Microsoft is claiming that a working version of IE8 is showing the smiley, and has passed the Acid2 test. Even if Microsoft is lying, this means that at the very least, someone there is using a browser that can pass!
[that, or they stole the screenshot from some place!]
So I had a problem a while back where I thought Firefox for Mac was picking up some left-over or un-overridden size styles, while the other browsers were not. It turns out that it wasn’t actually my problem.
While all of the other browsers that I tested… for both Windows and Mac display the default font (serif) set to .8em as glyphs that are 9 pixels tall, Firefox for Mac displays glyphs that are 8 pixels tall, but with 1 pixel of anti-aliasing on top. The difference of one pixel usually doesn’t mean much, but when dealing with font-sizes that small, it makes a big visual difference.
I submitted a Mozilla bug report which has not yet been picked up, but I’m not sure if there’s anything to be done, especially if the rendering engine is at all based on the system software (doubtful, since none of the other browsers work the same way). I wonder if the release of MacOSX Leopard is going to affect this.
Gotta love the Mozilla people, though. It’s such a relief that you can even submit a bug report for something like this. A chance for actual interaction, and a chance to better the product. I only wish Microsoft would pay a little attention.
I’ve been working on the same project for about 4 weeks now. 4 weeks straight. It’s the re-design of certain parts of a big site using CSS. Sounds like nothing, but the constraints of the re-design are that it must function almost exactly like the old. Therein lies the difficulty.
It is surprisingly hard to make the new act like the old. I am pretty good with my CSS, but when you have different parts that can expand to huge sizes, both horizontally and vertically, it is quite the challenge. Also, when certain expections have been set by use of tables, it is hard to design around them. There is only one widely supported html tag which can resize a collection of block-level elements similarly, and that would be a table. And yes, I have had to revert to a few tables (with some crazy CSS trickery on top).
I have found myself longing for Microsoft to catch up to other browsers, specifically regarding support of display: table* attributes, but I’m not really sure why I even looked.
Aside from the technical difficulties, my main problem as of late has been focus. I have focused so long and intensely on this one project, it is beginning to blur together. Today I was making mistakes in my code that I would have never normally made. And I had to think…for a rather long time about a conceptual problem concerning whether a certain piece of code should be put in an include, or in the calling source.
I guess I don’t really know how “long” is “long” to be working on a project. Something I will have to figure out gradually, I assume. I am glad to be able to recognize the problem, as I can now see if I can work on de-bluring my vision of the project. Maybe it simply requires a different perspective. That being said, one approach that I will take before anything else is to get a good long night’s sleep tonight.
So I have been working on a small piece of navigation at work. Tabs, to be exact. Multiple items, but no more than 5 at a time. Variable length titles (including some rather long). As it is a list of links, of course, I wanted to use an unordered list. It all made perfect semantic sense. Just spit out the list, add some CSS for the tab look, and done.
However, there were requirements for its behavior. The tabs were not allowed to wrap around to the next line. They also could not just drift off the right side of the page. Everything had to be shown. And it was alright for the individual tabs to wrap and grow taller. Basically, I was told the nav had to act like a table, just not in so many words.
Because I am likely more standards-driven than most doing similar work, I wanted to stick with the list. Doesn’t make any sense to have non-tabular data in a table, I thought. Within a few minutes, I had found a semi-solution. W3C recommends the display attribute having a “table-cell” property, which was just what I was looking for. Threw it in my code, hit reload in Firefox, and wham, there it was. Needed a slight bit of tweaking, but it was working for the most part. Then I alt-tab’bed over to IE7….
Nothing.
Low and behold, Microsoft hasn’t added that to IE. Of course not. Why would they? It’s only been in the recommendation since… you know, May 1998. At least! (I don’t have the heart to look any further back).
I am not “new” as my sister would say… I know how it is. I hadn’t expected it to be there, but the more work I had to do on an alternate table-based solution, the more it annoyed me. I keep hearing more and more about the CSS3 recommendation, adding more elements to HTML 5, and all of these other grand documents, which all currently amount to little-to-nothing. Maybe I am missing the point, but if 1998 is going to be ignored, why should 2008 be any different?
I am going to keep this rant short, the rant wasn’t really the point. The greater point is that was enough of a call-to-action for me. That’s what it took to realize I should start looking into what I can do about giving certain browsers a push in the right direction. They seem to be lost.
Continue readingSo we thought we just had a solution to the IE 6 background-image flicker problem. We were trying the javascript again, but calling it from the CSS. Nope, back to intermittent searches.
