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Re: Html questions

for

From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: May 5, 2006 5:30AM

On Wed, 3 May 2006, marvin hunkin wrote:

> thought i would ask you html and web gurus on this list.

The WebAIM list is about web accessibility, not web authoring in general.
HTML questions are welcome _if_ they relate to accessibility.

> if this is off topic, i apologize,

Either you have a question about accessibility, or you don't. If you have,
ask it as clearly as you can.

> and give me a local group in Australia,
> where i can ask this question.

This isn't a help desk for finding discussion fora either.

> got a page called Welcome.html in a folder called
> c:TafeMarvinsWebsiteWelcome.html.

"Welcome pages" are generally worse than useless. But maybe you don't mean
a usual "welcome page" here; maybe you mean a main page, or something.

Anyway, the path to the file on your computer does not help at all,
unless some of us want to crack into your system and find the file there.

> now got the problem, that on my three 80s music pages, got a frame called
> Navigation,

If you are using frames, stop using frames. Frames as such aren't always
hostile to accessibility, but they are almost always abused so that
serious problems arise.

> get the error that cannot find server,

Without information about the actual page, I can only say that probably
you have mistyped some URL. But the problem may vanish when you get rid of
frames.

> will paste the url page code below.

It doesn't help much: there is no absolute URL, so relative URLs cannot be
resolved.

> so am i missing something, or being a dummy, do i put the full path, or just
> the ../ path, then the file, or do i put the Welcome.html file, in each
> directory, to reference back to the main page?

You should not think about referring "back". You cannot know whether the
visitor came through your main page or via a link somewhere.

What you need is a URL of the main page, preferably a relative URL - but
it is impossible to tell what it should be without knowing its relation to
the referring page.

> <p> <a href="../MarvinsWebSite/Welcome.html" title="Welcome To Marvins Web
> Portal" target="content" accesskey="W">Welcome To Marvins Web Portal</a> </p>

The title attribute is pointless and potentially confusing when it just
duplicates the link text. Accesskey attributes are harmful. Simple
web sites should not be called portals; such big words just confuse
people.

> now, for some strange reason, want the heading of the actor and part on the
> same line, with a space in between, but it is on two lines.

This is a general authoring problem, not an accessibility issue. There are
many solutions, but you might actually end up with creating a bigger
problem than you solve: a largish requirement on canvas width. Again, it
is impossible to evaluate the situation without a URL.

> in between the paragraphs, jaws says blank, and the line is blank.

Again, it is impossible to suggest solutions with no direct access to the
problem. It is possible that you have superfluous <p> tags or <br> tags.
My guess is that Jaws says "blank" because it encounters an empty
paragraph.

P.S. Please leave a blank line between paragraphs in E-mail, and please
start a sentence with a capital letter. If you have problems in achieving
that, try and find some local help; it's better than forcing all readers
to fight with the inconveniences or real problems that arise from poorly
structured text.

--
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/