Archive for July, 2009
Fun with Tooltips
A long time ago, at a far away company, I was given a project that required a not-so-usual use of tooltips. I had to implement multi-line tooltips like so: Luckily it only had to work in IE, and line breaks for tooltips in IE are just normal linebreaks in HTML, so nothing too complicated. But this got me thinking, what else is possible with tooltips? What are the limitations of tooltips? Is there any consistency between browsers? I've setup a ... Read More »
Contribute to Mozilla Service Week
In an effort to bootstrap Mozilla Service Week, we've put out our first call for volunteering on Idealist.org. Want to exercise your CSS skills? We need help fixing IE 6 layout issues. We mark IE6 bugs as critical when they block a user's ability to volunteer, but display bugs are less of a priority. It's important that this site be accessible to everyone, but we have many higher priority bugs and features to work on, with limited resources. Display bugs are also an easy way to get started coding, without ... Read More »
Cesium 0.1 Released!
Update: We've released Cesium 0.1.1, which can be downloaded here: http://people.mozilla.org/~rdoherty/cesium/cesium-0.1.1.zip YSlow is an invaluable resource for developers who want to ensure that their web applications are as responsive as possible to users. For those who don't already know, YSlow is an extension for Firebug, another incredibly useful tool for web developers, which is in turn an extension for Firefox. Developed at Yahoo!, it calculates a score for a web page's overall performance using a number of heuristics (http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html) based on web development best practices geared specifically toward decreasing page load times. But YSlow is not without its ... Read More »
Improving Accessibility Through ARIA
Accessibility is a pretty hairy issue in web development. When attempting to determine if your site is accessible, there are so many standards and recommendations to follow. 508, WCAG, WCAG 2.0, WAI Priority 1, 2 & 3. Well, now there is a new standard from the W3C called WAI-ARIA (Web Accessibility Initiative - Accessible Rich Internet Applications) The simplest definition of ARIA is adding UI semantics via HTML element attributes. Simply, you add things like '<div role="navigation">' or '<form role="search">' to specific HTML elements to give screen readers a better understanding of your content. The ARIA spec is huge (160 pages), ... Read More »
