Tag Archives: web development

Change is afoot in the web…More foundational than when the first graphic showed up in a web browser…

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What an exciting time to be in the Web industry. I just read an essay by Janice Fraser of Adaptive Path that really got me thinking.

Major change, like questions of what happens to our bookmarks when we lose our current definition of a web page? In 2002, Luke Wroblewski of the NCSA published a book (SITE-SEEING: A Visual Approach to Web Usability) that referred to the unified model of the Web, a model that we have internalized and includes concepts like clicking a link “takes” us somewhere, like we can go back and visit a page using a bookmark, our browser keeps a history of our session, which we can navigate, etc. This model frames (ahem) some hostility to new windows, especially pop-ups, as well as framesets, because a user may not always realize that they’re ability to bookmark a page has been undermined (in the case of frames) and that they’re browsing history has started anew when the new browser window appeared, whether or not they know it

Sorry, it would seem this post has been cut short, likely during a transition from one blogging platform to another. -drg

How HTML and CSS is like an egg hatching.

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A discussion has been building in a web developer community email list I receive. The discussion looks at the field of “professional web developer/designer/etc.”

One of the posters wrote up a long response to many comments; one of the things he said struck me as true, but a shallow observation.

It was this:

Stuff like HTML, CSS, Javascript are /relatively/ simple compared to the knowledge that most professionals require

Props to Capital Area District Library on their web site

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Was just looking up something on the CADL site for my wife, and, as is my habit, I took a quick peek at the HTML code (View -> View Source in Safari). I was pleased to see first that it appears to be valid XHTML 1.0, and quickly noted some nice uses of accesskey attributes in the a elements. Very humane coding. Nice.

Specifically, I noted this pattern repeated for nav links:

<a href="/databases/"
title="Research Tools and Databases. AccessKey: d"
accesskey="d">
Research Tools
</a>

The title attribute will inform users of which accesskey is set for which link.

To see how this works, hold your mouse over the following link.
Capital Area District Library
Then, if you are on a Mac, hold down the CTRL key and that key on your keyboard. If you are using Safari, that should just load up that URL for you.

If you are on a Windows machine, you might need to press ALT or some other key. I’m not sure. Try something. May the force be with you.

The reason we care is that we are always open to ways of making our web sites more accessible for people with disabilities, and the accesskey can be quite helpful for people who may not be in a position to use a mouse. I imagine that some assistive technologies make use of the attribute as well.

If anyone out there knows more of the nitty-gritty detail of how the accesskey attribute is practically applied, I’m interested.