Tag: Forms
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.
PayPal options and Expression Engine’s Simple Commerce Module
Recently I had to add basic shopping cart functionality to a site that had been built with ExpressionEngine (my CMS of choice). “No problem,” I thought; I can use the Simple Commerce Module (SCM), which as the names suggests, is ideally suited to simple ecommerce requirements, and which I had used before on other EE sites.
More on PayPal options and Expression Engine’s Simple Commerce Module
Legends of Style Revised
When I wrote the original article on how to achieve cross-browser consistency when styling form legends, I noted that there was a bug in the way Firefox handled legends which required an additional div to be wrapped around the fieldset with positioning and other styling applied to the div rather than the fieldset. The bug appears to still have not been resolved, but as Thierry Koblenz pointed out in the comments on the original article, there is a way to achieve the same effect across browsers that doesn’t require the additional div.
Buttons – forgotten and immobile
Last year, Nick Cowie created a podcast on the <button> and how it is the “forgotten element”
. Well, it seems that it is not only developers who have forgotten about it, but browser makers, or more specifically those making browsers for handheld devices, and the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) (authors of the XHTML-MP specification) who have forgotten about it as well.
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.
Styling form buttons
Anyone who’s used the web has encountered buttons in forms. Buttons, as with most form controls, can be a bit tricky to style for consistent look cross browser and cross platform as the operating system often has more to do with how they are rendered than the browser itself. Roger Johansson has delved into this issue in more detail.





