No December Pulse as I took a long break from all things web over the holiday season so this post will double-up the two months worth of links I saved to del.icio.us.

1. December’s links
2. January’s links

I only saved 23 links during December but considering the holiday, not a bad effort with many interesting articles coming out of the excellent 24 Ways website.

The designer in me is winning the war over my developer side (the analyst part of analyst-programmer) so despite a couple of links to PHP frameworks, specifically symfony and CodeIgniter (and indeed a separate post for the former) the rest of my links are largely concerned with design principles from the excellent Design Meltdown blog.

January. Unless you’ve been living under a rock you’ll know what <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=8" /> means. If the news has evaded you go read “Beyond DOCTYPE: Web Standards, Forward Compatibility, and IE8” by Aaron Gustafson. A lot of people got their knickers in a twist and Digital Web Magazine collated a lengthy list of blog post reactions. My thoughts? Whatever. No really. Just like HTML 5 it will happen regardless of what I think, so why get upset? My battle lies with getting my employer to understand the need for a web development process before arriving at the visual design right now—more on that in future posts. With 46 links saved in January, I am rapidly approaching my 1000th link—I wonder who’ll get that notable?

Technorati Tags: 24ways, design-principles, html5, ie8, php-framework

Surely this is the last we’ll hear about CSS frameworks? Jeff Croft kicked up something of a bun fight at the CSS Coral with his post “What’s not to love about CSS frameworks?”. A huge response in the comments and elsewhere in the blogosphere with a lot of people confusing their distaste with Blueprint’s treatment of grids and the idea of a framework as a collection of snippets and common CSS techniques that can be reused on multiple projects.

A bumper crop of links saved to del.icio.us this month with some great articles on design and user experience. Jared Spool has a great two-parter for describing 7 Critical Considerations for Designing Effective Applications and Patrick McNeil has a series of articles ongoing at the moment exploring the Principles of Design in an easy to understand fashion complete with real-world examples. In case you missed it, Bruce Tognazzini was interviewed by e-consultancy.com. Some really interesting stuff from Apple’s 66th employee and founder of their Human Interaction team.

I don’t know who gave the other the idea, or maybe it was coincidence, but both Boxes and Arrows and Blue Flavor released some good articles on getting started in information architecture, building the UX dream team and getting hired an area I am very keen on exploring and using. Jakob Nielsen made it into my del.icio.us links this month with an overview of recent research in Intranet information architecture.

In the familiar territory of web accessibility and markup techniques, Steve Faulkner of the Paciello Group examined the support (or lack thereof) for fieldset and legend in screen readers. It’s poor, but you knew that would be the case anyway. Steve’s conclusion is important though:

…the poor support in software such as Window Eyes must not stop developers using these elements or accessibility practitioners recommending their use. Their use can make it easier for a wide range of disabled users to fill out forms. In order to improve accessibility for all disabled users, web standards must be adhered to so that developers can code for accessibility with confidence. It is the assistive technology vendor’s job in these cases to fix their implementations.

Further highlights from this month’s del.icio.us links:

• Improving the usability of within-page links.
• Introducing AxsJAX—Access-Enabling AJAX.
• Product pages: so much suck, so easy to fix.

Technorati Tags: CSS, design-principles, framework, ia, information-architecture, user-experience, ux

Target.com. What is their malfunction? Apparently it’s endemic too, judging by the slew of ignorant commenting on the news that Judge Marilyn Hall Patel, of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, granted class-action status to the law suit filed by the US National Federation of the Blind (NFB) over the inaccessibility of the Target.com website. I previously wrote about the law suit back in February 2006 and several times since but Jeremy Keith has a good opinion piece in “Ignorance and inspiration” this time around.

It can be really depressing working as a web standards, web acessibility advocate sometimes, so it was a great shot in the arm when Roger Johansson posted a link to videos of people using assistive technology. This is why we do what we do.

The UK government’s Central Office of Information (COI) released a “Public consultation on Delivering Inclusive Websites” in which it re-iterates (amongst a lot of other stuff) that public sector websites failing to meet web accessibility standards will lose the .gov.uk domain name. Dan Champion challenges the COI with a Freedom of Information (FOI) request as to how many websites have had the .gov.uk domain withdrawn. That’s right, none. I couldn’t help but focus on Para 55 of the document though—perhaps a link to my article on the usefulness of accessibility evaluation tools or Grant Broome’s excellent earlier work would help reinforce the point? The guidance certainly wasn’t arrived at without reading one or both—or another published source I’m not aware of.

Continuing on the theme of automated testing, Christophe Strobbe wrote to me to draw my attention to an important European Union (EU) project:

The EU projects combined in the Web Accessibility Benchmarking Cluster (WAB Cluster) have launched the Unified Web Evaluation Guidelines (UWEM) version 1.2 for a short expert review period… The review’s objective is to allow experts, who are not directly involved with the Cluster development of the UWEM, to indicate if they believe the document clarifies the WCAG1.0 document and in that way helps the harmonized evaluation of web content for accessibility in Europe.

Fortunately, the deadline for comments has been extended to 5 November 2007 so if you have an interest in this field please do stop by and contribute if you can.

CSS frameworks. Again! Jeff Croft and Blue Flavor come out in favour of Blueprint CSS and my CSS framework gets a link on CSS-tricks.com. Hello new readers! Please read the specific use case of my framework at that specific point in time. My general, (and unpublished) “framework” is not done the same way.

Pick of the bunch from this month’s del.icio.us links:

• Juicy Studio: Screen Readers and display:none.
• Videos on computer accessibility.
• PPK on the Professionalization of Frontend Engineering.

Technorati Tags: target.com, accessibility, assistive technology, css, blueprintCSS