Platinum Edition Using HTML 4, XML, and Java 1.2
(Publisher: Macmillan Computer Publishing)
Author(s): Eric Ladd
ISBN: 078971759x
Publication Date: 11/01/98

Server-Side Processing

When Java was released, it was touted as the panacea for Web programming. Several years later, though, Java has not panned out as the “end-all” language for Web-based data processing. Part of the problem was that users were just too impatient to wait for Java applets to load. Security was also a concern as programmers discovered security “holes” in Java that could put a user’s machine at risk.

A similar thing has happened with ActiveX technologies. ActiveX controls also take time to download, and they have had their share of security issues. Additionally, only Microsoft Internet Explorer has native support for ActiveX controls, so users with other browsers would either miss out on ActiveX technology or have to find a plug-in that enables their browser to work with an ActiveX control.

The common thread in both the Java and ActiveX stories is that they tried to be client-side technologies in the face of users wanting short download times and a secure environment. After it was clear that neither technology was really delivering on those counts, the fervor over them subsided. It’s true that both are still around, but they are by no means the hot technologies that make the Web interactive.

Rather than shift the burden of interactivity to the browser, support for interactive sites is now being refocused on the server. Indeed, server-side Java is becoming more and more prevalent, and Microsoft’s Internet Information Server (IIS) can easily work with server-side ActiveX controls. In addition, many “middleware” technologies, such as Allaire’s ColdFusion and Microsoft’s Active Server Pages, are available on the server side to make it a fairly simple matter to develop Web-enabled database applications. All these server-side technologies return HTML to a browser, enabling fast downloads and the security of knowing that no executable files are being placed on a user’s machine.

As time goes on, look for more and more processing to occur on the server side of the HTTP coin. Client-side processing will likely be limited to scripts written in JavaScript or VBScript to perform tasks such as form validation or to support other client-side technologies such as Dynamic HTML.

Respecting an International Audience

Site designers and content developers often forget about the “World” in “World Wide Web.” As the Internet expands to more and more of the globe, you need to be aware that your visitors can be coming from anywhere on Earth, not only from your own city, state, or country.

You can demonstrate sensitivity to an international audience in several ways:

•  Use the HTML tags that specify the meaning of your content and let the various international versions of browsers handle the language-specific nuances of rendering that content. You can use the <Q> tag, for example, to mark up a quotation. Then a Spanish-language browser would know to offset the content with << and >>, rather than with quotation marks.

•  Use the LANG attribute available for many HTML tags to specify a language context for a piece of content or for an entire document.

•  Use iconography that is not culture specific.

•  If you specify dates and times, make sure you note the time zone and/or a reference city so users can deduce when things happened or are going to happen in their time zones.

•  Check your server access logs to see what kinds of hits you’re getting from countries other than your own. If you’re detecting a number of hits from Portugal, you might go so far as to have key content translated into Portuguese so that visitors from Portugal can read your content in their native language.

You should also test your site with an international audience as well. This can be fairly easy if you work in a corporation with offices around the globe. In that case, just call around and line up some volunteers from each office to walk through the site and offer their feedback.

Respecting a Disabled Audience

HTML 4 went a long way toward increasing the accessibility of information published on the Web for users who use browsers that are not screen based. Visually impaired users, for example, might use a browser that renders to Braille or even synthesized speech.

Perhaps the best way to make your pages accessible to non-visual browsers is to make judicious use of the HTML tags and attributes that support the rendering of non-visual content. These include

•  The heading tags (<H1>–<H6>), which define a hierarchical structure in your document.

•  The ALT attribute to specify a text-based alternative for an image, applet, or other embedded object.

•  The <LABEL>, <FIELDSET>, and <LEGEND> tags, which make it possible to create Web forms that are more accessible to users. Marking up the prompting text in front of a form field, for example, will enable a speech-based browser to use that text to prompt a user for input.

In addition to using accessible HTML, you can also make use of style sheets that enhance accessibility. You can use relative sizing in your style sheets, for example, rather than absolute sizing, so that a user who has set the base font size to a larger value to enhance readability won’t have the size reset to an absolute value by your style sheet.

The Cascading Style Sheet level 2 specification also provides support for assigning style information to sound information delivered by an audio browser. You can use these style sheet properties to control volume, pitch, and position of the voice the user hears. By creating the illusion of different people delivering the information, you can simulate a conversation or assign one person to a class of information so that the user comes to associate a specific voice with a specific kind of content.

Finally, the new Java 1.2 standard includes several accessibility hooks that are useful for developing content for the disabled.

•  For more information on writing Java applets for maximum accessibility, see “User Input and Interactivity with Java,” p. 1025.