Unintentionally Blank

Being relatively new to the web standards scene, and especially since I was drawn in by marvels such as the CSS Zen Garden, I have read over the many different ways of replacing text with an image. Time and time again I was disappointed with each method for one of two reasons; it used an extra empty span element or would not work in the “images off/css on” scenario. Using an extra span is unsemantic and “images off/css on” left a gap where either the image or text should have gone.

Continue reading “Image Replacement - Getting Closer?” »

I was just running through my examples yesterday evening, checking they work in IE7 when to my horror my stylesheet switcher failed miserably. I ran to IE6 to see if I had overlooked the problem for IE in general and it turned out that I had. I guess that since the majority of visitors to this site use Firefox (in which the function works perfectly) no-one else had noticed either. The strange thing was that it was only the final version that didn’t work, the first version, using just links rather than the dropdown box, did work. This means that the stylesheet switching function was working fine and there was a problem with the dropdown box.

Continue reading “Stylesheet Switcher - Part 3: Revenge Of IE” »

If you’re reading this at anytime over this weekend then you can be jealous of me. Using the power of scheduled posting, I am posting this from the Reading Festival. I’ll be rocking out to some of my favourite bands, including Reel Big Fish, Less Than Jake, Hundred Reasons and many more! The only thing that I’ll be hoping for is a change in the weather so that I don’t get too wet this weekend!

Continue reading “Away From The Office” »

Recently I have undertaken my first web design project. It has been an exciting time because it is a step in the right direction for my career possibilities! However things haven’t gone as well as I’d planned and up until yesterday I was starting to reconsider my abilities.

The Problem

Redesign and update the website for a local grounds maintenance company. The link is currently to their old site, so that you can see where I was starting from. Looked yet? Appalling isn’t it? All I had to do was come up with a better design, update the content and add a custom contact form… easy! Self imposed regulations were merely that I’d keep to W3C standards on the new site.

Continue reading “Frustration and a Learning Experience” »

I recently came across some problems whilst posting code on this blog. I was showing the javascript for my font sizing and stylesheet switching scripts and found that it was often awkward to format and display the code properly, even though I am using styled code tags around it.

The Problems

Indenting, line breaks… all the formatting that I had applied to make the code clearer to myself disappeared. Then I remembered the HTML element that retains that formatting; the <pre> (preformatted text) element. Using <pre> instead of <code> would make the script appear clearer and easier to understand. However, semantically the code element Designates a fragment of computer code. I want my markup to remain as meaningful as possible so what is the solution?

Continue reading “<code> and <pre>: Semantic Code Markup: A Quick Tip” »