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”.
There has been quite an interesting thread on css-discuss about solutions how to make a blog post construct like
headline
date
text
link. In compliant HTML you cannot nest block elements in a link, therefore you would need to repeat the link three times – one inside the header element and two inside the paragraphs for date and the text. This poses an accessibility issue of three links to tab through / listen to / appear in the document’s links list.
Ingo Chao came up with a pure CSS solution.
The only problem with that one is that the link text will be just far too long, and you have no structure in the text any longer.
I decided to harness JavaScript to do the dirty work.
It seems like that an operating system monopoly is not enough. Adobe bought Macromedia, which leaves me with mixed feelings. I like Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, I never saw a point in their WYSIWYG tools. The Macromedia products I like are the ones they got when they bought Allaire. What I can forsee with that merger is even more “Click together your web site” tools which claim to create “100% WAI and 508 compliant accessible web sites”. Don’t believe the hype.
After a rather abysmal start of a three part article on DOM and CSS, Alejandro Gervasio came up with an interesting way to switch style sheets via DOM. I took the liberty to make the code a bit less obtrusive and checking for real DOM support.
It is not a real style switcher, and personally I consider JS only switchers pointless, but it is an interesting idea.