Web Do's & Don'ts » Intermediate

Don’t put non-ascii characters in URLs

Siniša — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 17:30:11 +0000

One thing that is rather common, especially on websites whose content is not in English, is URLs that contain unencoded characters such as space, å, ä, or ö. While this works most of the time it can cause problems.

Specify unique values for the accesskey attribute

Bojan — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 08:05:01 +0000

If you use accesskeys, make sure the value of the accesskey attribute is unique. If two or more elements share the same accesskey value, browsers will not interpret it consistently.

Use CSS for generating purely presentational content

Siniša — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 11:42:09 +0000

The content property was introduced in CSS 2.1 to add generated content to the :before and :after pseudo-elements. Given that IE 8 also now supports content, we really are getting to the point where can use this CSS feature in our production work. Just be sure to use it only in appropriate circumstances, and be mindful of the accessibility implications that generated content still has.

Remove the outline from links on :active only

Bojan — Mon, 17 May 2010 09:32:52 +0000

Web developers sometimes hide the outline of image replaced links, but then keyboard users have no way of seeing them when they are tabbing through the page. The trick is simple-remove the outline from links on :active only. By doing this, keyboard users still get the default outline when they tab to a link and activate the :focus state.

Specify HTML document’s language

Bojan — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 10:21:22 +0000

Use the language attribute(s) on the html tag to indicate the language of a HTML document, unless the content is aimed at speakers of more than one language.

Make sure your site works with and without the www prefix

Bojan — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 09:11:01 +0000

Many websites make the mistake of not making sure the site works without the www prefix. So for instance, if you type sitename.com in your browser, you end up at a dead end. You should make sure the site works with and without the prefix by redirecting traffic.

Use the CSS cascade

Bojan — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 09:33:58 +0000

Many website coders do not make good use of the cascade, ending up with more complicated code. Learn how to use the cascade properly and define the importance of individual styles.

Don’t use HTTP based resources on a HTTPS page

Siniša — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 20:35:27 +0000

Internet Explorer interrupts the download and displays a confirmation dialog whenever it detects the use of mixed content on a secure page.

In IE 7 and ealier, this dialog would cause annoyance to users but generally didn’t cause any other significant problems because most users would click on the Yes button and allow non-secure content to be downloaded. However, the wording in the IE 8 version of this dialog has changed and to download the content a user would now have to click on the No button.

Specify a text colour for img elements

Bojan — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 08:59:09 +0000

Some browsers display the alt text when an img element is not displayed. The alt text can sometimes be invisible or hard to read, if the color of the text is similar to the background color. Therefore, specify the color(s) and check how it looks in the browser.

Don’t use protocol relative paths to CSS files

Siniša — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 18:53:03 +0000

Internet Explorer 7 & 8 will download stylesheets twice if the http(s) protocol is missing.