Posts tagged CSS
Sometimes I hate Flex… Sometimes
0Don’t get it wrong… I am not leaving Flex, most of my current developments still rely on it and I am sure it will last for several more years.
Working with Flex for nearly two years. I am sure I have the right choice however sometimes Flex do makes me mad.
- SWFLoader content can’t be unloaded completely.
(How many times you try to replace a loader content but you notice the content music never gone away) - VideoDisplay component doesn’t play .flv correctly…
- Not even those produced by Flash Video Encoder…
- Non standard CSS
- Math.floor (Math.random () * 4) + 6
(Oh my god… I just want a random integer) - Smooth scroll List
- Disabling Ctrl key during drag move
- Gradient fill Container
- Full screen Keyboard input…
(I understand security… but that should be user’s responsibility… not developer’s obstacle)
Flex Builder related…
- Why can’t I export my syntax coloring settings?
- I don’t know which part I haven’t done yet… WHERE’S MY TODO!?!?
- Auto building get set function please…
To be continue…
Adobe… please… I love advancedDataGrid… but fix the old ones first…
Alternate Style Sheets
0When we designing our web site style, have we think about whether others like our style? I guess it is not possible making a style which suits everyone’s taste. So why not letting the visitor selecting his own style? That is why Alternate Style Sheets become an important function in a web site.
The idea of alternate style sheet is that we will first prepare a few different style sheets to be the alternate. And then providing a drop down box within the web page allowing the user to choose the style he / she likes. And the preferences are stored in the cookies, so the next time he / she returns will be browsing in his / her favorites.
This method is not simply talking about suiting someone’s taste. It is also raising the accessibility of the web sites which is suggested by W3C. Because we can design styles which have larger fonts for the elderly, or design styles which have simpler color combinations for the people suffering color blindness.
Although it increases the workload designing the styles, it worths.
Reference:
Alternative Style: Working With Alternate Style Sheets. [Online]. Sowden, P. Available: http://www.alistapart.com/stories/alternate
Aural Cascading Style Sheets (ACSS)
0Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is widely used when developing a web page. It can be used in both layout and styling. However it is meaningless for the blinds. So are there any styles for the blinds?
Aural Cascading Style Sheets (ACSS) is the answer. Actually ACSS is not a new technology. It can be viewed as an add-on to the original CSS. The following are the commands supported by ACSS.
voice-family
speech-rate
pitch
pitch-range
stress
richness
By means of these commands, the speech produced by the disables assisting browsers like JAWS that I previously mentioned can be “styled”.
For example the following will make the browser reading the text in a woman high pitch voice.
Phantom of the Opera. Arrrrrrrrrrrrrrr~~~~
References:
ACSS: Aural Style Sheets. [Online]. Burns, J. Available: http://www.htmlgoodies.com/beyond/css/article.php/3470211
The Form Assembly
0HTML Form, I guess anybody who written some web pages before should be familiar. It is not a really hard one actually. With some form elements like input, select, options, etc… the form already works. However is it usable and accessible? Have you done enough form validation? Have you provide enough labels for the form elements?
Building a good HTML form is not a easy task, especially if you want to follow those standards. Googling for a while, found out this web which is great to achieve the mentioned points above. The Form Assembly (http://www.formassembly.com)
Same as other informational web sites, there are articles and tutorials on building the web forms. But my focus are on the three links on the left hand side of the web.
Form Builder
A web tool which will help you to build your form in a standard format. What you have to do is just filling your requirements and thats it.
Form Library
Here you can access a large number of templates with different stlye and even different language.
Form Garden
Personally I suggest this to everyone, which is a CSS form builder. You can select the styles available on the right and test it in the center. After your selection, you can simply download the CSS and use it in your own web page.
It is so convenient with all these handy tools and the most important thing is that we can learn from their source and design :p
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines
0Before having the first lecture there are already quite a large number of things that can be explored simply browsing Andy’s web.
You may notice that there are a number of small icons on the bottom of Andy’s course web. Saying W3C XHTML, W3C CSS, W3C WCAG, BOBBY 508 and BOBBY AAA.
For the first two, I guess is quite familiar to many people. They are the standards posted by W3C. (World Wide Web Consortium) Using the validators provided by them, (HTML validator and CSS validator) anyone can check whether their web page fullfill the requirements of the standards. If it is a success, they can place this icon on their web.
But how about WCAG, 508 and Bobby??
Due to my curiosity, I have made some search on W3C. Actually WCAG stands for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. It is a guideline which will make a website more accessible. (WCAG 1.0) Section 508 is something similar to WCAG but written in US Federal law.WCAG have a total of 3 accessibility compliance, A, AA and AAA. (where AAA is the best and of course the hardest to achieve) Although W3C do not provide any automated WCAG checker, we can still check it through WebXACT. (WebXACT) I guess the former name is Bobby but now changed. However even WebXACT can not do all the testing inside the guideline, because some of them are not coding related, e.g. color matching.
Although it is hard to acheive all these standards, I think as a web designer we should try our best to do at least most of these. This improves not only the speed of loading the page but also helping our visitors to browse.








