Since learning about the May 2007 update of the WCAG 2.0 Working Draft, which I wrote about it WCAG 2.0 Working Draft updated, I've been trying to find time to read the whole thing in order to be able to write a more thorough piece on it. However, because of the size of the WCAG 2.0 documentation I just haven't been able to get through it yet.

You don't have to wait until I manage to read it, understand it, and write something about my opinion on it though. Jack Pickard has already done that work, and presents his verdict in WCAG 2.0: Woeful to Wonderful in One Easy Draft?, an article split into three pages (WCAG is a large document, so commenting on it may require using quite a few words after all).

Judging by the result of Jack's assessment, the updated WCAG 2.0 Working Draft is a vast improvement over the Working Draft released in April 2006:

I was critical of WCAG 2.0 before, and it deserved that criticism. Now, I'm prepared to praise it, because it deserves that praise.

What I've read of WCAG 2.0 so far is definitely much better than the April 2006 Working Draft, but I'm not going to stand up and praise it before I have read it thoroughly.

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Posted in Accessibility.

Hide Your Shame: The A List Apart Store and T-Shirt Emporium is back. Hot new designs! Old favorites remixed! S, M, L, XL. Come shop with us!

Hide Your Shame: The A List Apart Store and T-Shirt Emporium is back. Hot new designs! Old favorites remixed! S, M, L, XL. Come shop with us!

Ten years ago today, I had a car to sell
A VW beetle, that was great, but not doing well
Long distance commutes were not it’s forté
So I sought a buyer (this was before ebay)
Who’d love it, care for, it and take it away

A friend of friend was looking for just such a car
She lived in Oxford, which wasn’t too far.
Her name was Leigh and she came from Lenzie
The first sight of her sent me into a frenzy!

She impressed me with her Jaffa Cake tricks
I wondered then if she could be a Hicks?
The deal was struck and the beetle was sold
But was this the end? Fear took hold

I couldn’t wait to see her once more
I called her and explained it was her I adore
That was the event that changed my life
Before a year was out, Leigh became my wife.

XXXX

(apologies for the cheese)

As most designers and developers who use CSS on a daily basis know, it's been a while since a new CSS Recommendation was released. There are several possible reasons for it taking so long, something Andy Budd brings up in CSS2.2.

While I agree that the W3C's process is way too slow, I don't think we can lay all the blame on the W3C. Browser vendors are a big part of the problem. Especially one of them (you-know-who).

Of course there are many neat features in CSS 3 that I would love to be able to use now, but just imagine for a moment that all browsers had full support for CSS 2.1. They really should, considering how long they have had to implement it. Don't you think that would be a great first step forward, and that it would open up for completely new approaches to designing with CSS?

I do. So I think the first thing is to get CSS 2.1 fully implemented. How to make you-know-who do that, I have no idea.

In the meantime, some people could form the 2nd Generation CSS Samurai and write a CSS 2.2 specification in the hopes that it will be adopted, or at least put some pressure on the W3C and browser vendors.

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Posted in CSS.

• THE GOLDEN COMPASS
  The trailer is out and looks really good.

I'm a big fan of Smashing Magazine and appreciate the time and effort that goes into researching and writing their often exhaustive posts on web design tools, resources and techniques.

However, I'm sure there are some people who are not familiar with the site, so I thought I'd post a list of their top 10 articles based on del.icio.us bookmarks:

1. 53 CSS-Techniques You Couldn't Live Without
2. 70 Expert Ideas For Better CSS Coding
3. CSS-Based Forms: Modern Solutions
4. 83 Beautiful Wordpress Themes You (Probably) Haven't Seen
5. 35 Designers x 5 Questions
6. Cheat Sheet Round-Up: Ajax, CSS, LaTeX, Ruby…
7. 50 Beautiful CSS-Based Web-Designs in 2006
8. 30 Scripts For Galleries, Slideshows and Lightboxes
9. Tutorials Round-Up: Ajax, CSS, PHP and More
10. Online Generators
11. Free Design Templates
12. 60 Elegant and Visually Appealing Designs
13. 45 Fresh, Clean and Impressive Designs
14. CSS-Based Navigation Menus: Modern Solutions
15. 19 More Free Quality Fonts

Bonus: Oh, and if that lot wasn't enough, coming in at #16 is 42 Design/Tech Magazines To Read.

Thanks Vitaly and Sven — keep up the good work!

As someone who has spent lots of time taking screenshots of various CSS applied to form controls, I know that styling form controls consistently across browsers and operating systems is impossible. If you don't know what I'm talking about, have a look at Styling form controls, Styling even more form controls, and Styling form controls with CSS, revisited.

In the discussions following those articles (and any article that discusses styling of form controls), there tends to be a bit of frustration expressed by designers who feel that being able to specify exactly how form controls appear in a graphical browser is necessary for their design to work well. I really cannot agree with that. In my opinion form controls should be left mostly alone (though some light styling may be acceptable) in order for the user to quickly recognise them for what they are.

Regardless of whether or not you agree with my opinion on this you will probably find Eric Meyer's article Formal Weirdness a good read. In the article, Eric explains some of the technical reasons for form controls being so hard to style consistently across platforms with CSS. He also asks a lot of good questions related to how various CSS properties should affect form controls if browsers would let them.

Eric wrote the article as a follow-up to his series of articles about resetting the default CSS in browsers in order to get a consistent, cross-browser base stylesheet. His reset stylesheet evolved over several articles, and the final version is described in Reset Reloaded. Several people posted comments asking why Eric did not use a universal selector to set the margin and padding properties of all elements to zero. Eric's response to that is that he avoided doing so because of the problems it causes for form controls.

After reading Formal Weirdness I think you will understand why.

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Posted in CSS.

• Bokardo » How to Design for Word-of-Mouth
  Josh has some very good tips and rationale here.