I ordered it even before it came out, but as I just got stuck in writing a part of my own chapter in an upcoming book, I finally opened Stuart Langridges DHTML Utopia: Modern Web Design Using JavaScript & DOM published by Sitepoint. (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…)

We have faced quite a dilemma today and had a 4 hour meeting about possibilities how to solve it. The client has a huge sitemap, and they are bound by law to offer all of the services listed in it on their site as links.

Now, up to two levels, a navigation on the left hand side is bearable, but when it comes to three levels with up to 30 links each, even the highest resolution will have the current link below the proverbial fold.

We tackled a lot of that by using something I christened “Contextual navigation order (CNO)”, meaning the current section will always be the first in the navigation, which is good for visual users and screen readers, as neither need to go past the other links to reach where they want to go. An example of CNO is on the easynav demo page and on the North Yorkshire Council web site. North Yorks solved the third level by moving it to the right of the screen, but in this case that space is reserved for marketing.

As cutting down on links is not an option – although it would be more usable – we needed a solution that shows the third level. As the client was not sure if their development team can put parts of the navigation somewhere else on the screen – the easiest option in the CMS (Tridion) is to loop through all folders once and generate one navigation – we wondered if there is a CSS/JS solution which still remains accessible.

A first draft of my attempts can be found here:

• Different examples of third level navigation via CSS and DOM

Maybe you will have to face the same problem, or you have another option?

Personally, I don’t see much sense in displaying that many links at once, and as a visitor I’d use the A to Z or the search instead.

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.