Feb. 17, 2005
Please feel free to invite some of your colleagues from your or another city/county if you think it would benefit them to be a part of our group.
Location
City of Overland Park
(Meetings alternate monthly between MARC in Kansas
City and the City of Overland Park, KS.)
Attendance
City of Gladstone, MO................ Kelli Behr
City of Kansas City, MO.............
Rich Lovett, John Sims and Jan Wilkinson
City of Overland Park, KS...........
Chris Audano, Randy Ellis and Susan Waters
City of Shawnee, KS.................
Sonya Fendorf
Jackson County, MO.................. Dan Davis and Joe Tanner
Johnson County,
KS.................. Tom Erickson, Michael Morris, Anthony Oropeza, Sonia Smith,
Karen Sorensen
MARC......................................... Julie Wittman
and Barbara Hensley
Barbara Hensley began the meeting with a couple of short announcements:
- SoniClear sent us product information about MeetingPro Gov, a digital recording software with advanced note-taking and publishing features. For more info, please visit www.soniclear.com or email info@triosystems.com. The phone number is 626-584-0364.
- At today's meeting, a free copy of Studio.Net will be given away at the end of the meeting thanks to Microsoft.
Browser Compatibility
Attendees viewed a comparison of how
web pages look in different browsers and how they work in a screen reader emulation
program called Fangs.
The browsers tested are all free. Versions with advanced features, however, can be purchased. Sites for downloading browsers:
Internet Explorer v6 or higher for Windows delivers full support for HTML 4, CSS-1, and other important W3C recommendations.
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/default.mspx for Windows
http://www.microsoft.com/mac/products/internetexplorer/internetexplorer.aspx?
pid=internetexplorer for Macintosh
Netscape v7 or higher (all platforms)
http://channels.netscape.com/ns/browsers/default.jsp
Firefox (Windows) stemming from the Mozilla.org project.
http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/
Opera v7 or higher (Windows, Linux)
http://www.opera.com/
Some of the issues for webmasters
- Older browsers do not support the most recent technologies used in website development. Some browsers may have bugs that could lead to problems browsing sites. Others may have security flaws. Here are some of the technological challenges:
- You can't predict how much screen real estate you have to work with. Visitors will have a variety of screen resolutions.
- Browsers don't all have the same page display area.
- You can't tell what fonts your visitors will have installed.
- Different browsers will interpret your page slightly differently.
- Some visitors will turn off scripting, cookies and Java applets. Therefore, you can't rely on the effects or content that need these to work.
- Some visitors won't have the necessary plug-ins or programs installed. They may not be able to view Microsoft Office documents, Adobe Acrobat files, Flash movies, and various audio, video, etc.
To find out which browsers support what features, check out these charts:
http://webmonkey.wired.com/webmonkey/reference/browser_chart/
http://webmonkey.wired.com/webmonkey/reference/browser_chart/index_mac.html
http://webmonkey.wired.com/webmonkey/reference/browser_chart/index_nix.html
http://webmonkey.wired.com/webmonkey/reference/browser_chart/index_other.html
The power of CSS
The good news is that, if you follow the standards guidelines,
such as use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and Extensible HyperText Markup Language
(XHTML), your design will look fairly similar in modern browsers like FireFox
and Opera, not to mention being quick to load and easier to maintain.
Karen Sorensen used CSS to redesign Johnson County Wastewater's new site, www.jcw.org . Attendees noted that the design loaded quickly and looked similar in all the browsers.
Some basic principles mentioned by the attendees include:
- It's difficult to aim for pixel perfection; web pages cannot be designed like print media.
- Try to keep things simple when laying out your pages. Eliminate clutter.
- Use CSS style sheets to control the basic colors and fonts on your page, and the spacing of individual elements like paragraphs and lists.
Fangs
Fangs is a Mozilla Firefox extension that displays a text representation
of a web page similar to how a screen reader would read it. This helps web
developers finding accessibility issues at an early stage in the development
process." Download
from http://sourceforge.net/projects/fangs/ . Right-clicking a page and selecting
Fangs from the Firefox context menu will open a popup window with the text
representation of the page. To see what the output looks like, visit http://www.standards-schmandards.com/exhibits/fangs/fangs-sample.gif
or http://www.standards-schmandards.com/index.php?2004/11/22/8-fangs-release-05.
General discussion included:
- PDFs do not get read by Fangs, an accessibility issue we webmasters in the public sector should consider. HTML seems to be the only alternative.
- The City of San Diego site was compared in different browsers and also translated in Spanish.
- The relatively new browser, Firefox, has a new extension worth noting: Firefox Web Developer Extension. It adds a menu and a toolbar to the browser with various web developer tools. Find out more at http://texturizer.net/firefox/extensions/#web .
- ALT tags do not show up in Firefox.
- The drive to make sites accessible to wireless devices will probably, as a byproduct, help with other accessibility issues.
Other Business
- Rich Lovett won the drawing for Microsoft's Studio.net.
- The 2005 Government Webmaster Conference is scheduled for September 22 and 23 in Denver. Stay tuned!
Next Meeting
To be announced. The meeting will not meet as
regularly scheduled since it falls on St. Patrick's Day, and annual festivities
are held near MARC.
Meeting minutes: Karen Lynne Sorensen, Johnson County Wastewater.