[WSG] IE, alpha transparency and sliding doors...
Hi all - I've been set what I believe to be an impossible challenge, but before I admit defeat I thought I should cast it out into the wilds of the internet and see if others agreed or could suggest a solution. The challenge is this: to create a flexible (vertical and horizontal) content-containing box with rounded corners and drop shadows (three sides) - over a patterned background. The problem, of course, is IE 5.5 and 6 - I've investigated the AlphaImageLoader filter and I can't see any way to make it do what I want - if I use the sliding-doors method, neither left nor right borders show up, even though the top and bottom work OK (barring the fact that you can see the underneath sliding image in the transparent bit going around the topmost rounded corner). I have also tested trying to make this work using side-by-side spans, which again could be made to work OK for the top level (fixing the over/under thing), but which then left me with the issue where the left border showed up OK, but the right border either didn't (because to make it stretch the full length of the content meant I had to put it in a div surrounding the content, but then AlphaImageLoader doesn't allow positioning, so I couldn't shift it to the right) so it was hidden by content, or only showed up 23px high because IE doesn't implement height: 100% unless the bounding box's height is expressed in pixels - no good where you have no clue how tall your content will be. I even tried using IE's proprietary dropshadow filter with transparent gifs for the rounded corners minus the photoshop dropshadow, but the results were too hideous to even contemplate. SO: Does anyone know of a way to implement such a thing, or is this indeed, as it seems, totally impossible? I'd appreciate either sort of response :-) Thanks, Caitlin. Caitlin Rowley, B. Mus. (Hons), Gr. Dip. Design Composer, musicologist, web designer http://www.minim-media.com/listen/ *** List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm Help: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ***
Re: [WSG] Usability Accessibility Over Design?
Hi James, On 14 Aug 2007, at 13:43, James Jeffery wrote: Web Standards, Accessibility and Usability needs to be put right at the top of the list, way before design. Focus on the users and the people, and it will help to create and bring the internet up to a better standard. I agree wholeheartedly with this. The point of design (as opposed to art) is that it is a functional artform. If it doesn't do the job it's enlisted to do (generally, to encourage people to use the site to whatever end by making it possible and enjoyable for them to do so), then it's a poor design and should therefore be changed. I'm not saying there isn't a place for good-looking websites - on the contrary - just that a good design is one which both achieves its purpose (usability/accessibility = increased visitors/sales/happiness/ whatever) AND looks good while doing it. It's possible, but many designers need to be a little more informed and a little more flexible. It doesn't matter how good pale grey text on a white background looks if no-one can read what it says. Stick it on the wall of an art gallery though and I'll cheer :-) Just some thoughts... C. Caitlin Rowley, B. Mus. (Hons), Gr. Dip. Design Composer, musicologist, web designer http://www.minim-media.com/listen/ *** List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm Help: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ***
Re: [WSG] Standards and Blogs
Rick, PHP shouldn't affect IE at all because it gets calculated on
the server, so by the time the page gets to the browser, it's 100%
HTML/XHTML/whatever - no PHP is seen on the client-side at all.
Cheers,
C
Caitlin Rowley, B. Mus. (Hons), Gr. Dip. Design
Composer, musicologist, web designer
http://www.minim-media.com/listen/
On 13 Aug 2007, at 15:16, Rick Lecoat wrote:
On 13/8/07 (13:01) Christian said:
You can even make a Wordpress blog (and probably the others) output
valid HTML 4 instead of XHTML. Tutorial:
http://www.christianmontoya.com/2006/02/13/serve-your-weblog-as-
html-401/
That's a really useful tutorial Christian, thanks.
One question though: On your tutorial page, you appear to put some PHP
code above the doctype in order to remove any instance of self-closing
tags. Specifically:
That's all you need. The full header looks like this:
?php
function fix_code($buffer) {
return (str_replace( /, , $buffer));
}
ob_start(fix_code);
?
!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC -//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN
http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd;
html lang=en
Does this not throw Explorer into quirks mode? I was under the
impression that anything (other than whitespace, maybe) before the
doctype had this effect.
Is PHP code an exception to this rule? or am I way off base here?
--
Rick Lecoat
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Re: [WSG] setting fontsize in body
It's all starting to sound to me like the only way to deal with all the ifs and maybes is to set up our own options - use the browser default size as a base and provide a switch for the user to set their own preferences for your site in case they haven't fathomed the mysteries of their browser buttons and menus yet. We can guarantee neither that users will or will not have used the in-built text-size otions (and with so many sites out there still using small text, it's not really practical for anybody to just set a text size and stick with it - you really need to be au fait with the keyboard shortcuts and switch according to site to make comfortable use of the facility) and all we really know is that some people may need to. For me, I think I'll go and look into PHP sessions and see how I can set up my site so they can specify what size font they want to use when they visit and have that size persist on their return :-) Caitlin Rowley, B. Mus. (Hons), Gr. Dip. Design Composer, musicologist, web designer http://www.minim-media.com/listen/ On 7 Aug 2007, at 12:54, Rick Lecoat wrote: At 12:13 (London time), on 7/8/07, [EMAIL PROTECTED] said: does Jakob Nielsen's research count as creditable research? Absolutely, of course. I would like to draw your attention to his Alertbox column, where he repeatedly states that tiny text is one of the worst design mistakes. To quote from his Top Ten Web Design Mistakes of 2005 at http://www.useit.com/alertbox/designmistakes.html : Bad fonts won the vote by a landslide, getting almost twice as many votes as the #2 mistake. About two-thirds of the voters complained about small font sizes or frozen font sizes; And nobody could make a case for type that is to small to read being acceptable. No me, certainly. But I just wondered how accurate the idea that 'type that is smaller than the user's specified browser default is too small to for that user to read' really is? Because we don't know that they /did/ specify it. The browser vendor probably specified it. At the same time, however, I also accede to David Dorward's point that browsers go through much usability testing before release. Of course, if we are to trust that usability testing to provide an accurate gauge of what the majority of people consider a comfortable reading size, then the fact that different browsers specify different default sizes slightly undermines that. -- Rick Lecoat *** List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm Help: [EMAIL PROTECTED] *** *** List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm Help: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ***
Re: [WSG] Please help! CSS/IE Link Color Problem
In the light of the pseudoclass and class having the same name and
smart-alec browsers trying to correct perceived errors, could this
then be a case of misinterpretation by IE6? Might it not be better to
avoid using 'reserved' words for class/id names in case this sort of
thing happened (I guess a test would be, if the class name were
changed, does IE6 still not recognise the issue)? It's not something
I've ever encountered myself, just wondering...
[having problems sending this - my apologies if it turns up more than
once!]
Caitlin Rowley, B. Mus. (Hons), Gr. Dip. Design
Composer, musicologist, web designer
http://www.minim-media.com/listen/
On 4 Aug 2007, at 10:57, Stuart Foulstone wrote:
Hi,
a:active is a pseudoclass, not a class, and the declaration should
read:
ul#navTopSimpleUL li a:active
not a.active class name.
Browsers are tolerant of mistakes and try to correct wrong coding in a
meaningful way. However, different browsers may apply different
corrections to the error producing different results.
This is why you are getting different results in different browsers,
rather than it being a browser fault.
On Sat, August 4, 2007 4:38 am, Cole Kuryakin wrote:
Hello All -
After tearing my hair out for over 4 hours I come to you guys/gals
for a
fresh eye and perhaps a solution.
I've got a simple class name (.active) attached to an a tag.
This class
is
programmatically activated when a link is chosen and the page loads.
When the chosen page loads, the chosen link turns deep red.
The declaration for this is as follows:
/*ACTIVE LINKS ONLY*/
ul#navTopSimpleUL li a.active
{
color: #CC0033;
cursor: default;
text-decoration: none;
}
A similar declaration is in force for the side AND footer navigation.
In FF it works as required/expected. But, even though the HTML and
CSS
validates, this small but important functionality doesn't work in
IE 6.
If you look at the testing site in FF (www.koisis.com/.problems/
index.php)
this works as required and expected.
If you then view the same page in IE 6 however, the .active class
doesn't
work at all - I haven't begun to test in IE7 yet and I can't
figure out a
work-around for IE 6..
If you'd like to view the css that controls the navigation rules,
it's
named
c.project_navigation.css.
Can someone(s) please take a look at this for me and tell me where
I'm
going
wrong, or what alteration(s) I can make to trigger this class in IE?
Great appreciation and thanks to all in advance!
Cole
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