Continuing from my last post, I discovered that both IE7 and IE6 were behaving badly and that I needed to feed different CSS to these browsers than to Opera, Firefox, etc.

But IE7 has rendered most of the CSS hacks useless. The normal solution is to use Conditional Comments to include an additional stylesheet. But that wasn’t an option as I wasn’t prepared to get into the whole hassle of learning how to change the Live Journal HTML.

I thought I had a solution. Use the IE specific CSS expressions (basically small pieces of JavaScript embedded inside CSS properties) to feed different values to IE.

top: 2px;
top:  expression(26 + "px");

It’s nasty, it’s not valid CSS, it will no doubt break in some browser or other, but it seemed to work when testing locally.

Live Journal wouldn’t have any of it, their CSSproxy said:

/* suspect CSS: potential scripting: expression */

So for now, I’m using the Owen Hack:

div.title { top: 26px; }
head:first-child+body div.title {top: 2px;}

Which may or may not get broken as IE continues to improve Which doesn’t work in IE7 because between whenever I last checked and the current beta they improved its support for the more exotic selectors without fixing the many bugs in its handling of basic things like floats and margins.

Very True Mood: annoyed

There’s a mirror of this blog on Live Journal (Or for LJ readers - there’s a mirror of this blog off Live Journal).

This evening I decided to make the LJ mirror look more like the real thing. I took a look at the LJ templating and styleing system (and the related documentation, or lack of) and decided that life was just too short. So I picked a style that looked somewhat like what I wanted (Flexible Squares) and then wrote a stylesheet to do the rest.

Some of the things that came out of this exercise are quite interesting and may be folded back into the main site design.

But, and there was bound to be a but, IE isn’t playing ball. There’s stonking huge gap between the title and subtitle in IE (at least in IE7b2, I’ll check IE6 at work tomorrow). Bugger.

Very True Mood: tired

Right, as I’ve said before Ok Cupid are a bunch of wankers so it’s hardly surprising that their system is buggered up. I noticed yesterday that everyone doing the Atheist Test was being marked as 99% higher on pentagrams (!?!) than other people their age and gender.

Then today I noticed that I was coming out as being 99% higher on every category in every test, regardless of how high my actual scores were. I would report the error to them but as they think I’m a “turdbag” based simply on my choice of browser I really can’t be arsed. I’ll just delete those parts of the results from any memes I do.

But perhaps they shouldn’t have annoyed me…

Via armcurl.

( The Personality Defect Test )

Very True Mood: cynical

Maybe you could…

You scored 29% Cold and 48% Level-Headed!

In a pinch, you could do it, but you’d need a damn good reason to. And you’re not going to be too happy afterward.

My test tracked 2 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender:

	You scored higher than 13% on Cold
	You scored higher than 14% on Level-Headed

Link: The Can You Kill a Man? Test written by notmarkflynn on Ok Cupid

Oh damn. I forgot that I was boycotting Ok Cupid because they say this on one of their pages:
“By the way, you’re a turdbag for using Opera in Windows.”

Very True Mood: annoyed

Via a newsgroup post:

A stylesheet used on a MicroSoft web site: http://connect.microsoft.com/Styles/GeneralStyles.css. And just in case they edit it, the first few lines read -

/* fix for the IE 1px-off margin error */
* html .StupidIEMarginHack
{
margin-right: 1px;
}

* html .StupidIEWidthHack
{
width: 100%;
}

Even MicroSoft’s own web developers are fed up with IE’s CSS shortcomings.

Very True Mood: cheerful

The browser with the rather unwieldy name of Internet Explorer 7: Beta 2 Preview - released on March 20th is, as the name hints, here and the usual suspects are talking about it.

This release is feature locked as far as site rendering is concerned. So time to start checking your CSS, etc. I’m happy to see that the problems with the book covers in the side bar are fixed, and as conditional comments are also working now I can hide the covers from older IE versions and show them to IE7. (But remember, if you have multiple copies of IE installed they will all use the version number of the ‘main’ copy. So check your conditional comments are working on separate test machines or use browser cam.)

One bug that’s still outstanding is that links with display:block in some case only respond to mouse hovers and clicks on the text and in other cases respond to hovers and clicks anywhere in the block. I think the deciding factor is float related but I need to create some test cases to check. Unless anyone can point me towards someone who’s already done the work?

Very True Mood: optimistic

I’ve added a couple of plugins to the blog to display music and books that I’m enjoying at the moment. Over there, on the sidebar, down a bit, below the categories and links. (Scrobbles and Now Reading plugins created by Rob Miller.)

Depending on which browser you use you may notice one of two things - FireFox users will notice that both of the new sections suffer from the random single-pixel transparent lines that crop up here and there on the sidebar. Still no clue what causes this. [Update] - FireFox 1.5 fixes this problem, I must update my home version.

And IE users won’t see any cover pics for the books. That’s ‘cos, even in IE7b2, the display was totally screwed up. Too late on a Sunday to dissect the CSS (and let’s face it with IE there’s not much chance of a happy ending anyway), so I gave up and applied an IE only stylesheet to hide the images. Blah. [Update] - Mac IE doesn’t use conditional comments and hence shows the images, incorrectly, but really, Mac IE?

[Update] - As Paul points out in the comments Safari is inserting a large chunk of empty space under each book. According to browser cam this happens in Safari 1.2, 1.3 and 2.0 but not in Konqueror 4.3.

Opera 9, Tech Preview 2 is out and that’s what I call an interesting change log. Liking a lot of things - thumbnail previews when mousing over a tab; user interface exposure to whole bunch of stuff only previously available via .ini files; Widgets; BitTorrent…

One line of the change log did catch my eye: Several changes to the default margin and padding of legends and fieldsets. This ties in directly to my suggestions on how to create Cross-browser unobtrusive fieldsets and legends and seems to screw Opera by making it apply both the Gecko and the IE/Safari solutions. So the legend is thrown out to the left. The best solution now would seem to be a basic line of code for Opera and Gecko, a negative margin for IE hidden behind a hack, and let Safari do whatever it wants. But more testing is needed.

I’ve also downloaded, via BitTorrent, a slightly naughty copy of Internet Explorer 7, Beta 2. Unlike Opera I’m not happy about installing a Microsoft beta product on my home PC, and as it’s not really a legit copy I’m also wary of installing it at work. I wonder what IT would say if I asked to install cracked beta software on a machine?

However, it does have a whole bunch of CSS improvments and changes (and no doubt some new bugs as well) and I’d like to get a head start of investigating what we’re going to need to change when IE7 goes public (I wouldn’t actually change one single line of code before then because the final release may differ from the beta). And of course, I bet IE7’s CSS changes will impact on my fieldsets and legends experiment as well. Still, better bumpy progress than stagnation.

As seen on Slashdot and elsewhere, the current storm in a teacup is that Firefox will support a ping attribute for link tracking.

I wonder how many of the tech-heads who are ranting about privacy concerns also rushed to sign up for Google Analytics?

We’ve been choosing a web analytics firm for work and compared with the sort of stats that are already tracked on all major sites (and cross sites when advertising, affiliates, etc. are taken into account) this is nothing; and it will be (a) technically cleaner and (b) faster and less obtrusive for the user. Not a big deal.

The shocking thing from my point of view is that I’d never heard of the proposed ping attribute until now. Must catch up on the WHATWG specs.

365 days ago I made a post about things I was looking forward to in 2005. How did they turn out?

Obviously, getting married and the subsequent honeymoon was fabulous beyond words. (If you haven’t seen them already Lettice has stuck a whole load of photos online.) Also on a personal front I moved house and got a new job, so a very good year.

Doctor Who was incredible. Listened to some of the commentaries on the DVD box set (and is that a wastfeul piece of pacakaging or what?) yesterday and was thrilled all over again by the passion and dedication of the people who brought the Doctor back.

The market share of Internet Explorer did continue to fall. On the SFSFW site it fell from 77% to 67%. This is also the year that Opera became totally free. I also finally got around to learning a bit of XSLT which I’ve been meaning to do for ages.

Serenity was the best film of the year for me (yes I have middle-brow sci-fi tastes, didn’t you know?) and well worth the wait. Can we have a sequel (or two or three or…) please? Batman Begins and The League of Gentlemen’s Apocalypse were also very good whilst The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and Revenge of the Sith were better than expected (but as we expected total train wrecks that’s not actually saying much).

And finally, I was looking forward to the general election, but it turned out a bit dull. It did give us one last chance to be rude about Tim Collins before he vanished into well deserved oblivion. But for my political fix this year I’ve been watching the post-election leadership battles (Brown vs. Blair; Davies vs. Cameron; everyone vs. Kennedy) with much glee. Politicians spending so much time shafting each other means, we can but hope, that they have less time for shafting us.

Good things I didn’t predict at the start of last year included, Wales winning a Grand Slam; England winning the Ashes; London winning the Olympics; Judge Jones putting both boots into the Intelligent Design movement.