Adobe just announced the new searchability features of Flash complete with a specifications document of the SWF format. Google already announced that they are indexing SWF as of now to a full extend and according to Adobe Yahoo! are soon to follow.

This is splendid news, as it will allow people to write APIs to get text information out of SWF movies in a much easier way. Sure there were several Flash Decompilers already available, but this will make this much more mainstream and people will take adding text information to their Flash movies much more seriously.

On the other hand, this will also lead to more security exploits, but that is to be expected from any disclosure of file format specifications.

Thanks Adobe!

I am very happy to announce that I am organizing my first big event. After years of fighting the good fight and getting people to embrace accessibility I was ready to give up on it. Instead I took a new angle on it and used APIs to create alternative interfaces to systems that just will not get more accessible any time soon.

Readers of this blog will have seen the outcome of these, and last weekend at mashed08 I showed another hack and explained the idea of it. I also gauged if there was any interest by the assembled hackers in an event like this and got some good response.

Even better was that I won a prize – some financial support to get an “accessibility hack day” on the road.

So here goes, check out Scripting Enabled

Scripting Enabled is a conference and hack day in London, England in September 2008.

The aim of the conference is to break down the barriers between disabled users and the social web as much as giving ethical hackers real world issues to solve. We talked about improving the accessibility of the web for a long time – let’s not wait, let’s make it happen.

Right now I am still looking for, well, everything. I have some money, I need a location and other speakers. I got a lot of ideas, though.

Check out the site, the calls for participation and if you want to help, please contact me!

I just read another amazing novel by Douglas Coupland on my 5 hour flight to Ankara called “Eleanor Rigby”. This is a quote I really enjoyed:

Jeremy asked if I liked my job.
“I think big companies are like marching bands. You know the big secret about marching bands, don’t you?”
“No, what is it?”
“Even if half the band is playing random notes, it still sounds kind of like music. The concealment of failure is built right into them. It’s like the piano – as long as you play only the black keys, not the white ones, it’ll sound okay, but on the other hand it’ll never sound like real music either.

Now this sounds negative, but I also like the idea that big companies can have failure without totally vanishing. That’s where research departments and incubators come in.

This was a question I got in the office today and there is no shame in asking it:

I am using Event Delegation on one of my products and I need to stop the main handler on the body from firing when I click a certain button. How do I do that?

The answer is of course to use stopPropagation() or cancelBubble(), both nicely wrapped in YAHOO.util.Event.stopPropagation():

HTML:

JavaScript:

YAHOO.util.Event.onContentReady('buttons',function(){
YAHOO.util.Event.on(document.body,'click',function(e){
var t = YAHOO.util.Event.getTarget(e);
snitch('
It was the ' + t + ' that was clicked
');
});
YAHOO.util.Event.on('tease','click',function(e){
snitch('
that was the first button
');
YAHOO.util.Event.stopPropagation(e);
});
YAHOO.util.Event.on('tease2','click',function(e){
snitch('
that was the second button
');
});
function snitch(msg){
document.getElementById('littlesnitch').innerHTML += msg;
}
});

Try it out here: Overriding Event Delegation with stopPropagation

[tags]events,javascript,eventdelegation,webdevtrick[/tags]

It is 1.14am after the first day of @media2008 and I just finished my report over on the YDN blog:

• Check @media2008, day one

See you there tomorrow morning for day two, I am off to bed.