Author: Joe Dolson

Why use semantic HTML?

April 3, 2008

2 Comments

Topics: Semantics, Web standards.

This is part 1 of 2. Part 2 is my Guide to the use of Semantic HTML (HyperText Markup Language) Elements I’ve seen a lot of articles discussing the importance of HTML and XHTML (eXtensible HyperText Markup Language – HTML reformulated as XML (eXtensible Markup Language)) semantics. I’ve seen articles describing what it means for a document to be semantic. Most of these articles, however, don’t provide a serious overview of what HTML elements actually may be considered semantic — […]

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Google Site Links for “Joe Dolson”

April 2, 2008

7 Comments

Topics: Accessibility, Blogging.

This is just cool: “Sitelinks” are additional links Google generates from the contents of a site in order to help users navigate your site — they provide these links in their search results for selected terms. Most sites don’t have site links, so I’m finding it pretty cool to notice them for myself! If you can’t see the image, the current Sitelinks for this site are: Gallery Blog Home What is Web Accessibility SEO and Accessibility Articles On the whole, […]

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What is “Cross-browser compatibility?”

March 29, 2008

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Topics: Usability, Web Development.

Here’s the first clue: it’s not creating a pixel-perfect replication of your ideal version of a site in all browsers. In fact, cross-browser compatibility ultimately has very little to do with what a web site looks like, and a lot more to do with how it functions. It also has relatively little to do with browsers, and perhaps could better be explained as multiple user-agent compatibility. “Compatibility” (in this context) is not a term which means “looks and behaves identically” […]

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Refining Text Presentation with your Web Browser: Windows

March 16, 2008

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Topics: Accessibility.

It wasn’t long ago that I wrote an article on authoring an effective text-resizing widget. In that article, I made a point not to espouse the use of text-resizing tools, since it’s generally more effective to allow people to use their browser’s built-in text-resizing functionality. In fact, browser’s allow you a great deal more control than simply size. Modern browsers can give you extensive control over website text, including dictating background colors, text color, base text size, minimum text size, […]

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What does a “free script” need to provide?

March 12, 2008

5 Comments

Topics: Web Development.

I received an interesting comment from my contact form the other day. I don’t need to respond to it, as the sender left a clearly false email address as their response address, but I do feel that it poses an interesting question for me. This is the message in its entirety: Dude how come your example poll have this amazing format, cool graphics, and when I download and installed yours, looks like SHIT? I mean, thanks for doing this and […]

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