Sep 7, 2006 News Wire

Roger Johansson sparks off some debate on the readability (and thus, accessibility) of light text on a dark background. Many first-time web designers go for this look because it can be instantly attractive, but is it difficult to read?

Jeff Croft considers the question of just how far to take accessibility in the real world. In particular, he points out that accessibility is not an absolute (yes or no) and that most accessibility work involves tradeoffs in other areas.

The two preceding articles received a great deal of feedback, some quite vitriolic. In this post, James Bennett highlights the key points of both and suggests people learn to set aside egos and emotions before joining the discussion.

Low Pro is a standalone version of the JavaScript components of the Unobtrusive JavaScript Plugin for Rails. Prototype is not particularly obtrustive, but this add-on extends it with many useful features, and some can ease unobtrusive scripting.

This new release of the effects-laden add-on library for Prototype is based on the as-yet-unreleased Prototype 1.5 RC1, and features improved drag-and-drop and a bunch of bug fixes.

IronPython is an implementation of the Python language for the .NET Common Language Runtime (CLR). Under development for three years, the project has finally made it to 1.0, and is reportedly faster than C-based Python in many benchmarks.

Adobe follows up last month’s PHP SDK release with a new Ruby on Rails SDK. Both open source SDKs provide code samples for building web applications with Adobe technologies like Adobe Flex and the Adobe Spry AJAX framework.