GoneWacko’s Blog

Website form usability

For some weeks now I’ve been using Linux, exclusively. Everything works fine - Music, Movies, DVDs, Games (by using Cedega), etc. So there’s no reason for me to go back to Windows.

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I’m currently using the XFCE Desktop Manager because it’s somewhat GNOME-like without being bloated and made for complete noobs. I’m currently using a black colour theme (”XFCE Dusk”), just because I like it. Plus it looks good with my xterm colours (on display in the terminal at the top-right corner of the screenshot).

One thing that is somewhat annoying is that firefox also adopts these theme colours for its interface elements. I guess this can be solved by using a firefox theme, but I like the way it looks. The only annoyance about it is that form elements on websites also get the GTK theme’s look - black background, white text. This does not always (rarely, in fact) work out.

I’m suddenly finding out that a lot of webdesigners are doing a half-assed job at designing websites. Lately I’ve been focussing on usability of websites quite a bit, because two out of four people in RBTS are visually impaired, and thus we will be very good at making websites that are accessible.
Now, back to my rant. It seems that there are too many webdesigners out there that live by a rule of thumb: “If it looks good on my screen, it looks good everywhere“. Apparently the way to make a form element look good is to specify the background colour for it. I’ve come across many form elements where my white text looks hideous on the form element’s background. However, white backgrounds take the cake.

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Let’s look at Owen’s blog (sorry Owen ;)). When I want to comment on his blog, I have to fill in some information.
For some silly reason, the first input box is not themed. I remember that, on a default Windows XP theme, this looks okay. But in my case, it doesn’t fit in with the website’s style at all.
The worst are the other input boxes, however. These were given a white background colour, but the foreground colour was not specified. Why is this a problem? Because the theme’s default colours are used unless the stylesheet specifies a different color. In my case, this default colour is… White.
The screenshot (click the image so you know what I’m talking about) features a completely filled out form. You just can’t see it.
The only way to check what you typed was by selecting the text so it gets highlighted.

Because it’s impossible to get everyone on the planet to fix their stylesheets (although I think I will be sending e-mails to any large and/or well-known site because I think it’s just plain stupid) I guess I’ll try writing a chickenfoot (warning, looooong video (Google TechTalks, great stuff)) script that injects some better CSS for forms.

Probably not the most fascinating blog entry, but I felt like ranting about it. Although I’m not very good at doing so.

Driving school

After stalling for a good amount of weeks, today I finally called the driving school to inquire about things such as waiting lists, costs, average amounts of lessons, passing percentages, etcetera.

Only to get a hold of their voicemail system.

Being so shy over the phone (for some reason I’m not shy when/once I’m talking to people over the phone, but I am shy when I have to call people), I didn’t even consider leaving a message and hung up.

If I get the same message again next Monday I’ll leave a message telling them to call me back.

In other news, today (or, technically, yesterday, the 18th) is my sister’s 23rd birthday. So happy birthday to the sister of GoneWacko.

What happens when I’m bored

I end up making a javascript-powered sudoku thing.
Although it’s not quite done yet (it does not check if you’ve finished the puzzle yet, and some other minor tweaks are still missing), it’s starting to get better

Check it out here, but be warned: It’s a very easy puzzle, the script is not done yet and, last but definately not least: Internet Explorer sucks. Use it in firefox if you can (haven’t tried any other browsers than those two). It’ll work in IE, but if you fill in a number and then clear it, it’ll actually say ‘null’ instead of clearing the cell (’internally’ the cell is definately cleared though, so it’s no biggie).

It was interesting to make because I hadn’t used javascript in 7 years. Not to mention the fact that back then the best javascript I ever wrote was
.