May 2009
66 posts
Hands off http://mtile.us/Catharsis
ok so those warningnotice.com spam calls have merit. just don’t send them money or deal with them at all.
RT @Malarkey Announcing “Universal Internet Explorer 6 CSS”: http://forabeautifulweb.com/s/239 (interesting solution to the ie6 problem)
Professionally, I find that a good deal of sites I work on have a significant IE6 visitor base, making the most viable, business-acceptable solution something like “use conditional stylesheets to get it as pixel-perfect as possible”. This is frustrating, but it gradually becomes more acceptable since figuring out what hacks are required to fix a layout eventually takes less time than writing them. In addition to conditional CSS, depending on your level of support for IE6, it is almost necessary to roll your own JS support so that you aren’t littering your markup with cruft like class="hover". I’ve tried out third-party JS solutions (like Dean Edwards’ IE7-js), but I’ve found that they really hike up page load times and don’t solve enough of the inherent browser issues to make them worthwhile.
In my personal projects, I’ve followed the reverse of “design for better browsers, then design alternative solutions to handle IE6 bugs”. I say the reverse because #1 describes “graceful degradation”, a top-down approach that considers users of minor browsers an after-thought. “Progressive enhancement”, however, is fundamentally more sound. But this approach is still problematic because it requires redundant code and extra-legwork to ensure that enhancements are properly isolated.
Unlike countless other web designers faced with this conundrum, Andy Clarke spins IE6 hacking on its head by asking “what if we instead create a standard presentation for sites viewed in IE6?”. I really like this idea… this redefinition of “broken”. While not at all viable for certain projects (depending on the percentage of IE6 users), it is undoubtedly inspiring.
This should hold me over until I have the time and savings to get my MFA.
I’ve been using jQuery in a recent project, and one of my tasks was to parse an RSS feed that contained non-default namespaced XML. For reference, the XML went something along these lines:
<rss version="2.0" xmlns:custom="http://www.custom.com/namespace/rss">
[…]
<custom:date>Apr 9, 2009</custom:date>
Apparently, jQuery has more than a few issues with XML namespacing. The commonly-mentioned solution is to use a selector like $(this).find('custom\\:date'), with the double-backslash escaping the colon. This worked fine in IE7+, FF3+, Safari, Chrome and Opera, but not in FF2.
After banging my head against a wall for a bit, and after reading one more post (credit: Michael Lawson) on the subject, I realized nodeName could be treated as an attribute to traverse the XML DOM with the find() method. So, without further adieu, a selector for a non-default namespace XML attribute that works in FF2:
$(this).find('[nodeName=custom:date]')
Replace custom:date with your namespaced attribute of choice. Note that this probably doesn’t work in IE6, but every-modern-browser-but is still pretty good.
October 2008
4 posts
Please, please view this one for yourself. This site is using Wordpress 2.6.1, but it looks like whoever created the page decided they needed to infuse it with a little more character. And by character, I mean pre-CSS character. Here’s a glimpse:
<fontcolor=999999>. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .</font>
That’s what substitutes for a dotted border. Kind of expected. But “fontcolor”? Almost every instance of the font tag on the page is replaced with “fontcolor” (and closed with /font, to be fair)!
I know it seems like I’m nitpicking, but this is simply another reason why people who don’t know how to craft standards-compliant front-end code need standards-compliant WYSIWYG editors (Dreamweaver CS4? Are you it?).
I love reading The Daily WTF. That said, I’ve always wanted a place to capture some of the more intense coding WTF’s that popped up in front-end coding, i.e. (x)html, css. So I’m going to start logging them here as “Epic Coding Fail”s, until I think of a better name for them.
I recently read about Miss Louisiana Teen USA, Lindsey Evans, losing her crown after a dine-and-dash gone awry. A Google search of her led me to some more articles, and eventually to the Miss Louisiana USA / Teen USA website. At first glance, it looked like a typical Flash-centric, amateur-designed site. Amateur in a studio-from-the-90’s way, you know? Clicking around, I came upon this gem on the Video & Photo page:
<p>________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________</p>
That’s right: a bootleg horizontal rule. It made my day (in a very small way).
oh thank god. this is long overdue.
