29 November next I’ll speak in Groningen at a Fronteers meeting. I’ll talk a bit about Fronteers itself: what is it, why, who et cetera. Also, I will tell something interesting about classes and ids: how to optimize the usage of these attributes.

The meeting will take place in ABN AMRO Business Corner of the Euroborg, and is organized by Wisdom/Ordina. Two other people will tell something interesting. Stefan Wobben is going to talk about usability. The way Wisdom/Ordina handles front-end web developing, will be presented by Alexander Kroon.

The meeting will kick off at 18 o’clock, and it is (of course) possible to meet colleague front-end developers. Hope to do that, and see you next Thursday!

Update: the slides can be viewed at SlideShare.

Today is my nineteenth birthday.

Drawing by El Bosque

I came across an web page (I don’t link) that had removed the outline from all links. Why? I don’t know. Maybe because it looks nicer. By removing the outline, however, an accessibility problem occurs.

But first, what are the outlines? And how to remove them? Outlines are the gray dotted borders around links, buttons and input elements that indicate where the focus is. To remove them, the CSS property outline needs to set to none. Example: a:focus {outline:none;}. Some CSS reset methods also remove the outline. Not all browsers support this property, but quite a few do.

The problem you get when you do remove the outline, is quite simple. If you don’t use a mouse to navigate, but instead use the keyboard, you cannot navigate easily. Because you use the tab-key, you don’t know which link you are when you hit tab. As alternative you only can see the URL in the status bar (not ideal, is it?).

It can become even worser when the page uses the tabindex attribute to mess up the default order. I have never believed in the usage of that attribute, since you simply need to place the elements in the order you want in the source. With CSS you can visually place them almost anywhere you want.

Conclusion: just not remove the outline. Your page looks the same, and everybody is happy.