Tuesday, 11th February 2003
Indexing hypertext
Dorothea Salo explains the thorny problem of indexing (the back-of-a-book kind rather than the search-engine-spider kind) marked up electronic documents. Another example of what my first year software engineering lecturer would call a “wicked problem”.
[... 39 words]Label elements
Peter Van Djick asks why does hardly anyone use LABEL tags?
It’s a very good question—in my opinion label tags, like title attributes on links, are a complete no-brainer. They’re well supported by all modern browsers, completely backwards compatible (in that there are no ill effects for older browsers), great for accessibility and easy to implement. They’re much more than just an accessibility issue—the usability of a form is dramatically increased by the addition of label tags, especially for radio and check boxes where they greatly increase the “target area” for the user to click on.
Validity would be nice
In-Valids is an enjoyable rant by Joe Clark chastising the big guys on the web for being completely incapable of producing valid HTML.
[... 27 words]Nice titles
Stuart has posted yet another inobtrusive DHTML gem—Nice Titles, inspired by a thread on web graphics.
[... 28 words]