Graceful Degradation

For giggles I fired up an ancient NT4 VMware image. It was so old that it still had IE 2.0 on it! After digging up a CD with IE 4, I surfed to this site and saw this.

That is Graceful Degradation at it's finest. IE 4 has pathetic CSS support, and I'm not even sure if the CSS boxing model existed yet. However, the page displays, and it is perfectly legible.

Maybe later I can dig up a CD with IE 5 on it. Or maybe get totally masochistic with some old versions of Netscrape...

10:26:17 AM | Comments: | Topics: accessibility css radio vmware 

CSS: Why Bother?

Drop down to here for the story of building a CSS theme in Radio.

Why bother? CSS gets formatting away from content. A good CMS is only part of the solution. With not much additional work, it is possible to provide users with alternate presentations without providing multiple renderings. A stylesheet formatted for printing. One for portable devices. One with larger fonts.

CSS also gets the CMS away from formatting. Using external stylesheets it is possible to make major layout and formatting changes without rendering the content again. This is a big deal when large quantities of content are involved.

And CSS degrades gracefully. Not always in the most optimal manner, but pretty much always in a readable manner. A table-based layout that doesn't properly account each browser's rendering flaws will often be completely illegible.

Finally: Web Accessibility.

4:49:32 AM | Comments: | Topics: accessibility css radio 

Fixing the coffee mug did require digging into the code:

• system
  • verbs
    • builtins
      • radio
        • macros
          • xmlCoffeeMug

Change: local (img = radio.macros.imageref ("http://radio.ntwizards.net/images/xmlCoffeeCup.gif"))

To: local (img = radio.macros.imageref ("http://radio.ntwizards.net/images/xmlCoffeeCup.gif","","","","","Radio users: Click to subscribe"))

Of course, it still doesn't pass the HTML validation. Ignoring the "UL" errors that I just created, the validator bug that causes some querystrings to be parsed as entities, and Radio's mis-handling of &mdash; we are left with a <td background> error. That one is confusing because there is a later <td> with a background element that it is not complaining about.

4:37:58 AM | Comments:

Got the permalinks "fixed"

Open weblogData.root. Navigate to:

• weblogData
  • prefs
    • itemPermaLinkImgTag

<img src="<%radio.macros.imageURL ("images/woodsItemLink.gif")%>" alt="permalink">

Will a Radio.root update potentially wipe this out?

Update: Duh, that item is in the "Customize Images" page. Coffee mug, here I come...

4:07:50 AM | Comments:

Had a mini-disaster, hit Alt-R a couple of times going for the Radio menu only to discover that a Find window had the focus and thought that doing some replacing would be more appropriate.

Took a couple of re-installs, but now everything is kosher once again. A "Fix My FUBAR'd Scripts" button would be nice...

Fixed some of the ALT validation problems via the "Customize Images" options. Permalinks and the coffee mug remain.

3:48:15 AM | Comments:

Adventures in CSS with Radio

This page has no tables in the main body, and validates as CSS. Couple of warnings about colors not being set, no big deal to fix as a later date.

How it was done:

• Copied the homepage template from the default theme into a text editor.
• Removed everything that wasn't a macro.
• Borrowed some CSS box code, via Zeldman I believe, and made some minor changes.
• Slapped all of the macros into a new template, cut-n-pasted the original code to build the tables at the top and right.
• Removed table code from the Day and Item templates.

How to make it better:

• Test with browsers other than Internet Explorer 6 on Windows XP.
• Clean up CSS so that fonts are not specified in pixel sizes.
• The table on the right it not necessary, it's only there is create the shadow effect and rounded edges. The shadow can probably be duplicated with carefully placed boxes.
• The top table seems trickier. Maybe an additional box with a blue background, merge the images on the left side and split them where the top of the title begins.

Getting HTML validation is a bigger problem — fixed all of the radio.macros.imageRef calls so that they would return alt=" " for now, and the "unknown entity" errors are a bug in the validation script, but what to do about the macros that return complete image references? Where does one even find those things, like "<%permalink%>" ?

And to bitch for a moment... Why are there scripts named imageRef all over the place in Radio? That is so lame.

Another validation problem is that &mdash; is being converted by Radio into it's binary representation, and not being converted back upon rendering. That's a major no-no. Seems to be a problem only with certain characters — &lt; &gt; survive the trip.

2:32:38 AM | Comments: | Topics: css radio