News from Other

Designing with Progressive Enhancement (Book review)

Whenever I hold workshops or lectures on web development, I talk a lot about Progressive enhancement. To me it is the obvious and only sensible way of building websites and web applications. With that said, you can bet I was very pleased to learn that Designing with Progressive Enhancement was being worked on. A whole book covering the subject was very promising, and the previews and code examples on the Designing with Progressive Enhancement book site raised my expectations.Read full postPosted in Accessibility, Reviews, Web Standards.
Publication date: 2010-04-16 more

HTML5 input types

It is a rare day at work when I don
Publication date: 2010-04-13 more

Google incorporating site speed in search rankings

(I’m in the middle of traveling, but I know that a lot of people will be interested in the news that Google is incorporating site speed as one of the over 200 signals that we use in determining search rankings. I wanted to jot down some quick thoughts.) The main thing I want to get across [...]
Publication date: 2010-04-10 more

The modern workplace is optimised for interruptions

I recently came across an interview with Jason Fried, co-founder of 37signals, where he among other things talks about why you can
Publication date: 2010-04-08 more

Things to do in Japan and Thailand?

Sometime in the next few weeks, my wife and I are going to take a trip to Japan and Thailand. Our tenth wedding anniversary flew by in January 2010, and now we’re taking the chance to celebrate and explore some new places. I’m really excited because I’ve never been to Asia before (!). We’ve got our [...]
Publication date: 2010-04-07 more

Using the lang attribute makes a difference

About a year ago I posted a Quick Tip titled Specify each HTML document
Publication date: 2010-04-05 more

Mini-review of the iPad

I played with an iPad yesterday. Here’s my mini-review. The screen is bright and the touch sensitivity is fantastic. Given that it reminds me the most of an iPhone, it’s surprisingly heavy. It feels dense with potential. On the childlike-sense-of-wonder-scale (as fake Steve Jobs would say), the iPad is better than the Macbook Air but not [...]
Publication date: 2010-04-05 more

Whenever you use :hover, also use :focus

Probably one of the most common accessibility oversights is neglecting to apply CSS to the :focus state of links whenever you style the :hover state. How much of a problem this oversight leads to for non-mouse users depends on what CSS is applied to the :hover state.Read full postPosted in Accessibility, CSS, Quick Tips.
Publication date: 2010-04-02 more

A selection of VoiceOver keyboard commands

One of the many great things about using a Mac as your development machine is VoiceOver, the screen reader that ships with every copy of Mac OS X. Testing your work in a screen reader is only a small part of building accessible websites, but it helps you understand the need for many accessibility guidelines. To test your sites in VoiceOver you obviously need to know how to use it to navigate the Web. There are many, many keyboard shortcuts that can be used to control VoiceOver
Publication date: 2010-03-29 more

Ruby, PHP, MySQL, and Perl issues when upgrading Mac OS X from Leopard to Snow Leopard

I bought Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) on the day it was released, but didn't gather enough courage to go ahead and install it until a week ago. Yep, it's been collecting dust on my shelf for over six months. Upgrading between major revisions of Mac OS X has bitten me several times in the past, mostly because I use my Mac as a web development machine. I need Apache, PHP, MySQL, Perl, Ruby and a whole bunch of Ruby gems in working order, and it seems like major OS X updates almost always mess with those in one way or another.Read full postPosted in Mac, Movable Type, PHP.
Publication date: 2010-03-26 more

New 30 day challenge: not replying to outside email

I just wrapped up two 30 day challenges (no sugar for 30 days and no iPhone for 30 days). I’ll try to report back what I learned soon, but in the mean time I wanted to alert you that today I’m starting a new 30-day challenge: not replying to outside email. When I announced my first [...]
Publication date: 2010-03-23 more

Heading navigation in web browsers

All screen readers that I know of have keyboard shortcuts that allow the user to navigate within a web page by jumping from heading to heading. This can really speed things up when you want to skip to a particular section of a page. Being able to navigate by headings would also be very useful to sighted people who do not use a mouse, but unfortunately very few web browsers offer this functionality. The only graphical web browser I know of that has such functionality built in is Opera, while Firefox can get it by way of an extension.Read full postPosted in Accessibility, Browsers, Usability.
Publication date: 2010-03-22 more

Open hidden folders in the Mac OS X Finder

This is one of those simple tips that makes you think
Publication date: 2010-03-18 more

IE9 Platform Preview available

In November last year, Microsoft revealed some of what will be new and improved in Internet Explorer 9 in the IEBlog post An Early Look At IE9 for Developers. Today, IE General Manager Dean Hachamovitch posted a follow-up: HTML5, Hardware Accelerated: First IE9 Platform Preview Available for Developers. Yes, you can now download what Microsoft calls a Platform Preview to test drive Internet Explorer 9 for yourself.Read full postPosted in (X)HTML, Browsers, CSS, HTML 5.
Publication date: 2010-03-17 more

More material for web site owners

Here’s some more stuff you should know about. - I did a monster-long interview with Eric Enge. I think the interview lasted an hour or something like that, and we covered several areas in depth. - Next, take a break and go read this post by Rhea Drysdale. Heck, maybe send her a donation by Paypal (Added: [...]
Publication date: 2010-03-16 more

Google stars for bookmarking

Google is replacing SearchWiki with stars in Google search. The stars sync with Google Bookmarks, so you can get access to them wherever you go. Once you star something, it shows up above the search results: Pretty cool. But I discovered an extra little tip. If you go to Google Bookmarks, you can find a bookmarklet [...]
Publication date: 2010-03-14 more

Clarifying a couple points

[Just as a reminder: everything below is my personal opinion. I haven't sent it to anyone else at Google for a review, etc.] Valleywag used a recent podcast I did as material for two points in Six Delusions of Google’s Arrogant Leaders. The two assertions that used my comments as material were “Google’s wealth means Google [...]
Publication date: 2010-03-13 more

Reverse chronological order comments

Maybe I
Publication date: 2010-03-12 more

Geek Meet Gothenburg March 2010

It's been over three years since Geek Meet Gothenburg February 2007, so it's about time for another one. Like last time, this event will take place at the NetRelations office in Gothenburg, Sweden. The date is March 24, 2010. We
Publication date: 2010-03-12 more

Seven HTML related working drafts published

On March 4, the W3C published no less than seven new or updated working draft documents related to HTML: HTML5 HTML: The Markup Language HTML5 differences from HTML4 HTML+RDFa HTML Microdata HTML Canvas 2D Context Additional Requirements for Bidi in HTML Read full postPosted in (X)HTML, HTML 5.
Publication date: 2010-03-08 more

Visual display of alternative text

The fact that web browsers have different ways of displaying alternative text when images are missing or disabled is something that I talked about in Safari, WebKit and alt text for missing images and Steve Faulkner expanded on in alt and title content display in popular browsers. In How should Web browsers render alternative text?, Vlad Alexander asks (and answers) a few questions on this topic.Read full postPosted in Accessibility, Browsers.
Publication date: 2010-03-05 more

Start an embedded YouTube video at a certain timestamp

In a previous post I covered how to link to a specific timestamp in a YouTube video. The short version looks like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PjDw3azfZWI#t=31m08s The “#t=31m08s” takes you to 31 minutes and 8 seconds in a video. I just found out that you can also start embedded videos at a certain timestamp. To do it on an embedded [...]
Publication date: 2010-03-04 more

Calling for link spam reports

Google has been working on some new algorithms and tools to tackle linkspam and we’d like to ask for linkspam reports from you. If you’d like to tell us about web sites that appear to be using spammy links (e.g. paid links that pass PageRank, blog spammers, guestbook spammers, etc.), here’s how to send us [...]
Publication date: 2010-03-03 more

Accessibility issues on Vancouver Olympics websites

Being a pretty big fan of many winter sports I have spent most evenings of the past two weeks in front of the TV, watching the action from the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics. With excellent live TV coverage from the games I had no reason to visit either the Vancouver2010.com or the CTVOlympics.ca website to find more info about the games. But one person who has visited and taken a closer look at those sites is Joe Clark. What he found is that the Vancouver Olympics Web sites are inaccessible to disabled people.Read full postPosted in Accessibility, Web Standards.
Publication date: 2010-03-02 more

Leaving the iPhone

I’m three weeks into a new 30 day challenge: no iPhone. When I got a Nexus One in December, I spent a few weeks carrying both phones around in the pockets of my jeans. It took a little while to adapt to Android, but I’m very happy with my Nexus One and I don’t plan [...]
Publication date: 2010-02-23 more

CSS efficiency tip: use a single stylesheet file for multiple media

The way most people link CSS intended for different media types, such as screen, print, or handheld, is to use multiple files. The files are then linked either through link elements with a media attribute or through @import statements with one or more media types specified. There is nothing wrong with splitting your CSS into multiple files and linking them this way (I currently do that here on this site), but there are two drawbacks: it leads to more HTTP requests from the browser to the server and the need to maintain multiple CSS files.Read full postPosted in CSS.
Publication date: 2010-02-22 more

Remember the Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG)

An increasing number of web developers are aware of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) (though they don
Publication date: 2010-02-19 more

My speaking plans for 2010

Last year I tried to limit my travel but still ended up making about ten (!) trips in 2009. This year I’ve resolved to travel less for work. Right now, here’s my current speaking/travel plans for 2010: March 2-4, 2010: SMX West, Santa Clara, CA. I’m doing a “Ask the Search Engines” panel. May 19-20, 2010: Google [...]
Publication date: 2010-02-17 more

How to respond to email messages that contain multiple questions

Email messages often contain a number of questions that the sender wants the recipient to answer. I find that many responses to such messages are much more difficult to understand than they should be. Not because of grammar or spelling errors, but because of how the responses are structured and formatted. I
Publication date: 2010-02-17 more

Finding the best cell phone carrier

Okay, someone tell me if this device exists (or build it!). I want a device where I can pay $10-15 to get a gadget in the mail. The gadget would sit in my pocket for a week wherever I go. The device would record cell phone signal strength for each of the four major U.S. [...]
Publication date: 2010-02-16 more

Blog to Book?

I recently went looking for some software to make a blog into a book. Here’s what I found: - Lulu will take PDF files for a book. Blogbooker.com will try to create a PDF from a blog. Unfortunately, my blog made BlogBooker choke (I have 991 posts from my blog) — even when I excluded comments. - [...]
Publication date: 2010-02-16 more

Specify a text colour for img elements

When an image specified with an img element is missing from a web page, some browsers display the alt text instead. Why not all browsers do that is a separate topic which I talk a bit about in Safari, WebKit and alt text for missing images. I think most people will agree that it is a good thing for web browsers to display the contents of an image
Publication date: 2010-02-11 more

Chrome support for Greasemonkey

Back in December, I happened to click on a Greasemonkey script in Chrome and was shocked that it just worked. At the time, I wrote a note within Google that said Whoa. I just clicked on a Greasemonkey script in the latest dev version of Chrome (4.0.266.0 on Linux). Chrome offered to install the GM script, [...]
Publication date: 2010-02-09 more

sIFR default CSS hides content from at least one screen reader

Just a heads-up to anyone using sIFR to render text: the default CSS that comes with sIFR hides the replaced text from the VoiceOver screen reader. I don
Publication date: 2010-02-08 more

Forgotten CSS selectors

Anyone who has been using CSS for any length of time has probably been frustrated by the lack of selector support in Internet Explorer 6. There are quite a lot of cases where a CSS 2.1 selector will let you target elements in all other relevant browsers, but where you, if you want it to work in IE 6, have to add a class or id attribute to the HTML. Well, the market share of IE 6 is now finally at a level where we as developers can say that a site
Publication date: 2010-02-05 more

Improving Arabic searches and talking more about ranking

Moustafa Hammad and Mohamed Elhawary, a couple engineers in our search quality group, just did a nice post about improving Arabic language searches: Our algorithm employs rules of Arabic spelling and grammar along with signals from historical search data to decide when to leave out spaces between words or when to remove unnecessarily repeated letters. Now, [...]
Publication date: 2010-02-03 more

Beware of

Every now and then I need to ask a client or another developer to save a copy of a web page and email it to me. Mostly it is because they are viewing a page that is behind a firewall and I need to see the markup. Something that happens a lot is that they send me HTML that is more or less mangled. This HTML mangling happens when you choose
Publication date: 2010-02-02 more

Installing Android development environment on Ubuntu 9.04

I wanted to play with writing Android apps on my home Linux computer, which is currently running Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope). These are mostly notes for myself, so don’t feel guilty if you skip this post. - Make sure your system is up-to-date: sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade - Install Java sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jdk - [...]
Publication date: 2010-01-31 more

XHTML Media Types Working Group Note updated

The W3C Working Group Note XHTML Media Types - Second Edition contains updated guidelines for the use of different media types with XHTML documents
Publication date: 2010-01-30 more

Unobtrusive JavaScript is not necessarily accessible JavaScript

Plenty of JavaScript demos and tutorials that you come across on the Web note that they are implemented using unobtrusive JavaScript. While that is great and should always be encouraged, some people seem to believe that unobtrusive JavaScript equals accessible JavaScript. That is not always the case. Unobtrusive JavaScript is normally mentioned to emphasise that a script uses progressive enhancement to cater for people who use a browser without JavaScript support. But that does not mean that a script is accessible, since two key accessibility issues tend to be overlooked
Publication date: 2010-01-27 more

Keep an eye on changing pages

Google just launched a nice feature on Google Reader: the ability to keep an eye on pages for changes. This works even if the page doesn’t have its own RSS feed. This sort of thing is very handy. You could use it to spot new things on a privacy policy page or watch for changes [...]
Publication date: 2010-01-26 more

Embedding video files without JavaScript

Nowadays, it is more or less the norm to use JavaScript to insert video content embedded in Flash into web pages. While it does work in the majority of cases, there are a couple of problems: it requires JavaScript and it requires Flash. Some people block JavaScript, some block Flash, some block both, and some use platforms or user agents that do not support JavaScript and/or Flash. Like the iPhone and iPod Touch, for example. So to reach the largest possible number of people with your videos, you may want to look into the method described by Kroc Camen in Video for Everybody!.Read full postPosted in (X)HTML, HTML 5.
Publication date: 2010-01-25 more

PubCon 2009 talk: State of the Index

If you followed @googlewmc on Twitter you would already know about this, but I recently recreated my “State of the Index” talk from PubCon in November 2009. Here’s the video of the talk below: And here are the slides if you’d like to follow along: The talk is almost half an hour, so I hope you enjoy [...]
Publication date: 2010-01-23 more

Google earnings via YouTube webcast?

Huh. This looks new. I headed over to investor.google.com to listen to the Google earnings call. Normally the webcast uses Windows Media Player or Real Player, but this time it looks like the earnings call is being hosted on a YouTube channel: http://www.youtube.com/GoogleIR instead. Cool. Go check it out if you want to listen along. Added: [...]
Publication date: 2010-01-22 more

A call for consistent display of alt text across browsers

A while ago I posted Safari, WebKit and alt text for missing images, in which I note that most WebKit-based browsers do not always display alt text when images are missing. In alt and title content display in popular browsers, Steve Faulkner presents his results from taking a closer look at this in the browsers that are currently most widely used. In addition to checking what browsers do with an image
Publication date: 2010-01-20 more