Following a request on the list, where a subscriber had unsuccessfully searched for an online gallery of styled data tables, I came up with the following idea:

http://icant.co.uk/csstablegallery/

It is pretty much like csszengarden, only for a single marked up data table.

What I need now is people participating with an own style for the data table. You can submit it directly on the site and I will check through them when I come back from a training in 3 days, so please don’t expect to see things appearing immediately.

I thought I had done well and created an easy to use, dynamic gallery with DOM and CSS. What it does is show pictures when you click them in the page instead of doing a reload. It also shows a “loading image” message. All feedback I got was positive and I was happy to have provided something slick and useful. Alas, I found out that it is not all like that. (more…)

A lot of email noise is being created on mailing lists and forums plainly because new developers are not sure about where what web technology ends and where the other begins. “Can I style the Icon of the page via CSS?”, “How do I send a form via HTML” or “Can I check in JavaScript if a folder has network sharing enabled” are just some recent examples. (more…)

Devarticles just published my first article in a two article saga: Talking business: How I Learned to Love CSV . Why they published it in their XML section is a bit beyond me, but there you go.
The article deals with the dilemma of receiving and giving data from and to non-techie business people and explains why I found CSV files to be a nice format to use for that task.

As some might know, I am currently writing a chapter for “Constructing Accessible Web Sites” by Apress / Friends of Ed.

As an example, I am writing a script to allow for “accessible” pop-up windows. I had an idea I hadn’t seen yet before and wondered if I should pursue with it.

Here’s the deal:

• We cannot assume that the user agent allows for popup windows
• When we only use HTML and the target attribute, we can open a window, but cannot “style” it or close it with a button
• When we have JavaScript enabled and we have a window.opener, we can assume that the window was opened and we can add window.close() links.

Therefore I considered using link relationships in conjunction with a script to make the whole process failsafe:

popup

would be changed by the script to a link opening the new window and get a message attached that it does so.

back

would get a close.window() attached and the text changed to “close window”.

Any comments why that is a bad idea and what would be a better one?
Yes, I will point out that popups should be avoided.