Scarf*oo

The People at RNIB have released the Surf Right Toolbar, which is — you guessed it — a toolbar for IE, which is designed to bring to the surface the often hidden accessibilty settings, such as turning javascript and images on/off, changing text size and so on.

Quoting:
“The Surf Right Toolbar is really for anyone who wants to adjust the way they view content on the web to make it easier to read. This could include people with mild disabilities, the elderly, people with reading problems, cognitive problems, using dial-up, photosensitivity and so on.”

You can grab the beta, right here.

An informative new website dedicated to webfonts & @font-face embedding. Features a list of fonts, which specifically allow @font-face embedding and fonts with an OpenFont license, so you can pat yourself on the shoulder, knowing you are a good boy/girl. Now I’d love to hear how many of you are jumping into font embedding, because I am actually considering it myself for a while now… Go.

For all of you – me included, of course, – who couldn’t make it to New Orleans and join An Event Apart, there is a short video online with Eric Meyer explaining why the W3C’s recommendation to allow browsers to insert quotation marks doesn’t actually make a whole lot of sense. Enjoy.

Google Doctype is an open encyclopedia and reference library. Written by web developers, for web developers. It includes articles on web security, JavaScript DOM manipulation, CSS tips and tricks, and more. The reference section includes a growing library of test cases for checking cross-browser and cross-platform compatibility.

A welcome addition to my virtual library, I guess.

The W3C announced today that the WCAG2 Candidate Recommendation is likely to go live by the end of the year. With their words, “Candidate Recommendation means that we think the technical content is stable and we want developers and designers to start using WCAG 2.0, to test it out in every-day situations.”

If you are interested to help them, you are warmly welcome to do so by building your content following the recommended guidelines outlined here.

Hey fellow web developers and designers, there is a new LinkedIn group available for your collaborating and stay-in-touch necessities called “Web Standards Design + Development“, enstablished by Greg Storey from airbagindustries.com. The membership is free, but you’ll have to be approved to join in.

And you are waiting for… what? Sign in.

WebKit, the development version of Apple’s Safari web browser now supports another advanced CSS feature, which keeps blowing it way ahead of the competition…

Competition?

For more info on the subject, visit Surfin’ Safari Blog.

“Bring your data to visual life with web standards, and roll you own Google-style maps.” is the theme for the latest issue of ALA.

The first article by Wilson Miner shares us techniques for incorporating data visualization into standards-based web navigation patterns, while Paul Smith teaches us how to build our own mapping application using open-source software and how to integrate it into our web site.

Enjoy the read!

Google App Engine is a new fully-integrated development environment, which offers you to run your web applications inside the Google infrastructure, which means you have their software framework, processing and storage power to work with. In this preview release you can sign-up for a free account with 500MB of persistent storage and enough bandwidth and CPU for 5 million monthly page views. For now you are limited to python-based web applications, but they promise to support more languages in the future.

There are tutorials and there are Tutorials coming from great web authors like Cameron Moll. The Highly Extensible CSS interface is a great collection of resources divided into four distinct parts, which guide you into creating a neat and sophisticated web page. Each part provides you with a working online demo, downloadable files, and links to articles and books related to each step of the tutorial.

• Part one builds a resolution-dependent page layout and demonstrates the use or a reset style sheet.
• Part two demos the use of CSS selectors and dives into the realm of scripting and adds some neat effects using the jquery library.
• Part three covers the integration of ajax technology and starts up with a shout-out on resolution dependence.
• The fourth and last part in this series is about testing for extensibility with 8 benchmarks to thoroughly bulletproof your site.

Overall this is a carefully written Tutorial worth spending time on. Thumbs up!

It seems webkit is the first one to obtain a 100/100 mark on the Acid3 test. They claim it passes the test, albeit they haven’t beat the smoothness animation test yet. Read more on the r31342 nightly build that passed the test here. You can get the latest nightly build here, if you are interested to test the thing, or if you simply want to be on the edge.

Matthew Mullenweg created a short screencast covering the new dashboard and uploader in Release Candidate 2 of Wordpress 2.5. I can’t wait to see the final version released, because of the huge improvements over the 2.3.3, which I have currently installed.

The new version was redesigned from the ground up in collaboration with the guys over at Happy Cog — Jeffrey Zeldman, Jason Santa Maria, and Liz Danzico, which pretty much guarantees a quality product, so my mind is at peace.

Apple released an update to the Safari browser today, bringing the version number to 3.1. The new release includes support for CSS3 web fonts, CSS transforms and transitions, support for the new video and audio HTML 5 elements, and support for SQL database offline storage of web apps. The update also seems to increase javascript performance, site compatibility (time for the Acid 3 test, folks?) and improve stability.
Finally web developers can easily turn on a Develop menu with various tools of the trade. Now you can access the Web Inspector, the Network Timeline, and you can edit CSS in the Web Inspector as well.

More detailed information on this update is available on this website, and security details of the update are available here.

Happy browsing!

Recently at my daily job I had the opportunity to work on a 100% fluid layout for a project management web application. During the process of cutting it up in XHTML and CSS, I learned a lot and definitely had a lot of fun moments while making it backwards-compatible with IE6. This article is a collection of insightful ideas and those moments I collected through the development of the project.

(more…)

“We’ve decided that IE8 will, by default, interpret web content in the most standards compliant way it can. This decision is a change from what we’ve posted previously.”
– Dean Hachamovitch, General Manager Internet Explorer

So the flames have extinguished? Read more on the subject.