3Dec
This October (2008) saw the SitePoint publication of ‘Everything You Know About CSS Is Wrong’ written by Rachel Andrew and Kevin Yank. Though I’ve yet to read the book its contents have been making there way onto an array of web development sites such as thinkvitamin.com. What the book essentially aims to promote is a way of building web layouts using a techniques known as CSS Tables. Without getting into too much depth the techniques allows you to use CSS to define layouts in the same way you’d expect to code a HTML table but using CSS attributes such as display:table-row and display:table-cell.
It is hoped this technique will make it easier for those people still building websites in tables to move to CSS but it’s also seen as an alternative to using float. Floats in CSS were primarily for wrapping text around images, and not for layout. As such this led to issues such as the IE6 double margin issue and the clearfix problem when people started using them for layout.
Continue reading “Why is all I know about CSS Wrong?”
7Sep
It’s now been a month since I moved house, and am still without a broadband connection due to BT taking it’s time installing a working phone line. So with access to a working Internet connection it seemed like a good time to catch up a little.
Continue reading “August Update”
23Jul
Currently I run Firefox 2.0.0.16 as my primary browser at work. The reason for this is that it provides me with a balance of all the things I need as a web developer. These include code inspectors such as Firebug, add-on’s such as twitterfox and the web developer toolbar, as well as being a fairly standards compliant browser and occupying suitable share of the browser market.
Recently I have started to do more extensive browser testing, beyond just Internet Explorer and Firefox. Today this led me to a positioning problem in Safari, where by floated elements within a floated containing div would not appear on one single line, the containing div would not widen to accommodate all the child elements. This error only existed in Safari and after a few attempts at fixing it I gave up on the problem as it only occurred in Safari and did not destroy the usability of the website overall.
Upon viewing the website at home, where I use Firefox 3, the same positioning problem has occurred. Unfortunately making this a more significant issue and one I now need to fix. However more worrying is that my coding must be against the standards to break in both Safari and the new version of Firefox. A simple solution is to specify the width of the containing div, however that is not an option in this case. I’m usually an advocate of standards compliant coding, but this is one time where I really cannot understand why what I’ve coded is against the standards.
2Jul
At work I have elected to stick with Firefox 2 as Firefox 3 is still rather new. This morning the browser auto-updated to version 2.0.0.15 and since then websites have started appearing without images. On a number of websites I have visited HTML embedded images (as opposed to CSS Images) have not been loading when refreshing the page, but they do appear when entering a URL in the address bar and when using Ctrl + F5.
As a web developer this is a rather annoying browser bug. Have Mozilla taken the decision to destabilise Firefox 2 in order to push people to download the more stable Firefox 3? I hope this isn’t the case as these aren’t the dirty tactics I’d associate with Mozilla and the Firefox team.