The HTML “accesskey” attribute allows web authors to specify hotkeys for links within a page. The idea behind accesskeys is that they’d allow for keyboard-navigability within a site (more…)

If a company owns multiple domains its website, its Google PageRank can be split up among those domains. As you may be aware, Google establishes relevancy in part through links which point to a page. Here’s a made-up example using Chiquita Banana… (more…)

A new design for our blog is underway and our boss has given us the green light to develop it live. So, we’ll be making the XHTML/CSS changes right on this server and you’ll be able to see the coding progress in realtime. Stay tuned. (more…)

We were working on a project recently that required us to refine some 3rd-party code. Among other things, we needed to add missing alt attributes to any images which were missing them. (Missing alt attributes are one bane to screen readers, which then resort to reading an image’s filename instead — just imagine hearing “graphic shim dot gif graphic shim dot gif graphic shim dot gif graphic shim dot gif …”.) I have an editor which supports extended file searches with regular expressions, so a regular expression seemed like a sensible path to take. (more…)

If you’re a front-end developer, you’re probably testing your sites with multiple versions of IE. (In late 2003, Joe Maddalone discovered a means of running multiple versions of Internet Explorer on a single machine, much to the relief of developers everywhere.) If you haven’t tried running multiple versions, check out PPK’s writeup at Quirksmode.org where you can download specific versions. (more…)

As you may be aware, longdesc is an attribute of image tags which can be used to provide a description more lengthy than its alt attribute (as a rule of thumb, images with alt text > 150 characters would benefit from a separate longdesc). However, unlike an alt attribute, an image’s longdesc attribute (if used) specifies a URI linking to a separate page. (more…)

Web servers send a “MIME type” with each file which tells the browser what kind of file it is. For instance, HTML files are “text/html” and CSS files are “text/css”. “Well,” you may be asking, “why not just use the file extension to determine the file type?” While file extensions commonly indicate an author’s intentions, that’s not always the case. (more…)

• Oreo Double Stuf cookies: $2.63
• Pringles Sour Cream & Onion potato crisps: $1.39
• Snyder Honey Mustard & Onion Pretzels: $2.50
• Combos, Pizzeria flavor: $1.79
• Kit Kat White Chocolate / Milk Chocolate / Dark Chocolate variety bag: $2.33
• Reese’s FastBreak fun-size bag: $1.69

Eating junk food while working on a tight deadline: priceless.

So, you’ve written a page using image replacement but you need rollover effects as well? That can be done. (For those unaware, “image replacement” is a CSS concept, implementable in several ways, where a page’s HTML has regular tags which are then dynamically replaced with image-based headers through CSS.) And, of the various image-replacement techniques the Gilder/Levin technique is my favorite for general use as it preserves text accessibility even in the unlikely event that a user has CSS turned on but images turned off. As you might guess, all of the image-replacement techniques are based on CSS background images; and, in the case of rollovers, you would think that you could just change the background-image on a:hover. That works in Firefox (no surprise) but not in IE (which is not a huge surprise, either). (more…)

When it comes to CSS-based layouts, there are basically two techniques: floated elements and absolute positioning. And, each has its advantages and disadvantages. (more…)