Month: October 2006

This article on the BBC site purports to be about how to create accessible websites, but reading between the lines I get the feeling there’s a press release from the company that built J K Rowling’s site behind it.

It looks like quotes have been taken out of context to me:

However, [CSS is] quite a new technology, it’s only been around a couple of years, and a lot of designers are still very wary of using it.

Flash is a very interesting topic in terms of web accessibility. It’s actually capable of being very accessible indeed.

This makes the article come across as ‘use Flash to make accessible websites because it’s better for it than CSS’ which is quite far from the truth. Initially I thought it was just a case of poor expert quotes, but it seems that it’s just poor journalism that’s behind it.

BBC NEWS | Programmes | Click | Designing a more accessible web

If a language is going to be loosely typed, then that’s fine as long as you know how to use it. If it’s going to be strongly typed that’s even better. So in JavaScript:

var i=1;
var j="1";
if(i==j)alert("Loose typing ahoy!");

Everything’s fine and you get an alert. And if you go:

var thingArray = new Array();
thingArray[i]="Loose typing still ahoy!"
alert(thingArray[j]);

You get the same thing.

Try something similar in C#, and you’ll get a compile error:

int i = 1;
string j="1";
if(i==j)Response.Write("Oooooh badness");

So it will never work.

In VB.Net, though, we’re in a funny middle-ground where things are sometimes the same, and sometimes different:

Dim i as Intger = 1
Dim j as String = "1"
If i = j Then
Response.Write("They're the same here.")
End If

So far, so ropey, and not that dissimilar to JavaScript. But then:

Dim thingArray as new ArrayList
thingArray.Add(i)
If thingArray.Contains(j) Then
Response.Write("They're still the same...")
End If

will never write anything out. Because despite the fact that 1 = “1”, an ArrayList that contains 1 doesn’t also contain “1” because they’re different…

It’s a cop-out of a language, I say.