While browsing the news today I found an interesting article on BBC. The article talks about web-standards and how most web-sites fails to follow them. The result of this is that all these web-sites block out all their disabled users who need alternative browsers.

As you might have read in our article ‘Why Your Site Should be Multi-platform,’ we strongly support the usage of web-standards in order to not block out any users. There are standards set by the W3C on what HTML should look like, but sadly enough, these are not widely obeyed. Microsoft has, mainly due to a dominant position of Internet Explorer, been able to abuse their position and ignore the rules. Hence, many (unskilled) web-developers today only build their web-sites for Internet Explorer, and ignore the standards.

However, with the increased popularity of FireFox, many companies are starting to realize that they’re actually loosing business by not having a compatible website.

The web-sites surveyed revealed that:

• 93% failed to provide adequate text descriptions for graphics
• 73% relied on JavaScript for important functionality
• 78% used colours with poor contrast, causing issues for those with colour blindness
• 98% did not follow industry web standards for the programming code
• 97% did not allow people to alter or resize pages
• 89% offered poor page navigation
• 87% used pop-ups causing problems for those using screen magnification software

Not only do these web-sites discriminate against disabled people, but, from of a business point-of-view, they probably loose plenty of potential sales.

How can a disabled person purchase something from a web-shop when they can’t browse it?

How can can a disabled person find information about a product or service on a website that fails to support their browser?

Is your/your company’s web-site following the web-standards? The W3C Validator will give you the answer.

Read the entire BBC-article here.

           

Showing some true Christmas spirit, we’ve gone ahead and added Furl support in Cuzimatter. We’re just too nice. Now your honored blog readers will be able to Furl your blog entries like crazy and you’ll be insanely famous and popular at parties. Just remember to invite your friends at Playing With Wire when you go.

Yesterday, we finally received a letter from the Secretary of State. After about 1.5 month of waiting, we are now finally a ‘legal’ company.

As you may/may not have noticed, we’ve already changed the footer of into stating ‘(c) WireLoad, LLC‘ rather than just Alex and Viktor.

So what’s next? Now we’re going to apply for a FBN (Fictitious Business Name).

A while back Viktor had to make a server redirect from http://domain.com to http://www.domain.com. He experienced some issues because of his lack of control over the server which he wrote about here.

Also the other day we featured an article about the importance of having a unified URL. Since

http://www.domain.com/article.html

looks different than

http://domain.com/article.html

to del.icio.us and similar services, you might not get all that nice attention you deserve. In our article we suggested using Cuzimatter to alleviate the problem. We also linked to a suggestion by Pronet Advertising’s URL’s matter. This article mentions that redirecting everyone to the same URL, if possible, is useful too.

We already use our own solution, Cuzimatter to promote unified links to our articles. But today as you might have noticed, we have also added the other solution: any address on http://playingwithwire.com now redirects to http://www.playingwithwire.com.

Luckily, we have a little bit more control over our own server than Viktor did when he was working with this earlier. So on Playing With Wire, the redirect is as simple as it gets. We use Apache 2 as our web server. Our httpd.conf used to look something like this:

<virtualhost>
  ServerName playingwithwire.com
  ServerAlias www.playingwithwire.com

All we had to do was to change this a little bit. (Note that the Redirect pemanent thing should be just one line including the http://… part.) Here’s the modified configuration:

<virtualhost>       
  Servername playingwithwire.com
  Redirect permanent / http://www.playingwithwire.com/
</virtualhost>

<virtualhost>
  ServerName www.playingwithwire.com
  ...

All done! Works for every page on the site and does not require slow .htaccess files or complicated mod rewrite rules.

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Hey. Just thought I’d let you know that Cuzimatter now has support for Reddit buttons too, complete with that little cute dude with the antenna. Remember, applying a good helping of Cuzimatter to your blog is good for you!