7 posts tagged “craig-saila”
2003
The year that was. Craig Saila’s analysis of 2003
Better structural markup rants
Better structural markup rants than mine: Owen Briggs’ classic Design Rant and Craig Saila’s Tables or CSS? Choosing a Layout. Incidentally, my rant has sparked some excellent feedback in the comments section.
CSS Headings
Via Craig Saila, Christopher Schmitt’s 50 CSS Headings. Free CSS code snippets is definitely an idea who’s time has come—there are hundreds of copy-and-paste javascript sites out there but hardly any for CSS (discounting the many excellent full layout sites). Mark Newhouse’s extremely popular CSS Design: Taming Lists article does the same thing for lists but other than that this kind of resource is extremely rare. Web developers not interested in moving to CSS completely can still benefit hugely from using it in their current sites in place of nested formatting tables and presentational tags used to give the visual appearance of headings, so the more of this kind of thing out there the better.
position:fixed in IE, no Javascript required
Via Craig Saila, a method for getting IE to apply position: fixed without resorting to Javascript. It uses a conditional comment (slightly ugly but perfectly valid HTML) and works a treat. Kudos to Eric Bednarz for clearing up another of those niggling CSS problems.
Stylesheet parsing gets complicated
Craig Saila points to the SearchEngineWatch Webpage Size Checker. It’s a nice tool, but it doesn’t appear to take the size of linked style sheets in to account. I was playing around with the idea of a web page cache written in Python over Christmas and I hit the same kind of problem—while finding linked stylesheets using Python’s HTML parser wasn’t too difficult (and could be achieved equally well using a regular expression) things get a lot hairier when you start to take @import statements and CSS defined background images / custom bullet images in to account. Again I imagine a solution could be hacked out with regular expressions but a nicer method would be some kind of CSS parser (the Python standard library has yet to include one). Maybe another project for a rainy day...
DOM2 almost recommended
Craig Saila notes that the W3C have released DOM Level 2 as a recommendation and simultaneously recommended against its use in an article on News.com. Scripts should be used sparingly as they are less machine-readable or transparent than so-called declarative languages like SVG and SMIL
. I’m a big advocate of the labels.js school of scripting where DOM scripts are used to enhance the functionality of a document using the semantic structure of the underlying XHTML, while degrading gracefully (and without loss of information) in user agents without the required javascript support.