Topics: Code: Browsers
Does your content travel well? Can your design and functionality survive from one platform to another, one browser to another, one configuration to another? Web standards and testing methods are included in this topic. (40 articles)
ALA’s New Print Styles
by Eric Meyer
Issue 203September 19, 2005
...we figured that we could wait until after the launch to fix up and deploy the print styles, with little or no impact or notice. Okay, so we were wrong.
Hybrid CSS Dropdowns
by Eric Shepherd
Issue 197March 30, 2005
Yup. It’s yet another CSS dropdown article — but one that resolves many problems associated with common dropdown methods and degrades beautifully. Hybrid CSS dropdowns allow access to all pages, keep the user aware of where she is within the site, and are clean and light to boot. It’s a tasty little vitamin pill, so quit sighing and try it.
Big, Stark & Chunky
by Joe Clark
Issue 191January 11, 2005
You’ve designed for the screen and made provision for blind, handheld, and PDA browser users. But what about low-vision people? Powered by CSS, “zoom” layouts convert wide, multicolumn web pages into low-vision-friendly, single column designs. Accessibility maven Joe Clark explores the rationale and methods behind zoom layouts. Board the zoom train now!
Pocket-Sized Design: Taking Your Website to the Small Screen
by Elika Etemad, Jorunn D. Newth
Issue 187August 31, 2004
Creating a handheld-friendly style sheet that works well even on handheld screens no wider than 120px.
Drop-Down Menus, Horizontal Style
by Nick Rigby
Issue 184June 29, 2004
Multi-tiered drop-down menus can be a hassle to build and maintain — especially when they rely on big, honking chunks of JavaScript. Nick Rigby presents a way to handle this common navigation element with a cleanly structured XHTML list, straightforward CSS, and only a few concessions to browser quirks.
Onion Skinned Drop Shadows
by Brian Williams
Issue 182May 21, 2004
Animators use onion skinning to render a snapshot of motion across time. Now, web designers can use this technique to create the truly extensible CSS-based drop shadow.
Print It Your Way
by Derek Featherstone
Issue 182May 21, 2004
Because ALA’s readers are web users as well as designers and developers, we offer this tidbit from Derek Featherstone on creating user stylesheets to print articles to your own specifications.
CSS Drop Shadows II: Fuzzy Shadows
by Sergio Villarreal
Issue 178April 23, 2004
Picking up where Part I left off, in Part II designer Sergio Villarreal takes his standards-compliant drop-shadow to the next level by producing warm and fuzzy shadows.
Let Them Eat Cake
by Aaron Gustafson
Issue 177April 16, 2004
A growing debate pits accessibility against usability. From our point of view, it’s like pitting peanut butter against jelly. This article helps you create a page that is both usable and accessible, saving readers the trouble of scrolling with a little help from JavaScript and the Document Object Model.
Power To The People: Relative Font Sizes
by Bojan Mihelac
Issue 176April 09, 2004
Relative font sizes may make websites more accessible — but they’re not much help unless the person using the site can find a way to actually change text size. Return control to your audience using this simple, drop-in solution.
CSS and Email, Kissing in a Tree
by Mark Wyner
Issue 175March 26, 2004
Despite prevailing wisdom to the contrary, you can safely deploy HTML emails styled with good old-fashioned CSS. If you’re not content to roll over and use font tags in your HTML emails, read on.
CSS Sprites: Image Slicing’s Kiss of Death
by Dave Shea
Issue 173March 05, 2004
Say goodbye to old-school slicing and dicing when creating image maps, buttons, and navigation menus. Instead, say hello to a deceptively simple yet powerful sprite-based CSS solution.
CSS Drop Shadows
by Sergio Villarreal
Issue 172February 27, 2004
Much used, oft maligned but always popular, drop shadows are a staple of graphic design. Although easy to accomplish with image-editing software, they’re not of much use in the fast-changing world of web design … until now.
Designing for Context with CSS
by Joshua Porter
Issue 171February 20, 2004
The medium is the message: Imagine providing unique information exclusively for people who read your site via a web-enabled cell phone — then crafting a different message for those who are reading a printout instead of the screen. Let your context guide your content. All it takes is some user-centric marketing savvy and a dash of CSS.
Retooling Slashdot with Web Standards Part II
by Daniel M. Frommelt
Issue 165December 04, 2003
In Part I, we showed how Slashdot could save money and reduce bandwidth requirements by converting to semantic XHTML markup and CSS layout. In Part II, we explore how standards-compliant markup and deft use of CSS could make Slashdot and your sites play nicely in print and on handheld devices.
Retooling Slashdot with Web Standards
by Daniel M. Frommelt
Issue 164November 21, 2003
A look at the markup behind Slashdot.org that demonstrates how simple — and cost-effective — the switch to a standards-compliant Slashdot could be. (Part I of a two-part series.)
Suckerfish Dropdowns
by Patrick Griffiths, Dan Webb
Issue 162November 07, 2003
Teach your smart little menus to do the DHTML dropdown dance without sacrificing semantics, accessibility, or standards compliance or writing clunky code.
Facts and Opinion About Fahrner Image Replacement
by Joe Clark
Issue 160October 20, 2003
Fahrner Image Replacement and its analogues aim to combine the benefits of high design with the requirements of accessibility. But how well do these methods really work? Accessibility expert Joe Clark digs up much-needed empirical data on how FIR works (and doesn’t) in leading screen readers.
Accesskeys: Unlocking Hidden Navigation
by Stuart Robertson
Issue 158June 16, 2003
Your favorite applications have shortcut keys. So can your site, thanks to the XHTML accesskey attribute. Accesskeys make sites more accessible for people who cannot use a mouse. Unfortunately, almost no designer uses accesskeys, because, unless they View Source, most visitors can’t tell that you’ve put these nifty navigational shortcuts to work on your site. In this issue, Stuart Robertson unlocks the secret of providing visible accesskey shortcuts.
Cross-Browser Variable Opacity with PNG: A Real Solution
by Michael Lovitt
Issue 156December 21, 2002
Think you’re stuck with wimpy GIFs and their rigid binary transparency? Well, think again, Sunshine. Michael Lovitt shows how to overcome flaky browser support for PNG so you can take advantage of this graphic format’s lossless compression, alpha transparency, and variable opacity.
Flash MX: Clarifying the Concept
by Joe Clark
Issue 143April 26, 2002
In a detailed survey, accessibility obsessive Joe Clark evaluates Flash MX (authoring tool and player) in the context of the often confusing WAI and Section 508 guidelines, finds some things to cheer about, and draws a roadmap for future improvements.
Build a Cross-Platform Testing Station in Mac OS
by Paul Sciortino
Issue 139March 01, 2002
Everybody talks about cross-platform testing, but nobody’s shown how to do it on a nuts-and-bolts level. Until now. Sciortino’s comprehensive tutorial for Mac-based web designers will set you up with the testing platform of your dreams.
Better Living Through XHTML
by Jeffrey Zeldman
Issue 137February 15, 2002
Everything you wanted to know about converting from HTML to XHTML, including why you’d want to, tools that help, changes in the way browsers display XHTML pages, shortcuts, bugs, workarounds, and other tips you won’t find elsewhere.
What the Hell is XML?
by Troy Janisch
Issue 132January 04, 2002
Attention, content managers, developers, site owners and designers: XML is here, and the time to start using it is now.
Omniweb and Standards
by waferbaby
Issue 131December 28, 2001
Omniweb, a promising new browser for Mac OS X, has been much praised for its elegant interface and beautiful antialiasing of text. But how does it fare with web standards like CSS and the DOM? To find out, Waferbaby puts newly released version 4.1b1 through the paces.
Mac Browser Roundup (with Håkon Lie and Tantek Çelik)
by Jeffrey Zeldman
Issue 130December 24, 2001
We test drove and reviewed the new Mac browsers, then asked browser makers Håkon Lie of Opera and Tantek Çelik of Microsoft to respond to our comments.
Why Don’t You Code for Netscape?
by Jeffrey Zeldman
Issue 129December 07, 2001
Long considered the Holy Grail of web design, “backward compatibility” has its place; but at this point in web development history, shouldn’t we be more concerned about forward compatibility? ALA makes the case for authoring to web standards instead of browser quirks.
MSN, Opera, and Web Standards
by HГҐkon Wium Lie
Issue 127November 09, 2001
Håkon Lie, the father of Style Sheets and CTO of Opera, debunks Microsoft’s claim that web standards have anything to do with the blocking of Opera and Mozilla users from MSN.com. Lie’s eye–opening commentary includes a chart analyzing all 63 top–level pages at MSN.com in terms of standards compliance.
Much Ado About Smart Tags
by Chris Kaminski
Issue 115July 22, 2001
Microsoft’s proprietary Smart Tags: Boon or bane? Kaminski digs deep beneath the hype and paranoia in an extensive assessment of what Microsoft hath wrought.
CSS Design: Size Matters
by Todd Fahrner
Issue 109May 11, 2001
Everything you think you know about controlling text sizes on the web is either wrong, or else it doesn’t work. In this much-bookmarked ALA classic, UI designer and CSS Todd Fahrner provides a way out of the mess by showing how to make CSS font size keywords work – even in stubborn browsers that get CSS wrong.
“Forgiving” Browsers Considered Harmful
by J. David Eisenberg
Issue 107April 27, 2001
By hiding the need for structure that the web will require as it moves toward XHTML and XML, “forgiving” web browsers have helped breed a world of structural markup illiterates. Eisenberg examines the damage done.
To Hell With Bad Browsers
by Jeffrey Zeldman
Issue 99February 16, 2001
In a year or two, all sites will be designed with standards that separate structure from presentation (or they will be built with Flash 7). We can watch our skills grow obsolete, or start learning standards-based techniques. In fact, since the latest versions of IE, Navigator, and Opera already support many web standards, if we are willing to let go of the notion that backward compatibility is a virtue, we can stop making excuses and start using these standards now. At ALA, beginning with Issue No. 99, we’ve done just that. Join us.
From Table Hacks to CSS Layout: A Web Designer’s Journey
by Jeffrey Zeldman
Issue 99February 16, 2001
Redesigning A List Apart using CSS should have been easy. It wasn’t. The first problem was understanding how CSS actually works. The second was getting it to work in standards-compliant browsers. A journey of discovery.
This HTML Kills: Thoughts on Web Accessibility
by Jim Byrne
Issue 98October 20, 2003
Activist Jim Byrne sounds off on the importance of web accessibility, and the difficulty of doing it right.
Daemon Skins: Separating Presentation from Content
by Mark Newhouse
Issue 87November 03, 2000
There ’s more than one way to skin a website. Newhouse demonstrates creative scripting techniques that give viewers and designers the control they crave.
Dr. Strangeglobe: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love The W3C.
by Erika Meyer
Issue 76August 11, 2000
Can the mysterious Dr Strangeglobe save the WWWorld from a conspiracy to contaminate our precious liquid layouts? Erika Meyer takes a non-standard look at the W3C in this charming yet educational spoof of the Kubrick classic.
Walking Backwards: Supporting Non-Western Languages on the Web
by Shoshannah L. Forbes
Issue 65May 26, 2000
And you think you?ve got problems. Try building web sites in a bi-directional language like Hebrew or Arabic. Israeli web developer Shoshannah L. Forbes discusses the mind-boggling hardships involved, and looks at what the latest browsers are doing about it.
Why IE5/Mac Matters
by Jeffrey Zeldman
Issue 57March 31, 2000
It complies with two key web standards. And leaves out two others. It’s IE5 Macintosh Edition, the first browser on any platform to truly support HTML 4 and CSS-1. Its accessibility enhancements put the user in charge, and its clever new features solve long-standing cross-platform and usability problems. All this … but still no XML or DOM. Zeldman explains what IE5/Mac means to the web.
Why Gecko Matters: What Netscape's Upcoming Browser Will Mean to the Web
by Jeffrey Zeldman
Issue 56March 24, 2000
Netscape is about to unleash its new browser, built around the Gecko rendering engine. Theoretically the first completely standards-compliant web browser, Gecko enters a world where most people use IE5 (which is not completely standards-compliant). Is Netscape’s effort too little, too late? Or is it the beginning of a new and better way to create websites? Zeldman articulates The Web Standards Project’s position and explains what Netscape’s browser will mean to the web.
Fear of Style Sheets
by Jeffrey Zeldman
Issue 8March 12, 1999
“No-fault CSS” can help you work around frightened clients, buggy software, and readers who still love last year’s browser. In Part One of a series, Zeldman walks you through the fear.
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