Reading list, 3

30th March-5th April

  • Accessibility support for CSS generated content, by Leonie Watson - Internet explorer with a screen reader doesn't take into account the css generated content, so perhaps a good general advice is to "use CSS generated content to change or supplement the design, but not to create or alter important content on the page"... which should be what you're doing already, anyway!
  • Server side mustard cut by Chris Coyier over at CSS-Tricks - detecting client side capabilities once, acting accordingly from then on
  • Designing for simplicity by Mark McDonnell at my colleague David Walsh's blog - "If a piece of software is considered “simple”, then chances are it has been found to be easy to understand and easy to reason about. Simple software is also easy to manipulate and apply changes to [...] The irony of all this, is that writing and designing code to be simple is usually quite a complex task. It’s important to realise that simplicity != easy". Definitely not easy, but something I aspire to in every piece of code I write! There are so many other paragraphs I could quote from this article. Read it!
  • Chintz from BBC News - a sort of metaframework kinda thing for describing components without tying them to any particular language. It might offer some ideas for Web Components distribution etc. I found it in the "Designing for simplicity" link!
  • Accessibility wins - Marcy Sutton is collecting good examples of accessible websites