Archive for December, 2005

A quick tutorial in elastic faux columns, so Faruk Ates does not have to write one and can con­cen­trate on writ­ing stuff I need to read.

Word­Press 2.0 has some good fea­tures, the qual­ity of the HTML it pumps has improved and the rich text editor with it’s pop up tinyMCE html source editor is just the thing a hand coder like me adores. How­ever, there are also a couple of concerns.

Looks like I have found what I will be doing over the four day Xmas break, giv­ing Word­Press 2.0 Release Candidate3 a spin.

Got poin­ted to the Per­form­an­cing for exten­sion Fire­fox which makes blog­ging easy from within Fire­fox. Just giv­ing it a spin and see how it goes.  Easy to set up for Word­Press and looks easy to use, only con­cern is how much will appear in the sum­mary sec­tion on the home page.

A fol­low up to my pre­vi­ous post on the but­ton ele­ment, a little his­tory, why doesn’t any­body use but­tons, fun with Inter­net Explorer and Loz­enges of Death

While try­ing to give examples of code in the last couple of posts I found out an inter­est­ing typo­graph­ical fea­ture of Word­Press. A single hyphen is rendered as a hyphen, two hyphens are rendered as an en dash and three hyphens are rendered as an em dash.

Which means try­ing to show examples with con­di­tional com­ments, when ever I typed <!– it rendered as < !– and the dif­fer­ence as you can see if dif­fi­cult to pick between <!- and < !–

There have been a couple of minor changes to this blog. You prob­ably will not even noticed them, they are changes under the hood. Again they where the res­ult of I should prac­tise what I preach.

I ended up dis­cuss­ing hier­arch­ical doc­u­ment struc­ture and the use of head­ing tags over at Port:80 with Andrew Tet­law aka atelaw. I am of the opin­ion that each page should have a single h1 tag which reflects the pur­pose of the page (ie the title) and doc­u­ment struc­ture should be hier­arch­ical from there. Nav­ig­a­tion should not nor­mally be part of the doc­u­ment struc­ture and there­fore not be con­tained in head­ing tags. The obvi­ous excep­tions are nav­ig­a­tion pages, such as a homepage or an archive page.

I talk about about using con­di­tional com­ments to serve a stylesheet spe­cific­ally aimed at resolv­ing Inter­net Explorer unique inter­pret­a­tion of CSS, how­ever, until recently this blog was more a case of do what I say, not do what I do. In the rush the to get the blog up and run­ning I used a couple of hacks, mainly the !import­ant hack to serve dif­fer­ent val­ues to IE and other browsers.

After read­ing Tantek Celik’s Pandora’s Box (Model) of CSS Hacks And Other Good Inten­tions I decided it was about time I prac­tised what I preached.…