accessibility

Accessible web-design is important for many reasons and actually nothing else than semantic markup makes sense in the first place. This site uses an only slightly tuned simple.css of the standard TikiWiki distribution, which was made by luciash long time before I even started with Tiki. It's the only theme with a tableless layout in TikiWiki, but sadly still carries most of the standard mid-column templates, that usually utilize tables en masse. Fixing this is the main issue with accessibility development. And as said before, semantic, valid XHTML, which is also pretty important for µFormats (another good reason to like them ;) ). Perhaps the most interesting challenge will be to make the AJAX-stuff accessible.

Search Engine Friendly URLs

On the blog you see most URLs being something easily rememberable and 'meaningful', as http://amette.eu/blog/post252 - which means "Post nr. 252 in the blog on amette.eu over HyperTextTransferProtocol" (see why Tim Berners Lee says, that he'd rather put the smallest thing first? ;) ). Those URLs aren't yet ubiquitous. Since I do the one half of the job with RewriteRules and the other half with Tiki-template modding, I won't spread this too fast over the site. Template modding, especially in a sub-theme as simple, is a tricky thing. I will need to play with some reg-ex output-filtering of Apache here and see, if I'll find a sane solution that way.

JavaScript hover

I hate JavaScript - but I start to like it.
Those little grey hover thingies, like on this image:

They make text of screenreaders accessible to you guys not using 'em. Now, isn't that neat? It's made with the very nice nicetitle library. There are still many title-attributes missing in the Tiki templates and so it won't work everywhere - same as with the SefURLs above. But that's being worked on and going back to the simple style in Tiki CVS. Nevertheless this is cool unobstrusive DOM-scripting magic, using - JavaScript! ;)

ul-based menu

The <amette /> menu on the right side is made with an unordered list tag. Yeah, that's the bulleted list stuff. It's accessible like an open door! Why? A screen-reader will read out loud: "List of seven items - bullet Link blog - bullet Link tags - bullet Link bookmarks - bullet Link images - bullet Link contact - bullet Link cv - bullet Link login - List end" instead of some unrecognizable table-embedding - which isn't semantic at all. But a list, carries the right meaning, doesn't it?
The good looks come from my CSS-stylesheet, which is pretty minimal for that simple menu. But the goal is to make a good-looking, unordered-list, multilevel-menu from Tiki's menu-system and style it nicely with CSS - completely without JS, if possible.