Why don’t academic papers follow online readability guidelines?
Academic papers can be quite densely formatted. Using best practices for writing on the web could help increase readability and scannability for a wider audience. Continue reading
Category Archives: General Web Development
CSS: inner elements breaking border-radius
Some browsers support border-radius for rounded corners. But inner elements may break those corners. Simply using overflow:hidden on the outer element can often help solve this problem Continue reading
Web Standards – a good thing, but won’t help with SEO
There are many good reasons to follow web standards principles, to use CSS-based layout and progressive enhancement but SEO, unfortunately, is not one of them. Continue reading
Use CSS display:table for Layout
For a few years now, web developers doing CSS-based layouts have used floats or absolute positioning for layout web sites to avoid using non-semantic HTML <table>s.
While doable, extra hoops often have to be jumped through (mostly for IE) and some seemingly simple things can be harder than necessary (like equal height columns).
However, for a simpler solution, CSS-based display:table, display:table-row, display:table-cell etc are all usable today across Firefox 2+, Safari 3+, Opera 9+ and IE8. Continue reading
ASP.NET Is a Leaky Abstraction
ASP.NET is a leaky abstraction because it tries to hide away some of the details of HTML markup generation for you when sometimes you need to know about the underlying markup.
In doing so, it is too easy to create ASP.NET sites that violate web accessibility guidelines and contain unnecessary markup bloat. In some cases, ASP.NET makes it really difficult to create the exact output you need. But there are a some options to address this problem. Continue reading
Microsoft’s Internet Explorer Slows Down Web Development
This has been said so many times on the web by web developers frustrated at IE’s rendering bugs, lack of progress in support for web technologies, and so on, that at first I didn’t want to bother writing this post. However, a number of other posts on this site make reference to this point and I end up repeating myself, side tracking from the point at hand. For that reason, and for the benefit of some readers not familiar with this issue, this post serves as a summary of those concerns. Continue reading
The Email Standards Project
HTML-based email seems to be a mess, with different email clients supporting a different set (and sub-set) of web technologies such as HTML and CSS.
Microsoft’s Outlook has a commanding share of desktop email clients. However, Microsoft announced that Outlook 2007 would use Word’s HTML rendering engine, rather than Internet Explorer’s which seems like a big step backward.
While some may prefer text-only email, others prefer to — or must — create HTML-based email.
The Email Standards Project is attempting to follow the example of the Web Standards Project, but for email clients, web- and desktop-based to try and make HTML-email creation less hit and miss. Continue reading
Day 2: @media ajax November 2007
My impression of day 2 at @media ajax, the ajax/javascript conference with some of the leading figures in this area.
Day 1: @media ajax November 2007
My impression of day 1 at @media ajax, the ajax/javascript conference with some of the leading figures in this area.
Microsoft to make Internet Explorer 7 more widely available
Microsoft is making IE 7 more widely available. IE 7 still has to catch up with the other modern browsers but this seems to be a good thing from a web developer’s perspective as IE 6 is so much more buggy. Or is it…? Continue reading