Forum testing

Padwah

Fledgling Freddie
Joined
Dec 25, 2003
Messages
127
I've just been putting the finishing touches to my ASP (yeah, yeah I know) based forums and whilst I've been testing them myself I've probably missed a load of little things and I was wandering if any of you guys would be able give it a whirl?

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Cheers for any help you can give me :)
 

Shovel

Can't get enough of FH
Joined
Dec 22, 2003
Messages
1,350
Nice :)

I've gotta get back to work, so this is a bit of a fast-paced list of observations. I don't mean to sound short or negatively critical or anything like that.

Front page:
* No tables in the header - nice work. You could (should?) technically have those menu buttons marked up in a list for navigation, but not a huge issue.
* The alt text on your menu buttons seems to contain a superfluous "Button: " prefix, that'd be quite frustrating if I were listening through a screen reader.
* The "New Posts"|"No New Posts"|"Private Forum" legend/key underneath the forum listed probably shouldn't be a in a <table />, though. Same for the larger key underneath topic listings. An Unordered List might be more appropriate.
* Could also kill the tables for "What's on the boards", "Display Options" and "Forum Rules" blocks.
* Could benefit from adding some new-lines to the HTML output to make it easier to read the source
* I love the green and the pinstripes.

As regards those tables - and I know I go on about tables incessantly - I think it's just a case of running through each page with the same attention to mark-up detail as you've applied to the header. Strikes me that the top of the pages is quite well crafted, and then you find increasing table misuse the further down the page you go. The mark-up you've used seems neat though, so you've done yourself a service by making it easy to fix!

There you go. I'll try and find time for another, deeper look when I've finished my work.

Cheers,
Ben
 

Padwah

Fledgling Freddie
Joined
Dec 25, 2003
Messages
127
Cheers for the input guys :) With regards to the superfluous tables thought I'm in a bit of two minds. Things like the forum legends, forum icons etc, I feel are tabular data and so should be in tables but I agree it could be done with styled un-ordered lists. As for the Button prefix for buttons etc you're probably right and I think I will change it, I had them there for the alt text and carried them over to the title tag, which one do screen readers go for or do hey use both?

Sheepcow, yeah the source is all on one line. I wrote the whole mark-up using response.write's to increase the speed of the forums which makes them fast but the compiled html looks horrible, which I can live with.

Going back again slightly though to Ben's comments on the navigation I've been tring to keep the mark up down to a minimum so I've just used bog standard images for the navigation. My reasoning for this is that as I am using different images for each link with their own custom text it's less code just to use images than to have a styled list and allows easier customisation.

Thanks again for the input though, it really is appreciated. After trying to use Snitz or webwiz forums I got rather hacked off with their general ugliness and lack of flexibility so I decided to make my own that are both XHTML and CSS compliant and whilst there are a few error, mainly through the use of javascript, I think it's come off pretty well. I had started making it entirely through divs and spans but it ended up looking rather messy if massively customisable. i do think though that with the massive rise of CSS people are too quick to drop tables, no I wouldn't use them for a websites layout but if you've got tabular information to display then se tables, don't fuck about styling lists and divs to get the same effect. Doing that you just defeat the whole point of XHTML and CSS by creating more mark up for the same effect.

Anyway rant over and thanks again for the input, if anyone wants to check out the admin/moderator side of the forums let me know and you can give me some hints on that as well :)
 

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