It’s all about the hardware acceleration

We love hardware acceleration. Hardware acceleration is why a $40 DVD player from Walmart plays DVDs perfectly and a $1500 computer plays them poorly.

Use these resolutions to support hardware acceleration:

• on the title attribute, don’t use the same text as what it’s describing (same with alt attributes, duh)
• headings—may be easier to use as page nav for screen reader users (though they mention Skip Navigation, I’ve heard some users more rely on the header tags)
• Interesting link to WebAIM for Links that become visible with keyboard focus; addressing mobility-impaired users that can’t/don’t use a mouse. Might like that as a user myself.
• Labeling form elements, as we’ve mentioned here before.

Do check out the article.

Much of it is/should be habit, but there are some good reminders.

• My notes (some excellent links)
• #AccessU09 Twitter stream

A few, not all, highlights

• HTML 5 will be the next doctype for web standards. XHTML is going away since its benefits aren’t getting used (browsers…). So, for now, use the HTML 4.01 Strict doctype. Edit 7-7-2009: I know what you’re thinking. See Jeffrey Zeldman’s article defending XHTML 1.0, right after XHTML 2.0′s going away announcement. Short story: we’ll stick with XHTML 1.0 for now. Use strict when not impractical, transitional otherwise. btw, Jeremy Keith has a good overview of all this.
  
• IE 8: some seriously strange problems with its compatibility modes. Short answer (and there’s no short answer really), for now: design with tight web standards and don’t add MS’s suggested meta tag.
• There are many standards for accessible forms that I was not aware of. Example—here’s how to semantically connect a label with its associated input:
  <label for="dogname">Dog's Name</label>
<input name="name" id="dogname" size="30" />
• Simple semantic stuff I needed reminding of:
  • only one h1 per page (I think there was discussion of this in past years; that appears over), and it’s the title of that individual page
  • h tags must be used successively; i.e., if you use an h4 tag, you must have at least one h2 and one h3 on the page
• The new 508 and state accessibility requirements (coming this fall? Sept. 1?) will be close to the same as the WCAG 2.0. Overview—content must be:
  • technology-agnostic
  • perceivable
  • operable
  • understandable (for non-traditional browsers; e.g., a ‘more info’ link whose content can’t be perceived by screen readers isn’t acceptable)
  • robust

Dare to dream. From Mike Rohde of Rohdesign.

Sitepoint has this very useful list. Some obvious, some I didn’t know. The idea is to resort to as little extra stuff as possible to accommodate IE6′s strangenesses. A few points from the article:

• Set position:relative
• Use display:inline for floated elements with a margin
• Set an element to hasLayout

A few useful points in the comments, too.

• Adobe Photoshop CS3 Keyboard Shortcuts (they have CS4 too, when we get it)
• Adobe Pen Tool Cheatsheet (the pen tool rocks)
• CSS Cheat Sheet
• (X)HTML Elements and Attributes
• jQuery 1.3 Cheat Sheet

There are others; check ‘em out.

Nice quick read; here’s the four he describes:

1. Inquisitive
2. Empathic
3. Articulate
4. Ornery

Worth checking out. The author is himself a Design Researcher for Adobe Flex.

• updated version of the Web color palette (jpg)
• unofficial templates (suggested starting points for customization)
• content recommendations (some good points here)
• resources (they list and link to us–COM–directly here. Cool!)

Interesting that the new A&M web style guide came out the same day as an article called 10 things a web designer would never tell you. Note particularly #6: enforce style guides to the letter, and the link to the article illustrating its point.

While remembering what comes with great power, it sounds like responsible designers should treat branding guides like the pirate code—more what you’d call guidelines than actual rules.

Hmmm. So you must be a pirate for the pirate code to apply. How should that relate to a style guide?

I find myself so anti-tables, I often trying to get rid of tables – for tabular data!

Even though it’s 2009, apparently some “web designers” still don’t buy into the whole no-tables movement. This past week an article titled Why CSS should not be used for layout has spread like wildfire. If you are are moderate at CSS, you will quickly realize that most his arguments are off base, but it’s any interesting read never-the-less.

Luckily, an article has been written in response to the first, Why CSS should be used for layouts. I might be a bit bias, but I find myself agreeing with the second article.

Moral of the story: let tables die already (at least for layouts). Now if we can just kill off IE6…