In order to clean up the experience when a user encounters a bad link, the site could be quite smart, and respond with a custom 404 page that parses out the requested page from the url, and then run a search on that missing page topic.

For instance, if the missing url is http://www.myrobotcollection.com/astroboy.html

Besides sending a nasty email to the owner flaming him for losing such a vital page, we can serve up an alternative page.

As the page is hosted on a Microsoft IIS web server, I can configure a custom 404 using IIS and C# to parse out the “astroboy” search term and state that the page no longer exists. I can then provide a few links to other pages from the search on “astroboy”, and hopefully find the missing page if it happened to get renamed to “astroboyRocks.html” or completely changed to “Tezuka_Pinocchio.html”

If we cannot go with server-side scripting, another option is handle the error in the client. In his article, The Perfect 404, Ian Lloyd provides an elegant javascript example of how to react to a missing link ( Full Article ).

In my case, I did not something so pretty, and decided to dumb down Ian’s solution by rewriting it to just capture the last term in the url and chop off the extension:

// let’s see what they were searching for …
var myURL=document.URL.toLowerCase();
var myMissingPageName = “”;
// find search term
var urlArray = new Array();
urlArray = myURL.split(“/”);
var myMissingPageNum = urlArray.length – 1;
var myMissingPageHTML = urlArray[myMissingPageNum];
var myMissingPageArray = new Array();
myMissingPageArray = myMissingPageHTML.split(“.”);
var myMissingPageName = myMissingPageArray[0];
// ok found the last term and took off the extension…
// now I need to post it the ASPX which will respond with the custom 404 page
// document.write ‘http://www.clientsdomain.com/SearchResults.aspx?txtSearch=’ + myMissingPageName;

tip: while writing this code, I found inserting alert(myVariableName); after each line useful for tracing in the browser.

I’m currently working with a client (ontario government) on a rich media web portal that provides video and must adhere to certain accessibility guidelines. Some of the pages contain video and we are to serve up captions for users who request them.

After researching various solutions on how both Microsoft and Adobe handle accessibility issues, I decided to go with the Hi-Caption Studio by Hi Software which is an authoring tool for creating sami (Microsoft Synchronized Accessible Media Interchange) or Timed Text files, a format of xml that can be read by both the Flash and Window Media players. It takes about 15-30 minutes for each 10 minutes of audio to add timing points with Hi-Caption.

Window Media Player version 9 and up support captions, and Flash player 7 and up support captions through a Hi-Caption component. There is also a new Flash 9 component for FLV captions, but unfortunately Flash CS3 does not work with Hi-Caption.

Resources:
great article on authoring SAMI files
MAGpie (alternative to hi-caption) that supports Flash CS3
Adobe Whitepaper on using Hi-Caption
Adobe Accessibility Resource Centre
Adobe recommendation for Hi-Caption Flash 8
Microsoft recommendation for Hi-Caption