A quiet month for links worthy of bookmarking it would seem—I only managed 17—and a mixed bag too, but some important discussion to be had nonetheless.
The new blog I Love Typography gets a big thumbs-up for design and content from me with concise articles on type terminology. Steve Souders, author of the YSlow plugin for Firebug and High Performance Web Sites, a book title from O’Reilly, released a video over on the YUI Blog and to compliment this new interest in website performance, Ed Eliot and Stuart Colville announced their latest venture Website Performance with a new CSS sprites generator—a useful tool to create a single image file for CSS backgrounds in order to reduce the number of HTTP requests made for image resources referenced by your site. I’m looking forward to more tools and the book coming from these guys.
Perhaps the biggest talking point of the month was Ian Lloyd’s Teach a Man to Fish over at Accessify. In his post, Ian talks about educating site visitors in the use of their browser rather than providing text-sizing widgets and provides a good example of doing this through video (ignore the fact that it’s low-res YouTube, it’s the technique we’re interested in). Coupled with a transcript of the presentation this is a great idea to educate users so text-sizing widgets are dead, OK? especially if we could perhaps point to one website (like the BBC’s My Web, My Way) for this info. Wrong. Grant Broome chips in with a good counter as to why we’re not there yet—the technophobes. We’re providing these widgets because some users are unable or unwilling to dive into the menu systems of their browsers. From my perspective of working in local government, perhaps they’re in the library and it’s not their browser to “break” if it goes wrong. I still don’t believe in using widgets either but Mike Davies gets to the core of the problem—browser manufacturers need to be told to put a button on the toolbar by default.
Pick of the Bunch:
- Who shot the Serif?—great article title from I Love Typography.
- The Name Riddle—An examination of the structure and usage of names around the world and how to capture that information in a form.
[tags]typography, website-performance, accessibility, text-resizing, widgets[/tags]
