ASP.NET is a leaky abstraction because it tries to hide away some of the details of HTML markup generation for you when sometimes you need to know about the underlying markup.
In doing so, it is too easy to create ASP.NET sites that violate web accessibility guidelines and contain unnecessary markup bloat. In some cases, ASP.NET makes it really difficult to create the exact output you need. But there are a some options to address this problem. Continue reading
No sooner had I written about how Internet Explorer currently slows down web development, the IE team have announced that IE8, under development, is now rendering the Acid2 test correctly.
This is a great step forward. Continue reading
This has been said so many times on the web by web developers frustrated at IE’s rendering bugs, lack of progress in support for web technologies, and so on, that at first I didn’t want to bother writing this post. However, a number of other posts on this site make reference to this point and I end up repeating myself, side tracking from the point at hand. For that reason, and for the benefit of some readers not familiar with this issue, this post serves as a summary of those concerns. Continue reading
For a book with about 650 pages, I got through this really quickly (for me, that is — about 8 hours)!
That should hopefully help summarize my view that I really liked this book.
Read on to find out why. Continue reading
HTML-based email seems to be a mess, with different email clients supporting a different set (and sub-set) of web technologies such as HTML and CSS.
Microsoft’s Outlook has a commanding share of desktop email clients. However, Microsoft announced that Outlook 2007 would use Word’s HTML rendering engine, rather than Internet Explorer’s which seems like a big step backward.
While some may prefer text-only email, others prefer to — or must — create HTML-based email.
The Email Standards Project is attempting to follow the example of the Web Standards Project, but for email clients, web- and desktop-based to try and make HTML-email creation less hit and miss. Continue reading
Accessibility on the web not only benefits people who are considered disabled, but a much wider, often aging, population.
Some people still claim that people with such needs don’t use the web (see further below). Watching people use the web using assitive technology may however, change perceptions.
Continue reading
My impression of day 2 at @media ajax, the ajax/javascript conference with some of the leading figures in this area.
My impression of day 1 at @media ajax, the ajax/javascript conference with some of the leading figures in this area.
Web pages often benefit from some text that may not be necessary from a visual design perspective, but offer additional context to say blind users using a screen reader. Some CSS techniques to achieve this include moving text off the screen in such a way that screen readers will still read them out. However, there is a concern that search engines may not like this technique as it could be abused for keyword stuffing and other such practices. What are the implications? Continue reading
Microsoft is making IE 7 more widely available. IE 7 still has to catch up with the other modern browsers but this seems to be a good thing from a web developer’s perspective as IE 6 is so much more buggy. Or is it…? Continue reading
