Thursday, November 14, 2002

More Accessible DHTML Menus. The horizontal navigation bar used here on scottandrew.com is actually an unordered list of links. I used CSS rules to flatten out the list and create the rollover effects. In browsers that don't support CSS, the nav appears as a normal list. Dave Lindquist has taken this same basic concept one step further with these awesome DHTML menus. Both the dropdown and expandable tree variations are simple lists built with 100% valid XHTML. CSS and DOM scripting are added to extend the functionality. Dave even goes so far as to use ACCESSKEY attributes to make parts of the menu accessible via keyboard shortcuts. The result is a more widely accessible menu that doesn't sacrifice the whiz-bang functionality of DHTML. Try turning off the CSS rules (with a handy "Toggle CSS" bookmarklet) while viewing the menu demos and you'll see a plain, fully-accessible list. Better yet, run it through Delorie's LynxViewer to get an idea of how a non-graphical browser would handle it. Sweet. [scottandrew.com] 8:01:39 PM    trackback []     Articulate []

SharpDevelop. Wow ... SharpDevelop is really starting to look like Visual Studio .NET. A form designer in an open source IDE, huh? Very cool. I wonder if it's as quick as VS.Net, which, despite its complete lack of refactoring helpers (see: IDEA | Eclipse), is still my favourite IDE,, solely because of how incredibly fast it is when editing C# code and designing forms. The speed sucks for C++, but for C# I love it. When I swap to Eclipse to edit some Java, I really notice the difference. I wonder how SharpDevelop compares. Must check this out. Comment [Second p0st] 6:41:56 PM    trackback []     Articulate []

What is 'Good Advertising' ?. A passage from this interview with Temerlin McClain’s James Hering makes me realize why I think James understands the internet more than most advertising executives out there: When you think about day-parting, Reach & Frequency, targeting, and clutter, all of these are marketing communications’ tactics/issues. And the more we try to be different with online, the more we find we’re really the same. Aside from this little thing called interactivity, the medium pretty much behaves the same as other media. Granted, there are unique aspects of the medium that publisher, marketer and even the consumer all end up creating defined by the type of a relationship in which we interact. We’re still trying to figure out the magical balance between that trio: publisher, marketer and user. We’re getting close, though. We all agreed that we did not like 82 banners on one page. We’re starting to get really annoyed at pop-ups. Nobody likes the idea behind Gator for the most part except for direct-response marketers. But I think what we have found is there’s incredible value in the breadth and depth of content that’s online and those marketers who find a way to appropriately engage the customer in a context-relative way add to the value. And believe it or not, customers do like good advertising. Most of the time, they don’t even consider whether the content they see is advertising or content or what. Good advertising is viewed as good content. But its that last sentence that clenches it for me: Good advertising is viewed as good content. Yup, that just about sums it up. [inluminent/weblog] 6:29:55 PM    trackback []     Articulate []