Wednesday, 9th April 2003
IE6, italics and horizontal scrollbars
And the prize for freakiest CSS bug in the universe goes to... IE6! I was having a problem with the new design and a horizontal scrollbar occuring in IE6 for no readily apparent reason (the same bug had plagued my previous design as well). Bill Simoni on CSS discuss pointed out that the scrollbar wasn’t appearing on the comment / entry pages. After an extensive trial and error session I tracked the problem down to the fact that my blockquotes were in italic. If I removed the font-style: italic property from the blockquote declaration, the horizontal scrollbar vanished. No other changes were needed.
Half Hour Redesign
Redesigned. CSS changes only, took less than half an hour thanks to the zap style sheets, test styles and ancestors bookmarklets. I’m feeling orange :)
[... 58 words]The best bookmarklets on the web
Via Eric Meyer, the best bookmarklets collection on the web. Make a bee line for the Web Development Bookmarklets and grab test styles and shell (both Netscape / Mozilla only)—shell brings up a javascript console shell which can actively modify the DOM of the current page, while test styles (easily the most useful bookmarklet I’ve ever used) allows you to make live, dynamic changes to the CSS currently affecting the document. You type CSS statements and as soon as they are complete enough to be parsed they are applied to the current page. The other bookmarklets are well worth a look as well, especially ancestors which displays the CSS selector hierarchy of the element under your mouse pointer in the browser’s status bar.