MyDimension

There is an interesting conversation brewing over on dive into mark about object and Internet Explorer. Mark’s problem comes from IE’s poor support for the object tag. object was added to the HTML 4.0 specification to provide a method of including a wide array of media types into a web document. Unfortunately, Microsoft has been sluggish to provide proper support for this tag.

But the saga doesn’t end there. Other browsers support this tag in different ways. One person noted this issue in Opera:

Opera appears to handle all objects like plugins, even those that are handled internally (and thus cannot be disabled by disabling plugins!).

And, according to an anonymous comment, Mozilla appears to not completely render the object beyond displaying the image:

I’m wondering why I can select the IMG one, but not the OBJECT one (in Mozilla 1.3). If I paste it in Word for example, the Img is pasted as image, the Object is pasted as HTML code. So it’s not quite all right in Mozilla neither I think.

I for one would love to see browsers come out with reliable support for this highly versatile tag. Robin Lionheart has an object test page which also shows some very interesting ways of using the object tag, such as providing layered, alternate content in the case of a lack of support for the primary content. In doing so you can provide varying levels of content and the browser “chooses” which one it can handle.

But alas, developers are hampered by poor browser support and as such are kept from providing, to their readers, a highly usable interface.

Eric Meyer has re-released his CSS Support Charts over on DevEdge. He has also taken steps to ensure this information is forever avialable to the web development world by licensing his work under a Creative Commons license. When I get the chance I am going to pour over these charts to see what I can see.

Thanks Eric !

Nothing more refreshing then to see a site redesign itself. Simon went for the orange look today. I like it. Gives site a bit more life.

Point of note for the CSS nay-sayers, Simon did this entire redesign without touching his markup but rather by recreating his style sheet. Something which I plan to do with this site in the near future (/me crosses fingers). Only I want to go for something radically different. Get really crazy. You know? Now all I need is time and some really good inspiration. (Hint Hint – you know any?)

I picked up Eric Meyer On CSS today. From what I’ve read so far it is a very impressive presentation of intermidiate to advanced uses of CSS. Each chapter is a “project” that Eric takes the reader through. He states the goals of the project and then in a very understandable fashion executes those goals. There is a companion site which provides additional resources and updates.

CSS is a facinating technology that very few people have begun to scratch the surface of. With books like this, and authors like Eric, the rest of the web will become aquainted with the power of this styling language.

I was bored this evening so I re-marked up Andy’s webpage. His code uses tables for layout. While this is still the norm for the vast majority of web sites, there is a wave sweeping the internet that encourages web developers to use semantic mark up and use CSS for their layout. This has become the philosophy that I design under. With that said, here is my rendition of Andy’s page.

Andy has suggested that I hold a contest to see who can come up with the best redesign for his page. I’m not sure I have a sufficent readership to make this a succesful contest, but I’ll try anyway. If you feel the urge, submit your redesign to yours truly. Andy is looking for the most original redesign. His favorite colors are red, black, grey and white. As a last requirement, Andy is a self-proclaimed HTML newbie, so whatever you come up with, make sure it is easy enough to understand.

The redesign that Andy deems as the winner will be awrded a link from Andy’s page.

Via Simon, SitePoint has published an XHTML tutorial for beginners. I read through it and thought it very helpful for new developers.

Both Andy and Simon have come up with very interesting, and potentially very useful, functions for JavaScript. Andy started it by creating document.getElementsByClassName, a function that will return an element based on its class name. Then Simon come up with the idea of being able to select an element by using CSS selectors. Thus document.getElementsBySelector was born. So far they both seem to work in modern browsers.

I personally think document.getElementsBySelector will get more use because it is much more flexible. But that coming from a guy who, until a few months ago, loathed using JavaScript is not saying much. I actually enjoy using JavaScript now, but with one reservation: I will use it only to add features which can be safely lost in a browser with no JavaScript support. As cool as some JavaScript can be, it irks me to see some sites use it as a critical component to the function of their page.

As I promised earlier, I changed the way my icons in the navigation section function. They no longer use an img tag (go ahead look) and they react to your hovering over them. If they don’t react right away keep trying. Your browser should load them after a couple tries. I am aware of a few issues that I will be dealing with as time permits.

Simon has posted a number of interesting links. More to help cure his tag-itis syndrom going on in Phoenix than anything else. I noticed a few links there that I might like to check out some time. The are some great PHP, XHTML, and other web related links.

In my on going effort to try different design methods, I have changed the way the above banner is displayed. Previously it was an img tag placed within an h1 tag. While this method is totally valid and even preferred is some circles, I have chosen a differnet mothod outlined at StopDesign. This method removes the img tag from the markup, hides the h1 tag from most browsers and replaces it all with a background-image. My hope is that this will give more flexibility to change my design and even provide alternate styles to you, my readers. So be looking for that.