BlogmyQuery – BMQ

It’s quite obvious that the smaller the files that make up your website are, the less time your visitors will wait for them to download. One way of reducing file sizes is minimising JavaScript and CSS files by removing comments and whitespace, among other things.

To do that, you can either let the server do it for you or minimise the files yourself before uploading them to the server. Letting the server do it automatically is probably the most convenient way since you don't have to remember to do it. But it isn't practical or possible for everyone to use something like minify, so sometimes you'll need to do it manually.

That may sound like more trouble than it's worth. Luckily for us TextMate users there's a handy YUI Compressor TextMate bundle that makes it almost as transparent as the server-side solution.

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Posted in CSS, Coding, JavaScript.

There’s been some talk here and there about whether or not it matters that many people tend to mean a lot more stuff than what is actually HTML5 when they say “HTML5�.

Despite being kind of nitpicky about terminology, I can buy bundling stuff like Geolocation, Web Storage, Web Workers, and Microdata with the actual HTML5 specification and calling it all “HTML5�.

But also bundling CSS3 (and even some parts of CSS 2.1) with HTML5? Nope. As Jeremy Keith puts it in Clarification:

Don’t get me wrong: I honestly don’t care that much about whether something like geolocation is technically part of HTML5 or not: that’s a fairly trifling matter. But CSS3? C’mon! In what universe is it in any way acceptable that a web developer wanting to learn about web fonts begins by Googling for HTML5?

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Posted in CSS, HTML 5.

According to an HTML Working Group Decision, the longdesc attribute will not be included in the HTML5 specification. Not everybody is happy with that decision, so whether longdesc is still out when HTML5 is finished remains to be seen.

In case you aren’t familiar with the longdesc attribute, here is how it is described in the HTML 4.01 specification:

This attribute specifies a link to a long description of the image. This description should supplement the short description provided using the alt attribute.

This provides a way of describing images to non-sighted users in detail, with more text than what is suitable for the alt attribute (which is really more of a text alternative to an image than a description of it). The longdesc attribute explicitly associates this description with the image.

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Posted in Accessibility, HTML 5.

As I mentioned recently in Frustrated by the Web, I’ve been running into various usability issues on the Web recently. Well, I guess I do that all the time, but this time I took notice of them while trying be a “normal� user.

But I digress. What I actually was going to say was that I really, really dislike visiting websites that resize my entire browser window. You know, the typical “all-Flash-site behaviour�.

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Posted in Browsers, Usability.

So I’ve been on vacation for several weeks, trying to keep my mind off things like web development, HTML, accessibility and all that. All in all I think I’ve done pretty well.

However.

Completely staying off the Web for seven weeks is not very practical these days. It makes it so much easier than before to find information related to pretty much everything. Be it making vacation plans, deciding which new game to buy, finding angling tips, or selling the stuff you find lying in the attic, I don’t know how we managed to get by without the Web.

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Posted in Usability.