April 2000

Archives available on this page

• 23: Internet Explorer 5
• 26: Et Tu Sais Homme (and they know navigation)

2000.04.23

Internet Explorer 5 for Macintosh simply does not support all of HTML 4, no matter what Microsoft and its adherents say. (MacNN discussion.) Even my pal and staunch supporter Jeffrey Zeldman of the Web Standards Project is guilty of a significant inconsistency:

If I built a browser that supported <h1> and <p> and nothing else, would I claim to support HTML? Of course not. Why do browser makers think they can offer bits and pieces of a complete standard, and call it "XML support"? They need to be called on this behavior, and that’s what we’re here for.

Except that IE5 leaves out significant features in HTML 4 (and earlier incarnations), including LONGDESC (see Break This Page! for example uses, or this page, or jobsite-usability page), SUMMARY in TABLE, and CITE in BLOCKQUOTE (used in the quotation above: Will your browser give you access to it?), to name several. There’s still no support for LINK metadata, which even ol’ Lynx supports. (iCab does a stunning job of supporting LINK metadata.) These sins are venial, not mortal, but let’s call a spade a spade. IE5 has partial support for HTML 4. By the Web Standards Project’s own norms, that fact should be cause for opprobrium, not praise.

Furthermore, now IE5 isn’t rendering tokens like en dash <–> (that’s –) and only occasionally renders graphics.

2000.04.26

Our new standard is to feel the soul of music, embrace the whims of fashion, and imagine the realm of cosmetics.

So says a postcard sent to us from Japan. The postcard promoted a Web site called – get this – ettusaishomme.ne.jp. That’s Et Tu Sais Homme dot network dot Japan. "And you know Man."

The postcard featured a full-on Wallpaper-inspired photograph of Dead Ringers–reminiscent backlit blue translucent body-care products (scissors, tweezers, and ampules containing a myriad overpriced water solutions), so we surfed on over. Most of the thing is in Japanese (surprise!), but take a look at the WebShop page:

D.

They show a stylized (again, Wallpaper-style) map of the "store," errantly corresponding RL floorplans with cybershopping. Departments – Advice Desk, Back Yard, Library, etc. – carry English legends (in the house font, Avenir). Mouse over them, and voilà: They’re turning Japanese. (Katakana only: shiookeesu, not the true Japanese word for "showcase.") Underneath is a sentence in correct Japanese describing what you’ll find there. It’s all surrounded by a heavy-dashed-ruled ice-blue comic-strip word balloon. It’s gorgeous.

At page bottom are graphical representations of text links (i.e., not ASCII text but pictures of ASCII text – bitmaps) of the same departments. Mouse over them and you get the katakana again.

We like this approach. EtTuSaisHomme gets to profit from the prestige value of English (or English-like phrases: We used to own a sweatshirt emblazoned with "Wildlife Port en Ouest de Moose") while providing accessibility for Japanese-speakers if they need it and/or if they work a little or do a bit of experimenting.

Finally, the approach is internally consistent with Japanese. There’s a tradition in the writing system of furigana – hiragana placed above or below a kanji whose pronunciation you are unlikely to know. Another term for furigana is ruby. (Hiragana are syllabics. Everyone who reads Japanese can read hiragana. So if you encounter a kanji with furigana, you will at least know how to pronounce it.) These features of the Japanese orthography are evoked by mouseovers of this type.

We were just wondering if this kind of mouseover – maybe with flyout menus – could solve the problem of an interface to multilingual content at a site. Maybe an Info button (lowercase white i on a green ground) that, when moused over, turns into menus declaring Français, Deutsch, Português and the like. Perhaps that base graphic could be an animated GIF (yes, there may be a use for animated GIFs!) rotating text like FR DE PT.