A few links I found floating around in need of a home. So to speak. Some new, some old(er). All worth a look.

  • Mozilla Firefox 1.5 Beta 1 has been released. I've always been irritated by x.0 to x.5 version jumping. The next version should either be 1.1 or 2.0, none of this claytons-version crap. I know there's precedent, but guess what - I thought IE5.5, PageMaker 6.5 etc were dumb version numbers too :)
  • footerStick, perhaps the cleanest and most robust solution I've seen so far; although i'm yet to subject it to the rigours of a full vmware test suite.
  • Cheat Sheet Roundup - Over 30 Cheatsheets for developers. A bunch of cheat sheets... 'nuff said.
  • particletree | Preview Your Links with Unobtrusive JavaScript: You know that feeling at the grocery store express lane when you find out that the person in front of you actually has 74 items, a book of coupons, a checkbook and arthritis? That’s the feeling I get after clicking on an innocent looking link that goes to a PDF unexpectedly. What a great quote :) Anyway, the article details a way to indicate link targets like PDF documents, based on the file extension, just by adding a script to the document head.
  • Javascript - Event pairs, which runs through some tests and looks for keyboard equivalents for common mouse-based events. In simple terms, stuff like recognising that mouseover is mouse-specific and needs to be paired with focus.
  • ColorBlender.com | Your free online color matching toolbox, a(nother) nifty colour palette generator; for those of us who didn't go to art college and don't like to rely on gut feel all the time :) Of course you will still need to check your colours for contrast and safe combinations, but you do that anyway right? Right.
  • CollyLogic: Ticked-off visited links Reloaded - a neat approach to identifying visited links with something other than colour, which is something that most of us still tend to forget (slap our own wrists!). It is a difficult question since you don't really want to be fooling with emphasis (links aren't necessarily something you'd semantically emphasise, so why do it visually?) and some pages don't look too good with dashed borders or whatever. Add to that the fact that abbreviations are indicated with dotted underlines in most browsers and you're really getting caught between rocks and hard places.