I am sure it has happened to all of you. You are browsing a page and you see gibberish characters printed out, maybe where a vocal with tilde was supposed to be...

This is still a very common problem with certain types of printer and certainly with web pages.  This is most annoying if you are browsing non english pages and the author does not handle the special characters correctly.

To make special characters and accented letters show up on your pages, use a special set of codes called character entities, which you insert into your HTML code and which your browser will display as the corresponding symbols or characters you want.

The most common character entities have been collected by the International Organization for Standardization and compiled in an ISO Latin Alphabet table, which includes special characters, letters with diacritical marks (accents, umlauts, etc.), and scientific and currency symbols. The Latin-1 table contains 255 characters.

Of course, you don't want to learn the name or number of 255 special characters!  So, up until now, verifying and fixing the correct handling of Special Characters has been a painful and slow process.  With a new feature of our Online Web Optimization tool this is now a simple task.

When using our Silverlight interface, choose the "Replace Special Characters" task and you will:

- Fix malformed entities: XHTML entities should always begin with an & and end with a ; character. Some browsers render them even when they are not correctly defined, which leads to inconsistencies.

 The product is still in Beta but it is fully functional.  Tell us what you think.

By the way, if you like the features of the Online tool, don't be shy and try out the full featured Aggiorno products, the Visual Studio Add In version or the Standalone version. 

As web users and web developers we are constantly attributing human qualities to the different actors of the Internet.  In my mind Google has always been the sexy, out of reach girl that we're constantly trying to impress.  When courting a girl there is a well defined protocol that needs to be respected.  You have to be polite, tactful, respectful (... it seems I am listening to my mom...), in any case there are rules that need be followed when your are trying to impress a girl and these rules go well beyond appearances.

As web developers we tend to forget some of the rules that need to be followed to make our sites more findable, more accessible, more secure, more maintainable... we typically only care about how do our pages look like in the common browsers without paying to much attention to the inner details.  You can have great content but if your markup sucks you will have issues when trying to conquer important actors like Google.

Last week I wrote a post on how the lack of use of web standards can affect your SEO efforts.  Lot's of small details that can really turn Google off.

At Aggiorno, the team is on a death march towards the release of V1.0 (soon... very soon...) and we need to relief some stress and at the same time try to educate more about the importance of good markup, the importance of following web standards on our daily work.  We came up with a video called "Get a Chance at Google" that enacts an encounter between a very content intensive web site with ... some issues...

Take a look at the video and share it if you like it.  Also, let us know what you think and if you have more ideas so this can become its own series!

Enjoy!

NorthTemple.com recently published a comprehensive accessibility checklist and it’s a must-read for anyone who owns or maintains a Web site. The original post can be found at NorthTemple.com: The Accessibility Checklist.

The 30 items on the list (excluding the ones related to testing) can be classified in two different categories:

1) Considerations that require visual appreciation or understanding of the content to be enforced (19 items).

2) Considerations that are a property of the source code and do not require understanding of the subject matter (11 items).

The first category covers keeping your intended audience in mind first and foremost. Include great content. Use interesting descriptions for audio/visuals. Eliminateany non-accessible resourcesmeant tonavigate the user through the site.

The second category revolves completely around what I call properties of the source code, things that are coded in a way that can or cannot be accessible. Ensuring all pages are titled and all images have an alternate description.Ordering the form fields correctly (tab index). Separate content and style.

One of the article’s most notable points states that one of the ways to test whether the page is accessible or not is to certify that it is Web standards compliant. Aha! WEB STANDARDS again!

This is just another example of the importance of following Web standards. I would go so far as to say that making a page Web standards compliant is the FIRST step that needs to be done. In fact, I suggest that even if you do nothing else, at least make sure your pages Web standard compliant.

Finding and manually solving the issues from both categories is time consuming and detailed work. And that’s probably why many Web developers don’t bother doing it. But ignoring Web standards won’t help a site’s search engine rankings and it certainly won’t make it accessible to the users. So how do you find, fix, and solve the issues quickly, easily and automatically? Luckily, there’s Aggiorno to do it all for you.

Download Aggiorno Beta now!

Web developers and designers continually face choices about the web sites that they build. Often it seems that obtaining a desired look forces the design away from standards or making an accessible website automatically makes it “boring”. In actual fact, these are false choices, and especially with the advent of more standards-compliant browsers, it’s possible to construct fully standards-compliant Web sites with great accessibility.

We just released a white paper by Gareth Powell that addresses the main issues on how to make a page accessible.  You can find it in the following link

White Paper: Clean, crisp, accessible HTML – why not?.  Send us your comments in this thread!

Enjoy!