Wed May 19, 2004

Gabs in menu list items in I.E.

Yesterday I was working on a horizontal navigation with vertical submenus in CSS using list items. This is normally not that difficult if you don't have to deal with Internet Explorer. You just use the :hover pseudo class to let the submenus appear when you hover the main menu buttons. Since this is not supported by I.E. you have to find a smart way to get around this.

There is an article/tutorial on A List Apart that explains the whole issue and that learns you to create such a navigation step-by-step. This was also my starting point for my menu. My example uses graphical buttons for the horizontal main menu with rollovers (by JavaScript, I know I could have done this through CSS, but this time I chose not to).

• Look at my horizontal navigation with vertical submenus

When I was almost finished with this I had to deal with another I.E. problem. There seemed to be 4pixel gabs in between my submenu buttons. Sigh... :-(

After trying out some different things with no result, I came across this page. And using display: inline; in the ul li selector did the trick. The only thing that still bothers me is that I.E. doesn't give the mouse hover effect in the submenus when I'm not actually on the text. If anybody know what causes this, you're welcome to share ideas ;-) Or if there are even better resources on the I.E. gab or I.E. :hover issues, don't hesitate to comment.

Update! It seems that there was a gab between the main menu and the submenus in FireFox (both on Windows and Mac). I was able to fix this by removing this code:

li > ul {
	top: auto;
	left: auto;
}

It seems that in my example this special code for I.E. wasn't needed after all. If I leave it out everything appears to be fine (in I.E. 6 Windows, FireFox Mac/Windows, Safari). Except when you remove this piece of code the submenus in Opera 7.5 (Windows) will act strangely. However when you put it back in Opera 7.5 works great, but then there is a gab between the main menu and the submenu in FireFox 0.8. I don't know how to fix this so it works in both.

Tue May 18, 2004

Clearing floats

A few weeks ago I posted an article about the collapsing effect you get when a float is contained within a container box that has a visible background and how you can solve this problem. It seems that there is a smatter solution that involves no extra code in the HTML to solve this.

I've found an interesting article on how to clear floats without structural markup. This page explains why this effect happens and how to solve it in both the "old-fashion" way (using "clear:both" and 1 line of HTML code) or the smarter way (no HTML code needed) using the :after CSS 2 property.

Mon May 17, 2004

It had to happen sooner or later!

Yesterday I got hit by comment spam for the first time since my blog started in 2003. My guess, that's the toll to pay when a blog is growing up. Both spammers were from the US (no surprises here) and only one I could trace as a Verizon customer. I'm sure many popular blogs have been down this road before but for me this is new territory. I've sent an e-mail to the abuse address from Verizon and blocked both IP addresses.

I'm using pMachine and the comment post feature is set with a delay to avoid spamming but obviously that's not enough to rule things out. Now I'm wondering if there are any more actions that I can take to avoid things from happening again. I'm also wondering if you also had this what are your counter actions on the matter. Any tips would be greatly appreciated.

It's not that bad now since there were only two, so deleting wasn't that hard. Obviously the last thing I want is to close comments since that an essential part what makes blogging so fascinating.

Fri May 14, 2004

CSS vs tables

Andy Budd wrote a very enlightening article on his blog about CSS versus tables and why in some instances, traditional table based design can be as good, if not better than CSS and standards based design. It was one of the best articles about CSS vs tables I've read in a while.

If you're like me and only started with CSS designs just a couple of months ago I'm sure you'll had the same feeling as I do. You're sweating to get your design right in all browsers and you're often wondering is this all worthy? Also, when trying to find a solution to the errors, you often ask yourself is this a bug? Or is it me, just not yet fully understanding the way CSS works? In other words, learning CSS comes along with a big doze of frustration :-S

But I can tell you it gets better over time. It's been 4 to 5 months now since I've started with CSS layouts and I learned a lot so far. The "big" frustration is over and I'm confident about creating an entire website in CSS, I'm all for it and I believe it is the way to go, all IE hacks included ;-)

Still, I believe that tables aren't "evil" as some people claim. I think, if you can avoid a table in your layout then the better, but if in some cases a table is a better option then, why not? Question is of course when do you know this? I guess the answer depends on so many things. A lot of answers can also be found in Dave Shea's article. I believe you can form an answer once you know everything you'll need to know about CSS and when you fully understand it.

Take for instance the CSS form that I created some time ago. It is a cool form "look mama no tables" but on the other hand I wonder is this all necessary? Is this worthy? It cost me so much time and effort. Of course I did this just as an experiment and I wanted to learn. But I'm not sure if I would actually use it since it is not 100% "browser-proof". Sometimes you have to take a step back and see which option would be best. It's not that if you use 1 table in your page that you suddenly have "bad" code, table tags are still valid markup and can serve its purpose.

Why am I so persisted on using CSS for my layout instead of "traditional" tables? Well I guess it's because of its light and clean code, its flexibility and if you correct an error in 1 style, then this error is solved in all pages using that style. I like to feel "clean" ;-) It's a bit like my desktop, I hated when there is too much junk there.

Thu May 13, 2004

Itunes Music Store Europe in June?

According to the French Macplus website our patience may be rewarded. If this report is accurate we could see the iTunes Music Store go live as soon as June. The European store is currently undergoing a live testing phase. As it looks now the store is scheduled to open in mid-June but could see delays until no later than September. A delay beyond June would somehow be attributed to the launch of 4 competitive online European music services, which are set to open in October.

To me at least it's not all good news! Ok, this is still not confirmed but according to this report the price for a song would be 1,29 Euro. 0,80 Euro would go directly to the record labels. It was to expect that the price in good old Europe would be higher then the US. To me 1 Euro would have been a better price and at least pretty fair when compared with the US.

It looks that the record labels here are trying to set the price high enough to fill their pockets and that way correct the mistake they made in US since there is much talk about higher prices in the US too. At least Apple denied that prices would go up in the US.

Nobody seems to get it that price is an important factor in all this. The one and only reason why cd's are failing is the higher price we pay and of course the shift to other spending areas like DVD, Ringtones, Games etc...

Which brings me to the last bit of news that the Store here would also carry phone ringtones. This is an emerging market especially those latest generation polyphonic ringtones.