Bruce has been working on accessibility, web standards, and browsers since 2001. That’s why he looks that bad. You can follow him at @brucel, or read his ramblings at www.brucelawson.co.uk.
Browsers’ visual display of headings nested inside <section> elements makes it look as if they are assigning a logical hierarchy to those headings. However, this is purely visual and is not communicated to assistive technologies. In this article, Bruce Lawson explains what use we have of <section> and how authors should mark up headings that are hugely important to AT users.
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Art direction has been part of advertising and print design for over 100 years, but on the web art direction is rare and there have been few meaningful conversations about it. Art Direction for the Web by Andy Clarke changes that and explains art direction, what it means, why it matters, and who can do it. Jump to table of contents or pre-order the book right away. This is a book about why art direction matters and how you can art-direct compelling and effective experiences across devices and platforms.
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In this Smashing TV webinar recording, join Léonie Watson (a blind screen reader user) as she explores the web, and find out about some unexpected properties of HTML elements that not only have a huge impact on accessibility, but also turn out to be pretty good for performance, too. We felt that the webinar was so valuable that we would open it up so that it’s free for everybody to use. Hopefully, it will serve as a resource for the whole web development community to understand how — and why — semantic markup matters.
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Today is a very important day for us. We celebrate the first year of Smashing Membership. Those who have been with us from the start will receive an email with details of a present from us to say thank you, and we’ll give you a taste of what’s to come in year two. Now that the team is larger, we’ll be bringing you more content — going up to three webinars a month. The price stays the same. And, of course, we’d love your input on subjects or speakers!
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At Smashing Conferences, we don’t big up speakers to be Idols On A Pedestal — they’re developers just like the audience, who happen to have solved a problem that we think others face, so share that knowledge. In this post, Bruce Lawson brings you the newest member of the Smashing Team — Bruce Lawson — looks back on a successful Smashing Conf NY.
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Previously, Bruce Lawson’s tried to make some supply-side improvements to web standards so that websites can be made to better serve the whole world, not just the wealthy West. But there are other challenges, such as ways to get over creaky infrastructure in developing markets, to surmount, and Bruce will also look at some of the reasons why some of the offline billions remain offline, and what can be done to address this.
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Many of the developing economies across the world are growing extraordinarily fast, with a rapidly expanding middle class that has increasing disposable income. In this article, Bruce Lawson will examine some of those countries and where the next 4 billion connected people will come from, as well as some of the innovations that the standards community has made to better serve them.
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There has been a long-running war going on over the mobile Web: it can be summarized with the following question: “Is there a mobile Web?” That is, is the mobile device so fundamentally different that you should make different websites for it, or is there only one Web that we access using a variety of different devices? Acclaimed usability pundit Jakob Nielsen thinks that you should make separate mobile websites. I disagree.
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Much of the excitement we’ve seen so far about HTML5 has been for the new APIs: local storage, application cache, Web workers, 2-D drawing and the like. But let’s not overlook that HTML5 brings us 30 new elements to mark up documents and applications, boosting the total number of elements available to us to over 100.
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You can’t escape it. Everyone’s talking about HTML5. it’s perhaps the most hyped technology since people started putting rounded corners on everything and using unnecessary gradients. In fact, a lot of what people call HTML5 is actually just old-fashioned DHTML or AJAX. Mixed in with all the information is a lot of misinformation, so here, JavaScript expert Remy Sharp and Opera’s Bruce Lawson look at some of the myths and sort the truth from the common misconceptions.
Once upon a time, there was a lovely language called HTML, which was so simple that writing websites with it was very easy. So, everyone did, and the Web transformed from a linked collection of physics papers to what we know and love today. Most pages didn’t conform to the simple rules of the language (because their authors were rightly concerned more with the message than the medium), so every browser had to be forgiving with bad code and do its best to work out what its author wanted to display.
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