Unintentionally Blank

Yesterday I began to create a stylesheet switcher using javascript and the HTML DOM. I finished up with an example of the work so far, but I failed to address a few of the points in my requirements, namely:

• Use a dropdown box to select styles
• Populate the dropdown box with stylesheet names from the title attribute of the link tag
• Graceful degradation in browsers without script
• Future proof javascript

Today I will tackle these issues.

Continue reading “Stylesheet Switcher - Part 2″ »

You have created a site, hand-coded it to perfection in your eyes, but you are missing something. Something that every other web designer in the world has done before*. You have forgotten to alienate a subsection of Internet surfers by including some of the tricks below.

* may only apply to me

Continue reading “Making A Site Inaccessible - Things I Used To Do” »

A comment a few days ago about the colours used on this site got me thinking. First of all I started considering what would be a nice colour to make my headings so that they were readable for everyone. Rather than stopping there and testing out some new colours, I kept thinking eventually deciding that a new design was the only way forward! Finally, thoughts of accessibillity crept into my head reminding me of Roger Johansson’s high contrast layout (originally suggested on A List Apart by Joe Clark) and it all made sense.

If I build a stylesheet switcher into my site then I can keep this design and serve up as many other ones as I like, improving accessibility and keeping the bright blueness of my headings.

Of course, doing this would test and improve my scripting (my ultimate aim) so I got to work.

Continue reading “The DOM again - A Style Sheet Switcher” »

I have been working on my first job this week, hence my lack of posting recently. It has been quite an experience finally designing a site for someone else, but this is not really the issue on my mind.

The Box Model Hack Strikes

The design of the site that I was creating this week prompted me to think about support for CSS within IE and the highly documented ways to work around it. I was using the CSS from the method for sticking a footer to the bottom of a page from A List Apart and noted the use of Tantek Çelik’s box model hack. As I progressed with the design, I came to rest on a fixed width layout and deployed the box model hack again. By the time I came around to the third use of the hack I had almost forgotten what the first two were for and had to read the code carefully to work out what I was trying to achieve.

Continue reading “IF Internet Explorer THEN Do Something Else” »

It looks like I have failed almost instantly in my first experience in blogging. I have disregarded tips about blogging that have been set down for years and not to my surprise, found that only 4 people visited this site yesterday. If you are reading this, then I apologise for not posting anything for a whole week and I promise that I will rectify this situation starting from now.

I would love to set myself a proper goal for how often I am going to post, but I am so hectic at the moment that I cannot promise anything (especially nothing quite as severe as this). However, you can certainly expect to see more posts appearing here in the near future.

In fact, I’ve just thought of something I need to write about, better finish off what I was supposed to be doing before I started writing this post so I can write another!