You know in accessibility circles we are constantly telling people using drop down CSS menus that when the menus are not visible we shouldn’t be using display:none to achieve this. We all know this one, right. Just to refresh your memory, remember the display:none rule takes an element assigned right out of the picture completely, for anyone using a screen reader the assigned content will just not “exist”.
This is all well and good. Well that depends, maybe there is a case for the use of display:none afterall.
It’s one of those wet August days in Perth when the sunny and rain just can’t make up their mind who really wants to be the dominate partner. In a similar way a web design business can wrestle with a similar issue. Do you use someone else’s pre-built templates or do you roll your own designs.
Between User Experience and Information Architecture gigs I usually squeeze in a little standard front end web site development. Over the years I have rolled my own, designing each website from scratch to the final interactive site. I have prided myself in this production of a higher quality result that my clients where looking for. Something unique that they knew was a once off.
Post Lunch, comes forth with the usual multiple stream conflicts as you normally get with a conference like Web Directions South. Lucky there is power charging and free wifi in the breakout areas. Looking forward to the Bert Bos discussion of the revision of HTML and CSS.
John Allsopp – Trends and predictions in web technology
John Allsopp repeated it again, the web is now the platform, he looked at the internals of the stack of the web platforms. The centre can’t hold it all, its all moving outwards, moving away from the control. Technology is removing the friction, off loading the boring stuff to the machines. Privacy and security are still important and should be considered, we must always be aware of the implications of the security and the information being held.
Day one workshops, Web Directions South, the fun begins after breakfast at Concrete, with Andy Clarke launching in the breaking the limitation for the browser and CSS. Looking at the media rich presentations with the high end, advertising. movie and music industry, questioning why they can’t use semantic CSS based layout.
Andy has suggested people need to look at using more of the existing draft CSS3 standard that are supported be the relevant browsers and use javascript to plug some of the holes, example multiple columns in Firefox.
