Charanjit Chana

I've been uploading some photos throughout the day here at FOWD. Take a look at the slideshow below, or check out my Flickr set.

As we speak only photos I could Bluetooth to my phone have been added, will upload some more from my More photos added from my minimo later!

Tomorrow is the Future Of Web Design conference and I really can't wait to go!

There are a few topics I'll be really interested in and I am looking forward to learning lots more about the industry and where things are headed.

I'm still debating, but I think I'll be taking my laptop. All I'll be doing is taking notes, but I'll have my iPod and hopefully there'll be wifi so I'll be able to check in on emails too!

There are just some things that no front end developer should ever forget. There are so many things that often fall to the bottom of the list when developing something for the web, none more so than the ones I'll be highlighting here. It's often easy to forget small details, but when they're in they could make a big difference, especially when it comes to SEO and accessibility.

Titles

Often in Firefox, I find myself with quite a few tags but some of them just show 'Untitled' which just isn't very useful. Some sort of identification is always welcome by the user, whether they've minimized or tabbed your page.

Background color

This is a trivial issue and probably less than 0.1% of people will ever even notice it, but I will and it's a commonly forgotten bit of CSS or HTML when white backgrounds are used.

[ read more... ]

Another beautiful quirk in Internet Explorer is it's poor implementation of the setAttribute method. It's something I tried to make use of for my custom 'lightbox', but off course I had a lot of trouble getting it working.

After a bit of searching I came across a fix at webmasterworld.com. Using the setAttribute method should allow you to apply a class, an id, an event or any other attribute to an element. From what I've read, IE does this to some extent. It does apply the attribute you request, but not to the HTML element, it instead applies it to the JavaScript reference to the HTML element.

A subtle difference in definition, but another subtle difference that can add hours to your development time!

[ read more... ]

Internet Explorer 6 is possibly the single biggest pain in my life. I can cope with anything else that's thrown at me, but development time being doubled, if not tripled, because of IE6 is just something that really tests my love of web development.

I deliberately didn't develop for IE6 when building this blogging platform because I feel that I have a responsibility to promote better browsing. As a web developer, I do understand the need for backwards compatibility, but when a new version is released, it should be embraced. Plus, it's a FREE upgrade, whether you go from IE6 to 7, to Firefox, Opera or even Safari! The fact that so many people still use IE6 is a bit of a joke. It's around 10 years old, has well known security issues, is poor at doing what it's supposed to do and just simply doesn't work!

Forget the box model issues, forget the JavaScript issues and the lack of support for PNGs and even the ridiculous reliance on ActiveX controls, the 3 pixel bug is possibly the dumbest and most annoying thing that IE has in it's code. These 3 pixels that can quite simply ruin a perfect layout. 3 pixels that go unnoticed with dummy content throughout development and testing, but surface as concerns from clients when real content is introduced.

There are some 'accepted' fixes, but I seem to have stumbled across another!

[ read more... ]

As a follow up to my previous post on stopping development for IE6, I thought I'd share my knowledge of all the 'dirty' hacks that I'd picked up for IE6 and IE7.

They're not really 'dirty', but they're not always considered to be the best method because they cause your CSS to fail validation. For me however, they're just as effective as the conditional comment that people use to exploit IE's 6 & 7 to behave in the way they like.

I have used them many times, but have recently tried to switch to the conditional comment method. I do use them during development though, because I can just dump them into the CSS and HTML through the Firebug toolbar and I don't have to constantly switch between stylesheets

[ read more... ]

That's it. No more. I don't have the time or patience to do it anymore.

Internet Explorer 6 will no longer be developed for. Well, by me anyway. Some of my most recent projects have doubled in development time because of IE6. As a result of this wasted time, I've decided to stop and just add a bit of code to each of the new builds I do.



The above shows how it will appear. A simple bit of code that only IE6 reads and displays. It may seem 'lazy' on my part, but in almost any other industry, doubling your work load just for a shrinking demographic to make the most of your product, you'd be asked to phase it out as soon as possible

[ read more... ]

I thought I'd blog a bit about web development tools, more specifically, the ones that I feel are essential for web development on a Mac. I'll be trying to cover both Tiger and Leopard versions of OS X.

First up;

Text editors

Among the most important tools you'll need for web development, unless of course you plump for using Dreamweaver. Personally, I find Bare Bones' selection of software to be the best. Text Wrangler is an awesome, free, tool and is now compatible with another piece of software that was previously only compatible with BBEdit, Bare Bones' flagship product

[ read more... ]