Musings on: ColdFusion, Fusebox, Cascading Style Sheets and Accessibility http://www.shayna.com/ XStandard has released its newest version (1.7.1) of its standards-compliant plug-in WYSIWYG editor for Windows desktop applications and browser-based content management systems IE/Mozilla/Firefox/Opera/Netscape). http://www.shayna.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.display_entry&id=135 2006-07-20T06:45:00--05:00 A new Pew study on cell phone usage is out, showing that younger people, and minorities are tending to use their cell phones as mini-PC's using them to do everything from listening to MP3's to playing games to (gasp!) surfing the Net. (Pages 5 and 6 of the PDF report) What does this mean for us as developers? Maybe not much now if our sites might not be aimed at those demographics, but as this population ages, our web sites had better be able to be surfed easily with a cell phone. This means streamlined content and, you guessed it, xHTML and CSS. http://www.shayna.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.display_entry&id=121 2006-06-07T07:40:00--05:00 I'm originally from Los Angeles, which is why I tend to laugh hysterically when people tell me that Washington DC is easy to get around because its "built on a grid". (Los Angeles, like other newer cities out west truly are grid based) which makes it much easier to find alternative routes when things get backed up. Molly Holzshlag wrote about "Thinking Outside the Grid" after comparing the gridless city of London to the grid of Tucson. Along the way, she applies the grid(less) concept to web sites. Interesting theory. http://www.shayna.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.display_entry&id=108 2006-04-25T09:00:00--05:00 Back in the day, Browser Support used to mean that you either supported Netscape or you supported Internet Explorer. Meaning that your web site worked on either one or the other really well and either worked poorly or not at all in the other. Somewhere along the line Browser support began to mean that our site needed to look exactly the same way on every browser out there. In "Graded Browser Support", Nate Koechly, a Senior Web Developer with Yahoo, lays out the notion of supporting all browsers, with "progressive enhancement". As opposed to what we in the web world, usually use which is "graceful degradation". An interesting read and one I fully intend to capitalize on. http://www.shayna.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.display_entry&id=105 2006-04-20T08:35:00--05:00 Recently, Jim Collins of CFSynergy sent me a link to Accessites.org, a site that promotes and showcases web sites that are not only accessible, but are nicely designed and work well for both the disabled community as well as non disabled users. This web site goes a long way toward proving that accessible sites don't have to be ugly or simple. The sites were scored on a checklist which is prominently available through the main navigation and the scoring worksheets are displayed with each showcase. Its a good look at the fact that accessible web sites can be visually appealing and usable. http://www.shayna.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.display_entry&id=103 2006-04-18T07:45:00--05:00 Design Melt Down is a web site that hosts some very interesting web design information. From information on specific colors, what they mean and evoke to specific web design techniques, this book is a great read. http://www.shayna.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.display_entry&id=101 2006-04-14T08:46:00--05:00 As promised, I'm naked today. Well at least my site is. I however, am sitting behind my computer fully clothed as usual. Today is CSS Naked day and as I promised earlier in the week, my site is without Cascading Style Sheets. For my site, this also means no layout today since I use CSS Positioning to position my site. However, because I use structured HTML for my content, I (at least) think that my content can speak for itself. Its plain, but most people will be able to discern relationships between headers and text, menu groupings, etc. I know a lot of corporate sites out there can't spend a day publicly naked. But I challenge everyone of you to at least disable your style sheets and take a look at your site naked. Can you easily read it? Could your customers? If you can't, then a blind user to your site using a screen reader can't either. And by the way, the largest blind users on the internet are users you definitely want to use your site. Google, Yahoo, and other search engines are much more concerned with the structure of your site, rather than the presentation. If you can't easily get your information and how its structured without your presentation, then neither can the search engines. http://www.shayna.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.display_entry&id=97 2006-04-05T06:31:00--05:00 On April 5th, I and hopefully a lot of other sites will be participating in Naked CSS Day. The idea behind this is that while CSS is wonderful for presentation, your code should be readable and understandable without any presentation at all. This means structural markup. I've always told co-workers and students that we should begin by coding our web pages as if it were 1995. By which I mean, no presentation, just content. If you can understand the content of a web page without any presentation, then you are well on your way to creating truly accessible web pages. So join with me, strip off your CSS For the day and show us your content! http://www.shayna.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.display_entry&id=93 2006-04-03T09:15:00--05:00 A new Web Developer Toolbar for Firefox is out. Well, it has been out for a while, but the newest version is just 2 days old. Its pretty cool and works well in conjunction with my other web developer toolbar from Chrispederick.com. This one is by Joe Hewit and is called "FireBug". According to the Firefox Extensions page, it can monitor Ajax, let you poke into the DOM and "let you edit just about anything you can inspect." Do you have a favorite extension for Firefox that helps with Web Development? Tell us! http://www.shayna.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.display_entry&id=91 2006-03-30T06:45:00--05:00 While going through old bookmarks the other day, I came across this article from Fast Company, entitled, "The Beauty of Simplicity". It features information on the story behind Google's home page, and how most customers value ease of use. It also describes how creating something both simple, easy to use and compelling is not that easy. Its a good read and also says a lot that we as web professionals need to take to heart. http://www.shayna.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.display_entry&id=86 2006-03-24T06:00:00--05:00 I totally subscribe to Flip (The Fusebox Lifecycle Process), but this one is so cute, I just want to jump in! http://www.shayna.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.display_entry&id=82 2006-03-23T07:00:00--05:00