it appeared to be an increasing number as I went further down the rankings, were sites which had obviously forgotten to remove the offending text from their pages. Some sites had obviously been published with the Lorem Ipsum text but have subsequently removed them. But the tell tale sign is still there in the Google search results.

There are myriad traps awaiting the web site developer. This is just another one of the many.

In fact the link is not broken. It is a syndicated feed of the information that the site owner wants to make available in an easier manner than the normal searching of the site.

Let’s suppose that there is a site which you visit regularly because it regularly has information which interests you. But you don’t want to have to check every day just to find that it hasn’t been updated. This is where syndication comes in. With a feed reader you can check to see if new information has been added to the site without you having to visit it with your browser. So you only go to the site when something new has been added.

First you need a feed reader. There are a number of them around for all the different platforms. If you are using the Firefox browser then there is one, perhaps more, plugins or extensions which will get feeds within while you are in your browser. I have the plugin Sage installed in my Firefox browser.

There are other feed readers you can use which are separate from your browser, and many people find these better suit their needs. One of most popular is FeedDemon from Bradbury Software. It isn’t free, but it is relatively cheap and it is a very good feed reader. There are also free readers available. One which I have used is SharpReader. Whichever reader you use the principle is the same. You drag, or copy, the RSS or Atom, or XML link to the address bar of the reader and the reader will then check the sites for updated content.

For example, on this site the RSS link is to
http://www.midnightsoftware.com.au/index.php/
articles/general?theme=rss

The feed reader will go to this address and present you with a list of titles and summaries of articles. If any of them interest you then you click the title and are taken to this site to read the article. If nothing has been updated then the reader will bypass this site.

I have 20 or more site which I regularly check out through my feed reader. Sometimes I delete sites, and sometimes I add others. Some sites do not have new content very often, but when they do I don’t want to miss it. And I never have to go the actual site just to see if something has been added.

RSS has been around for quite a while. There are a number of versions, and a few different formats. But most feed readers can handle the different formats, and a number of sites publish in more than one format.

If you regularly check out different sites for information then using a feed reader could save you a lot of time. And if you publish information you should consider making it available in RSS or Atom format.

From a forum for particle physicists to discuss the esoteric properties of vector bosons, it is now a place for anyone and everyone to discuss anything and everything.

I read recently that there are 40,000 new blogs starting up every day. The web has democratised the publishing world.

But what sort of language should you use on the web? Writing styles are obviously varied and reflect the personality of the author, and the nature of the site. As they should. But one thing that I have noticed is the prevalence of, what I would call, bad language, in an increasing number of blogs. I’m sure that the writers don’t consider it to be bad language, rather the vernacular appropriate to their culture, and perhaps to the audience of the site.

But the web is not like the spoken word. It is, perhaps, a more informal medium than the printed word. But it cannot be likened to a television or radio program, or even a movie. What is put on the web generally stays there. And even if you remove a page it can have been cached or copied who knows how many times.

Perhaps the nature of the site means that it doesn’t matter. But these things can come back to haunt you, and an author of careless words may find themself at a later time not being taken as seriously as they would like, or have inferences drawn from the language which they have used at an earlier time.

Offensive language gains you no visitors but it may put others off.
Eric Meyer, a CSS expert, and all round guru of web related matters has timely advice at a web site for discussing CSS.

If you wouldn’t say it out loud in front of your grandmother while in a place of worship, then you probably shouldn’t say it on the list either.

Sound advice for any site, in my opinion.

They are bold statements to make and I have no statistics to back them up. Nevertheless I believe them to be true.

I am pretty sure that most web servers run on a Unix platform. What the breakdown of that is I have no idea, but Linux is certainly very popular in the web hosting world. There are Windows hosts running IIS. How many? I don’t know. But whereever you look you find a LAMP – Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP – installation.

What about the statement that most developers use Windows? I base that on the fact that Windows have the largest desktop market share. Sure, a lot of web developers use Macintosh. For some it is because of their graphic design background, for others it is because they realise that for designing webs the Mac is a superior platform, or so they say. And some people, actually quite a lot, I think, develop on some species of Unix, again often Linux. I know this because they mention it in forums and other places.

However, I still think I come across more people developing in Windows than any other platform.

I develop in Windows. Not because I think it is better, but because I also write programs and most of my clients use Windows, and I don’t want to shoot myself in the foot by not having the right platform to develop the applications that they want.

But the problem arises when you want to test your LAMP web site on a Windows machine. If the web host ran IIS on its server you have no problem. I have IIS on my XP. But my hosting company runs Apache on Linux with a MySQL database and Perl and PHP installed. The same as most hosting companies do.

You can set up Apache to run in Windows. The same for MySQL, PHP and Perl. But they are pigs of things to set up and configure properly. Don’t get me wrong, it can be done and has been done by thousands of satisfied web developers.

But you needn’t go to all that trouble. There are a few products which make the set up a breeze. You can find some at SourceForge and there is another called XAMP which might be worth a look.

I use a product called WAMPServer which you can get from the SourceForge site. I didn’t get it because it was the best, it was just the first one that I came across some time ago. But I have heard good things about XAMP, the choice is yours. WAMPServer didn’t install Perl, but I rarely use it and I installed it separately myself.

There is nothing magical about any of these products but they are free, easy to use, setup and configure and they certainly make setting up a local web server a breeze.

There are others who suggest that standards are a waste of time, and in reality, Microsoft has the lion’s share of the market, so they, rather than W3C, the World Wide Web Consortium, set the standard.

Personally, I am a practical advocate of standards. If I am building a page and it doesn’t render properly the first thing I do is validate the markup. If you build to standards then it is easier to find out problems. The second reason I try to be standards compliant is because it makes it easier to build accessible pages. And the third reason is that, I am a computer programmer. I am used to building things according to the specs. As a programmer I am also used to the specs being a lot of rubbish and in no way representing the desires of the users, but that is another matter.

Those, to me, are reason enough, to build web sites according to the standards, or recommendations as they call them, of the W3C. And like everyone else who designs according to those standards I have problems with Internet Explorer. Every designer knows the scenario. You build a page, test it in Firefox or Mozilla or Opera or Safari if you are on a Mac, and it looks great. You then test it on IE and it looks rubbish. You get up, wander around a bit cursing, put in a hack to fix it, and go on to the next stage. And the same thing happens. Over and over again.

I work at home and so my wife gets to see and hear the frustration and mounting anger as I condemn Microsoft to seven eternities in hell. By now she knows that IE is a bad browser, it is broken. She knows that Firefox is better. But which browser does she use? You guessed it. Internet Explorer.

I could have installed Firefox on her computer but intentionally I didn’t. Everything else on her PC is there because I installed it. My wife is an intelligent woman. She could install all her own software but she takes the view that she doesn’t need to, I will do it for her. But I didn’t install Firefox. I was waiting to see how long it would be before she realised that her browser needed changing. She knows I use Firefox, and she knows why, I have told her often enough. But she doesn’t feel the need to change. Why should she? IE works well enough.

And therein lies the problem. If people who know that there is a better browser out there won’t change, what hope is there for more standards compliance. Some of them might say that they know that Firefox is better but they couldn’t be bothered. In my wife’s case she doesn’t have to bother. All she has to do is ask. And she has asked me to install plenty of other software.

I think for most people, changing to a standards compliant browser is a tenth order issue, its importance rating is practically zero. And as long as users won’t change designers have to continue to build sites that work in all browsers. And while we do that we perpetuate the users’ reluctance to change. And so the circle goes round.

Is there any chance of change? Will standards compliant browsers ever have market dominance? I fear the answer is no. Rather sad, isn’t it?

A little background might be in order.

On a normal web site, not a web application, but a web site, like this one, a page is displayed in the browser because a request was sent to the web server asking for the page. The user either types in the http address in the browser, or, in effect, does the same thing by clicking on a link from another page within the site, or from another site altogether.

So, for example, if you type
http://www.midnightsoftware.com.au
into the browser text box and hit enter, click go, or whatever you do with your browser, the address for my site is sent through various servers until it hits the server hosting this site. The entire page is then sent back to you and loaded onto your computer and displayed by your browser. This is all pretty straight forward.

But the important thing is that the server, having sent the page you requested has now forgotten all about you. It is busy serving up other pages, or even the same page, to satisfy other requests. It has done what you asked of it, and moved on.

But it doesn’t really feel like that to you. You are viewing a page within this site, and if you see a link that interests you then you click it and move to another page. The perception for the user is that viewing a web site is like looking at a magazine – you can flip to any page you like but you still have the entire magazine in your hands until you put it down.
But that is only a perception. All you have is the web page, as it existed at the time that the server sent it to you. You don’t have special privileges with other pages.

The other important thing to note is that when a page is sent to you then you get the whole page. And so you should, you respond. But therein lies the problem. You have probably experienced filling in a form on the web. This is more of a web application than just a web site, or page. If you make a mistake and the web application doesn’t like what you filled in the whole page comes back to you. It has to because you don’t have an ongoing open connection to the web server.

This is probably the biggest difference between web applications and desktop applications, and it can be a source of frustration and anger to users.

Enter Ajax. The whole point of Ajax is that with a bit of javascript, actually it might amount to quite a lot of javascript, and a few other fancy tricks, information can be sent to the server and a response received and shown on the browser without the need for the server to resend the entire page. Web applications can behave much more like desktop applications. Response times are drastically reduced and it becomes possible, even practical, to interact with the web application using a relatively slow dial up modem.

The concepts behind Ajax are not new, but putting them all together to build new web applications is. It is very early days and impossible to foresee what will eventuate. But it is a very exciting development in web design and use.

One way to keep in touch is the telephone – and it gets a fair workout. The other common way these days is email. But to stay in touch with a lot of people you can’t beat blogging.

Of course, you have to be careful what you say, but my wife is pure as the driven snow and so she isn’t likely to say bad things. And blogging gives her the chance to say what she wants and allows her family and friends to do the same. Unlike emails or telephone calls, everyone can join in. She has friends overseas whom she sees rarely and so they can be included. Who knows, she may meet a whole lot of new friends online.

There are thousands, or is it millions, of blogs in cyberspace. Most of them would seem like the most arcane gibberish to anyone who wasn’t associated with the blogger. But that doesn’t matter, those people needn’t read it. But for those, often few, people who are interested it is a great way to keep in touch.

I had previously used WordPress v1.2 on another site and I wanted to see what v1.5 was like. So at 8:00 am today I uploaded WordPress to my site’s server and using the default theme I had a blog set up within an hour.

It needs work. We won’t keep the default look, and I have to do some work to make sure that all the pages validate. They probably do but once you install some of the plugins like Markdown to make it easier for other users, then you have to do some tweaking.

I knew WordPress was good from my previous experience, and it is the weblog software of choice for many well known and experienced bloggers. I’m not sure where it rates but I would imagine that along with Moveable Type, which seems to have suffered some bad press lately with its change in licencing, it is up the top of the list of popular blogging software.

And I wasn’t disappointed with this latest version. The install was smooth and fast. There are a couple of new features, like static pages, and it just does the job.

There is enough documentation to enable you to change the PHP code if you need to, and if you need further help there is always the Codex which has a wealth of information.

The only PHP I changed was to show the calendar, the rest runs straight out of the box.
WordPress is styled with CSS. I’m not sure if this was available in v1.2 or not, but in v1.5 you can edit the style sheets from within the admin area of your site. If you were doing a major change I would suggest coding outside and then uploading the changes via FTP, but for small changes this is a boon.

However, I fell into a trap. It was so easy to change that I opened the style sheets in Style Master, my CSS editor of choice, and wondered why the changes didn’t take effect. Of course, I was editing the local style sheets. Moral – make sure you have the required level of caffeine in your body before undertaking anything technical.

For most of us, and there are exceptions, people who work with accessibility all day, it is difficult to make our pages accessible. We can apply the rules but that doesn’t always work.

A friend of mine is an adaptive technology consultant and a well known speaker at accessibility conferences. He is a very experienced user of screen readers because he is visually impaired and reading computer screens is what he does all day. We have had many long conversations about accessibility and while he has given me some rules to follow – and they aren’t always in agreement with the advice given by the so-called experts – what usually happens is that he says something like ‘If you look at this site you will find…’

The point is that accessibility is about making sites accessible, it is not about slavishly following rules.

So what did he have to say about this site? The first thing he looks at on a web page is the Title, the words that appear in the very top of the browser. For this page the title is

Midnight Software Solutions–Web Site Production–Accessible Links

When he first looked at the page delimiters in the title were not “–” but “::” because that’s what the CMS used as a default. But the double colon is a pain to listen to over and over on a screen reader, and he suggested I use a dash. I have used an en dash, – and I don’t really mind what I use so long as it keeps people happy. I could have told him ‘bad luck, you have to put up with it’ but the point of a website is to keep as many people happy as possibe. After all, they may be potential customers.

The second thing he told me, and he stressed that this is a personal view, related to the navigation links. Like many, perhaps most, web sites, I have one word navigation links. In my case Home, Services, About, Contact. My friend tells me that they sound abrubt and therefore not very welcoming. Let me stress, this is his personal view. But I see his point. One word links sound like an order. Go here! So I am going to change this, or at least give some serious thought to changing it. Contact is easy, merely changing it to Contact Us sounds so much better on the screen reader, and makes virtually no difference visually. But what about the others? At this stage I am not sure what I am going to do. I am going to have to give it some serious thought and see what I can come up with.

In my naiveté, and in retrospect it was pretty stupid, I thought that by adding a title to the link the screen reader would read the title. But it doesn’t. It reads the link. My friend told me that on his screen reader, Jaws, you can set it so that it will read the title but he thinks that most readers would not be aware of how to do this, or if they were aware they would still not have it turned on by default. So if you want descriptive links put them in the link itself.

The last comment he made was in regard to my link to Other Places. He only looked at my Home Page and he assumed that Other Places was where I kept links to other sites. I sort of do, although, at this stage it is still very much in development. If it was to be a page of external links I would have probably called it that. My friend tells me that links called Links drive him crazy. There are links all over web pages. If you have a page that lists other places to go then call it that. So I made him happy, albeit inadvertently.

The final thing is that while I was talking to him on the phone he looked up a web site and I heard the screen reader over the phone line. I have never heard one before. And it demonstrated to me the difficulty sighted people have in testing sites and just coming to grips with accessibility. I could not understand what the screen reader was saying. It was just too fast. Using a screen reader is an acquired skill, it is not just installing the software and sitting back and listening.

If you want to make a site accessible then first follow the rules and take in the advice of the experts. Then see if you can get someone who actually uses the technology to give you an opinion. You will learn more from an intelligent user than from any other source.