GBHXonline V3 Forms Problem

[Green-Beast]

Hey guys, I made a new site for my hosting company. I made it really accessible -- checkpoint two site for sure. It's written to XHTML Strict, uses sematic mark-up, all that jazz. This site uses a more solid CSS than my portfolio, I hope so anyway. Please tell me what you think. Have some fun with it with the Firefox Web Dev tools: disable images, disable colors, removes styles, etc. It degrades nicely which is one advantage to making a site this way. Please tear it apart from an accessibilities standpoint.

If someone can, please let me know what's wrong with my forms. I guess I'm supposed to use "selected" on my pulldowns, but I don't know how to apply it and pass validation. It tells me my fields have to be populated, which they are, so I'm confused. The forms work great (try contact, check out the result return), they just don't pass priority three, mechanical that is.


Thanks,
Mike

[Green-Beast]

I took care of the selected issue. It needed to be selected="selected". While I was at it I improved the usability of my forms with this:

onfocus="if(this.value==this.defaultValue)this.value=''"

I had just a null onfocus value before... if one went back to say, fix their email address or something, the field would clear completely. Now it doesn't.

Mike

[David Harrison]

Well, this:

<div class="navbar"><!-- header navbar include -->
&bull; <a href='#content' title='Skip Navigation - Accesskey: 0' accesskey='0' tabindex='1'>Skip <acronym title='Navigation'>Nav</acronym></a> &bull; 

<a href='siteinfo.php' title='Site Information - Accesskey: 1' accesskey='1'>Site Info</a> &bull; 
<a href='index.php' title='Home Page - Accesskey: 2' accesskey='2'>Home</a> &bull; 
<a href='hosting.php' title='Hosting Information - Accesskey: 3' accesskey='3'>Hosting</a> &bull; 
<a href='support.php' title='Support Page - Accesskey: 4' accesskey='4'>Support</a> &bull; 
<a href='ticket.php' title='Help Ticket - Accesskey: 5' accesskey='5'>Ticket</a> &bull;
<a href='contact.php' title='Contact Information - Accesskey: 6' accesskey='6'>Contact</a> &bull;  
	</div>

Should be an unordered list and you could add the bullet points in with CSS, although to get the bullets with IE you'd still have to use •. And what's with the single quotes? I know you're not using XHTML 1.1 and sending as application/xhtml+xml, but if in the future you decide you want to, you'll have to go back and fix this.

Also, I notice that a lot of the text is light gray on a light gray background, that's gonna seriously hard to read for some people to read. And I didn't even notice the yellow underline for your <abbr>'s until I accidentally moused over one.

These are just a couple of quick points that I noted, I'll probably come back and post more later.

[Green-Beast]

Okay, cool man. Appreciate it.

The links are just floating there. I couldn't think of a reason to put them in a horzizontal list so I didn't. Sematics-wise they're fine as are et al. I just couldn't see a reason.

Good eye on the single quotes. The reason you're seeing that is because of the way they are brought into the pages (you'll only see that on certain links).

I maintan a link list for the entire site, being that the urls are in PHP, I had to use the single quotes... I think so anyway.

Example (to-top link-set):
<?
$toplinks = "|<a href='#top' title='Top of Page' accesskey='T'>PageTop</a>|<a
href='#mainmenu' title='On Page Menu'>PageMenu</a>|";
?>

...with this, then I only had to write <?=$toplinks ?> to get...

|PageTop|PageMenu|





Mike

[David Harrison]

You can escape " in strings by using a backslash:

<?
$toplinks = "<ul><li>|<a href=\"#top\" title=\"Top of Page\" accesskey=\"T\">PageTop</a></li><li>|<a href=\"#mainmenu\" title=\"On Page Menu\">PageMenu</a>|</li></ul>";
?>

Edit: Also, there's no need for this:

<a name="top"></a>
<a name="content"></a>
<a name="mainmenu"></a>
<a name="meet" tabindex="2"></a>
<a name="diff" tabindex="3"></a>
<a name="host" tabindex="4"></a>
<a name="sidebartop"></a>
<a name="sidemenu"></a>
<a name="deals" tabindex="5"></a>
<a name="webdesign" tabindex="6"></a>

Anything with an ID can act as an anchor. And the tabindex on the anchors doesn't work (at least not in Firefox).

[Green-Beast]

Okay, cool, thanks for all that David. Always learning.

I should have known about the escapes, it does that in my onpage output. I'll have to go back and work on those. Should take too long since they are all in a single file

Mike

[Green-Beast]

I went through and replaced all my single quotes with escaped doubles. Just posting this to let you know your advice didn't fall on deaf ears. Thanks.

Mike