Layout issues

[Gonzo]

Hi SotT team,
I was just visiting the site and noticed a couple things you might want to be aware of.

In FireFox, everything looks wonderful. However, in IE6, there are rendering issues:

- text size won't enlarge/contract (Menu: View> Text Size>) without overruling style sheet in IE Accessibility options. This impairs those with visual impairments (or just aging eyes) from magnifying text easily;
- left and right margins behave in a way that cuts some text off on both sides of body. This could be due to the left and right sidebars being too wide and interfering with the body margins.

Although IE 6 only represents 4.4% of browsers currently on the web (as of December 2010, down from 10.2% January 2010), this may indicate coding issues.

There could be several accessibility issues that you might want to eventually deal with, as disabled readers might not have the ability to keep up with the most current computers and browsers and therefore require greater backward capability.

I found it interesting that some online validators found only a few problems while others found quite a few. The W3C validator (_http://validator.w3.org/) only found 4 relatively minor errors and Total Validator - FireFox extension version (_http://www.totalvalidator.com/), found 26.

Accessibility validation seems to find quite a few:
- Total Validator found 98, depending on the level of accessibility you want to test (WCAG v2 A: 96, WCAG v2 AA: 2)
- WAVE found 27 (_http://wave.webaim.org/report?url=http%3A%2F%2Fsott.net&js=2)

I found some useful info from validating with Cynthia Says also (_http://www.cynthiasays.com/)

If possible, I believe moving toward XHTML 1.0 Strict can have a positive affect on accessibility as there would be a greater likelihood of compliance with the wide range of accessibility tools being used.

As a side note, I want to thank you for the enhancements you made to RSS. I can finally view the feeds on both my mobile device and all of my desktop RSS readers. Before, I could only see the output, which didn't seem like RSS2 XML, but some other standard for which I had no reader. Now I can quickly grab my news on the fly from a text reader instead of having to load up the entire web page in a browser. This means a lot to me and I really appreciate it.

Thanks,
Gonzo

 

[Sirius]

IE6 is one of the worst browsers available. It is not worth being supported or tolerated, IMO. There will always occur rendering issues, no matter how well designed your web pages are. One needs a very mighty CSS framework in order to display the contents on each browser equally by applying tons of CSS patches. This is possible, but not trivial and needs usually external code or dependencies which are sometimes licensed very developer-unfriendly (branding, etc.).

The W3C validator has to be the best and most accurate one, but whether this is true is another question. I think it's not the best.

text size won't enlarge/contract (Menu: View> Text Size>) without overruling style sheet in IE Accessibility options. This impairs those with visual impairments (or just aging eyes) from magnifying text easily;

Can be patched. It is a IE bug as far as I can remember.

If possible, I believe moving toward XHTML 1.0 Strict can have a positive affect on accessibility as there would be a greater likelihood of compliance with the wide range of accessibility tools being used.

Or XHTML 1.1. However, this move would add further constraints like forbidding the 'target' attribute in links, etc. (hence, external links cannot be used, except by using Javascript tricks).

 

[Sirius]

You could in addition try one of these readability tools:
1) _https://www.readability.com and
2) Safari's (Safari 5) Reader feature which is very cool and works perfectly in some cases.