February 2006 Archives

Most web developers I know are using Mozilla Firefox as their browser of choice these days. If you aren't well, why not?

Anyway, we all love Firefox and we develop our sites for it due to it's better support for standards. Then we make tweaks, hacks, and fixes to support IE since that's still the #1 browser. Sometimes it can be a pain to keep switching back and forth. That's where this handy Firefox extension comes in. Simply use Firefox as you normally do and when you're ready to view/test a page in IE, just right click and select "View This Page in IE".

It's incredibly simple but unbelievable helpful. I find myself using it all the time.

Download the IE View Firefox Extension.

One of the most overlooked aspects of web development has long been accessibility. More often then not the mentality has been "blind people don't come to my site so who cares?" To that end let me dispense with a common myth...

Accessibility is not about building sites for blind people. Accessibility is about making your site available to the largest possible audience. That does include blind people but also the hearing-impaired, those with motor-skills impairments that can't use a mouse, and those with only slight vision-impairments. Personally I happen to have pretty good vision, but if it's 7AM and I don't have my contacts in, I may want to resize the 9px font you used for the copy on your site. Building accessible sites means making the site available to everyone.

If you've done any work on government sites you've probably heard about Section 508. It's basically a law that requires any government site to be compliant with some basic accessibility guidelines. It's not yet a law for non-government sites but it may be one day. Overall accessibility is a good habit to get into.

Most web developers I know think one of two things:

• Making a site accessible takes a lot of extra time, effort, and/or money
• Adding ALT tags to site images will make the site compliant.

Both of these assessments are positively false. There's much more to making a site accessible than simply adding image ALT tags but neither is it expensive or time consuming. To help, I've put together a handy checklist of some of the things to keep in mind when building a new site. This isn't meant to be a definitive list, just some quick reference material on the basics.

Website Accessibility Checklist - - 24 KB
Website Accessibility Checklist - - 65 KB

If you're interested in learning more about accessibility, I highly recommend Building Accessible Websites by Joe Clark.

I was having a conversation with a colleague the other day and mentioned Macromedia Flash Paper. My colleague stared at me blankly. I asked another colleague if he's ever heard of Flash Paper. Another blank stare.

So what exactly is Flash Paper and why has no one ever heard of it? In a nutshell, Flash Paper was designed to compete with Adobe PDF as a universal document format. It uses the regular Flash player, which currently has an adoption rate higher than 97%. They're small, fast-loading, easily printable and open directly in the browser. They're also compatible with assistive technologies like JAWS and Window Eyes for users with vision impairments.

To demonstrate what Flash Paper looks like, I've converted the Website Launch Checklist from my previous blog post. Check it out..

Website Launch Checklist - 63K

So if this is so great, why has no one ever heard of it? Mostly, it's because Flash Paper only comes bundled with Macromedia Contribute which so far not that many people use.

What's to become of Flash Paper now that Adobe has acquired Macromedia? It's hard to be sure but for now, if you need a great alternative to putting PDFs on your site, consider using Flash Paper.

The other day I got an email newsletter from Adobe containing their quarterly interactive design publication "Adobe Proxy". I’m not sure how I got on this list since I’ve never received it before but I’m glad I did.

Each issue is a well put-together PDF download containing tutorials, tips and tricks, and information on the latest trends in graphic design from high profile designers. It's fun, informative, and best of all free.

You can download all the current issues as well as sign up for the latest info at http://www.adobeproxy.com

Testing and validating our pages is, or should be, a large part of the development process. It's no ones favorite thing to do but I've found a little tool that can make it slighly easier.

The Web Accessibility Toolbar is a browser plugin that provides a set of buttons which allow the developer easy access to functions such as:

• Validating HTML and CSS against W3C specifications
• Resizing the browser window to default sizes like 800x600 to see how the page will render on different monitors
• Easily turning CSS off to see how the page will render for old browsers, screen readers, and mobile devices
• Getting document info such as page size and estimated download time
• Seeing the underlying structure by highlighting table cells and/or div tags
• Checking the site for 508 and WCAG compliance

It's free, easy to download and install, and comes in very handy. While currently only for Internet Explorer, versions for other browsers such as Firefox are reportedly under development.

Download the Web Accessibility Toolbar

About a week ago I was l was lucky enough to be selected as a beta-tester for a new website called Ma.gnolia. Ma.gnolia is a site which is basically designed to allow users to collect bookmarks. You create and keep an online profile full of your favorite websites. That alone is pretty convenient but what’s unique about Ma.gnolia is that it allows you to tag your bookmarks with keywords so that other users can find them. This is probably better explained by example so…

A user logs onto Ma.gnolia and creates a bookmark to Code Scene. They enter a description and tag it with words such as: xhtml, css, asp.net, sql, web standards.

Ma.gnolia keeps an eye on the tags you enter and shows you a tag cloud with those and similar words. Clicking on the “xhtml” tag would then bring up a list of relevant sites based on all the other users who’ve tagged a site. This lets you find other great sites and blogs that you may not otherwise have heard of.

You can also create and join groups based on any topic you can imagine. I joined the “Web Design” group and founds tons of links to great sites, some of which I knew about, others I’d never heard of. Lastly, you can create contacts so you can see what your friends are reading.

While I’m using it pretty much to keep tabs on web development sites and blogs, it’ll really help you find just about anything. Overall I was pretty impressed with how well it worked. It’s still in beta testing right now but should be launching in the next few weeks.

For now, go to the Ma.gnolia home page and sign up to be notified when it’s live.

Last year Microsoft announced that they would no longer be supporting their version of Internet Explorer for Macintosh. Yesterday they further followed through on that promise and have pulled it from the Mactopia site so that users can no longer download it. Believe it or not, Microsoft actually recommends Mac users migrate to Safari.

See the Mactopia Internet Explorer page for Microsoft's official announcement.

What does this mean for us as web developers? Mac IE's somewhat abysmal support for web standards has made it the bane of our existence for the last couple of years. The amount of users with this browser has always been pretty low and steadily dwindling but with this development, it's pretty much been relegated to the browser graveyard with the likes of Netscape 4.

It's time we embrace the future, coding to support standards-complaint browsers, instead of wasting countless hours hacking sites to work with archaic browsers such as this. So long Mac IE. It's been fun... well... not really.