Tag: HTML
Web design ‘pre-flight’ checklist
Over the years of being a freelance web designer, I’ve been developing my own processes for the business of designing websites. One of those processes has been compiling a list of tasks that need to be completed before launching a website, whether it be a new site or a redesign. This list is kept in a spreadsheet which I work through, ticking off each item after the client has given final sign off for the site to go live. I view it as my final quality control procedure and I usually find that the process will highlight a few of the ‘little things’ that I might have overlooked in general development. Usually nothing too major; more a case of ‘dotting all the Is and crossing all the Ts’.
Site updated to Microformats Value Class Pattern
It may only be a very small amendment, but I’ve just updated the HTML of this site to bring it in line with the new Microformats Value Class Pattern which has just been released as an alpha draft.
Removing unwanted fields from TinyMCE’s image and link popup windows
If you use TinyMCE in your Content Management System (CMS) projects, you no doubt also give clients the ability to add images and links to their content with TinyMCE’s Link and Image buttons. But by default, these popup windows come with a variety of fields into which unsuspecting clients can input values which will translate into unwanted code when delivered to the page.
More on Removing unwanted fields from TinyMCE’s image and link popup windows
Which is better for search engines: plain text or alt attributes?
Which is better in links from the search engines’ point of view: plain text or images with an alt attribute that says the same thing? For example, is this:
<a href="">This is a link</a>
better than this?
<a href=""><img src="" alt="This is a link"/></a>
More on Which is better for search engines: plain text or alt attributes?
Animated navigation items using jQuery
Dave Shea recently published an article on A List Apart (ALA), CSS Sprites2 – It’s JavaScript Time’, about how to use jQuery to create the effect of animated rollovers on navigation items.
The technique he outlines makes use of the same image replacement method as outlined in ALA’s original Sprites article. The problem with this method however is that it uses a large negative text-indent to remove the default text from screen, and with images turned off in the browser, you don’t see anything. This has accessibility implications not only from the perspective of those with disabilities, but also for those who deliberately turn images off, i.e. people on slower connections or those using handheld devices who are trying to limit the amount of information downloaded to their phone.
The Ultimate Web Design Gallery Resource
< ?php
$docroot = $_SERVER[‘DOCUMENT_ROOT’];
include($docroot.’/shed/galleries/conn.php’);
include($docroot.’/shed/galleries/countries.php’);
include($docroot.’/shed/galleries/queries.php’);
?>
In case you haven’t noticed lately, there a LOT of web design galleries out there. I’d always kept bookmarks for the galleries I’d come across but recently while looking at one I noticed links to a lot of galleries that I hadn’t heard of before. So I thought it might be worthwhile to investigate just how many there were out there. I came across a few blog posts with links to galleries but rather than just adding to the list and then publishing it, I thought I’d do a bit more investigation and analysis.
Legends of Style Revised
When I wrote the original article on how to achieve cross-browser consistency when styling form legends, I noted that there was a bug in the way Firefox handled legends which required an additional div to be wrapped around the fieldset with positioning and other styling applied to the div rather than the fieldset. The bug appears to still have not been resolved, but as Thierry Koblenz pointed out in the comments on the original article, there is a way to achieve the same effect across browsers that doesn’t require the additional div.
HTML/CSS newbie FAQs
After spending a while on web development forums, you start to see the same questions being asked regularly. So here I’m going to answer some of these common beginner questions and hopefully save me typing answers out repeatedly in the future because I can just refer the poster to here or copy it myself. 
HTML image no preload rollovers
Recognise this?
<script type="text/javascript">
<!--
function MM_swapImgRestore() { //v3.0
var i,x,a=document.MM_sr; for(i=0;a&&i<a.length&&(x=a[i])&&x.oSrc;i++) x.src=x.oSrc;
}
function MM_preloadImages() { //v3.0
var d=document; if(d.images){ if(!d.MM_p) d.MM_p=new Array();
var i,j=d.MM_p.length,a=MM_preloadImages.arguments; for(i=0; i<a.length; i++)
if (a[i].indexOf("#")!=0){ d.MM_p[j]=new Image; d.MM_p[j++].src=a[i];}}
}
function MM_findObj(n, d) { //v4.01
var p,i,x; if(!d) d=document; if((p=n.indexOf("?"))>0&&parent.frames.length) {
d=parent.frames[n.substring(p+1)].document; n=n.substring(0,p);}
if(!(x=d[n])&&d.all) x=d.all[n]; for (i=0;!x&&i<d .forms.length;i++) x=d.forms[i][n];
for(i=0;!x&&d.layers&&i<d.layers.length;i++) x=MM_findObj(n,d.layers[i].document);
if(!x && d.getElementById) x=d.getElementById(n); return x;
}
function MM_swapImage() { //v3.0
var i,j=0,x,a=MM_swapImage.arguments; document.MM_sr=new Array; for(i=0;i<(a.length-2);i+=3)
if ((x=MM_findObj(a[i]))!=null){document.MM_sr[j++]=x; if(!x.oSrc) x.oSrc=x.src; x.src=a[i+2];}
}
//-->
</d></script>
<a href="#" onMouseOut="MM_swapImgRestore()" onMouseOver="MM_swapImage('example','','/images/example_company_on.png',1)">
<img src="/images/example_company_off.png" alt="Example company" name="example" width="326" height="167"/></a>
Chances are you do. Even if you don’t own a copy of Dreamweaver, it’s likely you would have come across the code it outputs for creating image rollovers in your travels looking at the code of other sites.
Tools for checking website accessibility
Following on from my last post in which I mentioned screenreaders (or alternatives) that people might like to try for checking their own sites’ accessibilty, and an earlier post in which I listed the extensions I use for web development with Firefox, I thought I’d also list the different tools I use for testing website accessibility.
