Going mobile
18th March 2008, Design, Javascript, Trends0 Comments
I’ve been knee deep in the web for as long as I know. Abandoning my graphics and Flash projects for the semantic web and standards driven CSS. But the proliferation of Flash Lite onto most phones has got my head turning again.
I think my first project will be to port retro classic Manic Miner onto my phone. That should teach me the ropes. More soon.
Firebug
15th December 2006, CSS, Javascript, Technology0 Comments
I don’t normally prop up other sites, but this little add-on for Firefox is excellent, mostly due to it being good for coders and the curious alike. Firebug is an easy install (as are all add-ons, you watching M$?) and it then breaks down the code, and even highlights, wonderful.
I know a few budding web-code curious friends that this could teach a thing or two…
iFrame shim
11th October 2006, Javascript0 Comments
Sorry to paraphrase a blog I just read but I was searching high and wide for this so some duplication around the interweb can’t do any harm. I was building some javascript floating calendar date pickers, and on explorer the calendar kept being rendered underneath the dropdown window elements. The reason being Explorer insists on select window elements to be rendered on top of everything.
Slowly I started to hear murmurs about fudging it by adding another window element along with your div, tricking Explorer to promote your div with the new window element. Still i couldn’t get it working or find out much, till I came across Soxiam Wiki. So thanks for that.
Why the title? Despite this solution being rather obscure, someone still managed to give it a name!
Internet Explorer Fails to do something
25th July 2006, Ajax, Javascript0 Comments
How many times does this happen in development? I’ve lost count. This time round, I’m working on a nifty Continent/Country/Region trio of dropdown lists where the respective parent goes all Ajaxy and populates its child dropdown list accordingly.
All working great in Firefox, but as soon as I tested in IE its all gone wrong. So what’s the reason? BUG: Internet Explorer Fails to Set the innerHTML Property of the Select Object.
What I love about Microsoft is there ability to acknowledge their bugs but instead of fixing them (if they can disable invalid copies of XP remotely, i’m sure they can tweak the DOM model in Explorer) they simply call it a bug and offer a very very poor workaround. When you then consider you’re trying to make future proof applications knowing Microsoft will abandon their crappy workaround as soon as you implement it, this all becomes rather frustrating.
Oh well. At least they spared me their splendidly deficient “This error is by design” conclusion this time. Back into the DOM I go to find the proper solution to this.
Date pickers
19th July 2006, CSS, Javascript2 Comments
I’ve been using a simple pop up date picker rather like this one for ages. Recently I’ve been refactoring a long term project with some splashes of Ajax etc and decided that I wanted a more inline calendar. Until now, the date picker has been built from the same PHP code that builds a more complex booking calender in the system, when really a javascript client-side date picker would be far lighter and suitable.
For the amount of CSS I do, I have a pretty poor understanding of positioning and the z-index but it seems to me that even the W3C have got it wrong. Trying to place a relative element into a layer above the page elements proved a complete nightmare, thankfully I found what I was looking for eventually. Its very well scripted and easy to decipher and tweak. It also helped me understand the workaround for getting a relative div to go into the next layer - simple really, sit it inside a parent node that is positioned absolutely, be it a p tag, a tag, even a span tag. Here’s my tailored version.
