Hi Ryan,

We have investigated the issue that you describe, and have determined that this error is caused by the firewall on your computer. Sometimes computer software will block sites that are important for Facebook to operate. If you temporarily disable your firewall before making profile changes, this should resolve the issue.

Let me know if you continue to experience problems after attempting this solution.

Thanks for contacting Facebook,

xxxxx
User Operations
Facebook

I wrote back to them saying how utterly ridiculous such a solution is. I said that if you hovered over the link, the link pointed home.php, and no firewall can intelligently redirect a link unless I had hand-coded it. I also informed him that for a firewall to block a firewall, the link would have to be something along the lines of: http://iam.goingto.spamyou.com/, then your firewall would nullify the link OR give you some warning message.

Of course I didn’t stop there, I asked why Facebook was telling people to disable their firewall to use their product. Doesn’t sound right to me. Thoughts?

Your account is temporarily unavailable due to site maintenance. It should be available again within a few hours. We apologize for the inconvenience.

I checked with a friend and they could log in fine, how weird is that? Is anybody else having an issue with it? I joined Facebook not too long after it launched, this is the first time I can recall not being able log in due to maintenance. Can you log in?

Facebook has started to put structure into their site. What I mean is using the various heading tags. Well, they did put a <h1> tag, but it is empty. That is completely useless, and bad coding for putting in empty tags that do nothing. Considering how big Facebook is now, they cannot make such errors. My only guess is they put it in to improve accessibility? If so, it just shows how little they actually know about accessibility. Header/heading tags DO NOT work like anchor tags, they are contextual!

Background on Headers

Think of headers as chapters in your average math or science book. You have Chapter 1, then part 1.1, and sometimes section 1.1.1 or 1.1.a, well “Chapter 1″ would receive an <h1> tag. “Part 1.1″, “Part 1.2″, etc would receive an <h2> tag. Sections, such as 1.1.1, would receive an <h3> tag. There are six heading tags in all, but unless you are doing something in the legal or scientific realm, I don’t think many people would have, for example, “Section 1.1.1.1.1.1″, but I may be wrong.

The way this has ties to the accessibility realm is mainly with individuals who use screen readers, such as JAWS. JAWS is a very popular screen reader for Windows. (Macs are stuck with the built-in screen reader.)

Next, they redesigned the sidebar menu. Once again, bad coding practice. Instead of making a simple unsorted list (without bullets), they did it all with divs. The genius who coded this named the class for each div list-item. On top of that each, link in the menu needs two divs to get it to look that way. Ok, this could be done dramatically easier and cleaner with a simple list!

I haven’t looked at the accessibility at all really, but seeing that they cannot design the simple elements, why on earth should I think they even consider accessibility. I wish there was a way to get these issues up with Facebook.

Technorati Tags: facebook, design, web design, standards