Recognise this? Chances are you do. Even if you don’t own a copy of Dreamweaver, it’s likely you would have come across the code it outputs for creating image rollovers in your travels looking at the code of other sites.
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When to use display: none
If you're interested in website accessibility best practices, you might have come across warnings against using display: none to hide content that you don't want to appear on screen. The argument is that content hidden with display: none can't be accessed by people using screen readers, and the recommended solution is to position the content offscreen instead using a large negative position (let's call this the offset method). But this shouldn't be a hard and fast rule for all situations. There are some situations for which using display: none will be acceptable.
New article on Search-This
I've just written an article on a technique which can be used with column layouts which has been published on Search-This: Two Column Layout With A Twist.
I've been a subscriber to the site for a while (a lot of its contributors and readers also frequent Sitepoint) and a regular commenter, but this is my first published article. Search-This also publishes a range of articles dealing with the spectrum of web development topics, so it's worth checking out.
‘No input file specified’ problem
If you've installed ExpressionEngine but find you get a 'No input file specified' error message on anything but the home page of the site, chances are it's because your server doesn't support the path_info server variable.
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.
The web from a screenreader user’s perspective
Victor Tsaran, an engineer and Program Manager for Accessibility at Yahoo!, has put together a 27-minute video introducing screen readers and how they interact with web pages.
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.
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.
Dropdown low down
Dropdowns (horizontal) or flyout (vertical) menus abound on websites and come in many different flavours. They are also put together in a number of different ways, some done with javascript, some with 'pure' CSS and some a mixture of both.