Technically speaking ...

Upgrading widgets to WordPress 2.8 – solving naming conventions

I’ve just been upgrading a website to WordPress 2.8 that makes great use of widgets, and was having problems with it recognising the custom widgets that I had built and had converted to use the new WP_Widget class.

The code that I had used as my basis had worked fine with a clean install of WP2.8 but didn’t like widgets that had been created under WP2.7.

An hour later of googling & trawling through the source code and I was none the wiser. Then I noticed that WP_Widget automatically adds on ‘widget_’ as a prefix to the id_base property. I had used a different naming convention when I had built custom widgets (e.g. starting them with the project or client name, such as ‘redefine_’…).

If I set the option_name property so that it was just the id_base then all of my widgets successfully reappeared in the upgraded site – but…

TinyMCE improves the code it generates

I was playing around with the current development version of WordPress (2.5 will be released in March) & had a nice surprise when I tried out the WYSIWYG editor. It’s about a year ago that I was last taking a serious look at the code they produced in response to Peter Krantz’s round-up over at “Standards Schmandards”.

Anyway it was nice to see that the indent button no longer uses the BLOCKQUOTE tag to achieve the desired styling, and that the alignment buttons have dispensed with the ‘align’ attribute.

It’s been a bugbear of mine that whilst the developers and designers of a site might be required (& also have a passionate desire) to work to standards, the content providers are being offered tools that makes all that effort redundant. In the case of these particular buttons they would have stopped a page from conforming with the Double-A…

Screen reader company not helping the cause

Jared Smith has raised a good point over at WebAIM in his recent post – JAWS license not developer friendly. Basically the licensing agreement for the trial version of the software (one of the most popular screen readers) specifically prohibits using it for testing purposes. I would have thought that the fewer barriers that web developers have in understanding assistive technologies the better. Ultimately it would be to the benefit of JAWS users, and that would also reduce support issues for Freedom Scientific.

Documenting page designs

A quick post before the Christmas break.

I recently came across Pearl Crescent Page Saver and I can see that it will be another useful tool to be used in 2008 when I’m working on template designs. Rather than just producing an image of what is visible on the screen, as happens with normal screenshot programs, it will include the whole of the web page. There’s also an option to run it from the command line, so it would be possible from a single command to create a batch file (or similar shell script) to capture a range of templates that I’m working on.

I’ve found that it has been very useful for documenting the evolution of templates & I can see that it will be handy for comparing different versions (e.g. how a template looks as plain HTML/CSS pages and when it is integrated into a system, or…

Browser market share – 2007

After warning about the misuse of statistics, I’m likely to find myself hoist by my own petard now, but here goes…

It’s over a year since Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) was released so I thought it was time to revisit the issue of browser market share, especially after the dramatic take-up of IE7 in the first few months.

However, first things first. Before getting to the detail of versions it’s worth looking at the overall market share for the browsers themselves. Over on Net Application’s Market Share site they’ve got this graph for November 2006 – 2007. You’ll see that whilst there’s some variation over the period, in general there’s not that much movement – Internet Explorer under 80%, Firefox hovering around the 15% mark, Safari reaching 5% and the rest less than 2%. The statistics collected by TheCounter for November 2007 show a roughly equivalent…

Convergent needs of mobiles and accessibility

With all the (technical) media interest in the iPhone I decided it was worth taking a look at the iPod Touch to test out its new web browsing features. Other handheld devices and mobile phones have gone down the route of reducing a web page to fit the restricted environment of the screen, as can be seen in the screenshots for Internet Explorer Mobile. However there seems to be a trend for this paradigm of using a normal page but zooming in & out and scrolling around with your fingers. For example the new mobile operating system that Google have developed (Android) has similar features, as can be seen in this demonstration.

As I’ve been testing it out I have been struck by the similarities with the screen magnifier demonstration that I posted about before.…

Making sense of stats

Recently I’ve been reading The Tiger That Isn’t: Seeing Through a World of Numbers by Michael Blastland & Andrew Dilnot. It was partly out of interest as I’ve been a fan of their series More or Less on Radio 4 for a number of years. I can heartily recommend it, even for the numerically-challenged as it’s very readable & brings the figures back from the abstract into real life. It’s a great help not just for charting a rational path through the health scares and political claims & counter-claims, but also for making sense of the statistics that are conjured up about the Internet.

In the past month there has been interest about the novel approach that Radiohead took for charging to download their latest album, and all things connected with mobile phones has gone into a frenzy after the launch of the iphone & Google’s involvement. In…

Screen magnifier demonstration

Continuing their series on accessibility technologies in action, Yahoo’s User Interface Blog has a video demonstrating ZoomText. Most of the issues involve the visual aspects of a web page (as opposed to a screen reader where the code used to create the page is more important) – for instance consistency in layout (as the user might only see part of the page at a time, so needs to know which direction to scroll in).

I liked the fact that it hasn’t been through their marketing department – the user demonstrating the magnifier obviously has Google as her default home page.

Revising the accessibility guidelines

Our recommendation for clients is that they should aim for small incremental updates on their website, maybe every three months – it avoids creating major upheavals that have to work as soon as the changes are implemented. This strategy isn’t going to work when you are developing standards as there needs to be more stability for others to be able to apply them. The World Wide Web Constortium (W3C) appears to have gone to the other extreme though as it is now 8 years since the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 (WCAG 1.0) became a recommendation – sometimes you might see references to the WAI (Web Accessibility Initiative) or the accessibility levels specified (AA, Double-A, etc.).

That’s no change since 1999! At that stage we were just discovering the joys of Internet Explorer 5.0 and the Netscape browser was stuck on version 4 (as the Mozilla project that produced…

Planning the end of a widget campaign

Back in the old days (maybe in Web 0.9) Analog, the popular web analysis program, automatically added a ‘Valid HTML’ button at the bottom of each report page it produced. This was before the W3 Consortium took up the banner of validation, so the button was provided by a third-party site (webtechs.com). Either through a ‘clerical error’ or an invoice not paid the domain name being used to supply the image lapsed – and it was then taken over by someone else who decided to add in a completely inappropriate picture with the same filename.

If we move forward to the present day, then in Web 2.0 the idea of bringing in content from other sources is the distinct flavour of the month. In some cases this is still just images (for badges), but the norm is either to have RSS feeds (essentially bringing in HTML code, usually with no…