The Accessible Web

The Opera Metadata Analysis and Mining Application (MAMA) is an incredible tool and Opera recently released some details on this, called MAMA for short, and some of the findings they have managed to gather using MAMA. Zone Leader Schalk Neethling sat down with Brian Wilson, QA Engineer at Opera Software, to learn more about MAMA.

Schalk Neethling: Hi Brian and thank you for granting us this interview. First off, please tell us a little more about yourself and what you do at Opera.

Brian Wilson: I’ve been involved with software QA for ~15 years, working over the years at Microsoft, Real Networks and now Opera. The Web has always fascinated me with its ability to help people communicate in so many new and interesting ways - to help bring people closer together. My first position was at Microsoft working on their first Web browser (it pre-dated MSIE 1.0 by more than 6 months at least). It was an add-on extension to Word called Internet Assistant that allowed a primitive browsing and authoring capability.

Separately, I also created an online markup reference Web site about HTML and CSS [www.blooberry.com/indexdot/] that has been quite popular for many years. One of the major features of that site is tracking the historical evolution of HTML and CSS in both the browsers and standards. If you look at MAMA, you can trace direct lines between that topic and what MAMA has become.

Read the complete interview at the Web Builder Zone.

I ended the first part of this two part series with a working two level drop down and fly out menu using CSS and HTML. However, we did find that all was not so well when it came to, particularly, Internet Explorer 6. The aim of this part of the series then is to close the gaps and ensure that our menus will work in Firefox, Opera 9.52 and 9.6, Safari 3, Internet Explorer 6 and 7 and for good measure, we will ensure that it works with Google Chrome. So let’s get started.

For me the easiest way to tackle a situation like this is to list the browsers and versions you want to, or need to, support and then work from the top down. So for this article we will use the order of the browsers as mentioned above. One important thing to note is that once the menus work in your current test browser and you move on to the next, you cannot simply forget about the previous browser. Excluding Internet Explorer, which we will target directly using conditional comments, we will more then likely need to make tweaks that might effect the browsers that has already passed the test, so we have to go back and confirm that everything is still ‘a ok’ in all tested browsers.

Read the complete article on the Web Builder Zone.

With the way the economy is right now you might be running into clients that simply cannot pay on time. I know I have had my share of this now and before. This seems to be especially a problem for clients that have a monthly payment arrangement, Again, Brendon Sinclair has the secret, change you billing cycle:

” A lot of my clients have been on monthly web site maintenance contracts for many years. We would perform work on their sites and bill them at the end of the month. Easy.
It’s so stupid, I can’t believe I’ve done it for years (but people who know me understand it!).
You see, we’ve just moved the majority of these clients from monthly to quarterly billing. That equates to much less work for my accounts person and more profit for me. ”

Originally from: http://www.sitepoint.com/newsletter/viewissue.php?id=2&issue=421

So think about changing your monthly contracts to quarterly and it may make all the difference.