All posts by AlastairC

Local W3C validator on OSX

You may have noticed the W3C was asking for contributions for the running the validator. There is a way that you can support the W3c validation service - by not using it. The public version that is. If you use OSX, you can install it locally.

Home links verses logos

Facebook appears to be testing (with a far greater audience than I could), the current state of web conventions. A few years ago, few regular people knew that the logo on a website would link back to the homepage. Anecdotally, I have noticed more people using logos for that purpose in usability testing, but it's very difficult to know what proportion of the general population that is.

Google Chrome market share

I've seen a few articles recently about Google's Chrome browser market share, some sites seem to have had quite a lot of visits from people using Chrome, which then fell off again. However, these sort of stats are probably missing the point, what sites is it that people are most likely to use Chrome on?

.net standards champion

I was pleased (and rather surprised) to be nominated for “standards champion” in the .net awards. The thing is, the competition is, um, quite fierce! I’m up against the W3C, Mozilla, and some of the best known names in the business (like Zeldman). So I’m not picking out a …

iPods get speech, Apple gets accessible

The new iPod nanos (4th generation) now have speech-enabled menus, so you don’t have to be able to see the screen to operate it. This is obviously a boon for the visualy impaired, but with my old iPod I quite often used it from my pocket, or whilst driving. Could …

Strange sIFR / screen-reader bug

I was writing a little accessibility article for .net magazine about text-replacement techniques, including sIFR. I was blithely saying that "yea, don't worry, it's fine" with a couple of caveats. But, rather than rely on memory I did a quick test, and discovered something strange.

Dr Horrible’s sing along blog

Capture from the first act of the musical.

In a break from our irregular schedule, I feel compelled to point out that Joss Whedon is doing a sort of Radiohead. For a few days only, there is a three part "supervillain musical" free online. During the writers strike Joss and a few friends got together to do something fun and silly, and experiment whilst they were at it.

ABBR pattern accessibility

I'd been meaning to post on the microformat-accessibility issue, but Patrick Lauke just posted a great sumary. As a sort of +1, I'd just like to share what I would prefer as an accessibility aware developer.

Nested conditional comments

In a recent test with Internet Explorer's conditional comments, some of the more complex operators didn't seem to work. For example, trying to target IE 6 and 7 defensively, the 'and' operator didn't work. However, there is another solution.