I recently ran into a problem that was really hard to figure out. I was working on a responsive design where I used img {max-width:100%;} to make sure that images would be downsized rather than overflow in narrower viewports.
It worked great everywhere… until I went to check in IE8. The site’s logo was gone! None of the usual IE bug fixes cured the problem, and it took me quite a while to realise that max-width was part of the problem.
Copyright © Roger Johansson
In an ideal world there would always be a clean way of displaying data supplied by a third party on your site. Two examples would be getting the data in JSON or XML format from a Web Service and having an API to code against. But you don’t always have any of those options.
Sometimes the only way of incorporating data from a third party is by loading it in an iframe element. A few examples are financial reports, e-commerce applications, and ticket booking applications. Using an iframe is not ideal for many reasons, one of which is that it can make multiple sets of scrollbars appear on the page. Not only does it look ugly, it also makes the site less user-friendly. But there is a workaround.
Posted in JavaScript, Usability.
Copyright © Roger Johansson
Showing whether a link on a web page has been visited or not can be very useful. One example that many will be familiar with is how it helps you know which links you have already followed from a Google search results page – links to pages you have already visited are a different colour than the other links.
Changing only the colour can be a bit subtle though, especially for people with colour vision deficiency. Depending on which colours are used to differentiate between visited and unvisited links it can be hard to tell them apart. To make the difference more obvious, there are a number of techniques involving background images, generated content (like the one I describe in Check marking visited links), and other CSS properties. However, if you’ve been using any similar tricks to style visited links, it’s time to forget about those and start relying on colour alone.
Copyright © Roger Johansson
When adapting a layout for different viewport widths (a.k.a. responsive design) or media (like print), it’s common to reset any float and width values on major layout blocks to linearise their display.
Unfloating a floated element is as simple as specifying float:none. Width doesn’t seem to be quite as straightforward – lately I’ve come across several cases where people use width:100% to undo explicitly specified widths when they should be using width:auto instead. So here’s a brief explanation of the difference.
Posted in CSS, Quick Tips.
Copyright © Roger Johansson
I just recently ran into an issue when styling buttons that had me pulling my hair for a while. I had my buttons looking the way they were supposed to look in desktop browsers, but when I went to have a look in Safari for iOS, much of my CSS wasn’t applied.
This was pretty puzzling as I couldn’t remember having any problems with buttons in Safari for iOS before. After taking a closer look at the CSS I was using for these particular buttons and the CSS I had used previously, I managed to find out what made the difference.
Posted in CSS.
Copyright © Roger Johansson