Archive for December, 2007

There is so much to learn, yet so little time to do it all in.

Making forms accessible isn’t something hard to do, but most times, it gets overlooked as developers pay more attention to parts that get noticed by users who can see visual changes. But then again, there are users out there who rely on assistive technologies and accessible forms help them tremendously in completing their tasks without unnecessary hitches.

There has been some talk recently about frameworks. Some for, some against and some on the fence. As someone who has not tried her hand at a single established framework, I have to say I am rather ambivalent about them. When I first read about the first CSS framework, my initial thoughts bordered on the negative. I was constantly arguing in my mind about the extra bloated code. Then my mind raced to the unsemantic code. And it went on and on …

There would be times you would want to offer your users an indication of the current form element they are on. A simple, non intrusive manner for this would be as simple as changing the background of the element using CSS. Users who are using their keyboard to move through the form elements would also benefit from this as this provides a more obvious cursor position.

Just picked up a jQuery book last week. Can’t wait to dig into it. The first couple pages I read about its wide variety of selectors just made me want to say WOW.

A while back, while working on an intranet that displayed the amount of cash flow, we (design team) had to come up with a way to show data graphically. As the graphs we wanted were rather simple bar charts, we did not want to expend too much energy in researching extra tools in achieving this goal. With a little creative trick using absolute positioning, out came the bar chart with negative axis. Check out the code below to create the effect.

In a recent project I was working on, I had a chance of trying out Microformats. Getting the hCard in and running was easy, but at the same time, I wanted to provide a mapping functionality that opened to Google Maps. The only caveat I imposed on myself was not to add any extra markup than necessary.
Why do it this way you might ask? Since the project was basically an online directory, it was easier to use Javascript to handle all the Google map address creation since there were literally thousands of addresses in the directory.