Web 2.0 has become a bit of an over used buzzword to describe modern web design (big buttons and icons, transparency, gradients, and rounded corners) along with the trend towards interactive and user-generated content (social sites, blogs and the like).

Vandelay design have provided a useful list of resources on their blog to help with Web 2.0 stylings - button generators, icon lists and colour scheme generators.

An ‘air permeability test’ is required by UK building regulations to ensure that new homes (and some commercial buildings) are fuel efficient. Details of the regulations can be found on the UK Planning Portal website.

Construction companies and builders use approved testers to certify that buildings meet the standards set out in the regulations. Leema Technologies Limited provide building air permeability testing to the required ATTMA TS1 standard and are approved by the British Institute of Non-Destructive Testing. They also provide their testing services for commercial buildings and private home owners who want to conserve the fuel and power use of buildings.

You can find out more about air permeability testing (sometime referred to as ‘air tightness’ or ‘air leakage’) on this page of the Leema Technologies site.

Don’t you just hate those default form submit buttons? No hover effect, no match with your site design. Yuck.
This article at www.digital-web.com explains the solution - use the <button> tag and add a little javascript to cover Internet Explorer’s lack of support for the :hover pseudo class.

This virtual Christmas card demonstrates the power of this technique.

Providing text equivalents for non-text elements on the web is one of the top priorities identified in the W3C Guidelines for making web pages accessible to all users.

The ALT attribute within the <IMG> tag allows you to do this for images. As well as making your site more accessible, it also makes your site ’search engine friendly’ because the search engine spiders can identify your images.

The LONGDESC attribute can also be used to provide more detail about a non-text element. The W3C states that the LONGDESC attribute can be used with the <IMG> and <FRAME> tags. (The LONGDESC attribute provides a link to a page providing further information - I’m not sure how well this is supported by different browsers). The ALT attribute can still be included to provide a title for the image.