I’ve written on making forms accessible before in the WCAG series, but I thought I’d document some real examples using the work that I’ve been doing. This one is a fairly simple, but important example especially since we’re moving to PDA (patron driven acquisitions). Continue reading “Making Forms Accessible”
Tag: HTML
Why You Should Learn HTML
Roy Tennant recently published a short article called Why You Should Not Learn HTML. It generated a lot of comments and discussion, because much like many of the commentators, I don’t agree. Continue reading “Why You Should Learn HTML”
code4lib Cool Tool Day
So inspired by the ASIS&T Cool Tool Day, I thought it’d be neat to do one of these since there weren’t many volunteers to do lightning talks/presentations at the code4lib Toronto meetup this time around. Our attendance was a little… paltry, but we had some great presentations! Here are my notes from the session.
Presented by @waharnum
- working with REST based web services
- testing automation tool for web services
- best for building with other API
- autogenerate stubs using WSDL
- interface between internal systems
- good for documenting web services, code style with examples
- normally, mostly used for unit testing
- virtual card based whiteboard
- flexible for planning based
- collaborative
- great usability/UI
- even has mobile apps
- maintaining HTML email templates
- also works as a crazy text editor for nerds
XSL Transforms plugin in Firefox
- local reporting
- anything XSLT with just a few security restrictions
- e.g. SVN reporting
Presented by @adr
- cross platform presentation
- push from laptop to another computer
Sidenote: Other Presentation Tools
- deck.js
- Impress.js (like Prezi)
Presented by @ruebot
VIM Plugins
- pathogen – linking for VIM plugins to automatically load VIM plugins
- nerdtree – pull files quickly by displaying directory/tree
Presented by Pomax
Thimble HTML/CSS Live Web editor
- teach anyone (kids, adults) HTML and CSS
- use existing projects to make it fun!
- easy inline flickr search of CC images
- attribution in alt text
Presented by me
- monitor hue changer, supposedly to help people sleep better by telling your body what time of day it is
That’s it! Hope to do another one of these or lightning talks next time.
Book Review: HTML & CSS: Design and Build Websites by Jon Duckett
I don’t normally do book reviews, but Jon Duckett’s HTML & CSS book was brought to my attention via twitter and it looked interesting, so I thought I’d give it a read.
If you’re the type that was discouraged from learning basic web programming because of the manual-like books, then I would definitely recommend this book. The information is presented in very visual ways and while there are a few pages here and there that have nothing but code on them (for full examples), almost every page has an image of some sort, whether as explanation or for decorative purposes.
While there are a couple of concepts I wish were explained in a little more detail with visuals (such as CSS selectors), I appreciate that Duckett will discuss deprecated tags and elements, which are still commonly seen, and point out which browsers do not support certain properties.
He also provides lists of practical websites or tools to use including commercial and open source alternatives. Code and extras can be found on the website, which can be useful even for those who never crack open the physical book.
The Conclusion
It’s what it purports to be. So, I highly recommend it for beginners and maybe even those that want an easy to digest review (it’s very easy to skip sections you feel you already know).
When Wiki and HTML Formatting Collide
So I’ve been messing around with wiki coding since obviously I’ve been working on developing content on the wiki. One of the things I was trying to do was a hanging indent (here’s another more complex one where you don’t need to set a margin and documentation is better) in order to display citation examples properly. More than that, I wanted to offset the whole citation (i.e. add an indent) in order to make it stand out from the rest of the text.
Template Code (Hanging Indent)
Whether you look at the first or second template, they both modify the CSS in order to make the hanging indent. They essentially change two attributes:
margin-left:2em;
text-indent:-2em; (shifts the first line of a paragraph)
Now in order to indent a line or paragraph, there are usually a couple of ways to do it in wiki, but throw the hanging indent template into it and it didn’t always work out so well.
Add Wiki Code
Usually the best way to do a simple indent in wiki is using a colon, such as
: Indented text
However, I suspect that rather than adding to the margin, the wiki changes the margin for that text, and the hanging indent code overrides it. So, the result is that it does nothing.
Add HTML Code
The other option was to use the <blockquote> tag. As the blockquote does not interfere with the CSS styling, this had the intended effect except that just like in this post, if I use blockquote,
you get spacing before and after the blockquote as you would with a <p> tag
My Solution
Not a very elegant solution, and rather the brute force way, but I just ended up creating a template for citation examples that hard coded the extra margin. I suppose the other solution would have been to add an extra variable to the hanging indent template but I figured that would not be worth the trouble.