Accessibility, Web Standards, and Authoring Tools

It's been a long trip, but we’re almost out of the dark. We finally have browsers that offer substantial support for several technologies established by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and other standards bodies. Designers and developers can use many core features of XHTML and CSS and sometimes DHTML without worrying about the hazards of cross–browser chicanery. As browsers have evolved, it’s become easier to comply with the W3C’s Web Accessibility initiative (WAI) and, in the United States, with the amendments to Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1974 (commonly called “Section 508”).

Schmitt, Christopher. List Apart, A (2002). Design>Web Design>Accessibility>Standards

Web Page Reconstruction with CSS

J. David Eisenberg tried to re-do a Yahoo! weather page in his article titled Converting a Page to CSS. While his attempt was not a complete success, he totally transformed the page's structure and style using contemporary CSS methods. As David says, 'anything worth doing is worth doing again.' The goal of transferring the page to a CSS layout is to get rid of any HTML that's used for presentational purposes in order to achieve the layout. As it is now, the Digital Web layout uses HTML tables for layout purposes and spacer GIFs for spacing and positioning of elements on the Web page. We will be using CSS to replace the JavaScript in the JavaScript rollovers on this page.

Schmitt, Christopher. Digital Web Magazine (2002). Design>Web Design>CSS

Zebra Striping Tables with CSS3

With the advent of CSS3’s nth-child selector, we are able to target multiple elements in a document by creating a "counter" that skips over specified children in the document tree. This allows us, specifically, to style only the odd or even rows of a table. This article details how to use nth-child sucessfully.

Schmitt, Christopher. Opera (2008). Articles>Web Design>CSS

CSS 3 Attribute Selectors

CSS attribute selectors allow us to pinpoint the values of attributes of an element and to style that element accordingly. CSS3 introduces three new selectors that can match strings against an attribute value at the beginning, the end, or anywhere within the value.This provides powerful new ways to style elements automatically that match very specific criteria. In this article, I will put these new attribute selectors in action and create some clever CSS rules that attach icons to links based on the value of the href attribute.

Schmitt, Christopher. Opera (2008). Articles>Web Design>Standards>CSS