Tag: Browsers
Web design ‘pre-flight’ checklist
Over the years of being a freelance web designer, I’ve been developing my own processes for the business of designing websites. One of those processes has been compiling a list of tasks that need to be completed before launching a website, whether it be a new site or a redesign. This list is kept in a spreadsheet which I work through, ticking off each item after the client has given final sign off for the site to go live. I view it as my final quality control procedure and I usually find that the process will highlight a few of the ‘little things’ that I might have overlooked in general development. Usually nothing too major; more a case of ‘dotting all the Is and crossing all the Ts’.
More useful extensions for developing with Firefox
A while ago I wrote about some of the extensions I use with Firefox which make the job of web development easier. I’ve since added some new ones to Firefox that I use on a fairly regular basis, so thought I should update the list.
First-letter bugginess
Recently I made some changes to the typography of subheadings on this site: I made them all uppercase and for the h2s I used the first-letter pseudo class to give the first letter a larger font-size (150%).
HTML/CSS newbie FAQs
After spending a while on web development forums, you start to see the same questions being asked regularly. So here I’m going to answer some of these common beginner questions and hopefully save me typing answers out repeatedly in the future because I can just refer the poster to here or copy it myself. 
My website’s broken!
A furore has erupted over the past couple of days within a section of the web development community over a decision by Microsoft to require web developers to add a meta tag to their pages to define what version of Internet Explorer a site has been designed for. I’m not going to go into the pros and cons of this decision as it’s been comprehensively covered elsewhere.
Tools for checking website accessibility
Following on from my last post in which I mentioned screenreaders (or alternatives) that people might like to try for checking their own sites’ accessibilty, and an earlier post in which I listed the extensions I use for web development with Firefox, I thought I’d also list the different tools I use for testing website accessibility.
Centering a dropdown menu
Recently, I needed to create a centered version of the Suckerfish dropdown menu and realised that some significant modifications were going to be needed. This is because the method for getting the top level list items to sit in a row, on the same horizontal plane, is to use float: left. However, when you float elements, you can’t centre them unless you give them a width and use auto left and right margins.
Legends of style
UPDATE: following on from comments by Thierry Koblenz, I have written an update to this article. The techniques described below will still work in different browsers, but the new article explains how it can be achieved with a little less mark-up.
It’s a well-established fact that achieving cross browser consistency when styling form controls is an “exercise in futility”
. And one of those elements that just won’t play ball is the <legend> tag.
Which browsers should I test in?
Well I’ve discussed which browser to avoid using for primary testing, and which browser I prefer to use, so which browsers should one test in?
Developing your site using Firefox
As mentioned previously, I have a personal favourite browser when it comes to web development and that is Firefox. This is not only because of its good standards support (although it doesn’t yet pass the Acid 2 Test) and not because it has tabbed browsing and not because it’s any other browser other than Internet Explorer.
