So, you think you're a webmaster?
Posted in : Babble
The WWW
One of the main aspects of the web is the WW bit, it stands for "Word Wide" (yeah, yeah, I know you know). What that actually means is, it's available to anyone and everyone in the world (allow me a rose tinted glasses moment) and is controlled and owned by nobody (unless you live in China, in which case google owns yer ass huh?). This means that [b]even a blind man in outer mongolia has the right to expect to browse the internet as freely and easily as anybody else[/b] (this is what WAI / DDA / 508 is all about) ...... lets follow him as he hits a "webmasters" site using a text reader :-
- Every image is replaced by the alt text ..... if only they'd included some
- Every bit of CSS fails, but that's alright because they haven't discovered CSS yet.
- Every bit of javascript on the page fails, so, there go all the special effects, but, more importantly, there goes all of the content that they controlled.
- Every bit of flash fails, so there goes all the site navigation, now we're limited to just one page .... and half of that dissapeared with the javascript failing.
- All of the nested tables used make the poor text reader work like a demon trying to understand what follows what, now all of the remaining content is starting to sound jibberish, and you can't navigate to another page because the navigation failed with the flash.
So, until the web has a damn sight less "webmasters" and more coders who actually give a shit about the visitor being able to browse through their site no matter what their abilities or needs, I'm afraid it's been reduced to just plain "Web". Of course, the "webmaster" couldn't care less, his stats show that 98% of his visitors are using IE6 with javascript enabled and flash installed ....... they never think to ask "why ?".
