The recent release of Safari 5 brought with it the reader, a new feature designed to simplify articles and posts for users to read. Many modern web pages are cluttered with other images, ads (that pay the bills), and elements that distract from the main piece of content. The reader jumps in to help us with that by simplifying the page and focusing us on the content.

The idea of focusing us is not new. Many applications provide a full screen mode that blocks out the rest of the desktop. WYSIWYG editors, like CKEditor, include an option to take it full screen. The clears out the other clutter and lets you write without being distracted.

The problem is the new reader is not accessible because you can barely see the links. Read more »

On of the common patterns in front end web development is to detect the browser and enable site features based on the particular browser being used. With so many different broswers and versions being used and constantly being released this can quickly become a pain. Take just the Yahoo Grade A Browsers plus Google Chrome and you are looking at more than ten browser versions being used. Luckily, there is a better way and it lets us support more browsers than we can think of. Instead of detecting browsers we detect features a browser might have. Read more »