Some geeky things to start off, for Canadians, what is a short work week…

• Tim Luoma has put together a Mozilla and Opera sidebar for a quick reference to accessibility checkpoints.
• The W3C has been busy, releasing six big drafts:
  • The first, and probably the biggest, is the XHTML 2.0, which is not designed to be backwards compatible like XHTML 1.x is. Some big changes, as gathered by Simon Willison:
    • img and applet are deprecated in favour of object
    • new element (dfn) for inline definitions (I currently have a class called info that serves this function
    • new element to define sections (section) which will eliminate the need for “container” div elements
    • unique elements for navigation lists (which could replace the current practice of using unordered lists)
    There is also clarification over acronym, which as of XHTML 2.0 could be used as either an acronym or initialism (this is no doubt designed to make it compatible with current usage). Here are some more changes:
    • b and i are eliminated in favour of strong and em, respectively
    • br is now deprecated, and is replaced by line
    • most deprecated elements from HTML 4.01 are now eliminated
    • q evolves into quote
    • it appears as though any element can now be a link and use the href attribute (which raises some wild possibilities, and interesting usability issues)
    • frames are now implemented via XFrames (not yet defined), forms by XForms, and events by XML Events
    • tables cells can now be associated with header information for non-visual browsers
  • The second is the CSS 2.1 draft. Unfortunately, the main text and index table doesn’t include (but the appendix of changes does) some of CSS 2’s errata, notably the correction saying white-space does apply to inline elements, despite what the current Recommendation says.
  • Along with these two, four new modules pertaining to CSS 3 were released:
    • Fonts (last call working draft)
    • Web Fonts (last call working draft)
    • Backgrounds (last call working draft)
    • Basic User Interface (working draft)