DennisDolan.com

A word about this site

One goal in developing this site was to make it conform, as closely as possible,to worldwide web standards. That meant seperating layout from content: no tables unless legitimately using them to present data, and use cascading style sheets (rules that tell a browser how to present a document). The theory behind this is simplicity itself. By conforming to standards, this site should be viewable (and, one hopes, aesthetically pleasing) on any modern web browser running on any computer, anywhere in the world.

But, here's the rub: web browsers implement web standards in varying degree and in varying manner. The most widely used browser, Microsoft's Internet Explorer, has the worst record of non-conformance to standards of any browser, and yet it is used by about 90 percent of web surfers. Any web site that does not take Internet Explorer's defects into consideration in its design is doomed to failure.

Another issue is display size (mistakenly called "resolution", which refers to number of pixels per square inch). Display widths can vary from 600 pixels through 1240 pixels and larger (or considerably smaller for hand-held devices). A design which displays well at one size may look cramped, or conversely, surrounded by a vast wasteland of emptiness, when displayed at a different display setting.

What to do?

My choice was to design for, and test in the most standards-compliant browser I could find, Mozilla's Firefox, then tweak the style properties (using style sheets' ability to cascade, or modify, those previously loaded) to make allowance for the peculiarities of other browsers. The main content section (where these words appear) is designed to be, on average, no more than 12 to 15 "words" wide. This is considered to be a comfortable width for reading—much wider and the eye muscles become strained from moving the eyes too far from side to side.

This site has been tested on Firefox 0.9–1.04, Netscape 7.0 (which uses the same rendering engine as Firefox), Internet Explorer 6.0, and Opera 7.5. While a number of people still use IE 5.5, and I have tried to accomodate its bugs and rendering errors, I have not tested this page with Internet Explorer 5.5, and have no intention of doing so. I mean, really... Some people have apparently never heard of upgrades. They're obviously connected to the internet, so what's stopping them? Huh?

FYI: your browser identifies itself as CCBot/1.0 (+http://www.commoncrawl.org/bot.html).

There is one annoying Internet Explorer bug I have not been able to work around. From time to time, IE gets the background color wrong. This is most often seen on the Gay Info page, which had a relatively long quote from Thomas Jefferson at the top.

Some links with information that was helpful in creating this site:

Accessibility

A word about a pet peeve: poor color choices

Choosing an appropriate color for the text and the background against which the text will be viewed is one of the most crucial choices a page author/designer can make. While chock full of useful information, some of the sites listed above make poor color choices that have insufficient contrast between text and background, and as a result, fail to meet accessibility standards.

Note: some complain that trying to read black text against a white background strains the eyes. This can be a problem for some who are using CRT monitors. The new LCD monitors do not produce a very true white and are not are brilliant as the CRTs, so less strain is involved. I am experimenting here with using a very pale color for background with black text.

Another Note: I placed the sites above on my good info/poor design hit list in mid-2005. I was viewing the sites on a CRT monitor. When checking back in early 2007 using an LCD monitor, I noted that some changes had been made to some sites, and that the contrast issue was less noticable on sites that had not (otherwise) changed. However, Lonley Planet continues to have a seriously messed up website (particularly when viewed on Firefox).

To save you the effort of bouncing back and forth from site to site to see what I mean, let me reproduce an example. Eric Costello, at www.glish.com, presents a list of links that become increasingly difficult to read:

On This Page:
CSS Techniques
CSS Resources
CSS Tutorials

This theme is maintained for links in the main content of the page. Stylish, but yellow against white (or any color combination that is low contrast, e.g. light blue against a slightly less light blue) is hard even for people with reasonably good vision to see. Someone with a vision impairment, or just plain aging eyes, would be tempted to skip this site. Too much work to read.

www.maxdesign.com.au and www.exgaywatch.com have been chastised for egregious design. When last I looked (January 5, 2007) they had fixed the worst of their problems, although maxdesign could stand to use a little darker text color.

www.communitymx.com illustrates another pet peeve: use of an image behind the text. This practice does nothing to improve design or convey information, and damages the site's usability. CommunityMX's background image is faint enough to merely be annoying [and seems to be getting fainter (1/5/07)]. Too many sites still use unfaded background images that compete with the text. These sites may contain the secret of the universe, but no one will ever know because they can't read the damned text!

←A habit, once begun...