After a quick brush up on my html element attributes by having a look at the W3 Schools html element list, I made a few discoveries. There are several areas that I need to revisit, mostly related to forms.

I also found an alternative to W3 Schools html reference at www.htmlref.com.

Some things I learnt:

There are elements that have only a subtle difference from one another. For instance, abbr and acronym. One is for abbreviations (say wgtn instead of Wellington), the other for acronyms (WCC instead of Wellington City Council). I couldn’t help wondering if it was really necessary to have both.

Likewise, q is similar to blockquote, but more straight-forward in that the former is a short quote and the latter is a long quote.

The head element has an attribute ‘profile’. Profile points to a URL containing a meta data profile. I could not find a concise explanation of this – although the best description is in the HTML spec itself. If you have a practical example, let me know.

And I discovered the joys of the dir attribute. Freaking great!

• General CSS/accessibility info @ dezwozhere
• Andy Budd’s Top 5 standards based sites – some interesting food for your creativity
• Bullets and icons for your site

That old chestnut, the corporate web site re-design has come around again. It was about this time last year that we were working on the upgrade. We rebuilt a hopelessly crap web-shite so that all layout and formatting was done with CSS, it was HTML 4.01 compliant, cross browser compatible back to IE4 and NN6 (the earlier Netscape efforts get text only) and gave a nod to accessibility (without embracing it whole-heartedly).

This time we’ll hopefully iron out more of the accessibility issues. I’ve found these links on accessibility really useful, and if you haven’t considered accessible web design before, these may act as a useful starting point:

• The law in the UK
• Free website evaluation (haven’t tried it yet)
• Juicy Studio
• WebCredible
• Blind foundation
• Sitepoint accessibility section