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Firefox 3.0 beta 5 on Kubuntu 8.04 renders some text way too big. It turns out to be an issue when using points for your font size units in CSS (although generally relative units should be preferred, anyway!). You can fix this by

1. Going to about:config
2. Look for the setting called layout.css.dpi. The default value is -1.
3. Change it to 96

The problem appears not to be Firefox, but the GNOME window manager’s settings. However, I don’t know how to change those when running KDE instead of GNOME. Anyone know?

Firebug may also have trouble running so this post has a tip on how to sort that out.

Read the full post titled, “How to fix huge text in Firefox 3 Beta 5 on Kubuntu 8.04”

I attended the Accessibility 2.0 conference, held in London on 25th April, 2008.

This post is a summary of some main points from each session, including links to notes from others, as well as slides from presenters.

Read the full post titled, “Accessibility 2.0 Conference”

Microsoft recently announced an add-on to Office 2007 to let people search for commands by typing it in if they can’t find it in the new Ribbon user interface.

I find it interesting that a number of interfaces are now offering “shortcuts” to mouse clicking everywhere.

Is typing become the new clicking?

Read the full post titled, “Searching for apps and commands by typing rather than clicking; is typing the new clicking?”

What a pleasant surprise to see the onenaught.com logo nominated for a logo design award at David Airey’s Logo Design Love Awards web site.

Read the full post titled, “Onenaught.com nominated for a logo design award”

A little while back the web development blogs were abuzz with Microsoft’s announcement that IE 8 will, by default, render in IE7 mode, so as not to “break the web.”

Well, it seems that the IE team have decided to change that decision, and decided that IE8 will, by default, interpret web content in the most standards compliant way it can.

Read the full post titled, “IE8 meta switch switch!”

Just as web developers want to use standards on the client side, standards such as XSLT on the server side may be an efficient way to create good quality markup and other web output.

It can help avoid the hard coded or hard to edit HTML strings that are often seen in server side templates and scripts.

As an open standard, XSLT is reasonably universal, and skills can be easily transferable.

Some people don’t like it or have had bad experiences with it in the past.

But it can be a very powerful tool in the developer’s toolbox. Perhaps it is worth giving it another look?

This article looks at why XSLT could be useful as part of the View in an Model-View-Controller pattern, its benefits and potential drawbacks.

Read the full post titled, “Why Use XSLT in Server Side Web Frameworks For Output Generation?”

A couple of XSLT profilers have recently been announced.

One by Microsoft, and one by PHP for the up-coming PHP 5.3.

The PHP one is interesting as it can be invoked from within your PHP code thus profiling actual run time XSLTs.

Read the full post titled, “XSLT Profilers”

PHP 5 in general has been a good improvement over PHP 4, but those used to full blown object oriented program languages such as Java or C# may find some OO features still lacking in PHP 5.

PHP 5 has the usual things, such as classes, interfaces, abstract classes, inheritance, etc, but some useful programming constructs have been missing, though PHP 6, under development, aims to rectify that.

However, it seems that many of those features are going to be brought forward to the up-coming PHP 5.3 (which may make it more likely that it will get installed by web hosting companies sooner than they would likely go for PHP 6).

Sitepoint has an excellent summary of the features. The list of features include:

Read the full post titled, “PHP 5.3 Gets A Bit More Object Oriented And More”

So Microsoft announced a way to support standards without “breaking the web.”

The challenge they had was to find a way to “enable (and encourage) interoperable web development, but don’t force IE to break pages that work properly in IE today.”

They eventually settled for a <meta>-based “opt-in to the browser version I tested with” strategy.

What this means is that if you as a web developer want IE 8 to render according to their best implementation of standards then you opt in by adding a particular meta element into your HTML (or send down a similar HTTP header in the response).

In other words, for web developers trying to do the right thing they must pay a small “don’t-break-the-IE-web tax!”

Many prominent web developers and designers have been highly critical of this. But, ironically, is this actually a positive thing in the long run?

Read the full post titled, “IE8 – meta switch = IE7!?”

ASP.NET is a leaky abstraction because it tries to hide away some of the details of HTML markup generation for you when sometimes you need to know about the underlying markup.

In doing so, it is too easy to create ASP.NET sites that violate web accessibility guidelines and contain unnecessary markup bloat. In some cases, ASP.NET makes it really difficult to create the exact output you need. But there are a some options to address this problem.

Read the full post titled, “ASP.NET Is a Leaky Abstraction”