I hate my favicon. I hate my gravatar. Hate ’em. I’ve tried four or five times to design something new to use as my favicon or gravatar and each time it ends up looking very SimpleBitsian.

Maybe I’m just blocked. Maybe I’m just working too hard on other stuff. Maybe I’m just looking for some inspiration from outside.
Continue reading flickr pro account contest

I’m not sure how this post is going to come across, but I have to write it anyway. Feel free to comment or not comment at all. I’m not attacking anyone in particular, but in my mind there is some “unfinished business” to take care of as a follow up to my “Browser Elitism” post.

Some people said that I shouldn’t call it elitism, and that’s fair enough. After reading through the comments, I felt that something was missing that I couldn’t address properly in the comments. This is an attempt to consolidate my thoughts, respond to some points that people raised, and record it all so that I can move on (yes, there are things that are bugging me. No, I won’t lose sleep at night, but I do need to write it down).

Continue reading Browser Elitism Part 2

It’s official. I’ll be heading to Austin again in May as a guest instructor for Knowbility’s Accessibility University.

I’ll be teaching a course in Accessible JavaScript — though many have struggled to define accessible scripting techniques, to me it means thinking carefully about what we do when scripting – we can’t just implement JavaScript solutions without actually determining their impact, and planning it properly first. In order to do this, we need to look at a few concepts:
Continue reading Back to Austin

The other day I was was encouraging a client to demonstrate their software’s front end web interface in Firefox rather than in Internet Explorer. (After all, I am all for getting clients on board using Firefox for their product demonstrations in sales calls or in meetings and for every day use.)

We were looking at a form that had a group of radio buttons for a choice, with a short paragraph nested below the label to further explain that particular choice. I implemented a :hover CSS effect on the div that I had used to encapsulate the radio button, the label, and the explanatory paragraph, which would only work properly in a “good” browser.

Continue reading Browser Elitism

I haven’t had a post in the “Quotable” category for a while, but I found a great one just today.

Simon Collison has a very good piece on how you can make your web site compatible for handheld browsing.

Outside of the fact that it is a great piece with some solid advice, one particular paragraph I found very quotable:

Serving content for handheld devices is all about compromise. Until connections are faster, all users have the same browsers and screensize, and there is better support for CSS and other markup, we'll have to make sacrifices.

I know Simon wrote this paragraph with reference to handhelds, but I can’t help but think that there are so many places and/or situations where this still applies outside of the handheld market…