Best of 456 Berea Street
Don’t want to spend time digging through the archives looking for gold? That’s quite understandable, especially if you’re new to this site. To make finding the goodies a bit easier I’ve made this list of the articles that I think are the most useful, interesting and/or thought provoking:
- A web professional can never stop learning
- Web professionals who refuse to update their skills and insist on using outdated methods can no longer be called web professionals.
- Accessibility and usability for interactive television
- Accessibility and usability for ITV have a lot in common with accessibility and usability for the web. There are also many differences, some of which are highlighted in this article.
- Accessibility charlatans
- Claims of adhering to accessibility standards are often false and nothing more than marketing.
- Accessibility myths and misconceptions
- A few common accessibility myths and misconceptions explained.
- Alt text is an alternative, not a tooltip
- Alternative text should never be displayed at the same time as the image it provides an alternative for.
- Ampersands and validation
- Why you should not shrug your shoulders at unencoded ampersands in URLs.
- Automatic pullquotes with JavaScript and CSS
- How to use JavaScript and CSS to create pullquotes without duplicating content in your markup.
- Barrier-free Web design, a.k.a. Web accessibility 2.0
- An attempt to explain why we believe that including everybody does not risk excluding people with disabilities.
- Basics of search engine optimisation
- Make search engines love your site by following these basic guidelines for SEO.
- Bring on the tables
- How to use HTML tables the right way – to create accessible data tables.
- Content Management Systems used by public sector websites found lacking
- A survey shows that CMSs used by Swedish public sector websites are lacking with respect to accessibility and web standards.
- CSS 2.1 Selectors, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3
- Detailed explanations of the selectors that are available in CSS 2.1.
- CSS 3 selectors explained
- CSS 3 brings us many powerful new CSS selectors. Browser support is currently lacking, but taking a look at what lies ahead is still useful.
- CSS Frames v2, full-height
- Create the visual effect of HTML frames with CSS and make the scrolling area stretch to 100 % height regardless of the amount of content.
- CSS Teaser Box (view demo)
- How to use a single image to create a box with rounded corners and custom borders.
- CSS tips and tricks, Part 1, Part 2
- My favourite time and trouble savers when working with CSS.
- CSS Validator colour warnings are not errors
- Messages about missing colours or background-colours are not errors and can often safely be ignored.
- Developing with web standards
- A long article (well, almost a mini-book) on web standards and accessibility, encouraging the use of best practices in web development. Available in several languages. A good place to start if you’re new to web standards.
- Document titles and title separators
- A look at what the best document title separator is from accessibility and usability perspectives.
- Does accessibility encourage discrimination?
- A discussion on whether it is acceptable for a website to be accessible to people with disabilities but inaccessible to people that use alternative browsing devices or operating systems.
- Efficient CSS with shorthand properties
- Save space in your CSS files by using shorthand.
- Equal height boxes with CSS (view demo) and Equal height boxes with CSS, part II (view demo)
- It’s easy to create equal height columns with CSS. It just doesn’t work in IE. Blame Microsoft for that, not the W3C.
- Evaluating Website Accessibility, Part 1, Background and Preparation, Part 2, Basic Checkpoints, Part 3, Digging Deeper
- A three-part article series that explains how to evaluate the technical accessibility of a website.
- Fixed or fluid width? Elastic!
- How to combine fixed and fluid width to create an elastic layout.
- Flexible news list (view demo)
- Using CSS to style a list of news blurbs.
- Google valid and strict
- Making Google’s home page use valid HTML 4.01 Strict and CSS for layout reduces file size by 21 percent.
- Hand coding
- Why hand-coding HTML and CSS is better than using WYSIWYG applications.
- HTML tags vs. elements vs. attributes
- An article that explains the difference between tags, elements, and attributes in HTML.
- Indicating language choice: flags, text, both, neither?
- Do not use flag icons to indicate language choice. Instead use the name of the language as text in the language itself.
- Inverted Sliding Doors tabs (view demo)
- Doug Bowman’s Sliding Doors technique for creating flexible tabs, turned upside down.
- Levels of HTML knowledge
- Descriptions of a few different levels of HTML knowledge among people working in the web industry.
- Light text on dark background vs. readability
- The recent design trend of light text on dark backgrounds is reducing the readability and usability of many sites for certain people.
- New clearing method needed for IE7?
- You may need to adjust your auto-clearing methods to work with IE 7.
- ONOFF: another failed redesign
- Swedish consumer electronics chain ONOFF launches a new, inaccessible, invalid website and falsely claims that it is accessible.
- Opening new windows with JavaScript, version 1.2
- A new window script that uses object literal notation for better portability and lets you choose which attribute-value pairs will open links in new windows.
- Quotations and citations: quoting text
- Quoting text in HTML documents. A closer look at the
q,blockquote, andciteelements. - Reveal your old school web development hacks
- A collection of old school web design and development hacks that were widely used before developers started abandoning table based layouts and adopting web standards.
- Setting the current menu state with CSS
- How to use CSS only to change the appearance of the current state of a navigation bar.
- Styling form controls and Styling even more form controls
- A CSS experiment I made to show that little to nothing can (or should) be done to make form controls appear identical across browsers and platforms.
- Ten reasons to learn and use web standards
- Some of the most important reasons for spending the time to learn all about using web standards to design and develop websites.
- The alt and title attributes
- Explaining the
altandtitleattributes, along with some guidelines on how and when to use them. - The danger of a better Internet Explorer
- Is the improved web standards support in Internet Explorer 7 a good thing only, or will it put the future health of the web at risk by tempting developers to use more proprietary features?
- The perils of using XHTML properly
- Problems you may run into when you start serving XHTML as
application/xhtml+xml. - Transparent custom corners and borders, version 2
- A technique that combines CSS and JavaScript to create flexible boxes with custom corners and borders and optional alpha transparency.
- Validity does not equal best practices
- It takes more than using valid markup to make a website follow best practices. Much more.
- Web development mistakes and Web development mistakes, redux
- Mistakes that are commonly encountered on the web, along with explanations of why I consider them mistakes.
- Who framed the web: Frames and usability
- A look at the usability problems with frames, iframes, and CSS frame imitations.
Information, sponsorship, and externals
About the author
Roger Johansson is a Swedish web professional specialising in web standards, accessibility, and usability. More about me and this site.
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