Topic: Browsers
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Bye Bye Embed
Break the chains of <embed> and live free. Elizabeth Castro explains how to embed movies without using invalid markup.
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ALA’s New Print Styles
Print away, you fiends! Eric Meyer presents the ALA 4.0 print styles and discusses the challenge of translating a complex screen layout into a well-designed and useful printed page.
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DOM Design Tricks III: Using Events in the Document Object Model
Be a code wizard ... or, just look like one. In Part 3 of the DOM Design Tricks tutorial series,Eisenberg shows us how to dynamically change text on a page. The theory, examples, and scripts will work in Mozilla and IE5.
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Pocket-Sized Design: Taking Your Website to the Small Screen
Among the many websites that are out there, few are standards-compliant. Among those few, only a handful sport style sheets adjusted to the needs of handheld devices. Of those which do offer styling for handhelds, not all will fit the smallest, lowest-resolution screens without presenting the user with the ultimate handheld horror: namely, horizontal scrolling. This article presents a set of general suggestions for creating a handheld-friendly style sheet that works well even on handheld screens no wider than 120px.
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Flash MX: Clarifying the Concept
In a detailed survey, accessibility obsessive Joe Clark evaluates Flash MX (authoring tool and player) in the context of the often confusing WAI and Section 508 guidelines, finds some things to cheer about, and draws a roadmap for future improvements.
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CSS Sprites: Image Slicing’s Kiss of Death
Say goodbye to old-school slicing and dicing when creating image maps, buttons, and navigation menus. Instead, say hello to a deceptively simple yet powerful sprite-based CSS solution.
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Meet the DOM
We’ve read about it. We’ve waited for it. Now we can actually start to use it. In this gentle introduction to the W3C Document Object Model, new ALA contributor Eisenberg shows how to make friends with the DOM, and use its power to manipulate dynamic HTML elements on the web.
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What the Hell is XML?
Attention, content managers, developers, site owners and designers: XML is here, and the time to start using it is now.
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Accesskeys: Unlocking Hidden Navigation
Your favorite applications have shortcut keys. So can your site, thanks to the XHTML accesskey attribute. Accesskeys make sites more accessible for people who cannot use a mouse. Unfortunately, almost no designer uses accesskeys, because, unless they View Source, most visitors can’t tell that you’ve put these nifty navigational shortcuts to work on your site. In this issue, Stuart Robertson unlocks the secret of providing visible accesskey shortcuts.
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Hybrid CSS Dropdowns
Yup. It’s yet another CSS dropdown article — but one that resolves many problems associated with common dropdown methods and degrades beautifully. Hybrid CSS dropdowns allow access to all pages, keep the user aware of where she is within the site, and are clean and light to boot. It’s a tasty little vitamin pill, so quit sighing and try it.
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Big, Stark & Chunky
You’ve designed for the screen and made provision for blind, handheld, and PDA browser users. But what about low-vision people? Powered by CSS, “zoom” layouts convert wide, multicolumn web pages into low-vision-friendly, single column designs. Accessibility maven Joe Clark explores the rationale and methods behind zoom layouts. Board the zoom train now!
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Facts and Opinion About Fahrner Image Replacement
Fahrner Image Replacement and its analogues aim to combine the benefits of high design with the requirements of accessibility. But how well do these methods really work? Accessibility expert Joe Clark digs up much-needed empirical data on how FIR works (and doesn’t) in leading screen readers.
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Build a Cross-Platform Testing Station in Mac OS
Everybody talks about cross-platform testing, but nobody’s shown how to do it on a nuts-and-bolts level. Until now. Sciortino’s comprehensive tutorial for Mac-based web designers will set you up with the testing platform of your dreams.
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Why Don’t You Code for Netscape?
Long considered the Holy Grail of web design, “backward compatibility” has its place; but at this point in web development history, shouldn’t we be more concerned about forward compatibility? ALA makes the case for authoring to web standards instead of browser quirks.
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CSS Design: Size Matters
Everything you think you know about controlling text sizes on the web is either wrong, or else it doesn’t work. In this much-bookmarked ALA classic, UI designer and CSS Todd Fahrner provides a way out of the mess by showing how to make CSS font size keywords work – even in stubborn browsers that get CSS wrong.
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Flash’s Got a Brand New Bag
Consumers love shopping. Designers love Flash. You do the math. Developer Michael Cardenas shares tips to help you get started building Flash-based e-commerce sites.
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Omniweb and Standards
Omniweb, a promising new browser for Mac OS X, has been much praised for its elegant interface and beautiful antialiasing of text. But how does it fare with web standards like CSS and the DOM? To find out, Waferbaby puts newly released version 4.1b1 through the paces.
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Mac Browser Roundup (with Håkon Lie and Tantek Çelik)
We test drove and reviewed the new Mac browsers, then asked browser makers Håkon Lie of Opera and Tantek Çelik of Microsoft to respond to our comments.
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MSN, Opera, and Web Standards
Håkon Lie, the father of Style Sheets and CTO of Opera, debunks Microsoft’s claim that web standards have anything to do with the blocking of Opera and Mozilla users from MSN.com. Lie’s eye–opening commentary includes a chart analyzing all 63 top–level pages at MSN.com in terms of standards compliance.
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“Forgiving” Browsers Considered Harmful
By hiding the need for structure that the web will require as it moves toward XHTML and XML, “forgiving” web browsers have helped breed a world of structural markup illiterates. Eisenberg examines the damage done.
