I don't expect this to be a big deal. Actually I’m not sure it will have any impact at all, at least not for me. It’s already a rare thing to need to do something special for IE9.

There used to be a time when “everybody” had Flash player installed. These days there are many millions of iOS users that don’t. Apple does not include Flash Player with new Macs anymore (neither is it included with OS X 10.7 Lion). And then there are people who block Flash with browser extensions or uninstall it completely.

There used to be a time when “everybody” had Flash player installed. These days there are many millions of iOS users that don’t. Apple does not include Flash Player with new Macs anymore (neither is it included with OS X 10.7 Lion). And then there are people who block Flash with browser extensions or uninstall it completely.

In situations like these you can use CSS to tell any HTML elements you want to behave like they were tables, table rows, and table cells by using a combination of display:table, display:table-row, and display:table-cell. You get the layout you want without littering your markup with tables that shouldn’t be there. But there is a slight catch.

But wait a bit. Leaving the issue of putting elements that may rely on JavaScript to work in the markup for another time, should those elements really be links? What does the text on them say? What happens when you click them? If they trigger some kind of action that doesn’t match the normal link behaviour of going to another URL, it’s quite likely that you should really be using buttons.

But that’s not all. As part of the birthday celebration there is also a campaign to raise 600 000 Ethiopian Birr (≈ USD 35 000) for charity:water. The goal of the campaign is to give the people of Northern Ethiopia access to clean water. You’ll find more info about the campaign on the Authentic Jobs charity:water Campaign 2011 site.

At first I thought it was going to be as easy as just copying the .vdi files to the other drive and then pointing each Virtualbox machine to the new location of its corresponding .vdi file. Turned out it isn’t quite that easy.

It’s more or less common practice these days to use real HTML lists when what you’re marking up makes logical sense as a list. If you don’t want it to look like a standard ordered or unordered list, that’s easy to fix with a bit of CSS. The underlying semantics will still be there for people using browsers without CSS support or screen readers.

Linking block level elements such as headings and paragraphs can be useful, but there are some things to be aware of in order to avoid reducing the usability and accessibility of such links to screen reader users.

Many developers don’t have physical access to a whole lot of different mobile devices, and buying a load of phones and tablets just for browser checking can be hard to justify. But another option is using a simulator or an emulator for browser checking. It’s not exactly the same as using the real thing, but it beats not testing at all.

So the other day I was trying to get text input fields to have the same height across browsers. I figured I could use the line-height property for this, but no such luck. Well, it does work in WebKit browsers, but not in Firefox.

The pitfalls of using display:none have been widely known among accessibility-conscious web developers for many years (in Web terms). As I mentioned a couple of years ago in Hiding with CSS: Problems and solutions, setting an element’s display CSS property to none makes it completely invisible. It doesn’t generate a box, it doesn’t take up any place, it doesn’t affect the layout. display:none hides the element – and its descendants – visually, and it also hide

I’ve taken a look at some of the changes that affect accessibility, and there are quite a few nice improvements. The Mac OS X Accessibility page as always has an overview of the built in assistive technologies. There’s also an overview of what’s new on the page listing Lion’s new features. Here are some highlights.

And that’s where this book comes in. The Book of CSS3, written by Peter Gasston, is all about CSS3 just as the title says. And it’s a book you more than likely should have, even if you think you already have a pretty good handle on everything CSS.

Instead of going completely offline and not posting anything at all here here, my intention is to slow down a bit during June, July and August. Instead of two or three posts per week, expect at the most a single post. And for a few weeks I probably will completely “unplug to recharge”, however contradictory that may sound.