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Yesterday I read an article by Aaron Gustafson on A List Apart regarding hiding elements with JavaScript and the accessibility implications depending on the technique used. As mentioned by Aaron the common way this is done in libraries, including jQuery, is by manipulating the display property.

In the article Aaron discusses five ways to hide content and what the accessibility effect is of each of these. Out of the five there is only one that passes the accessibility checklist and that is:

position:absolute;
left:-99999em;

With …

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For a while now I have been reading through the new HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript specs and posting my results with regards to browser support etc. on thebrowsereview.com. Recently I started looking at Offline Web Applications. One of the many interesting things I found is the navigator.onLine property. The W3C spec states the following:

In addition to those APIs HTML 5 also defines an onLine attribute on the Navigator object so you can determine whether you are currently online

This can be …

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One of the ways to make a large amount of tabular data easier to read for the end user is to use alternating row colors. This technique is known as zebra tables and has been around for some time and serves it’s purpose very well.

To accomplish this, developers rely on JavaScript because of the dynamic nature of the tables. If your table was static, you could accomplish this using CSS because you could add a class on every odd row …

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For a long time now, web developers have searched for and used a variety of techniques to target styles to specific browsers and browser versions to fix incorrect implementations of web standards or simply bugs. The biggest culprit of the bunch is our good friend Internet Explorer.

As developers we have moved on from the various style sheet hacks such as * and _ and embraced conditional comments to target specific versions of IE. While this works, it does add an …

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Often times the simplest tool is exactly what is needed to fix the most complex of problems. Sometimes you need to gain access to the right information to help your end users and support your web application through its various life cycles. Over especially the last couple of months I have run into a couple of web applications that are simple for the most part but, what they provide makes them invaluable. The situations I encountered were not unique and are …