Just in case you might want a three-column layout that doesn’t require the usual sacrifices, we thought we’d share this technique. Not that you’d want that or anything.
Topic: HTML
The Accessibility Hat Trick: Getting Abbreviations Right
The acronym element is missing in XHTML 2.0. Internet Explorer 6 ignores the abbr element. JAWS doesn’t like dfn. AAA-level compliance requires you to find a solution. Make it work.
Sensible Forms: A Form Usability Checklist
Sometimes it’s the little things that drive you nuts. As many of us have probably noticed during this season of holiday shopping, usability problems in online forms can be infuriating. Brian Crescimanno helps solve the problem with a checklist of form-usability recommendations.
Printing a Book with CSS: Boom!
You like microformats? We’ll give you some freakin’ microformats. CSS luminaries Håkon Wium Lie and Bert Bos introduce the boom! microformat and show you how to make book the easy way.
High Accessibility Is Effective Search Engine Optimization
It’s no coincidence that search engines love highly accessible websites; in fact, by designing for accessibility, you’re already using effective search-engine optimization techniques. Andy Hagans explains yet another reason to pay attention to accessibility.
CSS Swag: Multi-Column Lists
Multi-column lists: can’t live with ’em, can’t achieve perfect bliss without ’em. Paul Novitski offers a staggering six possible methods for accomplishing this commonly requested layout trick. Examine your options and choose wisely.
High-Resolution Image Printing
Your client looks up and says, “Why does our logo look funny when we print the pages?” Do you sigh dramatically, or learn about Ross Howard’s technique for printing high-resolution images via CSS? We vote for option B.
More About Custom DTDs
Your web page uses non-standard elements, so, following the advice of earlier ALA articles, you bang out a custom DTD to make sure your document still validates. Not so fast, says the W3C’s Quality Assurance team, who argue that crafting a custom DTD for the sole purpose of validation is a mistake … and then tell when it is the right thing to do.
Spruced-Up Site Maps
The clean-n-simple site map gets a nice haircut and and a shoe-shine as Kim Siever shows us how to hook custom bullet styles to troublesome nested lists.
Validating a Custom DTD
In his article in this issue, Peter-Paul Koch proposes
adding custom attributes to form elements to allow triggers for specialized
behaviors. The W3C validator won’t validate a document with these
attributes, as they aren’t part of the XHTML specification. Not to worry! This article will show you how to create a custom DTD that will add those
custom attributes, and will also show you how to validate documents that use those new attributes.
