Don’t call me DOM

I’ve spent a fair amount of my spare time over the past few months writing a book (in French) on mobile Web design and development, with my colleague François Daoust.

The book is now finally available, under the title Relever le défi du Web mobile (taking up the mobile Web challenge) — it can be ordered for instance from Amazon.fr.

We’ve also built a Web site to accompany the book, lewebmobile.fr, which allows our readers to follow the various links given in the book, copy the code samples, and get corrections and updates as we produce them.  Read more... (175 words, 1 image, estimated 42 secs reading time)

I inquired earlier today if there was a way to give focus to an HTML form field through a simple link.

The reason of my inquiry was that WCAG 2.0 recommends to make it possible for the user [to] easily navigate to [detected form submission errors] to fix the problem.

But in practice, with the following HTML form:

<p><label for='email' id='emaillabel'>Email:</label>
<input type='text' id='email' name='email'></p>

neither a link to #email nor to #emaillabel will give focus to the input field.

For instance, it would be useful to be able to markup a possible error message above that form as follows:  Read more... (200 words, estimated 48 secs reading time)

One of the users of the W3C cheatsheet (of which a new version was released yesterday including HTML5) reminded me of a nifty feature available in a number of browsers, the so called “smart bookmarks”, and how they could be used with the cheatsheet.

A smart bookmark is basically a bookmark where a part of the URL can be replaced by a user entered string; depending on the browser, this smart bookmark can then be invoked with a said string to bring you directly to a specific page (often, a search result).  Read more... (147 words, estimated 35 secs reading time)