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.

I just had a good chuckle at this job advertisment on reed.co.uk . If you haven’t seen the WTF yet, check the wage – £17,999 to £18,000. Makes you wonder what extra qualification you need to get the extra pound.

It may be Reed’s system filling those automatically, but I generally found that not only the wages in IT plummeted the last year or so, but with them the quality of job descriptions. I have seen job specs for people I was asked to hire change miraculously to something I really don’t need and got job offers for Senior J2EE roles as I seem to be good in JavaScript.

Read my lips: Java is to JavaScript as car is to carpet.

I am quite sure that a lot of the money wasted in IT these days is because of miscommunication in the hiring process. Did you have similar experiences?

I just came back from a quick vacation in Munich, and on the train I wrote a small introduction to pop-under ads for a friend. Personally I am not a friend of ads, pop-up or pop-under, but sometimes you need them.
The main problem I have seen so far is that bad implementations cover the content even when JavaScript is disabled, thus making it impossible for the user to get rid of them.

This article describes how to create user friendly pop-under ads with CSS and DOM and offers an example that only covers the main content and gets a “close” functionality when the browser allows it.

Hopefully you’ll find it helpful.

The Sunday Times this weekend had an ad that made my eyes pop (click the detail to see the whole page):

It really looks like one of those overlay ads you have in web sites, and must have cost quite a bundle.

If you came here to learn how to create overlay ads, check this out instead

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/).