Keri Henare

Dan Cederholm is in the middle of another live design refresh. In the meantime SimpleBits has no styling what-so-ever. I'm not a very patient person and I love Dan Cederholm's designs so I decided not to wait for the new design.

Dan removes the <link> element for his screen.css so I've created a Greasemonkey script that add's it back in as well as removes the little 'tune up' message.

var link = document.createElement('link');
  link.setAttribute('rel', 'stylesheet');
  link.setAttribute('type', 'text/css');
  link.setAttribute('href', '/css/screen.css');
  link.setAttribute('media', 'screen, projection');

var style = document.createElement('style');
  style.setAttribute('id', 'hide-h2');
  style.setAttribute('type', 'text/css');
  style.setAttribute('media', 'screen, projection');

var text = document.createTextNode('body > h2 { display: none; }');

document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(link);
document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(style);
document.getElementById('hide-h2').appendChild(text);

I just received a link to an image showing how Microsoft's web designers are web standards enthusists like the rest of us. It may not be something new but I think that it's hilarious. It's all been fixed up now.

/* fix for the IE 1px-off margin error */
* html .StupidIEMarginHack
{
  margin-right: 1px; 
}

* html .StupidIEWidthHack
{
  width: 100%;
}

Has been replaced with:

* html .HtmlRightMargin
{
  margin-right: 1px; 
}

* html .HtmlWidth
{
  width: 100%;
}

I'm sad that this has been altered but happy to see that the staff at Microsoft really are making a difference and I don't think it'll be long before we start to see more and more of the Microsoft that we really want.

Hold your applause, I have to clarify: I (kerihenare.com) am getting naked for Dunstin Diaz's First Annual Naked Day. I (Keri Henare the person) will be keeping my clothes on unless requested otherwise.

I think that my website should look fine without any changes because I always have a huge focus on correct semantics. For me this is 75% a case of why not rather than why. It's something fun to do... well, my idea of fun may differ to your own.

One of my favourite designers (possibly my all time favourite) Dan Cederholm has yet again realigned his website with a nice new design called Araknoid.

Since it was posted on ieBlog that some existing CSS filters will no longer work on future versions of Internet Explorer (including the upcoming IE7) there has been a bit of a buzz about the disappearance of the commonly used Star-Hack. Filters have become a necessary evil in order to resolve bugs and inconsistencies with the browsers. In an ideal world where all browsers behaved the same way and were bug-free we wouldn't need filters, however that world does not exist. At the same time filters are all about exploiting other bugs in browsers in order to get them to ignore sections of code or to parse sections that other browsers wont.

When all is said and done it is my opinion that all bugs should be fixed where possible. Which leaves us trying to find new ways to address the remaining bugs. The IE team have suggested using conditional statements within comments. This isn't that bad an idea but I'm not a big fan of using conditions within HTML.

My suggested alternative is to add ie7 to the beginning of the CSS selector. Basically we would be replacing all bug based filters aimed at IE with a dedicated, browser supported filter. While this method is obviously not part of any CSS specification it would be tidy, easy to learn and it doesn't throw up an error in the W3C validator. The question that remains is what everyone else thinks of this idea and whether or not the IE team would introduce it. Perhaps other browsers could add similar optional browser specific prefixes.