Ok, I have to comment on this.
May, the webmaster there, is VERY clueful. She's been there for a while.
Her first role there was as a temp/comsultant/something-or-other for one
deparment on an internal web job. I was VERY impressed with her work, and
really needed someone to help me out as the site grew. So I was strongly
in favor of hiring her full time as #2 on the webteam. That was quite some
time ago. I resigned as webmaster (I won't go into that) back in early 1997.
May has been the webmaster since then. The last design you all liked so much?
She handled that. I handled the CGI mainly, and acting as kind of a guru
on HTML markup and usability, but May has been handling the day to day
webmaster duties, and most of the changes and additions, for a year and a
half now.
I called her earlier and left a message about the site, and she called me
back. We talked for a while about it, and debugged several of the issues
together. I don't think it is fair to really expect anyone to know everything.
I have an advantage - I'm on the W3C working groups, I've been working with
the web since 1991, I helped create the HTML 4.0 spec (look in the FORMS area
of the spec - there should be examples using Livingston product names :-)),
and I edited a recent book on HTML, etc. I've been one of those crazy
accessability crusaders for years now, so I've seen countless issues in
reports, WGs, etc.
May does NOT need me to give her a clue. I suspect there was some pressure
to get the new site up and some things got missed in testing. I think the
new design works well, and there were really only a handful of problems.
They just happend to trip up Lynx for the most part, and some issues with no
fallback without JavaScript which won't be hard to fix, etc. My first post
was a bit harsh in its wording, I was upset to see the site with these
problems. Part of that is because I really thing Lucent RABU kicks-ass and
I hated to see their website less than perfect, but part of it was because
I was looking at it through my eyes - and things that are screamingly obvious
to me ARE NOT to many people. I'm more sensitive to certain things because
of my activities with the W3C, and strong personal opinions.
May is probably better than me when it comes to CGI scripting. When I started
I knew >< that much Perl. I learned out of necessity and by looking at what
other people did. She had more scripting background when she arrived and
taught me a few tricks.
I have a lot of respect for May, and I really enjoyed working with her. On
top of everything else she is a great person.
-MZ
-- <URL:mailto:megazone@megazone.org> Gweep, Discordian, Author, Engineer, me.. Join ISP/C Internet Service Providers' Consortium <URL:http://www.ispc.org/> "A little nonsense now and then, is relished by the wisest men" 781-788-0130 <URL:http://www.gweep.net/> <URL:http://www.megazone.org/> Hail Discordia! - To unsubscribe, email 'majordomo@livingston.com' with 'unsubscribe portmaster-users' in the body of the message. Searchable list archive: <URL:http://www.livingston.com/Tech/archive/>