"javascript" in Weblog

Unobtrusive Javascript is the old big thing. AJAX is the new big thing. Both are BIG right now. But a rather crucial question seems to have been missed… How do the various accessibility devices actually deal with Javascript?

Prompted by an interesting article by Derek Featherstone: JavaScript and Accessibility, I posted a question to Bob Easton over at Access Matters. I’m not sure whether I’ll be part of it yet but hopefully there will be some interesting test results forthcoming.

The rest of the discussion on JavaScript and Accessibility is facinating, with Brothercake explaining the importance of the question incredibly well.

Damn it, I was planning on doing this myself! Aaron Gustafson has written a nice little DOM script to dynamically replace your tired and inconsistently implemented (try z-indexing them) select boxes with tidy, customisable and semantic DHTML. It’s well documented, well written and I plan on using it myself: Select something.

I stopped reading ALA regularly when the content became simple how-to’s aimed at people beginning in the business… With PPK’s JavaScript Triggers article they’re back on top. It’s a look at a method I’d considered for form validation last year but gave up on as impractical - adding custom attributes to XHTML. The article is great and the comments are better: using namespaces instead of redefining the DTD makes more sense to me and the discussion sheds a lot of light on people’s decision-making processes.

An interesting side-note was a post on about class, id and style, which examines the specification’s definition of these attributes. It turns out that the spec never once links id and class to style so the common belief that class (especially) is FOR CSS is wrong.

Juicy Studio’s ECMAScript Menu System looks to be one of the nicest write-ups of non-intrusive javascript that I’ve seen in a while. Keep the behaviour separate from the content and use the DOM to link the two.

I’ve been using Feedreader to manage my RSS feeds and I’ve noticed myself using the built-in browsing capability more and more. It’s convenient - no extra windows or irritating replacements of my tabs, but I hadn’t really thought about how it behaved as a browser. I guess it’s embedded IE but the interesting thing for me is that it has JavaScript turned off. What does that mean? Not a lot right now but with RSS use growing, and these kinds of restrictions being placed on more and more users, unobtrusive JS has to become increasingly important…

Richard Rutter over at Clagnut has spotted a fantastic little bit of javascript on the Couloir site. I’d seen the site before but I’d just assumed that it was another Flash photo switcher… Turns out that it’s a pure HTML/JS thing! It’s done so well that it didn’t even occur to me to see how it worked.

The ‘loading’ message is in a div masking out the photo underneath. That’s nothing new, but it’s very well done. The clever bit is the dynamic opacity fading done onload, giving that proper macromedia look without the plug-in. Slick. Very slick.

I think I’m a bit late on this one but style:phreak has put up a nice little demo of an XHTML form. Now that’s hardly groundbreaking but the code is very nicely structured and I particularly like his ‘hide optional fields’ option. As a user that’s something I’d really appreciate, especially for long forms, although I doubt you’d squeeze that one past many marketing departments…

Just a quick update… Mike Davidson has released version 2.0b of sFIR, which adds improved performance, better flexibility and even accessibility to the mighty script.

I used sFIR for the first time last night (I’ve been waiting for the chance to put it into a production site and it’s finally arrived) and I am very very very impressed. I had a few teething troubles with the 1.2 version I was using not passing colour values in correctly and resizing the Flash text to be just slightly too small, forcing me to hack the fla, but it sounds like these things have been addressed now. Awesome work. Simply awesome.

Mike Davidson was the original daddy of the Flash Image Replacement technique, having invented and employed his own version in the ESPN redesign a couple of years back. More recently the technique was polished and relaunched by Shaun Inman. Now Mike has taken back FIR, now dubbed sFIR, improved it (with help from Tomas Jogin amongst others) and taken on board the advances to the method by Tom Werner and Rob Cameron… And the results sound a bit special.

The latest incarnation allows sFIR to replace html blocks as well as headings… Text can be scaled (although not without a page reload)… It’s printable… Text is selectable…

I really really like the look of this one!

Dynamic page elements - cloak and dagger web design is a great summary of the current state of javascript on the web… Where did it come from? What is DHTML good for? When should you use it? And have a look through the bibliography at the end. There are a load of great links relating to DHTML best practice and the legal/accessibility repercussions of doing so.