fordie’s Blog

The HTML5 Specification introduces a new element called “mark”.
I’ve created a little site to explain how the mark tag can be used, I’ll be adding examples to it very shortly. In the meantime, if the mood takes you why not visit http://mark-element.info

jQuery is a lightweight JavaScript library that emphasizes interaction between JavaScript and HTML it’s my weapon of choice when it comes to adding client side interactions to a site.
It has rapidly gained popularity with web developers and designers – now software manufacturers are starting to take note with industry leaders like Adobe & Microsoft adding [...]

Oftentimes we ask our users to provide us with an awful lot of information in things like registration forms. It’s no wonder that every now and again the poor dears forget to fill in a box or make a mistake.
On longer or complex forms users can find it difficult to see where the errors actually [...]

Back in April I attended Future of Web Design 2008; a two day event with a conference on Thursday and Workshops on Friday. On the Friday afternoon I attended a session on Guerrilla Usability Testing run by Andy Budd from Clear Left.
Usability testing is something I’ve been itching to do properly for years; I’ve been [...]

We’ve started using jQuery quite heavily to power our javascript widgets – without exception everyone who’s used it here has had their own little jQuery epiphany. It’s quite funny to watch, people tend to resist it to start with (particularly the hardcore coders) – but when they use it for a while and see how [...]

After threatening to do it for almost a year, I’ve finally got round to changing the theme for this blog. I had planned to create my own theme, but having seen “HemingwayEx 1.0″ in an article by Smashing Magazine I decided that this was so close to what I wanted to achieve it wasn’t worth [...]

When we were developing the Tesco Property Market website there was a requirement to be position the footer either at the bottom of the browser window or at the end of the content if it was over one screen high. On the original site I wasn’t able to acheive this, due to the way some [...]

One thing that has always infuriated me with .net is it’s insistence on adding an invalid name attribute to the asp.net form*.
About a month ago I found a nice easy cure for this, so I thought I’d share it. All you need to do to stop .net adding the name attribute to the form is [...]

Yesterday I finally got round to making a start on re jigging the site. Over the course of the coming days (and knowing how these things tend to go probably months) you may see strange things happening with the layout of the site as I switch backwards & forwards between the current theme and the [...]

eyes
ears
mouth
oh my!

Some time ago I got asked how to produce an “accessible alternative to an image map“.
As long as Image Maps are implemented correctly there’s no reason why the shouldn’t be accessible however they may not always be the most appropriate or semantic way to mark up your content.
In this example I’ve used a simple [...]