Category: HTML

Useful links: GIMP 2.6, CSS backgrounds, Google for Webmasters, and Kathy Sierra

GIMP 2.6 Alive and Well on the Mac at Burningbird may just set you free from Photoshop.

How to: CSS Large Background at Web Designer Wall provides some good tips.

Video Tutorial: Google for Webmasters at the Google blog talks about how Google discovers, crawls, indexes, and  displays search results.

Vitamin Training: How to Grow and Nurture Your Community. This is a video of Kathy Sierra’s talk at At Future of Web Apps Expo 2008. It will be the best 30 minutes you ever spent in front of a video. Go learn something.

Summary of eHow articles for October

Hot Air Balloons

Ah, October, that sweet time of year when the mornings are cool and the afternoons are warm, when the New Mexico skies are filled with bobbing color and the mass ascension at the Balloon Fiesta is more than enough reason to rise at 4:30 AM. But not before writing something for eHow:

Summary of eHow articles for September

Kid and jumper slide

There a business in Albuquerque called ABQ Jump that is a big building (air conditioned!) full of those huge air-filled toys kids can jump on. It’s crammed with them and the noisy fans that keep them inflated. Here’s one of the little people in my family sliding down a jumper slide.

And here’s what I did on eHow this month.

Summary of eHow articles for May

Taos, cultivated and uncultivated

I spent some time this spring in Taos, NM. There the cultivated and the uncultivated were both in full bloom. This is what kept me busy for eHow this month.

Useful Links

I mentioned alt text in the report about WCAG 2. There are two new articles about alt text and the whether it should be required or not coming from the group working on HTML 5. See HTML5 Alternative Text, and Authoring Tools by Gez Lemon and HTML5 and alt: The Editors New Clothes by Steve Faulkner.

The HTML WG folks are talking about alt text, too. See alt Attributes Authoring Practices by Karl Dubost.

I like the idea of making a rule that all decorative images have to be inserted as background images using CSS. Then they won’t be in the HTML at all and the question of when to use alt text and when not to use alt text will be solved. It’s accessible, too. Maybe then Tweets like this one won’t show up in Twitter: “stefsull loves it when people think about accessibility as they build web sites. But THIS as an alt attribute? [alt=”Non Descriptive Image”] C’mon.”