I’ve decided to start cataloging the sites that I’ve done recently, big or small. So, here we go:

Indian Valley Dental

Indian Valley Dental

What the client wanted:
This was a redesign of an existing CMS site that had a lot of Flash-based elements, including the navigation.

What I delivered:
The design kept the header flash from the old site, and I brought over the little Flash page title flourish.

I reworked the existing CMS to provide data is much more search-engine friendly and a lot more streamlined. The header navigation uses a CSS hover effect with a jQuery dropdown. The bottom navigation uses a quick server-side element to generate a style that underlines the page that you’re currently on, and the Contact Us page uses jQuery form validation and an AJAX spam-catcher.

The site is identical in IE 6, 7 and 8, Firefox 3, Chrome 3, Safari 4PB and Opera 10 (aside from a few form elements that resist styling).

Simple from the ground up, but that’s the way I like them.

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Yes, I know I don’t update here as often as I should, but hey, I do this, I just don’t frequently write about it.

So, let’s say you’ve coded a beautiful site, and you’re really proud of it, and you check it in IE6 and it looks like someone wrapped the entire thing in marquee and blink tags and then had their dog recode it for you. The natural inclination is to scream and toss your monitor out the window, and then hire Tom Clancy to write you into a Rainbow Six novel where you take out Microsoft Headquarters. While that would be an exciting read, what’s really going to solve your problem is to simply write a new CSS file to compensate for IE6 not being a real browser and a large (but slowly shrinking) segment of the browsing population not understanding that.

So, here’s how you handle adding a new CSS file in the most painless way possible:

You’ll already have your css declaration, which should look like this:

  <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="screen" href="/css/style.css" />

So, all you do is create your new CSS file, name it something like ie6.css, and throw that in there too.

  <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="screen" href="/css/ie6.css" />

But you don’t want Firefox (or Opera, or Safari, or even IE7) to see this web-based atrocity, so we’ve got to tell them to just move along, nothing to see here, folks:

  <!--[if IE 6]><link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="screen" href="/css/style.css" /><![endif]-->

That’s right, that’s all there is to it! Now, only IE6 will see it that CSS file.

BUT WAIT THERE’S MORE! This little trick is actually a bit more powerful.

You can wrap whole sections of code in this block:

<!--[if...]>

...

<[endif]-->

And, it’s not just for IE6. You can check for any IE version or even a range of versions with this syntax:

if IE 5.5 Single version specific
if gt IE 5.5 all versions greater than the specified version
if gte IE 6 all version greater than or equal to the specified version
if lt IE 7 all versions lower than
if lte IE 6 all versions lower than or equal to the specified version

So, if your problem exists in IE6 and IE7, but not IE 8, you’d just add

  <!--[if lte IE 7]><link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="screen" href="/css/style.css" /><![endif]-->

to capture anything equal to or lower than IE7.

Now, a quick note on crafting your CSS files. In my IE .css files, I just take the line that’s not working in IE, copy it to my IE6 css, and beat it until it complies. The problem with this method is that you’ve now got two lines crashing into each other, fighting a bloody struggle for dominance (and submission!). How, you ask, do you get the desired line to be the one that works? Give it an inflated sense of importance.

Say you’ve got this line:

 .page_content { background:#0CF; padding:10px 15px 10px 297px; }

but IE6 doesn’t understand pixels (or turquose), so you need to change it to:

 .page_content { background:#FC0; padding:11px 16px 12px 15px; }

the way to make sure that the line from your IE css is to add !important to the end of every statement, before the semicolon:

 .page_content { background:#FC0 !important; padding:11px 16px 12px 15px !important; }

That will guarantee that those declarations are the ones that are recognized when there’s the possibility for confusion.

It’s not enough! I need more! IE checking doesn’t seem to satisfy.

Do you need more advanced browser checking? Are you encountering a 1-pixel variance in Chrome? Do you want to have your website make fun of backwards Safari users? Well, simply checking for IE6 isn’t going to help you. You need more power (ah! ah! ah!):

<?
	if(preg_match("|Opera/([0-9].[0-9]{1,2})|", $useragent, $matched)){
		$browser_version = $matched[1];
		$browser = "Opera";
	}elseif(preg_match("|MSIE ([0-9].[0-9]{1,2})|", $useragent, $matched)){
		$browser_version = $matched[1];
		$browser = "IE";
	}elseif(preg_match("|Firefox/([0-9\.]+)|", $useragent, $matched)){
		$browser_version = $matched[1];
		$browser = "Firefox";
	}elseif(preg_match("|Chrome/([0-9\.]+)|", $useragent, $matched)){
		$browser_version = $matched[1];
		$browser = "Chrome";
	}elseif(preg_match("|Safari/([0-9\.]+)|", $useragent, $matched)){
		$browser_version = $matched[1];
		$browser = "Safari";
	}else{
		$browser_version = 0;
		$browser = "Other";
	}
?>

The output of this will get you down to the very version number, so if you’ve got some philosophical disagreement with anyone running Firefox 3.0.12, you can pick that version out specifically (but why? WHY?!).

It’s a good idea to leave this whole code chunk intact an in order, because Opera can masquerade as IE if you’re just checking for IE, and Chrome will pretend it’s Safari if you’re just checking for Safari.

-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.