On Apr 26, 2009, at 6:23 AM, Keith Martin wrote:
Sometime around 24/4/09 (at 13:49 -0500) Steve Kane said:
I made a web site in Freeway Pro 5.3.2 (on a MacBook running
10.5.6). Started it in 5.3.1. The site has just been uploaded a few
minutes ago here:
http://www.utmb.edu/cehd/
The UTMB web staff accepted the site for upload but said this about
it.*
“There is some funky table stuff going on that really should be
addressed in the design. We would prefer that you use a div-based
layout instead of a table-based design whenever possible for
accessiblity needs and requirements.”
Heh. If they really said “funky table stuff” then I wouldn’t
necessarily write them off - at least they’re not trying to blind
the reader with marketing-speak.
As far as the table stuff goes, any unlayered object on your page
must be positioned using an invisible table structure. It is NOT
true that table structures automatically equal inaccessible layouts,
however, it can make pages that aren’t quite as elegant and it can
(not “will”) affect accessibility. But hell’s bells - it is
perfectly possible to make a pure CSS-based site that it itself an
accessibility nightmare!
However - unless you’re able to relate this sort of thing over a
coffee or beer and with a friendly grin I don’t think you should
dwell on this; it is one of those ‘perceived wisdom’ things that can
be rather hard to change, particularly as there’s that grain of
truth in there.
Group your rollover items together and make that group item layered.
Then make all other items layered.
Do I select all 6x2 rollover menu items and group them all or do I
select each pair and group them? Or should I just rebuild them using
the CSS Rollover action available at ActionForge?
Test. That should pretty much eliminate all the table structure
layout from your page designs. Ask here for help if you have any
trouble, of course.
Watching Dan Jasker’s box model screencasts is on my todo list. I’ve
taken a stab at it, but my boxes-within-boxes experiments have been a
mess so far. I gather that the item settings are critical.
When I make the body text box and the three footer text boxes layered
there is a problem when text is enlarged in a browser. The footer
boxes stay where they are and the body text box distends downward
over the footer boxes which stay where they are.
The vertical CSS menu on the left swells to the right when font size
is made larger in the browser but I’ve given it enough room for two
font size increases before it overlaps the body text box.
You may also want to try setting the page alignment to Center so
that the layout is presented in a slightly more elegant fashion in
larger browser windows. See the Inspector palette; try doing this to
the master page and see if that does it for all your ‘real’ pages in
one step.
This I can certainly do. The master page feature is tremendous but
every now and then I apparently do something sloppy that causes some
item on some page to become unstuck from the master, so I’ve gotten
used to checking all the pages when I make a change on the master.
I have to manually change page heights and the position of the
footers, in any case, to accommodate the different heights of the body
text box on each page. I gather that in a true box model layout this
would not be necessary(?)
One last thing - they’re probably expecting that this will take a
significant amount of work, but because Freeway doesn’t work in
HTML but rather generates it on demand, this is normally a
relatively simple process. You may be able to score brownie points
by turning this around fairly swiftly and cheerfully.
Ha, well they did ask me to lighten the gray background on all the
pages. Uploading the new site to them took longer than making the
change in Freeway.
freewaytalk mailing list
email@hidden
Update your subscriptions at:
http://freewaytalk.net/person/options