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.
[tags]CSS, design-principles, framework, ia, information-architecture, user-experience, ux[/tags]
