Dreamweaver, Flash, Photoshop, CSS, Fireworks and HTML Tips & Tricks » html http://www.livetrainingsession.com/tips Get Quick Tips & Tricks on Web Applications Development Tools Thu, 29 Jul 2010 21:16:48 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 How To Make IE6 Play Nice with Other Web Browsers http://www.livetrainingsession.com/tips/2010/03/how-to-make-ie6-play-nice-with-other-web-browsers/ http://www.livetrainingsession.com/tips/2010/03/how-to-make-ie6-play-nice-with-other-web-browsers/#comments Sat, 20 Mar 2010 17:40:22 +0000 Alex http://www.livetrainingsession.com/tips/?p=272 The constant web browsers war is more about the chaos and the lack of consistency across the board in implementing the recommendations of the W3C (Worldwide Web Consortium) regarding HTML and CSS. That leaves web developers in the middle of a land mines field. Those pour souls have to gather all the courage it takes to tiptoe out that mess when designing or updating web applications.

It’s up to the web designer/developer to make sure the web site displays or degrades gracefully on all major web browsers: Firefox, Opera, Chrome, Safari and Internet Explorer (IE6, IE7, IE8). Reaching that goal seems daunting if not impossible.

How can one make all those web browsers get along?

For years now web developers have been pointing the accusatory finger to Internet Explorer: J’ACCUSE!!

Well, a few years back Netscape 4 was sitting on the trial bench, accused of slowing down the web. These days, all eyes are on IE6 . Internet Explorer 6 does not support most of the new HTML & CSS features which take web page design to the next level: CSS round corners, PNG graphics, and the CSS :hover pseudo-selector is limited to the anchor tag.

Those are just a few of the potholes along a winding road. The need to make websites display well on all major browsers, despite all the shortfalls mentioned earlier, puts a brake on how far a web designer/developer can push the envelope. More and more time is spent on a given project tweaking and “hacking the code” to be compatible with IE6 and others. And that “my friends” can not only be a real nightmare for the web designer, it’s a big impediment to the evolution of the web.

Since you will have to include IE6 anyway in the list a web browsers to check your website again, here are a few nuggets to save you tremendous web development time and frustration. At any stage in your web design process (HTML/CSS):

  • Avoid applying padding to main CSS layout containers (div tags) at all cost
  • Use margins in the nested container to simulate the left and right padding on the closest parent container.
  • Wrap the text in paragraph (<p>) tags to which you applying margins to achieve the padding.
  • IE6 doubles the margin of the floated element on the direction of the floating (left or right)
  • Always specify a width of any floated HTML element
  • Apply both the float and inline display properties to list items of your horizontal navigation
  • If you must hack, create a separate CSS style sheet where you would group all the styles aimed at IE6 and use the Internet Explorer’s conditional comments.

At the end of the day/project, web development is all about matching the capabilities of the end-user’s web browser. It’s less about the artistic talent of the graphic artist or the programming skills of the web programmer.

“This web site is best viewed in web browser X or Y” is just an excuse to avoid spending extra time checking your design compatibility with other major web browsers. It might seem cost effective at first but it does not make business sense: you are loosing potential customers user web browsers different than your target browser.

All you need is to preview your site design at crucial steps during the web development process to fix potential problems early on. In the end you will achieve a design that will accurately display your website on all major web browsers. It may also be time to target smartphones as well.

IE6 is still here and breathing. We just have to deal with it.

]]> http://www.livetrainingsession.com/tips/2010/03/how-to-make-ie6-play-nice-with-other-web-browsers/feed/ 0 Use HTML Comments To Solve CSS Layout Issues http://www.livetrainingsession.com/tips/2010/02/use-html-comments-to-solve-css-layout-issues/ http://www.livetrainingsession.com/tips/2010/02/use-html-comments-to-solve-css-layout-issues/#comments Tue, 02 Feb 2010 21:00:29 +0000 Alex http://www.livetrainingsession.com/tips/?p=86 If you are not inclined to use HTML comments in your web page markup you certainly never spent hours trying to fix a messed up CSS layout. That’s a loss of productivity and money that could have been avoided with just a simple preventive measure: using HTML comments.  It takes less than 20 seconds to write one that could save you an hour of layout troubleshooting.

You just devoted  hours creating a pixel-precision CSS layout,  tweaked and tested it on various web browsers. It all looks good and works perfectly even in IE6.  You now have a  template you can use to create your web pages.  You start adding content, preview  that web page in a browser and surprise, oh surprise, your nicely crafted layout is now out of control.

What happened? More likely mismatched <div>, <p> or <span>,… tags!!

Without proper comments to indicate where each main container tag is closed in the HTML markup, it can be challenging and painful to “hunt” the source of this layout issue. Because you now have so many nested  tags, you would have to look into your HTML markup line by line to match each opening and closing tag. And if you happen to miss just one of them, you will have to start all over again from the “<body>” tag down.

Let’s just take a look at this typical  markup within a body of an HTML document:

<div id=”wrapper”><div id=”header”>Header content goes here </div><div id=”maincontent”><div id=”content”> Page content goes here</div><div id=”sidebar”> Sidebar Navigation</div></div><div id=”footer”> Footer Content goes here</div></div>

It looks clean and is self-explanatory. However once you start  to copy & paste content in the different containers  and add new blocks , matching tags becomes a daunting task. That’s because each container can wrap smaller containers through a nesting process that can go on and on. It’s hard to tell which closing “</div>” corresponds to which opening “<div …>”.

That’s why you need to always comments your HTML markup before you start adding content. For instance the markup shown above would be properly commented as follow:

<div id=”wrapper”>
<div id=”header”>Header content goes here </div><!–  end header –>
<div id=”maincontent”>
<div id=”content”> Page content goes here</div><!–  end content –>
<div id=”sidebar”> Sidebar Navigation</div><!– end sidebar –>
</div><!– end maincontent –>
<div id=”footer”> Footer Content goes here</div><!– end footer –>
</div><!– end wrapper –>

The portions “<!– … –>” are HTML comments. The will never be displayed by a web browser when placed in your HTML markup.
So the tips I would like to share with you based on my daily experience are:

  • Comments helps you annotate your markup for future reference.
  • Add an HTML comment right after the closing tag “</div>” tag of each main container.
  • Commenting your HTML code help you set reference point where each HTML tags is closed.
  • HTML comments  helps you  isolate  each block and quickly fix a CSS  layout issue.
]]> http://www.livetrainingsession.com/tips/2010/02/use-html-comments-to-solve-css-layout-issues/feed/ 0