[Gloucs] [ot] sourceforge website

[Guy Edwards]

You're in for a (good natured) scrap here Barrie :-) feel free to argue
a point, this isn't a flame.

On Sun, 2003-01-05 at 21:20, bjh wrote:
> The simple Solution I use for that is to not use graphics for title purposes
> or any other heading or word that you require all browsers and computers to
> be able to see...

The alt tags are specifically there to display alternative text for the
image and show up using the text based browsers. If you use any
text-based browser - links, lynxs or w3m - they are there, and the menus
still are navigable. They will also be read in voice browsers.

> If you stick to building in "Tables" and use colour backdrops you can get
> good effects 

The problem there being that you are using tables for layout purposes
and not to represent tabliture data, which is against the W3C's
accessibility recommendations. Your layout should really be defined with
your CSS.

The reason behind it being that the more tables you have, the more
confusing it becomes for someone navigating with a non visual browser
(eg if they're blind).

> - oh, and you must stick to using Arial, Times New Roman or
> Courier, the three texts that all computers can read...

I don't agree here either :-) you can specify whatever fonts you want
but the last one you specify should be a generic family so that the
browser can specify one of the correct type e.g.

* {font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;}

here it ends with sans-serif. Other options (someone's run off with my
books so this might not be 100%) are serif and fantasy.

Incidentally, are you sure "Times New Roman" is an every computer font?
OpenOffice substitutes it for "bookman" if I recall correctly.

> The other advantage is the search engine Robots can then read the text
> heading as well, thereby boosting site ranking on some of the main search
> engines (as I am sure you are aware, the search engine Robots will not pick
> up content of any graphics at all)...

I kind of agree. The heading in any Google search is the <title> of the
page with the text that follows beneath being the first text it stumbles
across on the page. If I were really awkward I could argue that the tile
appearing again will make the summary less effective at conveying the
site in the limited space of a google search result and that the search
engine ranking will be better benefited by having good content. 

> You can boost the "Table" heading by playing with the Border widths, that
> is, 1, 2, 3, etc., to give different framing effects to boost the visual
> appearance and you do not have any Loading delay because the browser is
> reading text and not a graphic...

Yep I agree with that. (using css to do the border though)

eg
#heading  {border-bottom:1px solid #000;}
 
> If you want to see some examples please let me know.

I like new sites, I get new ideas. I find it can be difficult to make
sites different if you do a few. I made three in one week once.. they're
abandoned projects now but you can see just by looking they use almost
identical code

http://mailist.sourceforge.net
http://phpbddb.sourceforge.net
http://aal.sourceforge.net

> If you could also let me know what sort of "free graphics" you are looking
> for I will see what I can come up with......

Royalty free (is there such a thing as GPL for photos?) archives, public
domain similar to the nasa site. Mainly for doing website graphics with.

Guy