Internet Explorer has a number of css bugs which cause no end of headaches for web developers. Working on the uber complicated style sheets for the electronic product at work I’ve encounter enough oddities to fill my quota for the year. I feel pretty good that the IE-only css file isn’t actually that big. (more…)
During the past year I’ve become interested in using web standards and semantic markup. The idea is to separate content from presentation. For example, I have followed a variety of holy wars over the use of <i> (italics) and <em> (emphasis) elements. Italics are presentations, emphasis describes the content. The <i> element has been depreciated in favor of <em>, but that leaves a few things hanging. For instance, how should I code a book or movie title?
I follow the convention that book titles should be italicized, eg. The Stars My Destination. But if <i> has been depreciated, that leaves <em>, which isn’t the correct choice — I’m not emphasizing the title, I just want to note that it is a book title. (more…)
I installed the Web Developer’s Toolbar in Firefox and was poking around its many features on different web sites when I came across the “Display ID & Class Details” function in the Information section. Now, this is certainly handy when troubleshooting your own site, but it can be equally infomative when looking at other sites. (more…)
Facing a corprate mandated redesign at work, I decided to take the oppotunity to update our site to structurally meaningful and valid code, utilizing the latest in CSS to do so.
Corporate has provided templates and a code base which is old fashion tables in tables in tables with tons of spacer .gifs. I threw all of that out and started with just their dimensions and color palatte and recreated the site from scratch. My efforts have paid off.
We meet via a phone conference last week with the corporate web keepers and they were impressed with my work. At first they couldn’t believe that my pages didn’t use any of their images, since the look is nearly identical. They were further impressed with the numbers: their page - 32 kb, mine - 9 kb. Their total page weight (all images and code): 106 kb; mine: 32 kb. Total image they used: 60+; total images I used: 5.
They were impressed enough to ask if I minded sharing what I did with the vendor who created their original templates. Looks like I’ll be helping them rework the master corporate template that all the companies will be using.
Yes. If it’s gotta be corporate, at might as well be done right.
And, I’ve improved upon my own code. I had a brainstorm today that elliminated two entire styles, replacing them with simple decendent selectors. Smooth it is.
At work on Friday I gave a presentation to a few people on the power and benefits of using Cascading Style Sheets. It went really well. There were a couple of guys from our product development team and they were very impressed by what I can do.
It looks like I may be asked (I’ll see that I am) to have a similar chat with a couple of managers. If all goes well, I’m going to try to create a little niche for myself here - our products could certainly use my help.