This is an often debated topic amongst web page coders and “the idea of placing the informational content of a web page before the navigation has gained some currency”, report Roger Hudson, Lisa Miller and Russ Weakley. Their research into the relevance of these topics for screen reader users has now been published in full. They conclude that source order isn't that important for this group of users, but the that, quote, “quality of the actual code on a web page is much more important (...). Meaningful and appropriately marked up headings, descriptive link text and the clear identification of different levels of navigation, allow screen reader users to most effectively use their technologies when visiting a website”.
Alex Robinson on displaying your column blocks in any order with only minimal presentational markup, or create equal height columns, vertically arrange contents. Some interesting techniques.
Accessible Data Tables is a very comprehensive resource on the correct use of HTML data tables with accessibility in mind. In this article, Roger Hudson looks at ways to improve accessibility of data tables, and analyses screen reader support for the scope and headers attributes. Based on extensive testing done by the author together with Russ Weakley.
Feuilles de styles permanentes, alternatives et préférées en (X)HTML
In Feuilles de styles permanentes, alternatives et préférées en (X)HTML, Laurent Denis explains the role and function of the title attribute when applied to stylesheets and its relationship to the (x)html document.
Musings on feed usability, and some guidelines for working around problems with feeds. James Bennett wrestles with the problems and pitfalls of broadcasting and explaining feeds.
On having layout – the concept of hasLayout in IE/Win
A lot of Internet Explorer's rendering inconsistencies can be fixed by giving an element 'layout'. This leads to a question of why 'hasLayout' can change the rendering of, and the relationships between elements. In this article, the authors focus on some aspects of this complicated matter, and attempt at a definition of this property.
The Mozilla Foundation has been working behind the scenes to get back online all the old documentation for (web-)developers from Netscape. The result is developer.mozilla.org, a huge source of information about the Gecko browsers, Javascript, related web technologies and so on. And yes, the Javascript 1.5 reference is included. Kudos to the team led by Deb Richardson for the hard work.
