If the answer is no, you’re far from alone. The last couple of years, with HTML5 (or more correctly parts of CSS3 and various JavaScript techniques) becoming the new Ajax, it seems that people are so eager to apply the shiny new front-end toys that they forget that the Web is supposed to be universal. And in doing so, many developers unfortunately forget about or ignore progressive enhancement.

I bring this up because I have seen some HTML5 articles and blog posts that mention the new document outline without emphasising the current lack of support. That lack of support is a problem because it makes headings less useful to people who need a proper document outline to better understand content structure and use them as an aid for navigating within web documents. The most common example is screen reader users.

As I begin writing this book, I realize I can’t guarantee you’ll read these words on a printed page, holding a tiny paperback in your hands. Maybe you’re sitting at your desk with an electronic copy of the book up on your screen. Perhaps you’re on your morning commute, tapping through pages on your phone, or swiping along on a tablet. Or maybe you don’t even see these words as I do: maybe your computer is simply reading this book aloud.

Instead of having to double-tap with three fingers to zoom the entire screen of your iPhone/iPod/iPad, it turns out that enabling the Zoom setting actually makes Safari ignore any meta name="viewport" scaling settings on the page. You can zoom in and out the normal way by using two fingers.

Centering elements is normally taken care of by giving them a width and auto for horizontal margins. In this case I didn’t want to set a width on the button since the site will be available in several different languages, so the amount of text on the button will differ.

In practice this means that anyone is welcome to submit their feedback on the HTML5 specification and a number of related specifications. That’s kind of always been the case since participation in the HTML Working Group is open for all. But now the spec is stable enough for people who don’t actively participate in the standards process to review and comment.

Doing it that way works visually, but it isn’t exactly a semantically correct way of using lists. When you view a faked numbered list with CSS disabled you see either a list with the item numbers repeated or a list with bullets and numbers, and that feels backwards to me. I wanted to find a better way.

Many clients are still asking for various bookmarking widgets for social media. You know, the kind that shows a bunch of icons for Twitter, Facebook, email, etc. Two popular examples are ShareThis and AddThis, but there are others.

I agree that in the wrong hands, checklists can be used incorrectly. But I don’t see how you get from there to all forms of accessibility checklists being harmful. When constructed and used correctly by people who understand why the items on the list are important, checklists can be a great help to both developers and evaluators.

In both cases, elements that can have alt attributes are omitted from the returned string. In my opinion, alt text is the text content of an img, input[type=image] or area element and should be returned by methods like these. I also find it a bit weird that they return the contents of script elements.

In many cases this won’t be a huge problem, either because the site/app uses a sensible text size to begin with or because the user has sharp eyes. But when you find yourself viewing a site or app that has too small text for you to read comfortably and has disabled user scaling in the browser, there is a trick that may help – the built-in Zoom function in iOS.

In many cases this won’t be a huge problem, either because the site/app uses a sensible text size to begin with or because the user has sharp eyes. But when you find yourself viewing a site or app that has too small text for you to read comfortably and has disabled user scaling in the browser, there is a trick that may help – the built-in Zoom function in iOS.

Doing this works, and it works cross-browser, but it can be difficult for the user to realise that text has been hidden since there is no visual indication of it. A property from the editor’s draft of the CSS Basic User Interface Module Level 3 that can help improve the situation is text-overflow.

Several (many) years ago I posted a Quicklink about a document on Apple’s Developer site called Installing the W3C HTML Validator on Mac OS X, which obviously is useful for those of us who use Mac OS X. That document is still online, but the instructions there don’t seem to be quite up-to-date. Instead of following them, here’s what I did to get the W3C Markup Validator running on Mac OS X 10.6.

Where I’m using this I’m not particularly interested in checking that the domain exists or verifying that the URL is live – I just want to check that the path, query, and fragment parts do not use characters other than those described in RFC 3986.