ARIA is a W3C standard for making complex JavaScript & AJAX-powered web apps more accessible to people with disabilities. Unlike most accessibility initiatives, this is more than just theoretical chit-chat: Firefox 2 & 3 already implement it and recently Google Reader announced an ARIA-enhanced version. John Resig has a good introduction to how it works.
It’s great to see movement in an area where we’ve almost grown used to stagnation and huge, complex, impractical recommendations (c.f. WCAG 2.0).
In the recent Sheffield flood photos thread we noticed many people posting photos from their Flickr accounts to the forums. Wouldn’t it be good, we thought, if users could do it all from within the page without having to leave the community site? So I sat down for a few hours and came up with a proof of concept using jQuery and the Flickr API. A more polished version is now live on the community forums. Go check it out!
It’s all unobtrusive JavaScript so it degrades well and it can easily be ported to other forums/blogs/whatever. I just need to tidy it a bit, package it up and get it out there. Fun, fun, fun!
Inspired by meebo’s JavaScript Riddle blog post, here is another bit of weirdness I just came across. I’ve initialised the variable foo to some value and executing these statements gives these results:
>>> foo == false
false
>>> !foo
true
The first line implies that since foo isn’t false, then it must be true (every value in JavaScript is either true or false). But if not foo is true, then foo must be false! However the really weird bit is:
>>> foo == foo
false
What?! foo isn’t equal to itself? At this point you’ll either know the answer or you’ll be throwing your hands up in the air and cursing JavaScript for not making any sense. For those of you in the latter category, the answer is that foo is the special value NaN which stands for “Not a Number”. Attempting to equate NaN to anything, even itself, always returns false!
If you still think that JavaScript is nuts, go and read these articles by Douglas Crockford. It’s actually quite a cool language.
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