Cody Beckner

Alright everyone, take your seats. Today I am going to rant about teach everyone the label tag. It’s a very simple tag. <label> Any questions? Just keep reading…

How many of you use checkboxes, radio buttons, text boxes… hell, ANY form element really in your every day web development.

Right, that should be almost all of you.

Yet, as I browse around the internet, a sad majority of sites have failed to use this tag, forcing me to train my mouse oh so carefully on a 8×8 block of pixels to make some kind of selection. There is simply no excuse for this.

I will admit to a time when I was similarly ignorant of this tag, and I hate to admit that it was ASP.Net of all things that brought it to my attention. You see, when you make a Checkbox control in .Net it automatically ties the text that is associated to the checkbox to the checkbox itself, so that when you click the text, you change the state of the checkbox…

how you ask? That’s right boys and girls, the <label> tag.

So, let’s take a look and see what this thing is really doing.

First, a checkbox WITHOUT the <label> tag. (you know… how you normally do things)

A sad checkbox with no friends

… and now…

A checkbox with a clickable friend

Try clicking around above…

Done?

Notice the difference. Isn’t that SOOO Much nicer? Much easier to change the state of the checkbox isn’t it?

So, let’s examine the code for the second checkbox and break it down.

<input type="checkbox" name="checkbox_friends" id="checkbox_friends"> 
<label id="label_friend" for="checkbox_friends">A checkbox with a friend</label>

The input tag should be familiar to you all and there is nothing special about it, so I’ll start with the tag. FOR. Give that the ID of a control that you want to tie the label to.

Done.

Simple. Clean. Efficient. Oh, and not to mention, standards compliant, screen reader compliant, handicap accessible, etc, etc.

The decision is something Apple

“is wrestling with…”
-Steve Jobs

Steve had previously said that the Apple iPhone would be closed to 3rd party development to ensure that the device worked flawlessly.

In my opinion, this is going to seriously HELP the adoption of the iPhone as a platform. I have read various places about the iPhone being a new corporate platform. I honestly don’t know if that is going to be the case, but without the ability for some of these companies to develop their own custom solutions, it was definitely a no-go.

For those of you that have been hiding under a rock recently, Mobile development is rapidly becoming something that is good to have experience with as a developer. As phones become more and more powerful, being able to write applications and sites that run on them is becoming of more and more importance.

People are used to having information at their fingertips to a much greater degree these days, and as data transfer rates have increased on their phones and the phones have gathered more and more PDA functionality to themselves, this means that those fingertips don’t have to reach for a keyboard anymore, just into the pocket to flip open the phone.

This has been one of the major advantages that Symbian, Java, and Windows Mobile has extended to the community. SDK’s are readily available for almost any phone currently on the market, and each day the platforms become more standardized so that if you create an application on one phone, it will work on any other phone that runs that platform.

It will be interesting to see what will happen if Apple decides to open up the development for the iPhone since it has more horsepower backing it up than most other devices out there… not to mention a significantly better graphics subsystem than most of the other phones as well.

For those of you out there who actually bother to test against things in IE, (and subsequently tear your hair out) the IE Dev toolbar is an invaluable asset.

Up until now it has been released in various beta forms. Not anymore. It’s out there to be downloaded in all of its v1.0 glory.

What’s changed since Beta 3?
This release of the Developer Toolbar does not add any major functionality but includes a number of important reliability and “fit-and-finish” improvements. For example, the installation process will automatically remove Beta 2 and newer builds so you don’t have to do so manually, and for those of you running Windows Vista, you will not have to log off and back in to make the toolbar visible. However, you do need to restart IE and then click the IE Developer Toolbar icon in the IE6 toolbar or IE7 command bar.

Chicago had a little fun last week. Drivers by got treated to a billboard with a half dressed man and woman and a slogan that read

Life’s short. Get a divorce

The sign got removed after several complaints, but not because the owner agreed.

“I called the building inspector and told him to do his job and he did… It has nothing to do with content or anything else. They did not have a permit and they were ordered to take it down.”

• City Alderman : Burton Natarus

(by the way an alderman is a member of a municipal assembly or council in many jurisdictions.)

…

Awesome.

That’s it everyone. If I see ANY of you using this number, so help me…

82 30 75 6F BF 43 BC FC 7B 53 9A 2A D1 C6 79 7F

For all of you haters out there, You too can own your own number.

So stop with the 128 bit envy and go get your own.