Unintentionally Blank

Thanks to the magic of Google Analytics I have discovered that a good number of this blog’s visitors reach here with searches to do with Internet Explorer’s conditional comments. This is due to my post, a month back, extolling the use of conditional comments instead of CSS hacks. More recently I considered that if someone was searching for information on conditional comments then they were unlikely to find interest in an article merely telling them they should use them. Then along came the latest ProBlogger Group Writing Project - How To… and it all made sense. So here is how you can improve your code and drop those worthless CSS hacks; How to use conditional comments - the practical version.

Continue reading “IF Internet Explorer THEN Do Something Else (A How To…)” »

Continuing in my series of what I must have on a computer for it to feel like mine, I thought I might share with you my list of Firefox extensions that make a fresh install of Firefox feel alien to me now. They may not all be of use to everyone, but have a look and see if your missing out.

Continue reading “Stuff I Couldn’t Use Firefox Without” »

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” »

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” »