Wednesday, 10th July 2002
Alt all the way
Mark says that today is the most important day of his whole accessibility series, and who are we to argue? The topic is the alt attribute for images, and the message is simple: Every image should have one, even if the image is there purely as layout decoration (in which case an empty attribute should be used). Surprisingly Mark does not give advice on chosing text for the attribute but he does provide an excellent further reading list, which includes Hixie’s superb Mini FAQ About The Alternate Text Of Images.
xmlhack news wire
xmlhack’s “Editor’s Newswire” is interesting. It is a small column (explained here) located on the right hand side of the site that displays the latest XML news snippets “in real time”. The interesting part is how the section is updated—an IRC bot (The Daily Chump Bot, written in Python) monitors a channel for specific commands from authorised users, and produces an XML file of new snippets. Site updates through IRC (or instant messenging services such as MSN or Jabber) is a concept which we could see a lot more of, especially in this age of web services.
The semantic web explained
I just found a nice, clear and above all short explanation of the Semantic Web at The W3C’s Technology & Society Domain page:
[... 114 words]CSS numbered code listings
I’ve been experimenting with using CSS and <ol> tags to format code listings, complete with line numbering. Here’s what I’ve got so far: Numbered Code Listing Experiment.