Once again someone asked on CSS-D why MSIE shows some horribly yellow text boxes, and how to work around that.

The riddle is easily solved – the google toolbar highlights form fields that can be automatically filled with data you entered earlier and shades them yellow.

Patrick Griffiths reported on that some year ago, and of course there is a developer who came up with a JavaScript workaround to suppress this functionality.

Personally, I think it is a nice to have feature. It was bad practise of google to not make it more obvious that the toolbar causes these changes and explain what they mean. However, the amount of work some developers put into trying to control the UI as much as possible with web client technologies just makes me snigger.

Wake up, smell the coffee. Yes, you might know a lot about usability and you can design well, but it is the user’s choice to install the toolbar, and live with its features – or turn them off. The colouring has a reason, it is not done because google like yellow.

Update: If you are looking for an even cleaner and animated version of this script check out YUIDomCollapse.

I updated domCollapse, the script explained ages ago in the evolt.org article “Collapsible Elements with DOM“.
It is cleaner now and generates images with links to indicate that the header is clickable rather than just relying on CSS to indicate. Thank to Stephane for reminding me that screen readers are not text browsers ;-)

Update to Version 2.1 on 06.05.2005:
Due to the overwhelming demand (2 people wanted it), I now added an option to only show one element at a time or multiple ones.

Update to Version 2.3 on 22.05.2005:
You can now define via a parameter on the function call to automatically only allow one expanded element, or not to offer the option at all.

New Version 3.0 on 6th of December 2005
Now the whole script uses the object literal and proper DOM2 event handling. And yes, Safari is supported!

It is quite bizarre to see the decline of active web magazines right now. It seems that we all get busier in our real jobs or have different opinions on how things should go forward.

• Evolt.org is still on the move and our moderation and review queue gets longer and longer.
• A list apart has a blogworthy news item as the latest issue after a nearly one month silence.
• Sitepoint.com publishes one product review wrapped up as an article after another.
• Devarticles publishes a backlog of one author (which are in parts very badly researched) mixed with canned articles taken from different books.

It is no wonder that others like Digital Web are drowning in articles, and have a publishing queue filled up to August (I will have another article there on 20th of May – first free slot).

Having published articles with most of them, it pains me a bit to see the decline in activity, as it is a lot easier to find good articles when they are published on a web zine rather than googling or digging through blogrolls / RSS feeds.

The benefits of a web zine are (or in some cases should be):

• Articles get reviewed by an editor, and errors / typos fixed (I am one of those at evolt.org)
• It is easy to find the articles
• Considering the web zine, your article will be held in higher esteem than on your personal blog, as it got published alongside other, highly respected writers.

The problems the web zines face are:

• The amount of bad articles being submitted, spam to filter through and just plain wrong submissions is staggering
• They either have to have highly motivated editors who work for free or have to advertise cleverly – you can do it wrong – personally I wonder sometimes if the message comes across at some of them.

Are we facing the death of the web zine?

In the old tradition of giving me things not fitting my physical age (for my 25th I got a Harry Potter cake – Hogwarts Express – yes, I worked for etoys) I got a cake made from Gummi Bears for my 30th (two days ago):

Check Karlssonwilker, a NY design agency. Click the rectangle with the name and then choose “Jobs” and you know where designers end who consider this kind of navigation fit for the web.
Another nice touch is the little man on the homepage scratching his butt when you hover over him. But that is where my exploration of the site ended. Interactivity and user engagement is not “making the user guess what is going on”.