Mar 24, 2009 @ 05:53pm
Nearly all the main players in the browser world have their own blogs and while they might range in their usefulness they can give you an interesting perspective on the vendors ideas of themselves.
The obvious missing link above is from Apple, is the WebKit blog better for Apple than having their own? The fan-boys run Safari anyway. The WebKit blog focuses mainly on the visual elements they add and improve (CSS transitions etc), with the more tech elements (Eg. JavaScript performance) listed but given second billing.
At Mozilla, Firefox is just a category, it's not got it's own blog. Recently it's very focused on security and updates.
Chrome's blog is really new, although there is an older blog for Chromium concentrated on performance and stability
Opera's blog re-forces their position, unfortunately. The underdog's blog is all about getting the word out from their tight following, the tech elements play second fiddle. The Opera developer area is great though …
Mar 8, 2009 @ 08:29pm
Every web-developer on the planet, is waiting for the day we don't have to do anything for IE6. Nevermind creating scaled back versions for it, I'm talking about the day we don't even think about.
Wouldn't that be great.
Heres a quick list of the kind of simple CSS selecters we'd finally get to use;
Child selector
div > p - A little one to start with, but how useful. > matches only elements that are the direct children of the parent,
Sibling selector
p.bill ~ p.ben - If .bill is before .ben then the rule is true. Not the same as '+'.
Attribute selectors
div[aria-live=assertive] - Useful for more than just for input elements. and if you can find a use for them, advanced attribute selectors allow you to part match stings,
Multiple classes
div.big.red - Sure you can often get away with using these right now, but little risky no?
Inline-block
display:inline-block - IE6 lets you do this on inline elements, but being able to put these on a div cuts down those 'floating' headaches. Use with a liberal dash of -moz-inline-box or -moz-inline-block in FF2.
First-child
:first-child - If you can resist the temptation to move these around with JavaScript, it's the end of putting a class on your first navigation element... now if only last-child worked.
The day IE6 is dead can't come soon enough
Pay homeage to QuirksMode.org for the above research.
Mar 4, 2009 @ 04:52pm
WAI-ARIA (Web Accessibility Initiative - Accessible Rich Internet Applications) allows web pages (or portions of pages) to declare themselves as applications rather than as static documents, by adding role, property, and state information to dynamic web applications. ARIA is intended for use by developers of web applications, web browsers, assistive technologies, and accessibility evaluation tools
For a great first stop: Introduction to WAI-ARIA (Opera.com). Bit of an overview but goes into some usefully simple examples.
Secondly: WAI-ARIA (Alistapart.com)
It’s about a year and half since that’s been written and gets a little confusing when it doesn’t tell you which method you should use to make the attributes valid (DTD or XML schema).
But I know how much you guys love your validators so I just wanted really to point out what tags you can put in now through JS to be bring joy, love and showers of petals to our assistive technology using brethren.
The links get less readable from here on in;
- Managing Dynamic Changes (w3.org)
- Choosing Between Special Case Live Regions (w3.org)
- Form properties (w3.org)
- aria-invalid and role "alert" (marcozehe.de)
1 – Live regions, specify how updates to an area should be notified (or not notified at all) to the user
2 – Got an error pane, lightbox or some other fancy dan, ‘all your page are belong to us’ jazz? Whack one of these on to specify how irritatingly the user should be told about what just happened.
3&4 – form stuff, my favourite, put aria-required on if it’s required and aria-invalid on if it fails validation. As a bonus you can put described by to explain what it should contain but that’s where it starts getting a little hectic.
Browser support
The newest range support it (FF3, IE8 and Opera 9.6) handle the main properties for sure, Safari I’ve no idea. The big assistive programs all play ball… No promises on consistency though.
Update: this is the last month for feedback to the W3c on the ARIA working draft.
