Editing Live

Yes, if you happen to see some weird things going on, I am tweaking the CSS on the site. Live. See me work, or become annoyed and return when I’m finished. 🙂

Firefox for Mac and displaying small font sizes

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.

blurry focus

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.

CSS Shorthand Cheat Sheet

If there is one thing that I’m a sucker for, it’s cheat sheets. I love letting my eyes fall upon a single page and navigate right to what I’m looking for. It takes the whole “open book, locate index, look up word, find page, find where on page” process out and beats it with a big stick.

So the other day I was working on some trivial CSS, and found myself having to look up the shorthand for ’list-style’ for the millionth time. I don’t know what in my childhood prevents me from remembering it, but… it must have been traumatic. Anyway, I looked over at my CSS cheat sheet, and it was absent. So I searched the webbernet for a cheat sheet. I found Dustin Diaz’s guide, but that wasn’t what I was looking for. It was filled with information, however I know the values-I work with them constantly. I just wanted to figure out the order and defaults… and put them on the wall.

So here is my CSS Shorthand Cheat Sheet.

This cheat sheet contains all of the cases (that I can think of) where a CSS property has a shorthand notation. I’ve even added the obscure and rarely implemented outline and outline variations, as well as the Aural pause and cue properties (respecting accessibility). I even threw in the color shortcut (#abc) in for good measure. 🙂

From a design perspective, there is obvious room for improvement. I haven’t really messed with InDesign since it was called Pagemaker, and I was doing my high-school newspaper. So that was interesting. I also wanted the design to look slightly disorganized… anyone who’s ever seen my yellow shoes will know why. There are saturated colors, but no heavy backgrounds. I wanted it to be printed, and I only have a grayscale laserjet printer. While on the subject, it looks somewhat faded when printed. I have to look into adjusting the colors for priting grayscale, but I’d prefer not to darken all of them.

Anyway, I hope that someone will find it helpful. I’m going to use it tomorrow.

Pushing Browsers

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.