October 2005

What does inspired really mean?

Today marks the first day of Blind Week here in New Zealand. With the CSS Reboot exactly one week away it's a good last chance for all rebooters to make sure that their new websites will accessible for the blind and for those with other vision impairments. The added accessibility is worth both your time and your effort.

I'm still in the middle of my big CSS Reboot redesign/rebuild and last night I hit a surprising problem. After listening to the WE05 Podcasts I decided to opt for a liquid layout but found that certain browser widths were giving me a 1px variance in Firefox. Apparently it's a rounding error in Gecko (not IE for once) and it annoys me something chronic.

I recently emailed my local ISP Orcon telling them why they should switch to a web standards based design. As always it was a compelling argument. A week or two later I found that they'd started converting their website as I had suggested. I haven't heard anything from Orcon so I'm not sure whether or not it was my email that convinced them but never the less, I should have been happy that they'd made the jump right? Well, yes and no.

In one month the face of the world wide web will change forever. Ok, that was a little over-the-top and melodramatic but the point is, exactly one month from today over 650 websites will be changing in unison. It's all part of the November 1 CSS Reboot 2005. They call it the Fall 2005 CSS Reboot, but I won't. For me it's Spring. Some people don't like the Reboot idea, I do. Sure there's a temporary sensory overload as you try to see all the new websites but they're all so beautiful.