Yep, it’s that time of year again. Summer here in Sweden is very short. Too short. Some of you might not even think it’s worth calling “summer�. Anyway, to enjoy as much of it as possible I’m taking a break from working and blogging for a few weeks.
Back in August.
Posted in Life.
One thing that is rather common, especially on websites whose content is not in English, is URLs that contain unencoded characters such as space, å, ä, or ö. While this works most of the time it can cause problems.
Looking at RFC 3986 - Uniform Resource Identifier (URI): Generic Syntax, characters that are allowed to be used unencoded in URLs are either reserved or unreserved. The unreserved characters are a-z, A-Z, 0-9, -, ., _, and ~. The reserved characters are used as delimiters and are :, /, ?, #, [, ], @, !, $, &, ', (, ), *, +, ,, ;, and =.
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.
Posted in Browsers, Quick Tips, Usability, Web Standards.
I’ve written a few articles about techniques that use JavaScript to open new browser windows, the most recent one being Opening new windows with JavaScript, version 1.2. A very quick summary of my reason for using JavaScript is that it enables me to use strict HTML 4.01 and XHTML doctypes, which do not allow the target attribute.
By using JavaScript to open new windows I can still use validation as a quality assurance tool when working with HTML 4.01 or XHTML 1.0 without having to manually filter out the errors caused by target attributes or downgrading to a Transitional doctype. (I’m aware that the target attribute is allowed in HTML5, so eventually this will all be completely unnecessary.)
Let it be known that I am by no means a proponent of opening new windows, quite the contrary. As a user I find new windows a nuisance, and since there are several well-known accessibility and usability problems related to opening new windows I always recommend leaving end users in control.
Posted in Accessibility, JavaScript, Usability.
I like to be alerted of any validation errors that sneak into my markup as soon as possible. That's why I find the HTML Validator Extension for Firefox very hard to live (well, work) without.
Unfortunately, it does not support HTML5. I've been looking hard for an alternative that does and has the same features as the HTML Validator Extension, i.e. runs locally in the browser without sending anything to a remote server and validates every page you load automatically.
No luck.
Posted in Browsers, HTML 5, Web Standards.
A common misconception is that in order to make a website accessible you have to abstain from using JavaScript or Flash. Almost every time I hold a workshop on Web standards and accessibility there is at least one participant who believes that accessibility limits what they can do on the Web by telling them to stay away from anything that isn't pure HTML.
Posted in Accessibility, JavaScript.