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W3C Mobile Web Best Practices course, May-July 2010

megastarmedia — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 04:04:33 +0000

Looking to learn more about developing for the Mobile Web? How about giving W3C’s online course Introduction to W3C’s Mobile Web Best Practices a shot?

This course is an updated version of a course that’s been run several times over the past years – three times last year actually. Read more about why you should attend the course and browse the Read the rest of this entry »\'

Web Inspector adds Timeline and Audits panels

megastarmedia — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 04:04:16 +0000

The latest set of improved and new features to the WebKit Web Inspector are really great. I mean really great as in “I’m not so sure how much I’ll be using Firebug anymore.”

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Posted in Apple, Read the rest of this entry »\'

Designing with Progressive Enhancement (Book review)

megastarmedia — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 05:04:24 +0000

Whenever I hold workshops or lectures on web development, I talk a lot about Progressive enhancement. To me it is the obvious and only sensible way of building websites and web applications.

With that said, you can bet I was very pleased to learn that Designing with Progressive Enhancement was being worked on. A whole book coveri Read the rest of this entry »\'

HTML5 input types

megastarmedia — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 03:04:57 +0000

It is a rare day at work when I don’t do anything related to forms. Be it creating forms from scratch, modifying existing forms, handling user interaction with them, whatever. I work with forms a lot. So that’s why one of the things in HTML5 I’m looking forward to the most is the overhaul of the elements and attributes used to create forms.

Among other form-related things, HTML5 adds a whole bunch of new values for the Read the rest of this entry »\'



The modern workplace is optimised for interruptions
megastarmedia — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 02:04:56 +0000
I recently came across an interview with Jason Fried, co-founder of 37signals, where he among other things talks about why you can’t really get a lot of work done at work:
The modern workplace is structured completely wrong. It’s really optimised for interruptions. And interruptions are the enemy of work, they are the enemy of productivity, they are the enemy of creativity Read the rest of this entry »\'


Using the lang attribute makes a difference
megastarmedia — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 03:04:01 +0000
About a year ago I posted a Quick Tip titled Specify each HTML document’s main natural language. The reason is that software like screen readers can use this info to adjust the way they speak text.
But do they really do that? Well, it depends. You need to use a screen reader that supports Read the rest of this entry »\'


Whenever you use :hover, also use :focus
megastarmedia — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 05:04:14 +0000
Probably one of the most common accessibility oversights is neglecting to apply CSS to the :focus state of links whenever you style the :hover state. How much of a problem this oversight leads to for non-mouse users depends on what CSS is applied to the :hover state.
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A selection of VoiceOver keyboard commands
megastarmedia — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 04:03:01 +0000
One of the many great things about using a Mac as your development machine is VoiceOver, the screen reader that ships with every copy of Mac OS X. Testing your work in a screen reader is only a small part of building accessible websites, but it helps you understand the need for many accessibility guidelines.
To test your sites in VoiceOver you obviously need to know how to use it to navigate the Web. There are ma Read the rest of this entry »\'


Ruby, PHP, MySQL, and Perl issues when upgrading Mac OS X from Leopard to Snow Leopard
megastarmedia — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 02:03:15 +0000
I bought Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) on the day it was released, but didn’t gather enough courage to go ahead and install it until a week ago. Yep, it’s been collecting dust on my shelf for over six months.
Upgrading between major revisions of Mac OS X has bitten me several times in the past, mostly because I use my Mac as a web development machine. I need Apache, PHP, MySQL, Perl, Ruby and a whole bunch of Ruby gems in working order, and it seems like major  Read the rest of this entry »\'


Heading navigation in web browsers
megastarmedia — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 05:03:36 +0000
All screen readers that I know of have keyboard shortcuts that allow the user to navigate within a web page by jumping from heading to heading. This can really speed things up when you want to skip to a particular section of a page.
Being able to navigate by headings would also be very useful to sighted people who do not use a mouse, but unfortunately very few web browsers offer this functionality. The only graphical web browser I know of that has such functionality built Read the rest of this entry »\'