Rob Larsen

Archive for the 'css' Category

A Couple of Links and Random Thoughts, Dropped on You Out of the Blue

I haven't shared random bits of Internet with you for months. That changes right now.

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CSS Patterns That Need to Die- Yes, I'm Looking Right at You IE6

Here's it is.

//height for IE6. Thankfully IE6 messes up height in a useful way
height:350px;
//height for everything else. IE6 looks at this and says "wha?"
height:auto;
//min-height for everything else. IE6 is baffled by this.
min-height:350px;

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For the Developers in the Audience, a Scary Quote

Dave Shea says:

"Did you know that you can nest your divs so deep that Firebug stops working properly? I do now."

From:

mezzoblue ยง Design Rants

Personally, I'm surprised because I've seen some savagely nested divs produced by systems like Drupal and while it was a singularly awful environment to work in, it didn't actually cause Firebug to choke. Also, looking through his code, I see nothing that screams to me as being exceptionally deeply nested. I put a comment in. I'll update with more info…

Question: When is a CSS Class not a CSS Class?

Answer: When it's a unique identifier.

Check out this class attribute generate by my beloved WordPress' upload feature:

class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-4590"

See anything suspicious? I sure do. wp-image-4590 is a unique identifier being passed off as a class. Why? I actually have no clue as I'm not privy to the thought process behind that particular piece of code :) What I do know is pretty much demands to be an ID. When I teach this stuff to people, I say "If it's unique, meaning there will ever only be one of them, make it an ID. If there's more than one or it's a general descriptor, make it a class." So I look at that code block every time I upload an image and I frown. Then I blow away the whole class attribute away, since I use none of them.

This is just splitting hairs, I know. Using a class like that is basically harmless. But, truth be told, splitting hairs helps me solidify my ideas about the way these things should work. That, in turn helps me improve the way my crew and I do our thing. So? Hairs I split and everyone is happier.

I'm just doing my small part to make the web a better place one nitpicky, semantic post at a time.

Webmonkey Relaunches and I Flashback to the 90s

For real! I ran through all of the primordial webmonkey tutorials* when I was starting out building sites (10-11 years ago now!) and if the newly relaunched site is half as helpful it will be a great boon to the community. Great info and a friendly, funny attitude made it the place for me to learn about the web thing back in the last century. Honestly, I owe a lot to the usefulness of those early tutorials. Looking back on it I realize that Webmonkey, coupled with the community that sprang up around Dreamweaver at the time**, was a great forge upon which to build up my web chops.

We're Back! Webmonkey Relaunches, Rejoins Wired

The original web developer's resource has returned. Webmonkey has been completely redesigned, and we're ready to rock once more. Also, our entire content library is now hosted on a wiki, so every tutorial, reference page and code example is open for editing. Come on in and show us what you've got!

Webmonkey: the Web Developers Resource

*Some still exist: like Thau's JavaScript Tutorial, which is over ten years old now.

**I've been a Dreamweaver user since Version 1.2.