More bad news from Microsoft. Despite the uproar caused when they originally suggested making developers opt in, to get standards compliance mode in Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) they've now quietly returned to this unwise strategy. So developers are now back where we were a year ago, before Microsoft backed away from this plan. It seems we're being reprimanded for not making all of our sites compatible with a browser that hasn't been officially released yet. Why didn't I fix my sites for IE8 Beta? Because I'd have had to fix them again for IE8 Beta 2. Why not for Beta 2? Because I'd have had to fix them for IE8 Release Candidate 1. You get the picture.  Microsoft has a history of making significant changes right before the official release of their products, so I'll be waiting until I see a finished version before I change anything. Here's a few choice quotes about the progress of Internet Explorer 8. IEBlog : Compatibility View Improvements to come in IE8

With IE8’s Beta 1 release, Microsoft demonstrated its commitment to interoperability by making the most standards-compliant default view for web pages IE’s default.

With IE8’s Beta 2 release, we introduced the Compatibility View button. This button enables savvy end-users to resolve compatibility problems they encounter with sites that rely on legacy IE behavior.

When users install Windows 7 Beta or the next IE8 update, they get a choice about opting-in to a list of sites that should be displayed in Compatibility View. Sites are on this list based on feedback from other IE8 customers: specifically, for what high-volume sites did other users click the Compatibility View button? This list updates automatically, and helps users who aren’t web-savvy have a better experience with web sites that aren’t yet IE8-ready.

I translate this progression of quote like this

1. We'll be standards compliant
2. We give you the choice of being standards compliant
3. We'll choose whether you're standards compliant or not for you

While they suggest that users will get to choose to opt out of this "compatibility list" on installation, how many users will select "review and modify each setting individually" on installation? I'd guess very few. This setting will theoretically also be in the preferences, but I'd be willing to bet few IE users will go looking for it there either. Microsoft says that they're taking this course of action because they became aware that:

"...large groups of people were having a less than great experience because they weren’t aware of the manual steps required to make certain sites work."

They were surprised that a new feature was not being properly used in a Beta product? Did it occur to them that fixing the problems with the Beta product would alleviate this issue? How about educating their users about their new feature? Apparently not. Why spend all this time and money to improve their product, and IE8 is a big improvement, if you're going to force it to replicate the behavior of its flawed predecessor?

Website's in general, and blogs in particular, are all about links. Sending people where you want, to content that they want. Are your links easy to find? How about if your site was viewed by someone colorblind or partially sighted?

Accessibility can be viewed as the "ability to access" the functionality, and possible benefit, of some system or entity. - Wikipedia

If your viewers can't find your links, can't navigate your site, can they benefit from your content? The problem I often see with links isn't with the main navigation, but with links in the content of a page. Too often I see content links that don't contrast enough with the main content to be easily identifiable. They blend in to content, and therefore are useless. A link unseen is a link unused. In this sentence, which words are links? It's a trick question actually, because every word is linked. I've used a bit of inline CSS to change the appearance of most of them. I've also suppressed the hover and focus psuedo-classes on some of the links. This means that they don't change when you mouse or tab over them. Not a helpful change if you're trying to find links, but one I've seen in use. The important part of links is that they are consistently identifiable. They need to be seen to be used. Links can have just about any effect applied to them you'd like. Choose from things like added color to bold, italic, underlined and overlined text. These can be done singly, or in any combination. For accessibility purposes, you should use at least two of them. One thing that accessibility guidelines agree on is that color should never be the sole method of passing on information. WCAG 1, WCAG 2 and Section 508 all have similar things to say on this subject. If color is your only identifier, it only takes a poor monitor to make them invisible. Use multiple signals to identify links and everyone will be better off. I'll go into the CSS of links in another post, but for now think on this. The design of your links is important. Color and style, underlined or not, background color or not, these are all can affect the flow of traffic through your site. How important is visitors finding your content to you? Thank you to Glenda Watson Hyatt for starting the discussion that lead to this post. Now I suggest reading her post on 3 Tips for Making Your Hyperlinks More Usable.

Have you heard of Mozilla's Ubiquity? I think it's the beginning of something big.

Ubiquity is a Mozilla Labs experiment into connecting the Web with language in an attempt to find new user interfaces that could make it possible for everyone to do common Web tasks more quickly and easily.

It's going to change how people interact with the web. I don't know how exactly waht it's going to turn in to, but it's a project that I'm going to be watching.