i just had a fun bug to kill: A client complained that their site is not working. The code is theirs, all we did was update some flash movies. What didn’t work, was a popup window showing the flash movie.

Now, the code was Dreamweaver generated and the out-of-the-box functions have their version as comments on the line of the function name:

function MM_openBrWindow(theURL,winName,features) { //v2.0
window.open(theURL,winName,features);
}

There seems to be some optimising setting on the client’s server that deletes all whitespace in the documents, and when they uploaded the above code, it ended up as:

function MM[...]([...]) {//v2.0window.open([...]);}

This commented out the whole function and broke the popup. Learning from that: Don’t use embedded JS in an unknown environment.

Following the 10 Reasons why clients don’t care about accessibility article on Digital Web I was asked to participate in the World Usability Day webcast about web accessibility.

So if you have a question to ask about the matter at hand – how to sell accessibility in the large business world – please feel free to enter your question on the post about the webcast:

Webcast Homepage – 10 reasons clients don’t care about accessibility

Just got an URL from a friend that is too good to be kept just in my private stash: Sim Daltonism is a real-time colourblindness simulation app for Mac OsX. You can select what type of colourblindness you’ll like to simulate and a small window shows the area around the mousepointer with this filter enabled.

This little gem might save Vischeck.com some traffic and us less time spent copying+pasting into Photoshop (and checking with the Vischeck plugin).

It is amazing how the same idea seems to grip multiple developers at the same time. While the heydays of yet another image replacement technique seems to be over, flexible multicolumn CSS frameworks are the new sliced bread.

Thierry of TJK Design shows his One clean HTML markup, many layouts, Mike Stenhouse offers a CSS framework and Dirk Jesse brings Yet another multicolumn layout (in German).

If that is not enough, Alex Robinson gave me his impressive monster of an article + generator “one true layout” (to be released on P.I.E. soon) for review.

Update Stop the Press: The article is now live and can be read and enjoyed: In search of the One True Layout

A lot to read and skim through, and very great ideas, too. My concern is that it seems that everything generic tends to become a bit bloated and cryptic over time (DHTML libraries anyone?) and we’ll need to see how we can chop the ideas down into digestible chunks.

A lot of extra code has to be added to support outdated browsers, for example, and it would be cool to have these extras in an extra style sheet, for those who want to say “to hell with bad browsers” instead and keep their sheets clean and maintainable.

Sorry if that is already the case in some of those, I am also busy reviewing the AJAX/XML chapters for the upcoming JavaScript Reference for O’Reilly and prepare my webcast for the world usability day.

Read the linked bits now, you know it is good for you!

I finally got around to develop the scripts needed for the CSS toolshed. CSS what? Oh yeah, some may remember that I wanted to provide a means to simulate a CMS driven site to show that CSS can be used on an enterprise level, too.
Initially I meant to call that CSS factory but some people rightfully pointed out that factory has a negative connotation. Therefore I decided to go for CSS toolshed, to take the image of the Zen Garden a bit further.

In a nutshell, the CSS toolshed will be a site that:

• has three different templates (homepage, main section, detail section, meta page)
• has prepopulated navigation
• has a constantly changing content section – much like a CMS will have when the editors get their hand on it.

A sneak preview with my dummy stylesheet is now available and once I proved myself that the script works, I will need your contributions to make the thing work (clickthe link top right now that will show all the available styles). Have a click through the site to see the changes as they occur now, later on the content section will be populated with content filled building blocks showcased in this collection.

Don’t fret, there will be documentation as to how the page is built, and how to participate.