[WSG] Having problems with backgrounds and rounded corners
Hi guys, I'm in the middle of designing a site for a client, and I decided to have a go at a 100% tableless layout. It's the first one I've done with this level of complexity, and it's been... interesting. :) I've got most of it working as I want it, and am waiting on the logo and main header graphic from a friend of mine, but there is this on piece that is driving me up the wall. If you look at the site (url below) you will probably notice a yellow box on the lef-hand side that is looking pretty odd. What I want is to give it rounded corners to match the other two elements above it. As you can see, it's not working. I've had a look at the Custom Corners II article on A List Apart, which deals with putting rounded corners over gradient backgrounds. I tried to do what he said. It failed miserably, so I took it all out again. So can someone please have a look at my code and suggest ways that I can do this? I'd really like to get this sorted out soon, so I can show the client and get his opinion sooner rather than later. The page is at: http://homepages.ihug.com.au/~mikebell/swanstr2/index.html The css is at: http://homepages.ihug.com.au/~mikebell/swanstr2/_styles/sample.css My brain is at: mush In a completely unrelated issue, I've validated the page and I'm left with a handful of javascript errors. The javascript comes from the Son of Suckerfish menu that was brought up on this list recently. Has anyone else had problems making this validate? More importantly, has anyone managed to make it validate? Or should I just accept that as long as there's no markup errors it's good enough? Cheers, Seona. * The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list getting help *
Re: [WSG] file extensions
Michael Kear wrote: Whats the point of doing this? Saving 4 characters per image as a way of reducing bandwidth? Is there any other purpose? */ /* There is another purpose. See this W3C Note: http://www.w3.org/TR/chips/#gl3 Serve static content without file extension CM The reason why one should serve static content without file extension is similar to the reason stated above : the content manager may, at some point, want to change the document format used to serve a resource, yet the resource would remain equivalent. For example, switching from an image file format to an equivalent format, or switching from plain text to HTML... File extensions should therefore be hidden for static content, using content-negotiation (see Guideline 7: Server-driven content negotiation.), proxying or URI mapping technologies. /AndersN * The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list getting help *
RE: [WSG] file extensions
I can't think of a single site anywhere on the web that's not using file extensions for the images on the site. Does anyone know of one? And in a shared hosting environment, where you have asp, asp.net, php, cfm, html and shtml pages all residing and running simultaneously, I can't see how it would work, in practical terms. Yes, I know about content negotiation - NOW - but IIS and Apache (the two most prominent web servers) don't set up that way, few host administrators would know how to do this, and all the development tools load their options and config files based on the file extension. This would surely be the LEAST observed standard anywhere on the web wouldn't it? Or have I been living in a different world? As it happens, I tend to use non-specific urls myself where I can, but because I want it easy to remember. For example I'll have the url on my bluegrass Australia site so that a section is in its own folder. Therefore to access the magazine section the url is http://bluegrass.org.au/magazine/. But it's not for any standards reason - I had no idea until today that standard existed. But simply for reasons that it's easier for people to remember. For the same reason we set our sites up so they don't need any 'www' (but work equally well with the 'www') Cheers Mike Kear Windsor, NSW, Australia AFP Webworks http://afpwebworks.com -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Anders Nawroth Sent: Sunday, 13 June 2004 7:25 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [WSG] file extensions Michael Kear wrote: What's the point of doing this? Saving 4 characters per image as a way of reducing bandwidth? Is there any other purpose? */ /* There is another purpose. See this W3C Note: http://www.w3.org/TR/chips/#gl3 [snip] * The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list getting help *
Re: [WSG] file extensions
Hi The portability of URI's is an important point here: as discussed, if a web developer wants to move from X to Y server side language yet retain the URL stucture then this is the way to go, in Apache it's just a simple matter of telling it how to handle certain extension-less files. That said, you should be able to set up a server to handle PHP scripts with .cfm extensions via the PHP interpreter and vice versa (as an example). I wrote an article over at the Sydney PHP Group on doing this with Apache, shared hosting or otherwise, questions welcome offlist or post to that group. http://sydney.ug.php.net/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=61 HTH James Anders Nawroth wrote: Michael Kear wrote: Whats the point of doing this? Saving 4 characters per image as a way of reducing bandwidth? Is there any other purpose? */ /* There is another purpose. See this W3C Note: http://www.w3.org/TR/chips/#gl3 Serve static content without file extension CM The reason why one should serve static content without file extension is similar to the reason stated above : the content manager may, at some point, want to change the document format used to serve a resource, yet the resource would remain equivalent. For example, switching from an image file format to an equivalent format, or switching from plain text to HTML... File extensions should therefore be hidden for static content, using content-negotiation (see Guideline 7: Server-driven content negotiation.), proxying or URI mapping technologies. * The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list getting help *
Re: [WSG] new layout/design
Chris Stratford spoke the following wise words on 13/06/2004 2:52 PM EST: Firstly thanks for the indepth review! Pleasure =) */ - Teaser boxes shouldn't be span's /*Hmmm. I thought it would be ok using a span because its only going to contain small notes, or a link or two. What should I use in that place? It seems that you're using span to separate text flow and div to cut your page into chunks for styling. A div shows a change in the flow of page content, just as a p shows the change in the flow of text. */ - Don't use a clearing div if you can just clear the (next) element itself. /*I dont have any clearing div's - unless you saw the older version. Or if you are refering to the footer div clearing. Thats needed so the spans dont intrude on the footer when the span is larger than the content. You should be able to just apply the clear: both; on the footer div itself. */ - Need more contrast on the lower 3 buttons. /*Is it because they are hard to read? They arent really essential, and I am thinking of reducing the thickness of the borders. I wasn't planning on lightening the colour of the bg though... any special reasons why? Two reasons: 1) It looks nicer. 2) It's more readable and hence more accessible to vision impaired users or anybody with an uncalibrated monitor (majority of web users) */ - Consider a skip link /*Why is this important? I only have 8 links, i have seen them before. and they look kind of out of place. It'll only look out of place if you make it look out of place. Making something more enjoyable is about making the little things easier. If including the skip link makes somebody's life that little bit easier as they read through your blog postings isn't it worth it? Hey it's up to you, which is why I said 'consider' =) I recommend reading Chapter 1 of Joel Spolsky's User Interface Design for Programmers: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/uibook/chapters/fog57.html */ - Is your H2 a heading with associated content or just a tagline? /*The H1, and H2 headers are merely for when the browser has no CSS. If you have FireFox, view hte BASIC theme. You will see the headings. At the moment they are display:none. Its just so the site looks good without the CSS AKA bastardisation of web standards. Choose elements based on their semantic meaning -- not on their unstyled appearance when viewed through [insert your favourite browser here] with styles turned off. /*I usually use all the H tags, down to H6... So I will have the structure, just H1 and H2 are hidden, and are displayed as Images really... I know its not 100% correct, but its not that bad is it? Headings are *meant to be* used to logically and hierarchically separate your content. Some of your viewers may browse your pages by skipping through the headings on your page. Does it make sense for a user to skip to your tagline section? - Ditch the FIR on your H1 and H2. Use an image with an 'alt' in your H1 and H2 element or an accessible IR technique. /*FIR?? Hmm... Im thinking :) FIR = Fahrner Image Replacement = display: none; = bad practice. It's an elegant method of image replacement but unfortunately for us it's inaccessible. If you choose to use it just be aware that the browser (or any user agent) is not under any obligation to acknowledge it's existence. As alternative user agents increase in use amongst both the community and less-abled users it's even more important to be aware of this particular gotcha (especially with the upcoming release of OSX shipping with screen reading technology.) -- tim lucas http://www.toolmantim.com * The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list getting help *
Re: [WSG] file extensions
James Ellis wrote: Hi The portability of URI's is an important point here: as discussed, if a web developer wants to move from X to Y server side language yet retain the URL stucture then this is the way to go, in Apache it's just a simple matter of telling it how to handle certain extension-less files. That said, you should be able to set up a server to handle PHP scripts with .cfm extensions via the PHP interpreter and vice versa (as an example). I wrote an article over at the Sydney PHP Group on doing this with Apache, shared hosting or otherwise, questions welcome offlist or post to that group. http://sydney.ug.php.net/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=61 I agree, portability of URI's are important and an extension for an image is not doesn't necessarily qualify for an exclusion to this rule. I quite commonly render an image dynamically by setting the MIME type of a php file to the appropriate type and displaying the image I require. But I believe this is beyond the point with this article in question; The article suggests removing file extensions in the html document, eg the file logo.gif would be written in the html as img src=/images/logo /. this has no relevance to portability of URI's because it is not a direct link. Doing that with a .html document may be relevant but definitely not images. Apache has a module called mod_spell, it's not turned on by default but it helps when a site has been ported from an IIS server to apache. It solves the case sensitivity issue. The trouble is using the external modules can increase server load, a lot. Consider that you have 20 images included on a page all with their extensions removed, that means the server has to scan the specified directory for all those files rather than retrieving the specific files. That can cause a huge overload on the server, especially if there are a lot of requests at any one time. Secondly the article also referred to removing comments from javascript as if they were unnecessary garbage, but doesn't this contradict everything we have learned about good, clean code? The purpose of comments is to remember what you did six months down the track when you need to do something to it. Removing comments will undoubtably clear a few bytes from a page download, but the result will be extremely mimimal. * The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list getting help *
RE: [WSG] file extensions
But in a shared environment, which is where the vast majority of sites actually are, all the users on a site would have to stop using .CFM extensions on their coldfusion pages if you were sending .cfm pages to PHP. That just isn't practical. And it would PREVENT people moving their coldfusion sites into that system without extensive re-writing. Not just changing filenames, but also all cfincludes references, all custom tag calls, CFC component calls etc. Similarly the other way, if you configured the system to process .PHP files through the cold fusion server. Everyone would have to stop using .php extensions for their php files, thus preventing anyone copying a .php site into that system without re-writing it. Most of the dynamic sites on the net are actually in shared hosting environments, not on owned or dedicated servers. I cant see the point in this standard. It seems to offer a tiny advantage for a vast cost, if all you want to do is get rid of .cfm extensions on file names, and .gif and .jpg extensions on images. On the other hand if what you want to get rid of is the ?randID=12324587clientID3212345 kind of thing, then dump PHP and go with ColdFusion. It's a piece of cake. There's no need to pass variables from page to page as a URL string unless you want to. You can do it internally using two methods - session variables or client variables. But to get back to the standards aspect - I cant see the point in having non-standard installations in a shared hosting environment just to meet this W3C standard, which doesn't seem to provide any benefits apart from saving a few bytes in bandwidth. Cheers Mike Kear -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of James Ellis Sent: Sunday, 13 June 2004 9:58 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [WSG] file extensions Hi The portability of URI's is an important point here: as discussed, if a web developer wants to move from X to Y server side language yet retain the URL stucture then this is the way to go, in Apache it's just a simple matter of telling it how to handle certain extension-less files. That said, you should be able to set up a server to handle PHP scripts with .cfm extensions via the PHP interpreter and vice versa (as an example). I wrote an article over at the Sydney PHP Group on doing this with Apache, shared hosting or otherwise, questions welcome offlist or post to that group. http://sydney.ug.php.net/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=61 HTH James * The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list getting help *
[WSG] IE float positioning
Hi guys, Looking for some insight into float on IE. I have an image inside a div, that renders beyond the bottom of that div (deliberately.) Now, what I want is for the barckground image of the div below to render underneath the transparent area of the image - which is what mozilla does. IE however, starts the next div to the right of the earlier div. The html is as below. I used a negative top margin on B to get it to be positioned right beneath A. ... div id = A img src = _img alt = _alt / /div div id = B ... I hope that's somewhat clear. Any suggestions? * The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list getting help *
[WSG] XML Prolog rant [WAS] Site breaking in Mozilla
It seems that whenever I try to fix a problem in Mozilla, then IE breaks. There's a very good reason for that... Because you are using the xml prolog, and I'm betting that if you remove the xml prolog, IE will start breaking too. and many more.. XML declaration is the correct name of the entity referred to.. XHTML always has a prolog -- the DTD, which is required. You can't leave it out and still have a conforming XHTML document. I've written a brief rant about this here... http://blog.webx.com.au/?/2004/06/the_xml_prolog_whats_in_a_name Cheers, chris * The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list getting help *
Re: [WSG] file extensions
Hi, Thanks for the vigorous and spirited replies. I'll just use the trusted method of file extensions, as this excerpt was keeping me up at night. I was hoping I was not just blindly loyal to convention, unable to accept a needed change. After reading the replies to abandon file extensions is just dangerous. Say it clearly, and you make it beautiful no matter what. Bruce Weigl Chris * The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list getting help *
Re: [WSG] file extensions
The voices are telling me that Peter Firminger said on 6/12/2004 7:48 PM: Not a good idea for the average website. If you're running amazon.com then there would be a reason to do it but for most of us maintenance would be an issue. Not even a good idea for Amazon. If you stop putting extensions on file names, then your web server has to look inside the stream it's serving, read the magic header information, and figure out the MIME type from that. E.g., ff d8|de ff eo something something JFIF means it's image/jpeg, #VRML V2.0 utf8 means it's model/vrml. If this seems like a roundabout way to do things, go with your feelings, Luke. I used magic just for fun on a Sun 3-60 I used ages ago as a web server for my group at work and just as quickly took it off because it slowed even the tiny amount of traffic we were getting to a crawl. Now I'm sure the relevant code in Apache is lots faster now, as are CPUs, but if you've got a site like Amazon, I'll bet you'd notice the difference. Just to save a stamp, someone asked if such a thing is ever done in the wild. The only example I've ever seen is w3.org. -- Rev. Bob Bob Crispen bob at crispen dot org Ex Cathedra Weblog: http://blog.crispen.org/ Don't ask yourself what the world needs - ask yourself what makes you come alive, and then go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive. -- Howard Thurman * The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list getting help *
[WSG] Banners promoting standards-based products and services
Hi, We've created some hard-hitting pro-standards banner ads on our site. The banners promote our product too, but if you want to use the ideas behind our banners to create your own, using humor more might be a good way to promote your own standards-based products and services. Here is the link to see the banners: http://xstandard.com/page.asp?p=65AD7677-2F9B-4488-B91F-8FD5D56A53F7 Regards, -Vlad XStandard Development Team http://xstandard.com * The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list getting help *
Re: [WSG] file extensions
Marc Greenstock wrote: that means the server has to scan the specified directory for all those files rather than retrieving the specific files. The server has to scan the directory anyway in order to find the file matching the requested name. Server software isn't omniscient, scanning the directory is the only way it know where to find the file on the drive. Secondly the article also referred to removing comments from javascript as if they were unnecessary garbage, but doesn't this contradict everything we have learned about good, clean code? Not in this case. The article talked about having two copies of your code: one for working on and one for publishing. The code you work with should have all the comments and indentations good code should have, but your live copy should have all that removed. * The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list getting help *
[WSG] Category for Standards-based applications
Hi List, I have added (at the request of Bert Doorn) a resources section for server applications that output valid code. Bert's question included the following: - In order to further promote standards compliant (x)html and css websites, I wonder if we could as a group provide a list/database of commonly used server-side scripts that are designed to output standards compliant code (or can do so with minor configuration). I don't see anything like it in the resources. I am thinking in terms of ASP/PHP/whatever scripts in categories like (to mention just a handful): Shopping Carts Content Management Systems Forums Blogs Classified Ads There are of course lots of script archives out there, but it's hard to find scripts that don't use tables nested n levels deep, font elements and other assorted crap. - I've added Movable Type and Farcry to start with so please add any others that you know of (and feel free to edit the text of my entries). See http://webstandardsgroup.org/go/resourcecat25.cfm Personally, I don't know that there are a lot of these available off-the-shelf yet. I guess that's where groups like this come in and our clever developers start making them available to the world. Regards, Peter * The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list getting help *
RE: [WSG] file extensions
Michael Kear [EMAIL PROTECTED] said: But in a shared environment, which is where the vast majority of sites actually are, all the users on a site would have to stop using .CFM extensions on their coldfusion pages if you were sending .cfm pages to PHP. This can be done on a site by site basis. I'm moving one static site to ColdFusion on IIS without changing filenames, and another has already been moved to php without changing anything except the apache settings (both are hostedx on shared hosting servers). Having said that, I can easily see from recent personal experience that avoiding the need to change server settings would be a good thing! -- Kay Smoljak http://developer.perthweb.com.au * The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list getting help *
Re: [WSG] Banners promoting standards-based products and services
Vlad Alexander (XStandard) [EMAIL PROTECTED] said: We've created some hard-hitting pro-standards banner ads on our site. Cool! There's some more here: http://www.lazycat.org/postcards/index.html -- Kay Smoljak http://www.glyfx.com * The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list getting help *
[WSG] Temporary unsubsription
Title: Temporary unsubsription I need to temporarily unsubscribe from this mailing list. I will be in Ireland until July 29th and I won't have many chances to read my mail, and I would use up all my space. Therefore I need to unsubscribe from this list until July 29th. Thank you. Dante R. Evans: The Bo$$ Also known by his pen name, "Sean M. Hall" San Francisco and Atomic Bomb History Standards-based Design and Development 7 years of Piano Expertise .5 years of self-taught guitar experience Opera 7 Afficiando [sp?] "Wir Müssen die Verordnungswidrige Browser Aüsrotten"
Re: [WSG] Sydney meeting tonight
A big thanks to Pete, his mention of using a unique id in the body tag eg: body id=typeA to differentiate between different types of page layout styles has solved a problem bugging me for ages trying to consistently style a small network of 12 sites with very similar formatting, I manage for a client :-) -- Neerav Bhatt http://www.bhatt.id.au Web Development IT consultancy Mobile: +61 403 8000 27 http://www.bookcrossing.com/mybookshelf/neerav Russ Weakley - Maxdesign wrote: Tonight 44 people attended our Sydney WSG meeting - a huge night (where lots of beer was consumed). A big thank you to Peter Ottery, who did a fantastic presentation on the Sydney Morning Herald site and its conversion to full CSS. We will get the presentation up on the WSG site as soon as possible. Thanks to all who turned up! Russ and Peter * The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list getting help * * The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list getting help *
