fordie’s Blog

iOS developers are enabling users to get more and more out of their iPhones & iPads. But I think developers are missing one important thing that could make life easier for thousands of users. I’m not exaggerating. I have a particular bee in my bonnet when it comes to accessibility, my wife is registered blind [...]

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

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 [...]

Form layout is one area where designers have struggled to find a sensible way to replace tables with nice clean semantic xhtml + CSS. In 2005 Andy Clarke demonstrated his approach to form layout at CSS for designers, He wraps the label around the input field, then put the actual label text in a span. [...]

I was really hoping that I’d be able to go to @media 2007 in London next month but for one reason & another (it not having being signed off by the boss & actually being on holiday) I won’t be there. It’s a shame, but with any luck there’ll be plenty blogged about it. Last [...]

Just when you thought we had enough abbreviations in web development another one comes along. This one is POSH! POSH stands for Plain Old Semantic HTML. It’s a phrase first coined on the microformats IRC channel and promoted forward by John Allsopp, Tantek Çelik, Jeremy Keith, and Chris Messina. The thinking behind this abbreviation is [...]

Details are sketchy (or non-existent) at the moment but WaSP have recently announced a new initiative called “Street Team”. The idea is that together we create a number of tasks – challenges if you will – to help the promotion of web standards in your local community. Things that will help get the word out [...]

Molly E. Holzschlag knows her stuff; She’s been working in the webstandards arena since before there was even an arena to work in! I’ve seen her speak a couple of times, first at CSS for designers back in 2005 and then last year at @media 2006 where she spoke about internationalisation. Molly never fails to [...]

It was never my intention to use an existing wordpress theme for this blog. My original plan was to build a theme myself, however a combination of time pressure & a creative mental block meant that I ended up with a theme that I’d downloaded (albeit slightly modified). My biggest stumbling block was that all [...]

It’s not like me to post anything political, but I’ll make an exception for this. In the UK the Disability Discrimination Act (1995) covers access to services for disabled people; the part of the act that covers websites came into force in 1999. The act states that “reasonable adjustments” to ensure that their service is [...]