I have no illusions that accessibility on the web can be tricky. It’s primarily tricky because of the way developers choose to implement it. Web Axe nicely sums it up: Most people don’t realize that the web IS accessible. The problem is that designers and developers break it.— Web Axe…
Now that the (Western, my favorite) holiday season is upon us, the tradition of advent calendars whose chocolate is replaced with web-related tips and articles is back. This year’s crop is missing some from last year, but there’s still good stuff to be found. If you know of any others,…
When I saw main proposed as an element a few months ago (or content or maincontent as alternate names), I didn’t think the process to fold it into the HTML specification would move very quickly. Much to my surprise on the W3C HTML Working Group mailing list the main element…
As I started down the path of my first HTML5 web page I spent a good deal of time trying to understand the sectioning elements of HTML5 — nav, article, aside, and section — as well as the major structural elements such as header and footer. Trying to find the…
This is one of those posts that might interest only a few people and even then only if you are interested in a very specific aspect of this ongoing standard development. Yesterday I got into a conversation (just one of the messages) on the W3C Responsive Image Community Group mailing…
This post was written in 2012, when Internet Explorer was still a browser in common use, Edge did not exist (in either form), and WHCM was not yet on standards track. If you are supporting IE or looking for historical support, then this article is for you. Otherwise I recommend…
Baby Boomerangutuang, one of the Tick’s students. He is shouting It’s OK to play with dolls! If you cut your teeth building for the web in the 90s and even into the 00s, then you probably learned to lay out your HTML pages using <table>s. As CSS support and techniques…
It’s not hard to stumble across diatribes against IE6 (and 7 and 8) users across forums peopled by web developers. As a web developer there is no denying that my desire to play with the new and shiny is hampered by my need to support users on older browsers and…
Testing accessibility on your web projects can be a tricky task if you have no firsthand experience with visual, audible, physical or even cognitive impairment. Having resources in the community is important as is tracking down the same tools in use in that community. Despite all this it’s nice to…
Internet Explorer has been the whipping boy of the internet for some time now, particularly Internet Explorer 6. Now it seems Internet Explorer 7 may be the new cool target. Australian electronics seller Kogan has decided to impose a “tax” on users of Internet Explorer 7. The justification from Kogan’s…
Just over a year ago now I covered how the HTML5 specification is going to allow the alt attribute to be excluded from img elements under some very specific circumstances (Image alt Attributes Not Always Required in HTML5 and More on Image alt Requirement in HTML5). The one I am…
Using the CSS property text-transform to automatically shift copy to uppercase has been popular for a while now, but a combination of a recent explosion in the use of that style and my slow move to Chrome as my default browser has caused me to regularly paste text into emails,…