This year I decided to keep my birthday low-key.

Oh sure, it would have been fun to throw yet another orgiastic, decadent, cocaine-fuelled party that would have put Studio 54 in its heyday to shame. But at some point, you have to look back on the trail of broken hearts, the trashed hotel room suites, the days-long drug-induced blackouts, and the five illegitimate children scattered around the Western hemisphere (with a sixth on the way) and say damnit, enough is enough!

So low-key it was. I even tried to discourage gifts. “I’m only accepting socks this year,” I said. I thought that was pretty clever, but I failed to scare off Shauna, who went right out and got me some really nice socks. They’re black, non-dressy, and very comfortable — neither scratchy nor sweat-inducing. And of course, my teenaged sister Sarah rebelled immediately. “You sound just like Dad!” she said, exasperated. Sarah got me six wine glasses, which is excellent, because now I don’t have to serve wine to my guests in coffee mugs. The House of Goer is class all the way, baby! Finally, Mom got me Joe Clark’s Building Accessible Websites. I’ve already read most of it, and let me tell you, it is a fabulous book, probably up there with Chuck Musciano and Bill Kennedy’s opus. Maybe better.

I like Clark’s book for two reasons. First, he is pleasantly direct:

If you use the HTML Tidy authoring tool-cum-validator from the W3C, you’ll be stuck with error messages for every layout table you write that lacks a summary attribute, whose majesty will be fully revealed in mere moments. If that happens to you, adding summary="" to your table is legal and will shut the validator up.

Second, there are numerous myths in the web design community regarding web accessibility, and Clark wastes no time in puncturing them. For example, it seems that the difference between Clark and those who blithely advise that “table-based layouts are useless for blind people using screen readers,” is that Clark actually seems to have tried using screen readers. (And surprise! they handle most table-based layouts just fine.)

Of course that particular myth never made much sense anyway. After all, it’s almost impossible to find a major commercial site that doesn’t use table-based layouts. So what kind of silly software company would try selling a “voice browser” that chokes on nearly every single commercial site on the web? I think the reason this myth is so popular is because of its “clubbability”. If you’re having an argument with someone over whether to use a CSS-based layout over a table-based layout, the screen reader myth is great for clubbing your opponent over the head. “Your table-based layout will make it impossible for those poor, poor blind people to read your website! You must hate blind people! Jerk!”

As Grandma Harman used to say, “whether you’re wrong or right, it’s always useful to hold the moral high ground.” Well, okay, actually she said, “Never draw to an inside straight” — advice I have foolishly ignored for years.