Just stumbled upon this Translator tool using AJAX which translates text you enter in realtime into other languages. My, I don’t want to see the traffic stats of this one.

Neat though.

Right now I am working on a project that will be a paypal-esque financial application, and of course security is a big issue with this one.

We had a great meeting talking about security measures that could be added to the forms to ensure that only real users will be able to log-in.

I collected the ones I could think of based on the W3C whitepaper and own experiences and this is the list with pro and contra for each of them: (more…)

If you ever wondered if and where people read your RSS feeds, you might be in for a surprise, when your audience is in Taiwan. It seems there is a new product available that prints out RSS feeds onto toilet paper Would be great to have a control element to define the print strength, in case you want to leave a lasting impression.

Some of you may remember Bobby van der Sluis’ Unobtrusive Flash Objects – a clever way to add Flash to pages only when and if the browser supports it.

Paul Colton has now come up with a different idea of making JavaScript and Flash boogie, a JavaScript wrapper for Flash called AFLAX . What this script allows you to do is to script Flash animations with JavaScript – not the Flash IDE or ActionScript.

It does look sexy and pretty cool, but as some other comments at AJAXIAN already pointed out, it seems that we have a hard time to find a good use for this idea. I can imagine that in a closed environment, you can do some nice things with it – like interactive graphs. With Flash being able to talk to the backend and JavaScript doing the same via AJAX it does feel a bit like mixing technologies that don’t need mixing.

Well, I guess we should keep our eyes open what is happening to that.

Just got this as part of the e-government bulletin. Just another example as to how web accessibility has bigger issues than non-encoded ampersands.

European Accessibility Shortcomings ‘Shameful’, Says MEP
Richard Howitt MEP has said it is “shameful” that EU institutions have still not themselves widely embraced global web accessibility guidelines, despite urging their adoption on member states.
“My own institution’s web site was recently found to be inaccessible to people with a disability,” Howitt told an eAccessibility conference hosted in London last week by the UK Presidency of the EU (http://fastlink.headstar.com/eur2).
Last December, European institutions agreed that web accessibility guidelines should be adhered to by all public sector web sites across the whole of Europe. However Howitt, who is president of the European Parliament’s All-Party Disability Group, said: “It is shameful that the European Parliament is unable to do that nine months later. It shows the huge chasm that exists between good intent and what is the reality in terms of market and the daily experiences of disabled people.”
One of the aims of the conference was to discuss the EU Communication on eAccessibility (http://fastlink.headstar.com/comm1) which lays out an action plan to ensure all Europeans receive equal access to digital and electronic products and services. Howitt warned delegates that action on the communication is imperative. “If in two years’ time we have another set of dialogues, you risk losing the confidence of the European Parliament and the citizens of Europe. It’s no good just talking about it: challenge us as politicians to agree it.”
Next month sees the release of findings from a study commissioned by the UK’s E-Government Unit on the accessibility of public sector web sites from across EU member states. The research is due to be published at the ministerial conference on e-government in Manchester in November (http://www.egov2005conference.gov.uk/).