Philadelphia Standards Organization

In October, Federal District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel certified the NFB lawsuit against Target as class-action, charging Target with violating federal and California statutes. Patel further ruled that the American Disability Act (ADA) and California’s Unruh Civil Rights Act required Target.com to maintain website accessibility:

“This is a tremendous step forward for blind people throughout the country who for too long have been denied equal access to the Internet economy. All e-commerce businesses should take note of this decision and immediately take steps to open their doors to the blind,” said President of the National Federation of the Blind, Dr. Marc Maurer. “Target Corporation has led a battle against blind consumers in a key area of modern life: the Internet economy.”

A ComputerWorld update suggests that more retailers will find it upon themselves to adjust their online stores for accessibility. Such options as text descriptions and keyboard-focused inputs are mentioned. Could this lead to increased adherence to WCAG guidelines?

For the meeting this Thursday (February 1) we will be giving the Independence Brew Pub a try.

Over the last year, we have had some wonderful meetings, conversations, and ideas. I have been so lucky to have such a wonderful group of people come out and support the cause for web standards. During the last year, I have personally had some life changing events. I bought a new house, had my first child, and recently I started a new job. Unfortunately, all of these new aspects of my life do not allow me to give the PSO the attention I would like. So as of today, I am stepping down as president of the PSO.

In better news, Kenric Ströhm will be replacing me as President of the PSO. Kenric is a long time member of the PSO and is the perfect replacement. His ideas and leadership will help guide the PSO into the right direction. This move is an attempt to keep the PSO fresh and more updated than before. If anyone is looking to help Kenric, let him know at this Thursdays PSO meeting.

If anyone has any questions, feel free to email me or just post a comment to his post.

Last week was the Mozilla Accessibility Summit in Cambridge, MA. Shane Anderson gives a general overview, with links to Mark Pilgrim’s more detailed account of the presentations. If you’re getting the sense that Firefox is positioning itself as a sort of vanguard to advance and cultivate the cause of web accessibility, you would be correct.

As an update of Tim’s earlier post (regarding Target being sued by the National Federation of the Blind for failing to provide accessible website content), last month a California federal judge decided not to dismiss a discrimination case against retailer Target Corp. This opens the door to all Internet-related Americans with Disabilities claims, proving that websites fall under the category of “physical places of accommodation.” Target had filed a motion to dismiss the case on the premise that ADA laws don’t apply to Web sites, going so far as to suggest that such laws violate the Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution.

Microsoft’s Chris Wilson, the Group Program Manager for IE, is interviewed by ZDNet regarding the issue of whether Microsoft’s latest web browser IE7 is - and will be - CSS and Web standards compliant. Some people are still skeptical.

As the summer starts to wind down, the PSO will be revving up the engine and shifting the transmission into 2nd gear. My hectic summer schedule is slowing down. I’ve moved into my new house and my daughter was born. Work is settling down now and I am ready to start devoting more time into the PSO.

We will first start of with our monthly meeting on September 7th. So mark you calendars. If you use Google Calendar, click the icon below. Let all your standards friends know that we are back and better than ever.

In order to foster more interaction we have created a Google Group. Go check it out and join up at http://groups.google.com/group/phillystandards.

Way back, when I upgraded my personal site to WordPress 2.0 and began playing with the new WYSIWYG post editor, I noticed something about the bold and italic buttons in the tag helper bar: they say bold and italic but they output strong and em, respectively.

There’s been a push in the developer community to begin using markup that has more meaning, and in many cases <em> makes more sense than the presentational markup of the <i> tag, specifically when you want to give emphasis to the enclosed word or phrase. I mean, that’s the point of the <em> tag. Now many coders and developers are always using the <em> tag instead of <i>, falsely believing <i> and <b> to be deprecated (only <u> has been deprecated as of HTML 4.01).

But should we all go back into our code and change every isntance of <i> to <em>? I think not. There are plenty of perfectly good pieces of text that you would want to italicize, but you don’t necessarily want to emphasize.

Italics are used to indicate titles of longer works (albums, periodicals, television series, plays and films), foreign words that have entered English vocabulary (de rigueur, resume), and words or phrases used as themselves (the term computer, the letter A).

For example, I write a post about a certain book, perhaps a review. According to various guidelines for writing, titles of books written on the web should be in italics, since underlining is not only confusing, but a web standards faux pas.

I don’t want to emphasize the book’s title, but I do want to be grammatically correct. However, this brings up the debate over the practice of using presentational markup vs. separating style from content, and until we’re all writing XML and defining our own <booktitle> tags, I’ll keep using <i>.

When I originally posted this article to my website on 10 January 2006, someone commented that “[y]ou should use the cite tag for … citing the names of books and such.” However, I don’t know if the cite tag is appropriate, since I’m not citing a book or reference, just mentioning it. If I were to publish a research paper online, then I would use cite and blockquote quite often. This doesn’t seem the case to me here.

April 5th is the first annual CSS Naked Day!

Welcome to the first annual CSS naked day which will be happening April 5th, 2006. The idea behind this event is to promote Web Standards. Plain and simple. This includes proper use of (x)html, semantic markup, a good hierarchy structure, and; well, a fun play on words. I mean, who doesn’t want to get naked?. Feel free to see the original reference article for more information.

It has been a while since my last post. I have been hard at work contracting at a top pharma company in the Philadelphia area, developing their new website. For some strange reason, this company has decided to use the SAP Portal system to power their website. This has cause me nothing but problem with codiong. Usually the SAP portal system uses dozens of iframes throughout the site. With this newest version of the SAP portal, they introduced something that SAP calls “the light framework.” The light framework replaces the annoying and inaccessible iframes with a just as annoying and unnecessary nested tabling system.

I have been developing the internal pages using 100% valid XHTML and CSS, but after it enters the portal, any CSS layout styles I used were pretty much rendered useless. The nested tables destroy any dignity I gave it with dirty markup.

Today, while surfing the SAP Developer Networks, I read the latest post from Sven Kannengiesser. He goes through a little exercise on how to make the SAP Portal a little more Web Standards compliant. I had to chuckle at the article because of its attempt to teach developers of SAP about web standards. On the one hand, I find it awesome that someone at SAP cares enough about the front-end code to post something on the SAP blog. On the other hand, if a developer writes clean and compliant code, the SAP Portal destroys it with HTMLB and design layouts from 1999. Companies pay top dollar for this system and the code is cluttered with inconsistencies. Some <table> tags are written in all CAPS, while others are mixed case, and others are correctly all lowercase. There are also a number of empty tables lying around for no reason. There are many attributes that are not surrounded by quotes and most single line elements are not closed properly.

Why do people pay top dollar for such a half-assed product? My only hope is that this post gets back to the SAP developers and they decide to hire Eric Myer to oversee the front end development and produced SAP code. Until that happens, I will keep beating the SAP framework into submission while trying to make it as semantic as possible.