Another fantastic resource from Adrian Roselli. This is a collection of diagnostic tools that

• Restore Link Underlines,
• Restore Focus Outlines,
• Find Inline Styles,
• Find Duplicate ARIA Roles, and
• Find Missing Alt Attributes.

If this sounds cool, you may also like his Accessibility Bookmarklets and Tools.

Matt offers us a nice round-up of new selectors that will likely be a part of the CSS 4 Selectors Module. Notable additions:

• :has - select an element based on children it contains,
• :matches - a more compact way to select elements via alternate selector paths,
• :not() in a stack - lets you combine multiple selectors not to match, using commas.
• Column selection

Adrian has put together a great overview of why lang is important and how many sites are using it. Here are a few takeaways:

1. VoiceOver on iOS uses the attribute to auto-switch voices.
2. VoiceOver can speak a particular language using a different accent when specified.
3. Leaving out the `lang` attribute may require the user to manually switch to the correct language for proper pronunciation.
4. JAWS uses it to load the correct phonetic engine/phonologic dictionary — Handy for sites with multiple languages.
5. NVDA (Windows) uses it in the same way as VoiceOver and JAWS.
6. When used in HTML that is used to form an ePub or Apple iBooks document, it affects how VoiceOver will read the book.
7. Firefox, IE10, and Safari (as of a year ago) only support CSS `hyphens: auto` when the `lang` attribute is set.

Thanks for putting this together Adrian!

The insightful James Craig is compiling a list of alternatives to the troublesome longdesc attribute. You should follow along.

Great stuff from some folks who know an awful lot about email:

If there’s a medium that lends itself to progressive enhancement, it’s email. Given the contexts in which email content is parsed and displayed (and will be in the future), it pays to consider content first and independently from the presentation.

Traditionally, email designers have taken all sorts of scrappy approaches to ensuring that text in email “looks the same across all clients”. Your Gmail experience should be the same as your Outlook experience and so-forth. I’d argue that “reading the same across all clients” is vastly more important and that when possible, visually lovely flourishes should be added, for the environments that support them.

Jeremy perfectly captures my feelings on most client-side MVC frameworks:

Angular is for making (possibly enterprise) applications that happen to be on the web, but are not of the web.

It is possible to have your cake and eat it too if you go the isomorphic JavaScript route though.

Jason Weber, Group Program Manager of Internet Explorer, provides a little more insight into “Project Spartan” and how Microsoft plans to balance consumer and enterprise needs.

Because a picture is worth a thousand words:

Christian Heilmann’s take on yesterday’s IE announcement, including a bit of historical context and a look toward the future of browsers killing stand-alone apps.

For me, however, the whole thing was a bit of an epiphany about browsers. I’ve always seen browsers as my main playground and got frustrated by lack of standards support across them. I got annoyed by users not upgrading to new ones or companies making that hard. And I was disappointed by developers having their pet browsers to support and demand people to use the same. What I missed out on was how amazing browsers themselves have become as tools for end users.

Way back in 2010, Kyle Simpson proposed that a new version of IE should live beside an older version to allow the new IE to prosper while the old one remains stable for enterprises that require its proprietary features:

The IE (Consumer Edition) would at its heart be a very different browser than the IE (Platform Edition). Instead of releasing once every couple of years, IE-CE could release every couple of months. IE-CE could ditch all that legacy JScript extension junk (and ActiveX!) and fully conform to open web standards. They could embrace SVG, canvas, video, CSS3, and all the other amazing things that IE9 is only barely now giving us a glimpse of. Microsoft could stop being the joke of the open web community, stop playing catch up, and actually take the lead in helping innovate in the consumer browser space.

And all the while, they could keep (and from time to time, back-port to) IE-PE stable and reliable for the Platform world. IE-PE would be Microsoft’s proprietary extensions on the open-web consumer browser experience. IE-PE would serve the needs of corporations and sysadmins by giving them stability and security and not be bothered by all the “noise” of the rapidly changing consumer browser market.

I wonder if he called it. Will “Project Spartan” live alongside IE11? I guess time will tell.

This is a pretty interesting idea and I see where Peter Bright is coming from with this sentiment:

Although Microsoft has endeavored to be more open about how it’s developing its browser, and which features it is prioritizing, that development nonetheless takes place in private. Developing in the open, with a public bug tracker, source code repositories, and public discussion of the browser’s future direction is the next logical step.

With Microsoft opening up their process more and more, I wonder if they’ve considered open-sourcing Trident (or whatever is driving “Project Spartan” under the hood).