Web Development Advent Calendars for 2013

Ganesha may or may not be stealing chocolate from the advent calendar.For a few years now web developers around the world have celebrated Saturnalia Christmas with advent calendars covering topics related to the web. Some come and go, but you'll probably recognize a few regulars on this list.I may have missed some, so please pass them along if you know of any. For those I know are not returning, I have listed them at the end.1. 24 Ways24 Ways, the...

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Thanksgiving, Technology, and Just Picking a Fight

My logs tell me that nobody took this 2011 plea seriously. I blame the typeface.Last year on Thanksgiving I made the case for ignoring social media for the day. I felt strongly enough that for the new year I even wrote about some social media behavior goals for the coming year that we could all try to follow.The year before I cautioned you that you might get wrapped up in helping your parents (or elders in general) with tech support issues (like...

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Image alt Exception Change Re-Re-Re-Requested

This post is an unexpected follow-up to my post Image alt Exception Change Re-Re-Requested (note one fewer “re-”) from June 2012. Back then, some had called into question the need for alt attributes to be required and ubiquitous on all img tags.Well, guess what — alt is back under review.The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) working group is reviewing (and soliciting feedback on) changes to determine how a page may fail WCAG Guideline 1.1...

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Print Styles Are Media Queries

I have alluded to this point in the past. Usually when I get off on a rant about print styles, I lump it into the overall process of making responsive sites and I use media query formatting in my examples. But I haven't just flat-out said that print styles are media queries.I believe I always assumed that the reader would just understand that in the context of my writing, in using print styles on sites, and understanding that print is a medium in...

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Captions in Everyday Use

Yesterday Henny Swan asked a simple question on the Twitters:I'm curious to know, who uses subtitles on web content (X device) who's not deaf or hard of hearing? For example I did when breastfeeding.— Henny (@iheni) November 12, 2013Adam Banks put together a Storify of the responses that show there are plenty of use cases for those not hard of hearing to get value from closed captioning.In general, any context where either the audio track is loud...

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WayBack Machine Handler for Your 404 Pages

Last week I mentioned that the Internet Archive WayBack Machine had released a feature to allow custom URLs for on-demand archiving. That wasn't the only coolr feature it announced.Another nifty feature that the Internet Archive offers is the ability to enhance your 404 pages. You can provide a visitor to a missing page with a link to that page in the WayBack Machine: Free “404: File Not Found” Handler for Webmasters to Improve User ExperienceA nice...

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Tables as Responsive Image Containers

If you've been following the latest chaos in the responsive image debate, you may know that there is a battle afoot between supporters of src-n, srcset and picture. If you don't believe me, I refer you to this WHATWG post, a polite round-up of today's bar fight. Key is that it links to multiple discussions in its round up:[1] http://tabatkins.github.io/specs/respimg/Overview.html[2] https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/d/msg/blink-dev/tV3T1wHuXqE/SvWKxIyG6IIJ[3]...

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