A furore has erupted over the past couple of days within a section of the web development community over a decision by Microsoft to require web developers to add a meta tag to their pages to define what version of Internet Explorer a site has been designed for. I'm not going to go into the pros and cons of this decision as it's been comprehensively covered elsewhere.
I recently had a discussion with a client that I'd already produced a template for who said they wanted to change the primary navigation items at the top of each page. As the site hadn't gone live yet (they were producing it themselves – I'd simply done the graphic and template design for them), I didn't see much problem with fulfilling their request. But it was a two-part request and the part that raised a warning flag for me was that they wanted the navigation to be flexible enough for them to be able to make further changes easily at some point in the future.
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No I'm not going to talk about Paris Hilton (although she may not have so much to waste anymore now her grandfather has decided to give $US2.3 billion to charity 😉), what I want to talk about today is something that I've seen cropping up quite a lot on my travels through sites and code (usually via requests for help on forums) and that is a lack of understanding about CSS inheritance.
Recognise this? 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.
If you're interested in website accessibility best practices, you might have come across warnings against using display: none to hide content that you don't want to appear on screen. The argument is that content hidden with display: none can't be accessed by people using screen readers, and the recommended solution is to position the content offscreen instead using a large negative position (let's call this the offset method). But this shouldn't be a hard and fast rule for all situations. There are some situations for which using display: none will be acceptable.
I've just written an article on a technique which can be used with column layouts which has been published on Search-This: Two Column Layout With A Twist.
I've been a subscriber to the site for a while (a lot of its contributors and readers also frequent Sitepoint) and a regular commenter, but this is my first published article. Search-This also publishes a range of articles dealing with the spectrum of web development topics, so it's worth checking out.
If you've installed ExpressionEngine but find you get a 'No input file specified' error message on anything but the home page of the site, chances are it's because your server doesn't support the path_info server variable.
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.
Victor Tsaran, an engineer and Program Manager for Accessibility at Yahoo!, has put together a 27-minute video introducing screen readers and how they interact with web pages.
Last year, Nick Cowie created a podcast on the button and how it is the "forgotten element"
. Well, it seems that it is not only developers who have forgotten about it, but browser makers, or more specifically those making browsers for handheld devices, and the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) (authors of the XHTML-MP specification) who have forgotten about it as well.