Gone are the days when a nicely-styled text link was sufficient for main navigation. Heck, designs are even sporting graphical sub navigation these days. While this is a pain in the proverbial backside for easy updating, it’s what life has given us. And when life gives us graphics and demands SEO compatibility and semantically correct HTML, we make lemonade. And then we charge $125/cup.

So, how do we tackle this without all of that pesky JavaScript which is likely to break on any given browser (I’m glaring at you, IE6. And IE7. And IE8. And Firefox. And particularly Safari.) More to the point, how do we do this in a way that’s not just images and can actually be picked up by search engines? We say Screw the JavaScript! (I say that a lot.) The W3C has given us all the tools we need with HTML and CSS! We just need to find new and interesting ways to abuse them. Read the rest of this entry »

Apparently, IE6 throws a royal conniption fit when you attempt to have Flash do anything that involves pointing to an anchor tag on the page.

I tried a number of different methods, from a simple getURL to putting all of my functionality directly into JavaScript, but every time, it blew up.  More explicitly, it blew up after the second time it was accessed (so, click one functioned fine, click two functioned fine, click three went haywire).

For the issue I was working on, the workaround was to tell the browser to scroll to a certain point on the page instead of jump to an anchor, but I can imagine that’s not going to be a lasting solution, and certainly not dynamic.

-pb

Remember, folks, if you’re looking to affect an element’s height or width with JavaScript, you have to add “px” to the end if you want it to work in Firefox.

After bashing my head against a wall for a while trying to figure out why one page in a site was dropping my floated sidebar div to the bottom of the page, I came across this:

http://www.davidbisset.com/2007/12/20/drop-down-list-breaks-float-layout-in-firefox/

Say you have two divs - both have floats so that they can end up being two columns on your site. But sometimes when you add a dropdown menu (<select> tag) to one div) it will break the layout… usually meaning that the other div will be pushed down. And this usually happens only in Firefox. IE sees it just fine.

The solution to this?  Instead of the nice linear coding that you’re used to where the sidebar, to the right of the main area, comes after the main area code, it needs to be before the main area code.

Because apparently, in FireFox 2 seems to have a problem with floated divs, option tags, and SIMPLE COMMON SENSE.

I’m working feverishly to get PennridgeAlumni.Com relaunched before I have to renew hosting, which isn’t going to be with the same company. Of course, that means recoding from Classic ASP into PHP, so no sense in simply translating, I’m working on redesigning the entire thing.

Getting a lot done with AJAX. I’m shifting the user paradigm from a central account area to allowing users to edit things they have access to edit right on the page for instant gratification.

I’m also working on turning PhillyGoth into a Wordpress site.

-pb

I’ve finally scratched this thing together.  Watch this space!

-pb