28 October 2006, by Karl Bunyan
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. 
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
October 28, 2006 at 12:19 pm
Filed in: Accessibility
1 comment
10 October 2006, by Karl Bunyan
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... In VB.Net, though, things are sometimes the same, and sometimes different.
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.
October 10, 2006 at 11:18 am
Filed in: .Net, Programming
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1 October 2006, by Karl Bunyan
I kept on getting a problem whereby on trying to recompile a project in Visual Studio a dll assembly would be locked ... Microsoft: sometimes, I really hate you.
I kept on getting a problem whereby on trying to recompile a project in Visual Studio a dll assembly would be locked when I loaded the project up in a browser with a message such as:
Cannot copy assembly […] to file [..].dll. The process cannot access the file because it is being used by another process.
With a note that the error was something around:
<add assembly=”*” />
Which wasn’t very helpful. Googling for the error message didn’t help much as there were all kinds of reasons for files being locked, but Googling for asp.net compile file locking did and I was lead to this page which explains it.
I tried various ‘fixes’ of my own, such as rebuilding the entire
solution, starting and stopping IIS through services, and sometimes it
seemed to work and sometimes it didn’t. It was very bizarre and very
annoying, but the file lock was starting to cause me real problems.
The solution
It was quite easy: disable the Indexing
Service from the Services list. Apparently the indexing service was
locking the file and it would be released after ‘a bit of time’, which
was why my random attempts at fixes sometimes seemed to work, and
sometimes didn’t.
Microsoft: sometimes, I really hate you.
Preventing compiled dll’s from being locked in Visual Studio.
October 1, 2006 at 11:15 am
Filed in: .Net, Programming
No comments