Missing tricks...
I have just been designing webpages. Now most of the stuff I do tends to be at the back end. A little time is spent getting it to the screen, but I mostly use the "stick to what you know" route. Once I discovered DIVs in IE, and js, I stopped worrying to much about it. All of it tends to be for IE, so cross browser issues can be ignored.
All the mucking about with wikis made me want to make a new interface for it, so I started poking around inside the HTML generated from it.
The first useful thing I learnt was conditional imports:
I never realized you could do these at the browser. You can also detect the version that way:
Handy. Though to be honest I have not ever really needed it.
Next thing was useful though. Page layouts hare always been a pain for me. You always want to do columns and either end up with a nasty table with variable divs, that renders dodgily or have absolute positioned divs that don't resize propery. Luckily most of my stuff has to fit to fill the screen, so I have got away with it for a long time.
However, times are changing. The CSS I didn't realize existed was the "float:left" tag. This allows you to make a div sit in the flow. I guess I realized that such things could be done (inline divs for instance), but I had never thought of using them to lay out tables without tables.
Moving on I am starting to pick up on the numerous browser quirks. IE has many, however most have been limited to CSS - and like I said I never needed them. IE's Javascript, however, is much more robust - event handling on Firefox and Opera seem a little less certain.
CSS handling was something I stayed away from in IE for a reason: everyone said it was bad. I can see their point, but I now think I may have taken it too far. Most things is CSS 2 look to be supported. Layouts can be made hugely complex by CSS, and I have never been fond of pages that get transformed so far from the source you wonder where it came from.
W3C hasn't helped either. They seem to have an obsession with long method names to do minor things (getElementByID is a personal favourite - bloating webpages everywhere), and different properties doing the same thing. The original style tag was an innovation they seemed to have ignored. Style combines up a bunch of properties in a known, logical location. ALT TITLE DESCRIPTION SRC HREF all crop up on different tags, and even the style tag is not as consistant as it should be - combo boxes missing zorders.
Right I'm off to try out some new found knowledge - 6 years after it was invented. God, I'm getting slow!
All the mucking about with wikis made me want to make a new interface for it, so I started poking around inside the HTML generated from it.
The first useful thing I learnt was conditional imports:
I never realized you could do these at the browser. You can also detect the version that way:
Handy. Though to be honest I have not ever really needed it.
Next thing was useful though. Page layouts hare always been a pain for me. You always want to do columns and either end up with a nasty table with variable divs, that renders dodgily or have absolute positioned divs that don't resize propery. Luckily most of my stuff has to fit to fill the screen, so I have got away with it for a long time.
However, times are changing. The CSS I didn't realize existed was the "float:left" tag. This allows you to make a div sit in the flow. I guess I realized that such things could be done (inline divs for instance), but I had never thought of using them to lay out tables without tables.
Moving on I am starting to pick up on the numerous browser quirks. IE has many, however most have been limited to CSS - and like I said I never needed them. IE's Javascript, however, is much more robust - event handling on Firefox and Opera seem a little less certain.
CSS handling was something I stayed away from in IE for a reason: everyone said it was bad. I can see their point, but I now think I may have taken it too far. Most things is CSS 2 look to be supported. Layouts can be made hugely complex by CSS, and I have never been fond of pages that get transformed so far from the source you wonder where it came from.
W3C hasn't helped either. They seem to have an obsession with long method names to do minor things (getElementByID is a personal favourite - bloating webpages everywhere), and different properties doing the same thing. The original style tag was an innovation they seemed to have ignored. Style combines up a bunch of properties in a known, logical location. ALT TITLE DESCRIPTION SRC HREF all crop up on different tags, and even the style tag is not as consistant as it should be - combo boxes missing zorders.
Right I'm off to try out some new found knowledge - 6 years after it was invented. God, I'm getting slow!
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