Archived posts, February 2009

Creating valid names with the id attribute

There is a simple rule that defines which characters you may use with the id attribute: begin with a letter, then add any number of digits, hyphens, underscores, colons, and periods.

Posted on February 2, 2009 in Quick Tips, (X)HTML

Validating WAI-ARIA in HTML and XHTML

Validating WAI-ARIA in HTML or XHTML is currently more difficult than it could be, but it is possible and there is hope that it will be easier in the near future.

Posted on February 3, 2009 in (X)HTML, Web Standards, Accessibility

Use CSS Diagnostics with Stylish to find bad HTML

Combining the concept of diagnostic CSS with the Stylish Firefox extension makes it easy to apply CSS that reveals invalid or deprecated HTML to any site you want.

Posted on February 5, 2009 in CSS, (X)HTML

Results from the WebAIM screen reader survey

WebAIM’s screen reader survey provides some interesting results. Most are expected, but there are some surprises.

Posted on February 10, 2009 in Accessibility

No more pixel perfectionism in IE 6

It is time to worry less about non-critical bugs in Internet Explorer 6, and eventually we will be able to treat it like we treat Netscape 4.

Posted on February 11, 2009 in Browsers, Web Standards

It’s “class”, not “CSS class”

There is nothing called a "CSS class" in HTML or CSS, so please refer to values of the HTML class attribute as classes or class names instead.

Posted on February 12, 2009 in Quick Tips, CSS, (X)HTML

The alt attribute is for images only

The alt attribute is valid only for images and provides alternative text used when the image cannot be rendered. Do not use it with links and other non-image HTML elements.

Posted on February 16, 2009 in Quick Tips, Accessibility, (X)HTML

WCAG 2.0 recommends using luminosity contrast ratio to check colour contrast

With WCAG 2.0 now being a W3C recommendation it is time to check that the tool you use to check colour contrast supports the luminosity contrast ratio algorithm recommended by WCAG 2.0.

Posted on February 18, 2009 in Accessibility

IE 8 still does not resize text sized in pixels

Internet Explorer's text resizing behaviour is different from that of other browsers since IE does not allow the end user to (easily) resize text whose size has been specified in pixels.

Posted on February 23, 2009 in Usability, Browsers, Accessibility