It's right that they should be included, of course, because it's not up to implementations to decide whether this or that node is important. Nevertheless, whitespace text-nodes are usually not important, they just get in the way, complicating what should be simple relationships like firstChild and nextSibling ...

However, that simplicity masked an underlying problem — mutation events were not well implemented, and they plagued browser development with performance and stability issues. They fire far too often, they're slow and hard to optimize, and they're the source of any number of potential crash bugs ...

I have a brand new site in development which will be ready in the spring. I've had to pause work on that while I focus on a necessary update for Dust-Me Selectors. Once that's done and dusted (if you'll pardon the pun!) I'll be able to re-focus on the new site and get it ready for publication.

The new brothercake.com is a completely overhauled architecture and design, running off a custom-built CMS that I've spent much of the last year working on. I'll be publishing much more regularly, with (at least) weekly posts and articles, and as many scripts and tools as I can find the time and energy to develop.

That's all for now!

So what's next — a tax on screenreaders perhaps, for the extra time and effort involved in making sites accessible to them? Perhaps a tax on people who don't have Flash installed, because it's such a pain in the arse to sniff for that and design fallback behavior!

The real problem here is not the effort it takes to support IE7. The real problem here is false expectations.

It's been a sketchy year for Dust-Me, as the company who used to support its development no longer does so, and for a while it wasn't clear whether I'd have the time and resources to maintain it. But snatching development days wherever I could find them, Version 3 was eventually finished, and I realised that I owed it to the community to keep the project alive -- especially since there really isn't anything else quite like it.

To all of you who've encouraged the continual development of this extension,and particularly to Will Morrison -- a big thank you! Version 4 is already in development, and new features will include:support for Sitemap XML files, expanded data export and import options, some new preferences, and proper documentation.

I'm also investigating the possibility of being able to scan for different kind of data, or grouping and analysing rules in different ways. For example, identifying class names and attributes that are used by CSS and those which are not. Perhaps the extension could identify rules which are not used by any media, or media which are not addressed by any rules. Or identify how images are used, whether by CSS, or markup, or not at all.

Quite a few possibilities suggest themselves, so I'll be guided by feedback on which of them would be useful. And of course, if you have any other suggestions or ideas for new features or improvements, please do let me know

The long-awaited updated to this popular Firefox add-on has just been released, after almost a year in development, while the new Opera extension was released a few weeks ago, to exclusively-positive reviews.

The Firefox version has a huge number of bug-fixes and improvements, most notably a fix for the spider's tendency to hang while scanning some sites, and a ten-fold increase in scanning speed -- so on average, it can now scan five pages per second, where before it would take up to two seconds per page.

The Opera version is forked from the same core codebase, for parsing stylesheets and scanning pages, but its interface had to be completely re-designed to suit the capabilities of Opera's API. It's just as fast and just as solid as the new Firefox version, and brings this useful tool to all who have Opera as their browser of choice.

I'll be publishing my slides, and most of the demos I presented, once the audio is available -- I have an idea to use HTML5 <audio> to embed it into the slideshow (which was written in HTML and CSS and presented with Opera in full-screen mode), then add a bunch of synchronisation events so it automatically steps-through the slides at the appropriate points in the audio. :-) (It will of course work in browsers other than Opera, as it's relatively simple to script and extend basic pagination display and control; so simple in fact, I wonder why more browsers don't do this?).

I'll be speaking on the subject of Accesibility in Modern Interfaces:

Though the web has evolved a great deal in the last decade, the most basic aspects of accessible development have hardly changed at all. So to kick-off my talk, I'll be looking at accessible techniques which have stood the test of time, being just as important today as they were a decade ago.

But the web is continually changing, and web-accessibility has had to change with it. To continue my talk, I'll examine in-depth the most-recent developments in this area, focusing mainly on WAI ARIA — the standard for Accessible Rich Internet Applications, which makes it possible to build custom widgets, like sliders, or drag and drop interfaces, that are accesible to screenreaders and other access technologies.

Then to finish, I'll be asking: how do we pass-on our understanding of the needs and purpose of accessibility to the rest of our development team, to make sure it's treated as a core-requirement and not just bolted-on afterwards? And how do we make sure we remember ourselves, and not get distracted by the coolness of the latest shiny stuff!

But I'm just one among many!

Covering a fascinating and diverse range of subjects, I'll be joined at the podium by some of the web's brightest lights — none other than Steve Marshall, Mike Rundle, Remy Sharp, Rachel Andrew, Jack Osborne, and the irrepressible Christian Heilmann.