This month Authentic Jobs turns five years old. I’ve been a member and listing partner (look in the sidebar for job listings from Authentic Jobs if you’re reading this on 456bereastreet.com) since early 2007, so I haven’t been along for the entire ride, but long enough to have seen this job board evolve and grow plenty. I have also seen how hard Cameron Moll works to keep Authentic Jobs current and fresh.

Anyway, the fifth birthday is celebrated by a campaign to raise money – USD 20 000 of it is the goal – for charity:water, a non-profit organization dedicated to bringing clean water to millions of people in developing countries. Read more about that and what’s coming next in this three-part celebration on Authentic Jobs ~ Five-Year Anniversary.

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Posted in Job openings.

When I hold workshops on accessibility I am often asked how to detect screen readers. The answer is that you can’t, at least not in a reliable way.

The main reason is that screen readers run alongside (or on top of, if you prefer) regular web browsers and do not have a user agent string of their own that you can sniff.

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Posted in Accessibility, Quick Tips.

Everybody wants to use CSS 3 now that even Internet Explorer will support parts of it once IE 9 is out. But since parts of CSS 3 are still subject to change, most browsers use a vendor prefix for many CSS 3 properties to signal that their implemenation is “experimental” and may change in a later version of the browser.

This means that for a property like border-radius to work cross-browser you need to specify it several times with different vendor prefixes, like this:

1. .box {
2. -moz-border-radius:10px;
3. -webkit-border-radius:10px;
4. border-radius:10px;
5. }

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Posted in Browsers, CSS.

A couple of months ago I advised people to Be careful with non-ascii characters in URLs. We’ve been discussing that at work lately, more specifically whether characters like ":" and "/" are allowed unencoded in query strings or not.

I may well have made mistakes trying to understand the specification, so any help clarifying any errors in the following would be appreciated.

The summary of my previous post is this:

In essence this means that the only characters you can reliably use for the actual name parts of a URL are a-z, A-Z, 0-9, -, ., _, and ~. Any other characters need to be Percent encoded.

But what about those query strings? After studying RFC 3986 - Uniform Resource Identifier (URI): Generic Syntax I’ve come to the following conclusions.

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Posted in Web Standards.

It’s quite obvious that the smaller the files that make up your website are, the less time your visitors will wait for them to download. One way of reducing file sizes is minimising JavaScript and CSS files by removing comments and whitespace, among other things.

To do that, you can either let the server do it for you or minimise the files yourself before uploading them to the server. Letting the server do it automatically is probably the most convenient way since you don't have to remember to do it. But it isn't practical or possible for everyone to use something like minify, so sometimes you'll need to do it manually.

That may sound like more trouble than it's worth. Luckily for us TextMate users there's a handy YUI Compressor TextMate bundle that makes it almost as transparent as the server-side solution.

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Posted in CSS, Coding, JavaScript.

There’s been some talk here and there about whether or not it matters that many people tend to mean a lot more stuff than what is actually HTML5 when they say “HTML5”.

Despite being kind of nitpicky about terminology, I can buy bundling stuff like Geolocation, Web Storage, Web Workers, and Microdata with the actual HTML5 specification and calling it all “HTML5”.

But also bundling CSS3 (and even some parts of CSS 2.1) with HTML5? Nope. As Jeremy Keith puts it in Clarification:

Don’t get me wrong: I honestly don’t care that much about whether something like geolocation is technically part of HTML5 or not: that’s a fairly trifling matter. But CSS3? C’mon! In what universe is it in any way acceptable that a web developer wanting to learn about web fonts begins by Googling for HTML5?

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Posted in CSS, HTML 5.

According to an HTML Working Group Decision, the longdesc attribute will not be included in the HTML5 specification. Not everybody is happy with that decision, so whether longdesc is still out when HTML5 is finished remains to be seen.

In case you aren’t familiar with the longdesc attribute, here is how it is described in the HTML 4.01 specification:

This attribute specifies a link to a long description of the image. This description should supplement the short description provided using the alt attribute.

This provides a way of describing images to non-sighted users in detail, with more text than what is suitable for the alt attribute (which is really more of a text alternative to an image than a description of it). The longdesc attribute explicitly associates this description with the image.

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Posted in Accessibility, HTML 5.

As I mentioned recently in Frustrated by the Web, I’ve been running into various usability issues on the Web recently. Well, I guess I do that all the time, but this time I took notice of them while trying be a “normal” user.

But I digress. What I actually was going to say was that I really, really dislike visiting websites that resize my entire browser window. You know, the typical “all-Flash-site behaviour”.

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Posted in Browsers, Usability.