Incessant Rambling

Over at Digital Web yesterday, Christian Heilmann wrote a very insightful article on why clients don’t care about accessibility on the web. The article does a great job being rather pessimistic (in a good way) about explaining why our job as developers is a tough one.

I’ve been called an idealist - and am proud of it - when it comes to various ideas. One of these is innovation and technology. Web standards and accessibility are something you HAVE to think about. It makes things better. Get out of your comfort zone and jump on board now. It will make the rest of your career so much easier.

What gets me in his article is something he points out in his short list of bullet points on what we can do:

Make sure you’ve got your facts straight before releasing another “accessibility� article or blog entry (rounded corners in CSS do not increase accessibility, really, they don’t!)

I personally try not to write terribly technical articles here. One, because I don’t really have an audience for it. And two, because I typically don’t really care about the techniques as much as I do the theory behind the techniques.

However, to respond to the comment regarding round corners increasing accessibility, I’m not sure if I’ve ever read an article that said such techniques increase accessibility as much as they maintain accessibility. We all know there are solutions out there that actually make certain problems worse. Most of the techniques to incorporate rounded corners into a css-based design do so with ridiculous amounts of extra markup and do lessen accessibility as such. However, that does not mean that other techniques increase acessiblity, but they may maintain it.

I know most of you think that since this website is so popular, that it came under attach yesterday, but the LA power outages took down my web host. Why don’t these people have backup power. There were a very large number of websites that I regularly visit down yesterday, for reasons that I can only assume are related to the power outages.

Keith wrote an insightful article I felt I needed to link. Well put, Keith. Thank you.

It has been really exciting to see the advancements that Microsoft has been making in the last year or so. Granted, they still have a long way to go, but for developers, things might be getting better a little sooner than we every could have imagined.

First, we heard that they’re speeding up a release of IE7 instead of making us wait for eternity for Longhorn.

Then, this week we hear that they’re working on an Ajax framework for ASP.NET development. This is something I’ve been wanting forever. I’ve used Ajax on a few projects lately and it’s really made things pretty snazzy. Most of the Ajax libraries have been built on top of Ruby or PHP. Doing something for .NET myself had been a consideration, but where is someone supposed to find that kind of time?

I ran across Ajax.NET, but I’ve yet to have good results with a free .NET utility/library/control (and I’ve used quite a few).

I was wicked stoked to see Scott Guthrie’s post on the Atlas Project and that Microsoft is taking action on what developers are asking for. Sure, they’ve had the functionality for a while, and Outlook Web Access makes generous use of Ajax, but now they’re opening up the framework. I can’t wait.