Too much accessibility - TABINDEX
A cool article from the Web Access Centre Blog over at the RNIB on the use or misunderstood use of the Tabindex attribute.
With such a simple attribute promising a whole lot of accessibility, it’s easy to muddy the workings of a page and its accessibility if its use isn’t considered correctly.
To be frank, I’ve rarely seen the TABINDEX attribute applied without it creating more problems than it solves.
Too much accessibility - TABINDEX, pertinent musings that is well worth a read.
Forms. Inputting country names
In this post from Bruce Lawson, he discusses the problem of selecting a country from a drop-down select box and possible ways to make the process easier for users.
Valid Flash, video, and audio embed (object) markup
Courtesy of the Web Standards Project, one tidy resource on embedding objects the nice way, by Ben Henick.
Joe Clark points out that he’s been on top of this issue for a couple of years now. The comments posted are interesting, so don’t skip ‘em.
E-commerce layout with definition lists
With work being carried out at Jadu on a new and frankly exciting e-commerce project, I’ve been thinking about better ways to layout the products pages using semantic mark-up.
The use of definition lists came to mind whilst reading CSS Mastery, as the amount of product information or descriptions of a product seemed to almost decree their use. They are under used (by myself) so here are a few quick references.
- Max design looks at the basic use of the dl in Definition lists - misused or misunderstood?
- Malarkey looks directly at the use of definition lists in product layout in E-commerce definition lists, which is a bit handy
- Scott McDaniel gives good writing in Manipulating Definition Lists for Fun and Profit
The definition list can also be used for adverts and news stories or anything that uses a summary, an image and a title.
- Malarkey again describes this in CSS: Hold the front page
- Community MX (!) discuss it in Create a Teaser Thumbnail List Using CSS
Reflecting on the definition list, it’s easy to see how they can be misused, like the table, they can be pushed and sqeezed into holes they just weren’t meant to fit. Used wisely, they do improve semantics and increase the amount of hooks for CSS layout and presentation.