Scarf*oo

Interview with Ian Hickson, editor of the HTML 5 specification. – The Web Standards Project. A lengthy interview on HTML5 and accessibility – well worth reading.

An interesting short article on the pitfalls of using CSS to hide page elements: Hiding with CSS: Problems and solutions | 456 Berea Street.

Personally, for elements where accessibility matters, like navigation menus, etc. I prefer hiding those elements with a short javascript statement I put right after the element I want to hide. This way the user does not notice the element getting closed and best of all, it remains accessible to all.

Welcome to the second part of the Back to The Basics series of articles here on Scarf*oo. Back to The Basics focuses – in simple terms – on the basic stuff every web developer should be familiar with. In the first Back to The Basics article we covered the shorthand CSS notation. Today, we’ll be looking at the obscure box model and what does it mean to us and how can we manipulate it.

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Welcome to the first part of the Back to The Basics series of articles here on Scarf*oo. In this series, I’ll focus – in simple terms – on the basic stuff every web developer should be familiar with. Today, we’ll be looking at the shorthand CSS notation, a quick way to write long CSS statements in one short line.

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Take a break from work, sit down comfortably and watch this nine minute clip with Jeffrey Zeldman discussing web standards, how it all began and why should we care about them. Now I know how young our job is and how even big minds like Zeldman find themselves constantly taking tradeoffs when developing web sites.

Hear ye, hear ye! i invite you to take a look at NVDA – a free, open source screen reader. There is a short review of the software over at 456 Berea Street if you’re interested.

While I loved playing Lemmings, I never loved playing with IE. After spending a full week in bed, this is the first news I ended up stumbling into – IE8 Has Arrived. My head is still swimming around from the fever, so you’ll excuse me for not delving into the depths of this release.

If you are clueless about HTML 5, take a look at Christopher Schmitt’s Looking into HTML5 slides. No audio on the slides, but interesting to watch and read anyway.

If you are into em-based layouts, you probably want more precision when translating your photoshop designs into pixel-perfect HTML and CSS creations. Simply setting the font-size in your body element to 62.5%, will make sure that from now on, you can rely on the rule of 1em = 10 pixels.

body {
	font-size: 62.5%; /* 1em = 10px */
}

Note: Careful if you modify the font-size on a container element – that will break the 10px rule on all the contained elements!

This one’s got my heart pumping again – and it hasn’t happened in a while, mind you. I am talking about Mr. Jason Santa Maria and his latest article titled Making Modular Layout Systems over at 24ways.org.

The method is simple: write a bunch of well-thought classes, chain them together and you get a robust and versatile grid layout. A recommended read!