BlogmyQuery – BMQ

Now that Apple has made it possible to create Safari Extensions I’ve been looking for some useful ones. After searching the Web a bit and browsing Apple’s Safari Extensions Gallery, these are the ones I have installed:

• AdBlock for Safari: Blocks ads (and prevents ad code from being downloaded)
• Type-To-Navigate: Lets you highlight and follow links without taking your hands off the keyboard. Type any text that occurs inside a link and then hit return to follow the link.
• BetterSource: View source (original or generated) with syntax highlighting and line numbers.
• ClickToFlash: Replaces all Flash objects with a placeholder, letting you decide if and when to view Flash content.
• Resizer: Lets you specify and quickly switch between a number of preset window sizes and their on-screen positions. Great for getting your preferred window size back after you’ve had to make your browser window wider to accommodate an over-wide site.
• Safari Validator: Like the HTML Validator extension for Firefox, Safari Validator performs local HTML validation inside the browser. Note: I haven’t been able to get it to actually work, but it is so useful that I’m mentioning it anyway.

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Posted in Browsers.

This month Authentic Jobs turns five years old. I’ve been a member and listing partner (look in the sidebar for job listings from Authentic Jobs if you’re reading this on 456bereastreet.com) since early 2007, so I haven’t been along for the entire ride, but long enough to have seen this job board evolve and grow plenty. I have also seen how hard Cameron Moll works to keep Authentic Jobs current and fresh.

Anyway, the fifth birthday is celebrated by a campaign to raise money – USD 20 000 of it is the goal – for charity:water, a non-profit organization dedicated to bringing clean water to millions of people in developing countries. Read more about that and what’s coming next in this three-part celebration on Authentic Jobs ~ Five-Year Anniversary.

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Posted in Job openings.

When I hold workshops on accessibility I am often asked how to detect screen readers. The answer is that you can’t, at least not in a reliable way.

The main reason is that screen readers run alongside (or on top of, if you prefer) regular web browsers and do not have a user agent string of their own that you can sniff.

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Posted in Accessibility, Quick Tips.

Everybody wants to use CSS 3 now that even Internet Explorer will support parts of it once IE 9 is out. But since parts of CSS 3 are still subject to change, most browsers use a vendor prefix for many CSS 3 properties to signal that their implemenation is “experimental� and may change in a later version of the browser.

This means that for a property like border-radius to work cross-browser you need to specify it several times with different vendor prefixes, like this:

1. .box {
2. -moz-border-radius:10px;
3. -webkit-border-radius:10px;
4. border-radius:10px;
5. }

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Posted in Browsers, CSS.

A couple of months ago I advised people to Be careful with non-ascii characters in URLs. We’ve been discussing that at work lately, more specifically whether characters like ":" and "/" are allowed unencoded in query strings or not.

I may well have made mistakes trying to understand the specification, so any help clarifying any errors in the following would be appreciated.

The summary of my previous post is this:

In essence this means that the only characters you can reliably use for the actual name parts of a URL are a-z, A-Z, 0-9, -, ., _, and ~. Any other characters need to be Percent encoded.

But what about those query strings? After studying RFC 3986 - Uniform Resource Identifier (URI): Generic Syntax I’ve come to the following conclusions.

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Posted in Web Standards.