It's CSS Naked Day 2008, so my site has taken its clothes off to boast its web standardiness and stuff. :D

(And yes, the navigation links do appear back to front... I'll explain that another time :P )

Edit: It's the end of CSS Naked Day here in the UK, so the styles are now back up. See you next year!

I get asked quite a lot why my links don't open in new windows, and could I please add target="_blank" (or target="new" - which is incorrect) to them? The answer to that is no. I have never used target="_blank" on my site, except when I used popup windows (ewww, I know). And even then I wasn't happy about doing it. Especially now, when I validate to doctypes that don't support the target attribute.

Ok, I do have my Firefox settings set to ignore target="_blank", but why should I have to change my settings because of your site? I don't like being told how I'm going to go to a link. I want to choose for myself whether I am going to open a new window, a new tab, a new browser, or reuse the same page. I want links to follow what I've told my browser I want to happen. Usually, I reuse the same page. However, I never ever have more than one browser window open, and that is how I want it to stay, thank you very much. I can't stand cluttered desktops/taskbars where I don't know which window contains what. At least with tabs I can rename them and order them and whatever else (Firefox extensions FTW!1!).

This behaviour stems from the times of IE6 and other non-tabbed browsers, however is still being used today - people don't want visitors leaving their sites, so they force another browser window to open. On my old computer this was a nightmare - it couldn't cope with more than one instance of IE and opening another (by choice or otherwise) resulted in the whole thing crashing. Likewise, my current computer is getting slower and more dodgy every day, and opening an instance of Firefox/IE/anything takes it quite a while (yes, I have defragmented/taken off spyware/viruses/etc. It's just getting old). That's another reason I only have one FF window open, actually, heh. To those people (who don't want visitors leaving their sites) I say this: if your site is worth visiting, people will go back to it. You don't have to force them to stay on your site. In most cases, they will end up closing your site's window anyway.

So my point (I do have one, honest): please don't use target="_blank". It's not only inaccessible, but it's a nuisance to those of us such as myself (and it's not just me) who dislike our default settings being overridden. Let the user choose how to open links. Like I said, if your site is really worth staying on, people will stay on it. There is no need to force them to do so.

In case you haven't noticed, I've tried to make this site more accessible since the revamp last week. I had got everything to AAA/priority 3 standards about a year ago, but I got lazy and started using silly things like "click here" as link text and forgetting my accesskeys.

So, I put the accesskeys back in for this layout. When I went to test them, nothing happened. I know they work, since I was able to use them in IE, but in Firefox and Opera every time I tried the key combinations, a menu would popup, an extension shortcut would get activated, etc. etc. etc. (or in the case of Opera, nothing happened. Eh?) Of course, a solution to this is to do what many others have done and use numbers as accesskeys - but I disagree with doing this. Why? Because it's not symbolic enough (to me, at least), and ... I don't know, I just don't like it. I prefer to use letters if at all possible. Besides, the number thing doesn't solve the shortcut problem - I like to use accesskeys on others' sites because I'm lazy and prefer to use keyboard shortcuts than the mouse, but when I went to press ALT + 0 to go back home (or whatever it was), I was once again presented with some options for an extension. Hmph. Seeing as I never use the keyboard shortcuts for those extensions, I tried disabling them, but apparently that's not possible.

Having said that, the site should conform to priority 3/AAA accessibility levels now. The automatic checker at WebXact doesn't seem to like my previous/next page links though, and tells me they don't make sense out of context... I think they do, but I tried changing them to such things as "View more blog posts" and even more detailed sentences but it didn't like those either. I've manually checked everything else and to me it seems fine, but of course many of the accessibility checkpoints are to do with personal preference and/or opinion. I may think those links make sense out of context (they don't have a context anyway... They're pretty much standalone as it is) but that doesn't mean everyone will.

Just a small layout note: I know about the slow/jerky scrolling - this is caused by the transparent PNG background. I will try and change that, but when I tried a solid background, it didn't really work :\ Likewise, I also know about the fact that this centre column looks odd in high resolution/widescreen monitors, since it is fixed width and the rest of the layout is not. Again, I'll try and fix this when I have a moment.