Meme Catcher

Lately I have been fielding a lot of questions at work about strategies for assuring that the markup is semantic, accessible and valid. There are a lot of pieces to the puzzle, but the first line of defense is certainly my Firefox extensions.

I recently compiled a short list of Firefox extensions for the Front-End team. Everyone had always been aware of the HTML Validator Extension but hadn’t made a practice of cross-referencing those messages with an accessibility report from the Firefox Accessibility Extension. Putting those two together apparently gives developers a really granular sense of what’s going awry in the code under development. It’s a mini unit test suite right in the tool bar

I’ve also been surprised lately at how many people who use Firebug as a DOM inspector, don’t know about Firebug’s awesome JavaScript debugging capabilities. So overall, making and publishing this list was a surprisingly rewarding bit of evangelism.

Firefox Extensions for Front-End Web Developers

1. Web Developer Toolbar
2. Firebug
3. Firefox Accessibility Extension
4. HTML Validator Extension
5. Operator, for debugging Microformats
6. View Rendered Source Chart - the free version is not yet compatible with ff3 as of 8/14/08
7. Live HTTP Headers supplements the Firebug Net tab for debugging HTTP and HTTPS transactions.
8. Screengrab! is a versatile screen capture tool, essential for submitting bug reports.

Here is the classic Nielsen article on headlines.

The best practice as he outlines it is to place the most specific information about the page /first/ in the title.
Consider Macys.com. The following is a (hypothetical) nice, useful section title that could potentially be used:

“Fine China - DINING - Dining & Entertaining - Macy*s”

The most specific information comes first, then the name of the subsection, the section, and finally the name of the web site.
This is exactly the opposite of the common approach to titles

(more…)

This began as a post for the JAG internal wiki. After I’d gone to all the trouble of looking everything up and spelling it right, I thought it would be worthwhile to mirror the post here.

Here are a couple of basic pointers for building Acessible Web sites. I generally am interested in Accessibility, because it’s part of the Semantic Web vision. When I come across a relevant article, I tag it with accessibility. But I became especially interested after the National Federation for the Blind sued Target, basically because Target refused to add ALT tags to their images.

In no particular order, here’s list of core techniques:
(more…)