Burningbird

Lemur

Yes, probably a lemur Randy but which species :) It's not the ring tailed, or the brown, or the pygmy…..

Then again it could be a coati and as Randy has guessed my first choice I'll go with coati

My guess would be Microcebus rufus, or Brown mouse lemur. Very tricky. The head markings looks similar to a Ring Tail, but look! no rings!

Well, Randy gets the book for the lemur, and Robert for the subspecies identification. It's a forked mouse-lemur, though I've also seen images that are identical named a fork crowned lemur. But Doug, you tried, so you also get a copy of the book.

Cute little bugger. I had hoped for a giant squid, but those are taken up by the ASP book section.

Curses! Beaten to the punch again.

Of course, I was going to guess 'water buffalo', so I wouldn't have won anyway…

You were close, Stav. They are both mammals…and live on the earth.

woo! I'd like to take this moment to thank my kids for watching Zoboomafoo with me!

They get the book, Robert! If you ask nice, they might let you borrow it.

Eulemur fulvus (brown lemur) - bit different to the brown mouse?

Actually I thought it looked like my cousin, but that doesn't count, does it?

Both my kids are under six, Shelley. If its alright with you, I'll keep it on their behalf so that it won't be destroyed inside of 2 weeks (books, you know, make great jumping ramps for cars) ;)

I see this contest as proof that the early primate gets the book (apologies to the 'bird). Am I gonna have to use one of those "aggregators" to get in on the early end of the next exciting contest? Random surfage and daily visits clearly aren't working for me.

Dave, but it's brown…

Arthur, your cousin said to tell you, "PHBLBBBTTTT!"

That's true, Frank. Perhaps what I need to do is give items away to the last person who comments. Could lead to some really long comment threads.

Robert, terrific book review: "Makes a great ramp!"

Last!

(Such a nice refreshing change from those sites I visit where the first comment is invariably "First!")

I was going to comment on the TOC, but no comments there. Ajax evolves so rapidly. One of the areas of most interest to me is search and accessibility. Bizarrely, the two walk hand-in-hand. I often tell people to think of search crawlers as super limited people. Generally, what you do to make your site more accessible to people makes it more accessible to crawlers.

And search is important, not just from an SEO perspective. For instance, how do you make content in your blog known to your readers? Most blog-based keyword search sucks, giving no notion of relevance. Tags are a bit idiosyncratic and even quixotic.

So enough of this off-topic screed. I'll probably pick up the book.

Ajax accessibility (specifically for users of screen readers; accessibility is much larger than just the blind, however) is as yet a largely unsolved problem I think. As typically implemented, it's not accessible. Using the progressive enhancement methodology is a step in the right direction, but thinking that if you create your site to work without Javascript then you've made things accessible, that's not correct. Screen readers support a subset of Javascript, but none support the same subset as the others. Certain event handlers, like onchange (often used with popup menus), are problematic for users who navigate with the keyboard. Screen readers do not by default react to changes on a page, although there are certain Javascript steps you can take to force them to do so; it's not clear to me where this would involve a user having to listen to an entire page again to reflect the changes.

I attended a session about Ajax and Accessibility at SXSW given by Jeremy Keith and Derek Featherstone. My takeaway from their session was that if accessibility is crucial to your site, then you need to think seriously about not using Ajax. Failing that, the best way to ensure that an Ajax-enabled site is accessible is to use progressive enhancement and let the users turn the enhancement off. The latter is the approach I took when developing a site that had a small but significant community of blind and visually impaired users among the larger user population a little over a year ago. I found it depressing to hear that the state of the art has not advanced past that over a year later. There's still work being done to figure out how to make Ajax accessible, but like I said at the beginning, it's not a solved problem.

Bud, yeah, that post got hit with a ton of spam. Anytime I use Ajax in the title that happens. And I hope you do get the book — the IRS has hit, and I'm a step away from the tin cup ;-)

Ralph, my take on accessibility is more or less the same: using progressive enhancement, create the non-script application first, then add the Ajax bits. The whole book is based on that.

Needless to say, I don't create any WebOS applications.

There's still a problem, though. Progressive enhancement is a necessary but not sufficient condition to ensure accessibility. Because screen readers support an unpredictable (or at least not widely understood) subset of Javascript (and it's not the same for different screen readers), it's not safe to assume that users of screen readers have Javascript turned off and are therefore getting the unenhanced path through the site.

[…] Powers gave away a few copies of her new book, Adding Ajax, to the first few commenters who were able to identify the lemur that graces its cover. (My guess, […]