Safari ::
Detecting Mobile Browsers
Posted on :: Nov 30
It's becoming more and more common that Users are accessing your website from a mobile web browser (like that from an IPhone, Blackberry, Android or other mobile device). It's also becoming more prevelant that you need to start supporting and developing for the mobile platforms. But how would you begin?
Conditional Comments :: What they are & how to use them
Posted on :: Nov 24
One of the most common operations performed in a Web page is to detect the browser type and version. Browser detection is performed to ensure that the content presented to the browser is compatible and renders correctly. The browser type can be detected using many different techniques. Most methods of browser detection make use of script on the server or client.
This article introduces conditional comments, which offer certain advantages over scripted browser detection techniques.
Should Designers & Developers be held liable for Internet Explorer Design Bugs?
Posted on :: Nov 23
This is a question I'm posing to the wild Development Community becasue it seems more and more prevelant that Designers and Developers alike are being held accountable for Bugs and lack-of-interoperability especially when designing an developing Websites that are Standards-Compliant and are 'Web 2.0' compatible.
Internet Explorer, and its inefficient JS engine, is off in its own little world and forces web developers, designers, and programmers to make special exceptions when it comes to CSS and JS. Although its improved a little with the advent of its latest 8 version IE is slowly falling behind and yet people continue to use it because it comes with Windows...Designing Your Site for IE & Firefox
Posted on :: Nov 20
Hiding Styles from IE 6
It's actually really easy to hide styles from IE 6 but make them visible to standards compliant browsers. Use child selectors.
In one design I built, I created a two column layout that required margins and padding. This meant that I was hitting the box model differences when I viewed the page in IE 6. My first CSS style sheet for Firefox included a line like this:
div#nav { width: 150px; margin-left: 20px; }
This made the page line up perfectly in Firefox and Safari, but in IE the nav column was pushed over to the right too far.
So, I converted the line to use child selectors. The #nav div is a child of the body tag, so I changed the line to read:
body > div#nav { width: 150px; margin-left: 20px; }
Of course, doing this made the #nav div lose all it's properties in IE, so I needed to add in some IE styles to get IE 6 looking okay. I added this line to the CSS:
#nav { width: 150px; margin-left: 10px; }
The placement of this line of CSS is important if my page is still to look good in Firefox and Safari. The IE line needs to come first. Firefox and Safari will read that line and then it will be over-ridden by the body > div#nav selector lower in the document. IE 6 will read the first line and set the styles. It will then ignore the child selector, as it doesn't recognize them. When IE 7 comes along, it will act like Firefox and Safari.
By designing for a standards-compliant browser first, and then modifying your CSS to support IE's quirks, you spend a lot less time fiddling with the design and a lot more time actually designing.
Browser Labs
Posted on :: Nov 18
A wonderful co-worker had intriduced me to this excellent tool online for assisting me in assuring that a site we're building renders properly in Internet Explorer, It's called BrowserLab.
BrowserLab provides web designers exact renderings of their web pages in multiple browsers and operating systems, on demand. BrowserLab is a powerful solution for cross-browser compatibility testing, featuring multiple viewing and comparison tools, as well as customizable preferences. Since BrowserLab is an online service, it can be accessed from virtually any computer connected to the web.
Browser wars? The enterprise still loves IE6
Posted on :: May 1
This news may come as a shocker to the tech savvy folks in the house, but 60 percent of companies use Internet Explorer 6 as their default browser, according to Forrester Research. Meanwhile, your IT department spends a decent amount of time erecting barriers to prevent browser upgrades. Bottom line: Companies need a browser policy or they will risk productivity losses.
AJAX Development Gotchas
Posted on :: May 1
This Article goes over some of the Quirks and Browser behaviors and quirks you hsould be aware of when developing AJAX Applications. We'll be covering browser quirks, limitations and bugs you should watch out for.
Chrome/Safari Gotcha: Nameless Form Fields
Posted on :: Apr 29
In ColdFusion, you can loop over the keys in a structure without knowing what the key names are, by using either this syntax:
Or this syntax:
This is useful when you need to loop over a form with dynamically created fields — like editing N person records at a time.
IPhone Detection Scripts
Posted on :: Mar 31
With iPhones being all the rage these days, I am wondering if mobile versions of your pages might be useful. Viewing a site on an iPhone looks exactly as it does on your desktop. This is all well and good, but sometimes pages can be bloated with images, javascript libraries, and other markup that is not as important to your visitors. I am also a bit upset that the iPhone ignores the css media type of handheld. I wish there were an option to force Safari to render handheld styles as default, but I could not find any option for it. So I set out on a quest to find some alternatives for my iPhone experience.