[Gllug] [OT]Reforming wayward web designers

[Garry Heaton]

Rob Crowther wrote:

> A valid point, but also an argument for getting a specialist to do your
> user interface instead of letting a developer do it perhaps?  Plus
> following accessibility guidelines will be a legal requirement for some
> sites.

I doubt such a law would be enforcable. How many lawsuits has the American
equivalent spawned? Not many that I can remember. It seems to be more of a
scare tactic. Besides, I think the logic behind all this is convoluted. Why
isn't anyone demanding that the producers of devices aimed at people with
disabilities be improved instead of demanding that the majority of web
developers restrict their creativity? We should be looking at ways of
solving the problems people with disabilities encounter by developing better
 technologies aimed at those needs, not crippling existing designs. Isn't it
better to develop a text-to-speech synthesiser that can handle existing
standards rather than impose new standards on web developers? As for
text-only browsers, design them so that they CAN handle tables instead of
telling every web designer not to use tables for layout.

> http://www.browsercam.com/ will take care of most testing needs for a
> lot less than all the hardware if you only need it for the odd
> month/hour here and there, and saves you all the system maintenance.

I need my testing environment running all day long so this wouldn't be a
solution. I didn't mind buying all this lovely hardware :-) but my point was
that many web "designers" don't use any testing environment other than the
browser that ships with their favourite OS, particularly Mac users though I
know plenty of 'doze web designers who've never seen Safari or Mozilla.

> Not sure why you need VirtualPC either?  IE can be run in side by side
> mode if you have .Net framework, see
> http://labs.insert-title.com/labs/article.aspx?ID=795

You have to be joking. Dismembering the guts of Windows and hacking a bunch
of DLLs resulting in versions of browsers with bits missing is no solution.
Besides, I'm not complaining about Virtual PC. It runs well with IE4,IE5.0
and IE5.5 running simultaneously (all on instances of Win98).

> I managed to get IE3 running on my PC at work, and it made all the fancy
> modern websites look very ugly :)

IE3 has to be curiosity value at this stage of the game :-) However, for
curiosity I recently insalled Netscape 1.0 on Windows XP and it ran ......
for a while before a style sheet or some Javascript crashed it.

> 
> Rob
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