BlogmyQuery – BMQ

A few weeks ago I posted a short notice about the fifth birthday of Authentic Jobs and the associated campaign to raise money for charity:water.

The campaign is going well, but there’s still a few thousand US dollars to go before the goal of $20 000 is reached. If you can spare something – even just a few bucks – consider helping out. Visit the Authentic Jobs charity: water campaign to check the current status and to pitch in.

Donations will be accepted until Monday, October 4.

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Posted in Life.

When I write HTML code I want to check if I made any mistakes. Same thing if I use an application or a CMS that outputs HTML code. So I use validation as a tool to check the HTML code for errors. If there are any I want to find them and fix them if I can.

Even though I think it is a very important part of developing websites, validation in itself is not the goal. Validation is a tool to help you produce well-formed markup that is universally parsable and hopefully understandable and maintainable by other developers.

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Posted in (X)HTML, Web Standards.

Why is it that so many CMSs make it harder than it should be to use the markup you want to? And why do CMSs still, in the year 2010, output cluttered/inaccessible/outdated HTML that can’t be easily overridden? There may be exceptions of course – I haven’t used all CMSs that exist. There are hundreds of them, so I doubt anyone has.

A CMS should never, ever output HTML that is beyond the control of the developer. Every single tag and attribute should be possible to change by modifying templates or providing settings in function calls. If you have to use regular expressions and output buffers to get the HTML you want, something is wrong with the CMS. If you have to become a PHP or ASP.NET expert or install “cleanup plugins� to get the HTML you want, something is seriously wrong with the CMS.

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Posted in (X)HTML, Content Management, Rants.

To my great disappointment the screen resolution of my iPod Touch wasn’t affected when I updated it to iOS 4. Not even the 4.1 update fixed that. Sigh. On the other hand, I have found a few accessibility improvements that should make iOS 4 devices easier to use, especially for people who are visually impaired.

A few examples: visible VoiceOver Rotor Control, support for changing VoiceOver languages on the fly, support for WAI-ARIA Landmark Roles, touch typing, and a large text option in some applications.

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Posted in Accessibility, Apple, iOS.

One great thing about several CSS3 properties is that they let you save bandwidth and write cleaner markup. All those extra meaningless div and span elements you used to be forced to add to create rounded corners? Not needed. The images used for the same rounded corners, for dropshadows, and for gradients? Not needed either.

Unless of course you want to achieve the same visual design in Internet Explorer. Until IE9 is out, IE users won't get any rounded corners, dropshadows or gradients created with CSS3. So it’s either living with that (which can be an option) or back to writing markup suffering from divitis and spanitis and letting your users download loads of images. Or you could try CSS3 PIE.

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Posted in Browsers, CSS.