In this article, Olushuyi explores a mental model that helps you decide between the <article> and <section> elements when writing documents. You will explore how grouping content affects accessibility and how you can make it all count for users.
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Depending on how a user browses the Internet, modal windows can be downright confusing. Modals quickly shift visual focus from one part of a website or application to another area of content. This scenario is more common than it should be. And it’s fairly easy to solve, as long as you make your content accessible to all through sound usability practices. In this article, Scott O’Hara has set up a demo of an inaccessible modal window that appears on page load and that isn’t entirely semantic. First, interact with it using your mouse to see that it actually works. Then, try interacting with it using only your keyboard.
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When it comes to CSS, Thierry Koblentz is convinced that the only way to improve how to author style sheets is by moving away from the sacred principle of “separation of concerns”. CSS authors thrive on styling documents entirely through style sheets, an approach that has been sanctified by the CSS Zen Garden project (what most developers consider to be the standard for how to author style sheets).
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In this article, we will explore an alternative approach to styling Web documents. With the use of “intelligent” selectors, we’ll cover how to query the extant, functional nature of semantic HTML in such a way as to reward well-formed markup. If you code it right, you’ll get the design you were hoping for. Heydon Pickering hopes that employing some of these ideas will make your workflow simpler and more transferable between projects.
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Totally taming form elements is impossible due to the lack of detail in the CSS specification and because of the default styles applied by Web browsers. However, Gabriele Romanato shows us that, by following some common practices, reducing (though not eliminating) the differences and achieving good visual results is possible.
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Now that HTML5 has finally made sectioning elements available, many of us greet them with great reluctance. Make no mistake: Sectioning elements help you improve document structure, and they’re in the spec’ to stay. Once and for all, Heydon Pickering will be exploring the problems these elements solve, the opportunities they offer and their important but misunderstood contribution to the semantic Web. Some people will tell you not to bother with sectioning. They say that it’s hard work or that it doesn’t make sense. This is hokum. Using sections demonstrably enhances HTML structure without breaking accessibility.
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In a previous post, Niels Matthijs sampled a couple of common content types (such as products, stories and videos) across different websites. In this article, he sticks to four different views of a single content type: the story (or news article).
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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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Update (November 12th 2011): Read a reply by Jeremy Keith to this article in which he strongly argues about the importance of pursuing semantic value and addresses issues discussed in the article as well as in the comments here on Smashing Magazine.
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