There has been a little buzz about some CSS libaries, such as Blueprint, although YUI’s grids & other parts have been around for a while. I’ve kept an eye on these, but they have never seemed suited to CSS for one reason.

There are some things that are nice to add to a site that you don’t actually want to put in the content. They should be automatically added, so that you can change them systematically across the whole site. You can use JavaScript to add useful things like highlights for external links and to make quotes clickable. Not new things, but a collection of some robust enhancements.

A simple rule for good web sites: content is golden. In an accessibility context, structured content is golden. It a core responsibility of the site owner to ensure this is followed (not just the developer). When you examine this issue, you can then understand why few organisations will ever produce accessible PDFs.

I’m not sure whether to put this down to an issue with my (mobile) ISP, or whether it should count against using XHTML sent as application/xhtml+xml? I’ve recently found that even a well authored site using valid XHTML can display as an XML error in browsers that support XML mime types.

With all the fuss over AJAX and Flash accessibility you get, I thought it might be worth outlining the process we used to create a Flash/AJAX widget and highlight one of the advantages you get with this method. It also means that the use of Flash has no impact on your Search Engine Optimisation.

I’m just back from @media, and thought I’d post up brief notes (such as they are) for my own reference and anyone else’s gain. Obviously, I will only comment on the presentations I saw, and it’s all from my own particular perspective.

Jesse James Garrett – Beyond AJAX

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Steve Falkner did a good presentation to the WSG last week, outlining how and why AJAX can work with screen readers. One tiny little point I wanted to pick up on was whether it was a waste of time to update AJAX content if you’ve attached an event to an element that isn’t a link or form control.

I attend my first Microsoft (MS) oriented user group meeting yesterday, the SharePoint User Group on search and accessibility. Unfortunately our developers werre either too busy or on holiday, so I got volunteered.

I’ve been meaning to sit down and take apart Tantek’s polygons for a while, partly because it looks impossible, and partly because it might be useful. Five years later and today was the day, although it turns out that the usefulness has some limits.

This post is far too late, I really should have said this earlier, but the terms being used for various layout types are confusing. The top articles for “Elastic Design” on Google refer to elastic as being a a font-based layout. I think elastic is the wrong term for what the layouts achieve. Also, there is an assumption that these layouts are good for accessibility.