Adrian Holovaty has posted two excellent new items, the first is an interview with Andy King on optimization as it relates to news sites; the second is an open letter to the OJR’s editor/columnist Staci D. Kramer about the need for those same sites to support standards. The latter is an excellent argument on why standards are important, and was spurred by a shockingly naïve post to online-news suggesting it’s okay to block non-IE browsers.

Over at stopdesign, Doug Bowman has a new tutorial explaining a fiendishly clever way to use background-image to replace text and still make it accessible.