Evolt just published a pondering article of mine that was not techie enough for devarticles: Navigation – our visitor’s travel guide. In case there are issue with the evolt site (shouldn’t be now that it moved), there is also a local copy on icant.co.uk.

The article compares real life navigation aids to those we use on the web. I got the inspiration for it waiting for my girlfriend to finish her hairdresser appointment walking around the bluewater shopping centre in London.

I don’t know why this comes up now (after being a craze in July), but both Jens Grochdreis and Roger Johannson published posts about footnotes today.

While Roger’s post deals with Daring Fireball’s implementation, Jens points to an implementation at brandspankingnew. Joe Clark had a few well chosen words to say about footnotes and I tend to agree with him. There is no such thing as a footnote on the web, as this is actually what links are for – may they be page internal or to an external source.

I was really miffed by the implementation at brandspankingnew, as it is a perfect example of how not to create a sexy effect. Designers, hailing from a print background are always on the lookout for stuff like that and then they find JavaScript that turns spans into clickable elements (which are not keyboard accessible) and writes out HTML via innerHTML, thus making maintenance a nightmare.

So, from my point of view: Go NUTS on finding and trying out stuff like that, but when you do:

• Make sure the final result is usable regardless of input device
• Make sure the maintenance is easy – HTML should be in the HTML and not in a JavaScript variable
• If you need HTML that only makes sense with JavaScript, then create it via JavaScript and the DOM - thus leaving a clear path of objects that makes it easy to change and remove the elements later on

Content management systems with WYSIWYG editors have issues with some templates using CSS for layout – effectively forcing the designer to cater both for the CMS and the final browser. This post proposes the idea of an editor style sheet to overcome these problems.

Good web developers should have realised by now that there are a lot of different user agents out there and the web does not only consist of Internet Explorer 6 users on Windows XP with a resolution of 1024×768 pixels. Therefore we test on different browsers and settings – as defined in the project scope document. Most of the time this does involve MSIE 6 and MSIE 5.5, if we are lucky even Firefox and maybe Safari. Personally I tend to develop on Firefox and then fix MSIE glitches and do some sanity testing on Safari and the newest Opera flavour. Lately however, I realised that we are likely to forget another user agent – for another user group – the content management system. (more…)

It seems that Microsoft have realised that the debugging options in MSIE are just not adequate to developer needs. Following the success of the fabulous Firefox developer toolbar, Microsoft now released the beta of their Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar.

And after the publicity stunt of a one day free Opera, the Norwegian company now offers Opera without any advertising from here onward, which makes Opera enthusiasts very happy bunnies indeed.
People who bought for Opera some weeks ago could feel a bit miffed by that move, but what they did is support a product they believed in and they still get all the benefits of opera mail.

Now, seeing that I am a Firefox fan, and it keeps crashing on my Mac, I wonder if it is the lack of sufficient Ram (256MB) or if there is just something very wrong with Firefox and the Dev toolbar on Macs?

I finally got around to buying me a Mac to test my stuff on and surf without the need of a bullet proof firewall and virus scanners slowing down the machine. As nobody was gratious enough to buy me one I got this older mini mac from a friend in Germany for £280 and added the keyboard/mouse for £15 via ebay and the monitor for £180 including VAT and P&P. No more begging for Mac checks from me :-)