While the video tag has been standardized, there is a lack of consensus for supporting the codecs used to package the videos for distribution and playback. Some browsers are supporting the OGV format, some support the more popular but licensed mp4 format. Others, such as Chrome, will support both. To make it even more exciting, there is a new version under development to make a truly open-sourced format: WebM.

This means your video tag needs to define multiple movie sources to make it playable on all browsers. It sounds complicated because it is. Luckily, Kroc Camen has written a great article and code pattern for adding a cross-browser video tag with fallback to Flash for the older browsers: Video for Everybody!.

The article is full of great advice from a programmer that has learned the stuff the hard way. Here’s an explanation of how you’ll need to adjust your htaccess file.

Ensure your server is using the correct mime-types. Firefox will not
play the OGG video if the mime-type is wrong. Place these lines in your .htaccess
file to send the correct mime-types to browsers

AddType video/ogg  .ogv
AddType video/mp4  .mp4
AddType video/webm .webm

Video for Everybody! – Kroc Camen

Related Resources

• HTML5 video Libraries, Toolkits and Players – Specky Boy
• JW Player: Flash Video Player – a base flash movie to use as your fallback flash movie
• html5 video fallbacks with markup – Mozilla Hacks
• Fed Flix – Repository of US Government films in various formats. These are good for testing your video markup.

Todd Kloots, of the Yahoo User Interface group was one of the first to develop accessible javascript libraries with the YUI menu package. He just published a blog post on the YUI web site about adding ARIA support to the YUI tab package. This information could also help you add this functionality to your existing YUI-based applications.

Here’s how Todd describes the goal

The YUI TabView Control is built on a strong
foundation of semantic markup that provides users with some basic accessibility. But while TabView looks like a desktop tab control, screen readers don’t present it as an atomic
widget, leaving users to figure out how the various HTML elements that compose a TabView relate to each other. However, through the application of the WAI-ARIA Roles and States, it is possible to enhance TabView’s accessibility such that users of screen readers perceive it as a desktop tab control.

Enhancing TabView Accessibility with WAI-ARIA Roles and States – Todd Kloots

The following video shows how this approach works with Firefox and a screen reader.

Related articles

• IBM makes web accessibility for blind users a social effort
• Accessible Google Charts
• AxsJAX: Access-Enabling AJAX
• I.B.M. Software Enhances Web Accessibility for the Blind
• Quick follow-up: more YUI Compressor work
• High Performance Ajax Applications
• Reminded of speaking your YAHOO.lang

We have avoided using CSS3 rules for too long. It’s been difficult to justify using rules that won’t work for a significant portion of our audience, Internet Explorer 7 and below. However, Internet Explorer 8 is coming out soon and does work with the features we like.

I think it’s fairly safe to assume IE7 users will upgrade to IE8 within a short time. Those stuck with IE6 for one reason or another will slowly disappear as they are given new computers or their locked down environments are upgraded.

So, with the future of CSS3 functionality within reach, I’ve been energized to begin experimenting again. I’ll be writing a series of blog posts over the next few months that look at CSS3 functionality as a progressive enhancement. How can we continue to deliver a perfectly fine web site to IE6 and IE7 and mobile phones while enhancing the functionality of more modern browsers and devices?

Attribute Selectors

CSS attribute selectors are the golden ring on the web development merry-go-round. They can be daunting to learn, addictive to use, but then disappointing when you realize they are out of your grasp when you test in Internet Explorer. We can, however, begin using them to add additional functionality based on your pre-existing, semantic code. Attribute selectors give you power to write CSS that pinpoints the stuff you already code, without having to go back and add classes or ids. I’ve written previously about using attribute selectors to let your users know the language of a site they are about to visit. This trick relies on the rarely used hreflang attribute, which identifies the language of the site targeted in a link.

There are many other attributes in your HTML, from table headers, image src, link titles, and selected options. Think about all of those juicy attributes just waiting to be targeted. Also think about how you could actually do something useful with them.

Announce the file type of a link with CSS

I once worked for a company that had hundreds of thousands of static HTML pages in their intranet. With no content management system; it was impossible to make global changes. The only thing they shared was a common set of style sheets. Does this sound familiar? Follow along as we increase your site’s usability in a less than perfect, but efficient way.

First off, for accessibility, you need to let users know when a link will open a file, what type it is, and how large it is. This is best done by adding it to your HTML code:


Foo presentation (.pdf, 5kb)


That delivers the information to everyone, regardless of their browser. This, however takes time and is a daunting task for updating legacy code.

We can, however, use the atttribute selector to target the extension of the link to display the icon and insert the text describing the file type. Here’s the sample HTML code:

It’s a simple list of links for different types of files. We’ll be looking at the extensions: .zip, .pdf, .doc, .exe, .png, and .mp3. Feel free to extend this list to any extension you so desire. This would be especially helpful for a company that uses proprietary file types within their intranet.

Now, let’s look at the CSS:


a[href$="zip"],
a[href$="pdf"],
a[href$="doc"],
a[href$="exe"],
a[href$="png"],
a[href$="mp3"] {padding-left:20px; background:url(bg-file-icons.png) no-repeat 0 0;}
a[href$="png"]{background-position: 0 -48px;}
a[href$="pdf"] {background-position: 0 -99px;}
a[href$="mp3"]{background-position: 0 -145px;}
a[href$="doc"]{background-position: 0 -199px;}
a[href$="exe"]{background-position: 0 -250px;}

a[href$=".zip"]:after{content: "(.zip file)"; color:#999; margin-left:5px;}
a[href$=".pdf"]:after{content: "(.pdf file)"; color:#999; margin-left:5px;}
a[href$=".doc"]:after{content: "(.doc file)"; color:#999; margin-left:5px;}
a[href$=".exe"]:after{content: "(.exe file)"; color:#999; margin-left:5px;}
a[href$=".mp3"]:after{content: "(.mp3 file)"; color:#999; margin-left:5px;}
a[href$=".png"]:after{content: "(.png file)"; color:#999; margin-left:5px;}
a[href$=".exe"]:after{content: "(.exe file)"; color:#999; margin-left:5px;}


See the final test page.

Pattern matching in the attribute selector

We have some limited “regular expression” functionality in CSS3. We can search for an attribute’s presence and match a pattern within the attribute’s value.
Patrick Hunlon has a good summary of the pattern matching:

• [foo] — Has an attribute named “foo”
• [foo="bar"] — Has an attribute named “foo” with a value of “bar” (“bar”)
• [foo~="bar"] — Value has the word “bar” in it somewhere (“blue bar stools”)
• [foo^="bar"] — Value begins with “bar” (“barstool”)
• [foo$="bar"] — Value ends with “bar” (“I was at the bar”)
• [foo*="bar"] — Value has bar somewhere (“I was looking for barstools”)

Attach icons to anything with CSS

The CSS is simply looking to see if the desired extension is at the end of the link href. If so, apply the following styles.

Adding an icon to the link

First, we are match any of the desired file extensions. We then add a background image and some padding on the left side with a bulk rule. Then the background position on the sprite is adjust for each particular link type. Combining multiple icons into one background image reduces the number of files the user has to download, making your page faster. This will work with any browser that recognizes attribute selectors, including Internet Explorer 7. However, support for more obscure attributes may be spotty.

There’s another peculiarity with pattern matching. Some attributes are case sensitive while others are not. The href attribute is NOT case sensitive, so the above rules will also work if your image name was FOO.ZIP, foo.Zip, or foo.zip.

Adding the descriptive text

Now, we are going to add a bit of descriptive text to each link. We can’t describe the file size, but we can tell the user what type of file it is. This is using the :after(content:) functionality and is supported by Internet Explorer 8 (yeah!!!) but not Internet Explorer 7 and below (boo!!!).
We will also adjust the color and give it a bit of spacing.

A big step forward with a small chunk of work

There you have it. A small chunk of CSS coding has now added substantial usability to your legacy pages. While the CSS version is not as accessible as having the data in the actual link code, it’s a significant improvement over nothing at all. Further, there’s no harmful effect on browsers that do not understand the function. You’ve added information, but haven’t taken anything away. This is a win in my book. To save some time and effort, you could just download and use this package of CSS and icons from Alexander Kaiser.

This rather simple example of attribute selectors and pattern matching can open your eyes to many possibilities. There are a number of developers that have been expoloring this potential for the past few years. Take a look at some of these resources for more ideas and have some fun.

• CSS3 – Atribute Selectors Definition W3C
• CSS 3 Selectors Explained
• CSS: A Tribute to Selectors
• YUI: Selector Utility Use CSS3 selectors in JavaScript
• Dynamic File Type Notations
• Cool use for CSS attribute selectors – Hiding banner ads with CSS
• Showing Hyperlink Cues with CSS
• Showing Hyperlink Cues with CSS


/*this is for all browsers*/
#main p {color:black;}
/* this is for Internet Explorer */
#main *p {color:red;}
/*this is ignored by IE7 and will target IE6 */
#main _p {color:green;}


This set of hacks allowed us to control IE7 and IE6. However, IE8 does not recognize the * hack. Special IE8 rules will either need to be defined with conditional comments, the Microsoft proposed meta tag, or some new hack to be discovered. Let’s hope the mature version of IE8 will reduce the need for these hacks.

For more information on the above hacks, visit an earlier post: IE7 Hacks

Download Internet Explorer 8

You can download Internet Explorer 8, Beta 1 from the Microsoft Developer site. However, here are a few things to keep in mind:

1. This installation takes some time, about 15 minutes, and will require a restart of your computer.
2. It will replace your existing Internet Explorer and is not available as a stand-alone browser.
3. It renders in standards-mode as a default. You’ll see a button to render in IE7 mode. This is helpful to see the changes between the versions.
4. Many sites will have significant layout issues in the standard view. You may need to re-evaluate your conditional comments to specify IE7 instead of greater than IE6
5. IE8 is ignoring the * hack! This means you can use the underscore hack for IE6, the * hack for IE6 and IE7 and … um… I don’t know yet for IE8.

Is IE8 better than IE7?

• Internet Explorer 8 passes the Acid2 Test.
• It understands CSS attribute selectors and generated content.
  IE8 handles my international test page fine.
• It understands :hover on non-links but is still buggy. Here’s a good test page with multiple CSS3 styles.
• It seems to have more integration with social platforms, maps, etc. Perhaps this is a nod towards Flock?

It’s still really early to find all of the bugs and benefits of the new browser. The team needs to be commended for the fast development and their willingness to listen to criticism and change the default behavior at such a late point. I look forward to the more mature releases.

Updates

• Leave it to Hedger Wang to find and document the first IE8 bug: See how IE8 breaks

I’ve tried Opera before and have always had it on my machine. However, there are a few things I’ve become dependent on in Firefox and need to figure out how to do the same thing in Opera before making a permanent move.

Firefox dependencies

• Linky: I love this extension and the ability to select a bunch of links and open them in separate tabs. I think Opera has native support for this, but I couldn’t figure it out.
• Firebug and Web Developer Toolbar: How can we live without them?
• Bookmark toolbar on the top. I’ve already got my bookmarks setup and need to access them quickly. I don’t like the sidebar treatment in Opera
• Password memory: the Opera system so far seems clunky. How do I get it to remember my password after entering a protected domain, i.e. internal network
• Switch Proxy: This firefox extension lets me switch my proxy instantly.
• Pimpzilla: ok, I can live without this theme, but it is pretty darn nifty

Help?

If you are an Opera user, leave a comment on how to solve some of these issues. I’m sure I’m not the only one out there that would like to know.

The Web Accessibility Toolbar has been developed to aid manual examination of web pages for a variety of aspects of accessibility. It consists of a range of functions that:

• identify components of a web page
• facilitate the use of 3rd party online applications
• provide links to references and additional resources.

The Paciello Group

I’m the first to cringe when someone discusses Star Trek or Star Wars in reverential tones. The theme alone is enough for me to think twice about this event. However, this night at the Yahoo! campus will bring out the big guns of the browsers (Chris Wilson from IE, Mike Shaver from FireFox, and Håkon Wium Lie from Opera are members of W3C).

The three of them will discuss the DOM object, the future of browsers, and more. Here’s a snippet of the announcement.

Attack of the DOMs is very relevant in this Browser Wars Episode II as Web 2.0 increasingly utilizes AJAX in interface design, functionality and web applications. Each browser implements its supported DOM. IE7 is known to suffer in performance from memory leaks that are related to its inherited DOM architectural design. Firefox quickly gains popularity with its DOM strategy among Web 2.0 communities with faster loading time. DOM Level 2 CSS allows programs and scripts to dynamically access and update the content and of style sheets documents. No designers can deny the importance of the interaction between CSS and DOM in rendering site design properly across browsers.
Web Sig

If you are in the Silicon Valley, hurry up and reserve your seating today! This will fill up quickly and you shouldn’t pass up the opportunity to see Håkon Wium Lie, the inventor of CSS and one of the original creators of the “internet”. The event is free to attend and Yahoo! will provide snacks and free sodas.

Getting drunk on the possibilities and waking up to sober reality

It could be argued that 2006 was the year of AJAX and DHTML. They matured this year and solid libraries were released. The Yahoo User Interface Library makes a JavaScript mangler like me seem downright competent. Not only that, it’s got some good accessibility and security built in. Gez Lemon and others have been tearing apart AJAX for a possible accessibility hook that makes all of us happy. JSON gave us new ways to transfer information.

Yes, we got giddy with the possibilities. I helped build Yahoo! Tech. It’s a great site, if I do say so myself. We launched with every flash, web 2.0, animation, AJAX driven widget imaginable. Someone even called it “an explosion of a web 2.0 factory.” The site was accessible, harnessed the powers of a web-service architecture, and was the first completely new site for Yahoo! Media in a long time. But the web 2.0-ification was the star in many people’s eyes.

A funny thing happened over the months after launching. We got rid of the flash on the home page. We removed the dynamic width widget. We removed some animations. We began removing these Web 2.0 stars because the users didn’t use them AND they made the site performance horrible. Yahoo Tech, like many other sites, learned an age-old lesson. Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.

Prediction #1 – In 2007, AJAX and DHTML will be used reasonably.

I predict new sets of AJAX/DHTML libraries will be released with great features and accessibility. People will go gaga over a few sparkly ideas and ultimately settle with good sites that use the libraries reasonably. I predict AJAX will be used less often as commercial sites realize they need page refreshes for advertising revenue. AJAX will continue to be used for features that significantly help the user’s experience (Yahoo Finance Streaming Quotes) and not so much for page level mechanisms (Yahoo! Tech Search).

No More Rounded Corners

I hate rounded corners. They were fashionable for a year and everyone had to have them. You could build them with 15 nested divs, with javascript, with extra paragraphs, extra this, that and the other. Die rounded corners die!

Seriously, rounded corners add a bit of visual white space but they’ve gone overboard. They’ve hit the designer’s toolkit like a bad font and are being used because people feel like that have to use them. It’s time to be creative again and kill rounded corners. Please!

Prediction #2: Rounded Corners Replaced With Dancing Hamsters

Let’s look at alternate container variations. Put rounded corners on the shelf next to drop shadows and let’s explore line quality, tonality, texture, and contrast instead.

Accessibility is a big deal and then it isn’t

Accessibility for web sites will become a big deal in 2007 as the Target lawsuit comes back and someone figures out a way to make AJAX accessible and easy to implement. I’m putting my money on Gez Lemon finding a solution and the Yahoo! User Interface Library making it available.

Firefox, Apple, Yahoo!, Google, IBM, Sun, and who knows what other companies will come together and agree that there is a particular way that these things should be done and will create some resolutions. After these things happen, you will see more and more sites become accessible without even trying. Platforms such as WordPress have already made huge impacts in setting up sites to be accessible from the beginning. Look for more advances from Microsoft, Adobe, and more.

Apple will release their new OS with extended assistive technologies built-in. Existing screen reader companies will have to deal with a big new competitor. Watch for Jaws, et al to scurry around fixing outstanding issues to hold onto their audience.

Prediction #3 – Accessibility for All

Even if JaneDoe43 is simply dragging images into her MyLinkedInSpace page, it will have the hooks necessary to be accessible. Platforms and libraries will make it easier for people to worry more about content and less about rules. The web will be a better place for novice and advanced programmers. It will certainly be better for those that need assistive technologies.

IE7 opens the possibilities

Internet Explorer 7 has been released and will soon see adoption rates increase significantly. Vista is ready to also increase the graphic processing potential for millions of users. As web developers, we have new tools in our kit to work with. Start studying your attribute selectors, pseudo selectors, and playing with alpha transparencies. 2007 will see the death of Internet Explorer 6. It will still sit on a small percentage of machines, but IE7 will take over and with it comes hope.

Prediction #4: CSS2 and CSS3 Get Used

Start looking at progressive enhancements with your CSS. Give Firefox, Opera, Safari, and IE7 the best possible experience. You may have to dumb down some of the IE6 images but go for the beauty and simplicity that advanced CSS offers.

Where’s the new blood?

The standardistas of the past are busy working on big projects now. Sure, they’re still doing some innovative stuff. But where are the young guns inventing wonders like Son of Suckerfish, Microformats, CSS Zen Garden,Image Replacement, SIFR, and god-forbid the image-free rounded corners? Seriously, it’s time for some exciting developments to come from people recently discovering web standards and bringing a new approach to solving issues. Who knows who will be the next Erik Meyer, Big John, Andy Budd, Shaun Inman, PPK, etc. Who’s gonna carry Joe Clark’s torch for being the genius with a cattle prod as he solves the captioning dilemna next year?

Prediction #5 – New Standardistas Rock The House

Further, these new standardistas are going to come from Asia, India, South America, and possibly the United States and Europe. They’ll have us on the edge of our seat as AListApart releases the latest tools to completely change the way we build sites. My number one pick for standardista of the future goes to Hedger Wang who tirelessly experiments and publishes little teasers on a regular basis.

I can picture the @media 2008 conference in Singapore with Molly, Andy, PPK, et al lining up for a chance to rub shoulders with the new greats.

There were a few heroes that made this work a bit easier. Big John and Holly started a virtual library. There even became an “IE7″ long before Microsoft got off their asses. The IE7 javascript was a library designed to fix the annoying issues in Internet Explorer 6. Zeldman began touring the world preaching the horrors of bad browsers.

And then something magical happened. Firefox was released with great support for standards-based programming. Quick on their heels came Safari and new versions of Opera that made life much easier. Instantly, Microsoft began losing their monopoly on the browser. Something had to be done!

Chris Wilson must have been summoned to the all mighty Gates and given the go ahead to build the new beast: IE7. “Go forth and build a browser that fixes as many IE6 bugs as possible. Add tons of security fixes. Add new RSS and open-source features. And whatever you do… make it backwards compatible for our customers.” It was a big order to fill.

Internet Explorer 7 was on the road map.

To show good faith, they released a very early version – IE7 Beta 1. This browser was so meager that it generated even more bad press for the hard working group. Standardistas were up in arms over the remaining bugs. The team began to reach out even further to the developer pool. They made nice with the Web Standards Project, they went to conferences, worked with the web dev teams of large websites, they even gave out really cool shwag.

All of this led to some big promises and regular releases of subsequently better products. Bugs were squashed and developers began to learn how to deal with IE6/IE7 differences. I personally found a bug with transparent png sprites that I was happy to see fixed for the final release.

Internet Explorer Hits The Streets

This is the week we’ve all waited for. Internet Explorer 7 is officially released. Download it now. Microsoft will be actively pushing this browser as a security and feature upgrade. You can expect to see large numbers of your audience using IE7 over the next six months. I wouldn’t be surprised if IE6 is a grade B browser within a year.

Internet Explorer 7 is not as good as Firefox. It’s not as good as Safari. It’s arguably not as good as Opera, only because Opera users love to argue. But it is much, much, much better than IE6.

More importantly, this release finally allows us to use CSS2 rules. IE7 recognizes things like link[ahref="fr"], div>p, li:hover, and ul:first-child. It doesn’t recognize generated content, that is my biggest complaint about the browser.

Web standard design seems to be stagnating lately as we’ve gotten fat and lazy creating rounded corners without thinking twice. AJAX took over some of our creativity. Now it’s time to go back to the CSS2 specifications and really begin re-inventing web design.

We’ve not only seen the light at the end of the IE6 tunnel, we’re standing out in the sun throwing pinecones at each other and running through the fields like drunk rabbits. Hats off to the IE7 team for delivering a browser we’ve been asking for. It’s not the one we begged and pleaded for, but maybe that’s what IE8 is for.