November 20th, 2008
I discovered recently that Firefox 2 can’t handle negative CSS z-index values. Apparently it throws any element with a negative z-index applied to it beneath the body. I discovered this after I had already positioned elements on a page and found some improperly indexed elements on testing IE. So instead of reworking all my existing z-index values, I just gave the offending element a negative value. This worked in Firefox 3, IE7, Safari, and even IE6. I thought all was golden until a co-worker’s brother called and said “Do you know your site doesn’t work in Firefox 2?”.
Frankly, it never even occurred to me to check different versions of Firefox. I know this seems obvious, but Firefox had always been so consistent for me, I hadn’t thought about checking multiple versions. So I loaded up FF2 on my Windows VM (I normally run a Mac with windows installed in a Virtual Machine to do cross-browser testing and other windows-specific things), and sure enough, we have a whole lot of nastiness. Dang. So now I rework all my z-index values like I should have in the first place, and all is good again.
This has been a public service announcement. Carry on.
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November 15th, 2008
I could just say “Use trailing slashes!” and be done with it. But that would leave you, dear reader, underwhelmed and grumbly. You may have already read this article on A List Apart regarding using trailing slashes. In that article the author mentions three reasons for using trailing slashes when linking to directories (and I quote):
- We’re doing ourselves a favor, as this is the correct way to do things.
- We’re doing our server a favor, as this means less disk access.
- And most importantly, we’re doing our visitors a favor, because they’re no longer losing a few seconds while our server tries to find first a file and then a directory. And in this industry, you and I both know that a few seconds is a long, long time.
Now this article was written in 2002 when most everyone was still on dialup and servers were much slower in general. So number 3 doesn’t really apply anymore. In this article, I’m going to give you a new reason number 3, and go into more detail on number 1, to help you understand why this is the correct way to do things.
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Posted in SEO, Web Standards | No Comments »
November 14th, 2008
As you may or may not be aware, XHTML 1.0 Strict does not include the old “target” attribute of a link. In other words, you can no longer code thusly in order to tell the client browser that you’d like the clicked link to open in a new window:
<a href="http://some.domain" target="_blank">Clicky!</a>
So what does one do if you still want to open a link in a new window while still maintaining the integrity of your XHTML document? There have been many proposed solutions to this, but they basically devolve to two basic theories: 1) Use javascript to make it work; and 2) Extend the DTD to reinclude the old target attribute. I tend to agree more with using javascript to make it work. Please don’t misunderstand. In an ideal world, extending the DTD would be awesome. Afterall, extensibility is part and partial to the whole XHTML idea. But in practice, I fear this would introduce too many interoperability issues between browsers.
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Posted in CSS, Web Standards, jQuery | No Comments »