Web Developer Blog

Blog is now two years old. First post was July 25, 2003: First Weblog - Toolbars . It was setup before Google aquired Blogger. Google's toolbar had only just got popup blocking. There were no desktop search tools. Firefox did not exists (known as Phoenix then). No changes to IE since then (except security patches and XP SP2). Tags: Web Developer Blog

Google is now offering extensions for Firefox: Google Firefox Extensions . Google Toolbar - the toolbar that was previously IE only Google Send To Phone - send messages to phones, US only Google Suggest - adds Google Suggest to Firefox search bar for Google (does not effect other searches) The last two are Firefox exclusive (last one definitely is, as IE has no search bar). Edit: Google Blog: The platypus of the Internet (praises XUL technology, which is what Firefox and Firefox Extensions are built on). mozillaZine: Google Releases Toolbar and Extensions for Mozilla Firefox Tags: Web Developer Blog , Google , Firefox , Firefox Extensions

Web Usability - Accessible Data Tables . An article showing how you can make tables on a website accessible to users of alternative browing tools (i.e. screen readers). How to use the caption tag for the table title, the summary attribute of the table tag and use of th tags for row/column headers. thead (table header), tbody (table body) and tfoot (table footer) are also covered. More advanced topics are part of this as well, including little known attributes, like the headers attribute on table cells that refers to the ids of th tags that it is related to. You can make very complex tables that are accessible, but it is far better to keep them simple and accessible (both for the developer in coding, and also for the user). The main issue for developers though is that testing is hard if they do not have any screen reading software and that there are no free tools for testing. Tags: Web Developer Blog , Accessibility , Accessible Tables

Some projects building on Mozilla based technologies are now part of the Google Summer of Code initiative. mozdev.org - summer: projects . Nothing that will have a big impact on end users (i.e. mass exodus to Firefox), but could still be useful and encourage more development on Mozilla technologies. The BitTorrent client built using XUL may prove useful, especially if it will be able to integrate with Firefox. Would be interesting to see how Summer of Code goes at what comes out and is improved by the time the summer ends. Hopefully the code will be good and not have too many (or have no) bugs. Tags: Web Developer Blog , Google , Summer of Code , Mozilla , mozdev

Dean Edwards (of IE7 fame) has created some scripts that can be used to apply syntax highlighting to source code in your web pages - star-light . Useful if writing articles that have some source code displayed. Support JavaScript, HTML, CSS, XML, PHP, EMail, VBScript, T-SQL. It is modular, so you can add your own languages as well. As with a lot of his scripts it works in both IE and Mozilla Gecko based browsers (i.e. Firefox). Tags: Web Developer Blog , Syntax Highlighting , JavaScript