Sometimes it might be a good idea to give visitors an insight of what is lurking behind a link. Normally this is achieved via a thumbnail, but what about inline links?

This article explains how you can enhance a link with a class named “preview” pointing to an image via DOM JavaScript. The enhanced link has a small clickable icon that will show a preview of the linked image. If you have PHP with the GD library enabled, it even creates the preview on the fly.

Read more about Dynamic preview images with DOM, CSS and PHP

Lo and behold, what the Web Standards Project has to say in their latest press release:

In an effort to boost the quality of scripting on the world wide web, the Web Standards Project (WaSP) today announced the formation of the WaSP DOM Scripting Task Force

Lead by Jeremy Keith and Dori Smith, the task force will be evangelising the benefits of well-written, usable JavaScript and lead by example publishing articles and tutorials that illustrate best practices. These will be published on the DOM Scripting Task Force website and elsewhere.

Right now, the Task Force website is a humble, bare-bones affair (cobbled together by yours truly in half an hour) but the design and the content will be expanded before too long. For now though, there’s a blog where the Task Force members will be posting snippets and titbits of JavaScript-related news. Subscribe to the RSS feed to keep up to date with the activity.

Eric Meyer’s S5 standards based presentation slides system is used quite a lot by webstandardismos for their presentations.

However, some of its functionality is great for presenters but can be quite hard to follow for web surfers who just want to see what someone has presented.

My personal challenge was to come up with something that is as cool as Eric’s system, but much easier to use and more lightweight when it comes to creating your own slides.

The outcome is called DOMSlides and is licensed under Creative Commons for you to use, change and copy.

Any feedback, testing on Macs and own style sheets to bundle with the script are welcome.

I gave a presentation in a workshop this morning on the topic of “HTML tables best practices”. The catch: I didn’t get time to prepare properly and the audience was predominantly designers and non-technical types.

I cobbled the thing together in half an hour during the first presentation of a colleague and the result is a bit tongue-in-cheek, but might be helpful to you aswell:

Best practise on HTML tables for the non-techie audience

Yes, I couldn’t resist creating my own slideshow JavaScript thingy…

European Digital Rights and Privacy International have sent an urgent letter yesterday to the UK Presidency and the European Commissioners for Justice and Media to show restraint in today’s extraordinary JHA Council. EDRI expects the UK Presidency to table a new urgent procedure for the proposal on telecommunication data retention, bypassing the European Commission and the European Parliament.

Full news and downloadable PDF on the EDRI site

• www.edri.org
• http://www.privacyinternational.org