Ethan Marcotte now blogs at Unstoppable Robot Ninja.

Weblog entry:

Code, delete, repeat.

I suppose it’s all about paring back.

Started this website up again in October to tweak, fiddle, and continually experiment with the technologies and techniques that I read about on a daily basis. My daily stops at zeldman and alistapart are always good for a new thought (or to challenge an existing one), so I suppose that I should apologize for the lack of consistency that’s been visiting this site of late. I deleted the short-lived style switcher (largely ‘cause I was getting sick of the two CSS choices I’d given myself), tweaked the default style sheet a bit, and fleshed out a little content in the subnavigation areas.

Also removed my target="_extlink" JS hack, as the site started to feel pretty darn inaccessible. And that’s all the snippet was, really — a hack. It didn’t serve any purpose, per se — the website wasn’t particularly enhanced by it, the users (all three of you) weren’t singing its praises. All it did was provide me with a layer of functionality that I’d missed in this new spec of XHTML, a layer of functionality that everyone from Dive Into Accessibility to <shudder> Jakob Nielsen has decried. So instead of hanging the freak flag higher, I took it down. These days, the site’s much more interoperable…and a little less personal. I suppose that these are the risks we run — establishing a little island for personal expression and ‘blogturbation, or opening the doors wide for user access, regardless of device or disability. Personally, I choose the latter.

Or at least, I’m slowly learning how to.

Comments

Hooray, technical difficulties.

There’s a WordPress issue that’s currently preventing old comments from displaying correctly. Sorry for the inconvenience, but hopefully we’ll be back online soon.