Wednesday, 10th September 2003
Witness the excitement
The excitement peculiar to a markup geek, slight or otherwise, that is. (I know I don't appear to be a markup geek, but don't judge by my present markup - it was mostly done in Februaryish when I was younger and more stupid than I am today. That's a good point actually; I really, really must - and yes, I say this a lot - redo all my markup to actually make it near-valid and semantically pure. Anyway, back to the story.)
Sean has marked up a chess board with pieces in XHTML and CSS - no graphics. I had no idea that things like chess characters had their own HTML entities, and I am ridiculously excited about this. Minimal markup, three little CSS rules, and that's it. (And yes, I think it is tabular data.)
Sean's wondering whether it'll crash any browsers, although I'd be surprised. Anyway. Go check it out; I think it's fab.
Comments
that's cool; i wonder how a screenreader copes with it? for example, does jaws know to say "knight" instead of "♞"?
Well it really depends on the quality and purpose of the screenreader. They really are Just Another Browser. For example although it doesn't crash IE6 it also looks just like a checked board with a few transparent blocks where the pieces should be.
dvd: IBM Home Page Reader renders it correctly (it uses IE), but just refers to each piece as 'question mark'.
Kevin: try it now. It's not the browser, but you didn't have Arial Unicode MS and I don't think I'd supplied a suitable replacement. (This is also likely what happened on Cathy's work PC.)
Hmm, the pieces still don't render in IE6. Not sure if it was clear but it's always rendered perfectly in Firebird, Opera and Mozilla on the same machine.
Oh. Um. I really have no idea about this sort of stuff, so I'll just say that it worked for me (albeit not perfectly) in IE6 on two machines with the Arial Unicode MS font and that if you do find the problem, please let me know. Sorry.
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