Latest developments at brothercake.com
It's been a busy few months here at brothercake HQ, as a variety of challenging projects have come my way. Of particular interest is the work I've been doing building Extensions for Opera [...
View ArticleDust-Me Selectors for Opera and Firefox
Dust-Me Selectors is a development tool for Opera and Firefox, that scans HTML pages to find unused CSS selectors.The long-awaited updated to this popular Firefox add-on has just been released, after...
View ArticleBad Kogan!
So kogan.com has introduced the world's first browser "tax", on customers who use IE7, and apparently they've received a lot of praise for this. Well let me add my voice to those who think this is...
View ArticleEvolving a New Mutation [SitePoint Blogs]
I used to be a big fan of DOM Mutation Events. They provided a simple way for scripts to monitor changes in the DOM, irrespective of the event or action that caused them. However, that simplicity...
View ArticleChildren of the DOM [SitePoint Blogs]
Close node relationships in the DOM have always been problematic, because most interpretations of the DOM include whitespace text-nodes, which scripts don't usually care about. It's right that they...
View Article3 Neat Tricks with Regular Expressions [SitePoint Blogs]
I'd like to show you three cunning things you can do with regular expressions, that provide neat solutions to some very sticky problems: Removing Comments, Using Replacement Callbacks, and Working...
View ArticleAccessible Audio Descriptions for HTML5 Video [SitePoint Blogs]
Traditionally, audio-described videos have to be made specially, with the audio encoded in a separate track of the single video file. It takes pretty specialised video-editing equipment to encode...
View ArticleIs Generated Content Actually Content? [SitePoint Blogs]
The CSS2.1 specification summarizes generated content as "[rendered] content that does not come from the document tree" — in other words, text and images defined in CSS, rather than in markup.But even...
View ArticleImproving Usability With Extra Navigation Keys [SitePoint Blogs]
When handling keyboard events in JavaScript, most scripts and applications tend to stick to the basic range of keys that provide core accessibility. This is all good, but there are some other common...
View ArticleEssential Audio and Video Events for HTML5 [SitePoint Blogs]
The VIDEO and AUDIO elements provide a comprehensive range of events. While some are quite straightforward, like the self-explanatory "play" event, others can be rather more tricky to understand,...
View ArticleWhen Do Elements Take the Focus? [SitePoint Blogs]
Do elements take the focus when you click them with the mouse? Do they show focus indication, like a dotted-border or focus-ring?The answer always used to be "yes" — and in my view, it certainly...
View ArticleBest Practice for Code Examples [SitePoint Blogs]
The majority of articles about web development include code examples, and across the web we see great variation in how they're formatted and presented.But a lot of them are not very good — because the...
View ArticleThe Dark Shadow of The DOM [SitePoint Blogs]
Shadow DOM is designed to address the encapsulation problems that plague some kinds of web development.But Shadow DOM can't be defined in static HTML, only via scripting, so while it's undoubtedly...
View ArticleWe Can't Rely on Color [SitePoint Blogs]
A recent article by Georgina Laidlaw on the flat UI design style got me thinking about the accessibility implications of this trend, and especially how it affects the use of color to convey...
View ArticleWhen Feature Detection Fails [SitePoint Blogs]
Once upon a time, browser detection was the stock-in-trade of JavaScript programmers. Now we use feature detection, because the important thing is whether the browser supports a particular feature,...
View ArticleGood Users and Bad Passwords [SitePoint Blogs]
It's getting more common for sign-up forms to validate the format of passwords, and then give visual feedback on the password's content or strength. But is this good usability? And is it even good...
View ArticleAccessible Drag and Drop with Multiple Items [SitePoint Blogs]
I'd like to show you how to extend the capabilities of HTML5 drag and drop — so it can handle multiple elements, and support keyboard interaction, for sighted and screen reader users.
View ArticleLessons from a Failed Experiment in JavaScript Accessibility [SitePoint Blogs]
When you tick the 'show password' box on a site you expect to be able to see your password. But what happens for users with screenreaders?
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