Archive for the ‘General Web Development’ Category

CSS: inner elements breaking border-radius

Posted on: Thursday, July 9th, 2009 at 9:34 am by Anup Shah

Some browsers support border-radius for rounded corners. But inner elements may break those corners. Sometimes, applying border-radius to those inner elements can resolve the issue.

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Web Standards – a good thing, but won’t help with SEO

Posted on: Tuesday, June 30th, 2009 at 2:16 pm by Anup Shah

There are many good reasons to follow web standards principles, to use CSS-based layout and progressive enhancement but SEO, unfortunately, is not one of them.

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Use CSS display:table for Layout

Posted on: Sunday, February 15th, 2009 at 11:34 pm by Anup Shah

For a few years now, web developers doing CSS-based layouts have used floats or absolute positioning for layout web sites to avoid using non-semantic HTML <table>s.

While doable, extra hoops often have to be jumped through (mostly for IE) and some seemingly simple things can be harder than necessary (like equal height columns).

However, for a simpler solution, CSS-based display:table, display:table-row, display:table-cell etc are all usable today across Firefox 2+, Safari 3+, Opera 9+ and IE8.

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ASP.NET Is a Leaky Abstraction

Posted on: Wednesday, January 2nd, 2008 at 7:41 pm by Anup Shah

A manipulation of the classic Mona Lisa shows her holding a mask revealing a smiling, ugly face. 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.

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Microsoft’s Internet Explorer Slows Down Web Development

Posted on: Friday, December 14th, 2007 at 10:08 pm by Anup Shah

This has been said so many times on the web by web developers frustrated at IE’s rendering bugs, lack of progress in support for web technologies, and so on, that at first I didn’t want to bother writing this post. However, a number of other posts on this site make reference to this point and I end up repeating myself, side tracking from the point at hand. For that reason, and for the benefit of some readers not familiar with this issue, this post serves as a summary of those concerns.

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The Email Standards Project

Posted on: Thursday, November 29th, 2007 at 2:05 pm by Anup Shah

The Email Standards Project HTML-based email seems to be a mess, with different email clients supporting a different set (and sub-set) of web technologies such as HTML and CSS.

Microsoft’s Outlook has a commanding share of desktop email clients. However, Microsoft announced that Outlook 2007 would use Word’s HTML rendering engine, rather than Internet Explorer’s which seems like a big step backward.

While some may prefer text-only email, others prefer to — or must — create HTML-based email.

The Email Standards Project is attempting to follow the example of the Web Standards Project, but for email clients, web- and desktop-based to try and make HTML-email creation less hit and miss.

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Day 2: @media ajax November 2007

Posted on: Thursday, November 22nd, 2007 at 11:28 pm by Anup Shah

@media ajax 2007 My impression of day 2 at @media ajax, the ajax/javascript conference with some of the leading figures in this area.

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Day 1: @media ajax November 2007

Posted on: Thursday, November 22nd, 2007 at 1:04 am by Anup Shah

@media ajax 2007 My impression of day 1 at @media ajax, the ajax/javascript conference with some of the leading figures in this area.

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Microsoft to make Internet Explorer 7 more widely available

Posted on: Thursday, October 4th, 2007 at 11:47 pm by Anup Shah

Microsoft is making IE 7 more widely available. IE 7 still has to catch up with the other modern browsers but this seems to be a good thing from a web developer’s perspective as IE 6 is so much more buggy. Or is it…?

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WYSIWYG HTML Editors

Posted on: Tuesday, September 25th, 2007 at 11:18 pm by Anup Shah

WYSIWYG editors for HTML are fraught with problems, as discussed in a previous post. This post is a quick look at why WYSIWYG editors would be important for content producers and offers some links to tools and research that people are doing.

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