Category Archives: Webdesign

Webpage design and development.

The CSS position property

The position CSS property was my friend today, along with it’s co-conspirator, z-index. It helped me out with a situation where I have a footer which extends upward into the content area (a web-2.0-ish gradient to white) and the content partly overlaps. IE was as usual being contrary, displaying the footer on top of the [...]

Expanding a box to contain floating elements, again

Back in February I found out a neat trick for making a DIV element expand to contain floating elements within it, by setting display: table.
Unfortunately it’s not so neat when you have a form inside of the table-styled element, and you’re trying to view it on Safari1. As I discovered today, the form just doesn’t [...]

Pick a language, any half dozen will do

Part of being in the IT industry, and the internet sector in particular, is constant learning and keeping up with relevant technologies.
I found that out the hard way, spending the first 4 years of my first full-time job working on a system that was proprietary all the way from the code we wrote to the [...]

Tracking down obscure errors in HTML

Programming a computer can be an enjoyable if geeky pastime, a decent paying job, or a teeming hotbed of inexplicable weirdness, wrapped in a mystery and embedded in potential disaster, every line of code a primed man trap, hungrily awaiting the programmer’s ankle.
HTML is very forgiving of error, but that’s not a good thing; the [...]

Floating LIst elements across a DIV

My current project uses “cutout” containers for content (div elements). One of these containers is a list of US States. I want them to display 5 across by 10 down, but without using table markup. I have them set up as an unordered list.
So far, so good.

Printer-friendly by default

So many sites have “printable version”, “printer friendly” and other variations of that link. They take you to a suitably unadorned, formatted for paper copy of the page you were just on.
They’re also totally pointless. CSS, with the @media print {} attribute, allows you to style your HTML for printing without the user having to [...]

First IE7 CSS problems?

Just a quick post this week, I don’t have much time.
I’ve taken time this week to redesign my other site over at Alien Experiment Labs. I wanted to remove some class definitions and use more specific selectors (now that IE7 supports them) but haven’t quite worked that all out yet. File under future improvements.
I did, [...]

More IE stuff

For continued IE 6 testing (some people will still use it, after all, and it helps if they can at least see something readable on the commercial sites I help manage), I downloaded the standalone version from evolt.org, and it turns out that the old hound doesn’t do a bad job of rendering this site. [...]

Kicking IE 6 in the stylesheets

In honor of Internet Explorer 7’s release and the new reality that, at last, all the major browsers in their most up-to-date forms can display transparent PNG correctly, I’ve started a redesign. It makes heavy use of transparent PNG.
It won’t, absolutely, positively won’t, look right in IE6 or older. Sorry, but it’s time to move [...]

IE 7 footer bug

Could this be some sort of CSS/layout bug?
We had a closer look earlier at one of the pages with the weird detached footer gradient. It turns out (well spotted, Erin!) that the footer graphic is “broken” on pages where our “Free Setup” badge ends below the last of the text.
To test this out we viewed [...]