You are currently browsing the RobotZoo weblog archives for the day 19/04/2007.
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- 14/10/2007: Web 2.0 how-to design guide
- 22/09/2007: Niche Blogging Tutorials by doshdosh
- 22/09/2007: Internet Marketing articles by doshdosh
- 22/09/2007: D&AD: The best advertising and design in the world! Urbis, Manchester
- 22/09/2007: Hacienda 25 The Exhibition: Fac 491
- 22/09/2007: Design Process - Personal logo design sketches
- 22/09/2007: Popular Articles on Dosh Dosh: August 2007
- 22/09/2007: How to run a brainstorming meeting
- 22/09/2007: TinyURL
- 22/09/2007: Designing Design - by Kenya Hara
Archive for 19/04/2007
Improving Your Process: Site Planning Guides
19/04/2007 by admin.
Sometimes improving your process not only helps yourself, it can benefit your clients as well. Using your time more effectively allows a client to receive more time and effort from you focused on enhancing the project as opposed to spending time resolving miscommunication.
Posted in Tutorials, Articles, Web Design | Print | No Comments »
Transparent custom corners and borders, version 2
19/04/2007 by admin.
Thanks to Roger Johansson at www.456bereastreet.com for this:
It’s been almost a year and a half since I posted Transparent custom corners and borders, a technique for creating custom corners and borders with optional alpha transparency. The technique is based on a combination of CSS and JavaScript, and gives you a lot of flexibility when creating rounded corners or special borders.
Posted in CSS, Tutorials, Coding, Design (general), Web Design | Print | No Comments »
Alt text is an alternative, not a tooltip
19/04/2007 by admin.
It seems like there is a bit of confusion among many web developers and browser vendors surrounding the use of the alt attribute to provide alternative text for images and other non-textual elements.
In alt as a tooltip, Anne van Kesteren points to a document on the Channel9 Wiki site that contains feedback about Internet Explorer Programming Bugs. The alt attribute (yes, It’s alt attribute, not alt tag) and how it is displayed by Internet Explorer is discussed in the “Browser Behavior” section. Several people point out that Internet Explorer is wrong in displaying alternative text as a tooltip while also displaying the image.
Posted in Accessibility, CSS, Tutorials, Web Design | Print | No Comments »
Efficient CSS with shorthand properties
19/04/2007 by admin.
One of the reasons for using CSS to layout websites is to reduce the amount of HTML sent to site visitors. To avoid just moving the bloat from HTML to CSS, you should try to keep the size of your CSS files down as well, and I thought I’d explain my favourite CSS efficiency trick: shorthand properties. Most people know about and use some shorthand, but many don’t make full use of these space saving properties.
Posted in Accessibility, CSS, Tutorials, Web Design | Print | No Comments »
Using the title Attribute
19/04/2007 by admin.
Author: Gez Lemon:
The title attribute is intended to provide supplementary information about an element; for example, it might be used to provide extra information about the target of a link. Although the User Agent Accessibility Guidelines (UAAG) requires access to all content, current user agents provide very poor access to title text information, and what access they do provide is typically inaccessible for people with disabilities.
Posted in Accessibility, CSS, Tutorials, Web Design | Print | No Comments »
Firefox 2.0 and Access Keys
19/04/2007 by admin.
Author: Gez Lemon:
Update: Numeric access keys now work in Firefox 2.0.0.1, which is available through auto-update.
Firefox 2.0 uses Shift+Alt as the keystroke combination to invoke access keys. On the surface, this appears to be a great idea, as it avoids clashing with the shortcut keys used for the browser. Unfortunately, the new behaviour has been poorly implemented and breaks all websites that have implemented access keys using numeric values, as access keys specified with numeric values cannot be accessed in Firefox 2.0.
Posted in Accessibility, CSS, Articles, Web Design | Print | No Comments »
Choosing an Accessible CMS
19/04/2007 by admin.
Author: Joshue O Connor Senior Accessibility Consultant CFIT
How do you go about choosing an accessible content management system (CMS)? What are the main criteria for success? And how to ensure ease of use for authors including screen reader users?
The Centre for Inclusive Technology (CFIT), which is based in the headquarters of the National Council for the Blind of Ireland (NCBI), looked at several popular CMSs in order to assess which would be most suitable.
Our approach was to look at how these CMSs work out of the box and no complex heuristics were applied in order to simulate how many other users would approach the adoption of a CMS in the real world. The assessment method was an intuitive approach with some basic core tasks such as adding content and administration.
Expert Screen Reader Evaluation by Paul Traynor CFIT.
Posted in Accessibility, CSS, Coding, Web Design | Print | No Comments »
Div Mania
19/04/2007 by admin.
More and more web documents are appearing that consist of nothing more than a collection of div elements. In most cases, better use of CSS selectors could be used to avoid overusing the div element.
There are plenty of sites out there that just replace the old table-tag-soup with myriads of div and span elements instead of using the semantically correct elements for the task. Not much better than hanging on to the old-school presentational markup.
Posted in CSS, Web Design | Print | No Comments »
Avoid 404
19/04/2007 by admin.
Another appropriate title for this post could be “fix it before you break it”. Although a proper written 404 page can help you out it is better if you redirect a user to a new location (301) or return him a page that says that the page did exist, but will never return (410). The problem is that a lot of web companies start completely over when building a new web site and do not really look at the existing site. The result is that once a new site has been released, the old links are rendered outdated and now return a 404.
Posted in Tutorials, Coding, Articles, Web Design | Print | No Comments »
Accessible “read more” links
19/04/2007 by admin.
Thanks to www.456bereastreet.com:
Russ Weakley’s Simple, accessible “more” links explains how you can use CSS to make “read more” links more accessible to screen reader users. Florian Grell has extended the technique to display the hidden information when the user is hovering over the link - check out Simple, accessible “more” links - v2 for more information on that.
These techniques are useful for linking to full articles from a list of headings and article excerpts when your client or someone on your team insists on having “Read more” links instead of linking the heading. This way the links will actually provide some information on where they lead.
Posted in Accessibility, CSS, Coding, Web Design | Print | No Comments »