Category: CSS

Epic Fix for IE6 Browser Issues

I’ve come across an endless list of IE6 hacks and apparent fixes for the one browser that still causes many issues. This on is my favourite:

<!--[if IE 6]>
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; url=http://www.microsoft.com/windows/internet-explorer/default.aspx" />
<script type="text/javascript">
/* <![CDATA[ */ window.top.location = 'http://www.microsoft.com/windows/internet-explorer/default.aspx'; /* ]]> */
</script>
<![endif]-->

Drastic, yet very epic and takes seconds to implement. Solves all your IE6 problems 🙂

Object Oriented CSS (OOCSS) – My View

After reading an article about OOCSS (Object Oriented CSS) I was left a little numb and confused to be honest. I’d advise you read the full article before reading what follows.

The idea is fairly simple – write your CSS using a “bottom up” approach, as opposed to a “top down” approach, treating your elements as “objects”, using mainly classes, as opposed to IDs. The idea of this is to make classes more reusable and to encourage a greater css granularity architecture. The overall theory behind OOCSS is something I don’t dispute in the least, if anything it’s simply good practice when writing a CSS file.

For me, the whole article borders on the pedantic to the outright pretentious.

Firstly, I’m not a fan of the name. “OOCSS” implies a link to OOP (Object Orientated Programming), which it is not. I can see why they’ve named it OOCSS as I guess multiple classes could be similar to inheritance, an element on your page as an “object”, classes imply reusability etc. As a web developer, who uses OOP I was instantly put on the defensive, thinking “OOP for CSS, wtf”. I understand the name is simply a paradigm, but it sends out all the wrong signals for me personally.

Apologies if this article turns into a bit of a rant…..

Continue reading Object Oriented CSS (OOCSS) – My View

ECommerce Content Source Ordering for Product Detail Pages

Content source ordering or SOC (source ordered content) is the idea that content nearer the top of the raw  HTML source code has greater weight and meaning for search engines. For instance, a paragraph of text right at the top of the HTML source has more meaning than the same passage that may appear in the footer. It is very useful for those all too common generic menus (home, about, contact etc.) that has no SEO benefit at all, yet appears at the top of every page of your site. With SOC and absolute positioning of DOM elements, it is possible to position this HTML at the very bottom of the source code, thus gicing greater weight to your page content.

The latter is not a new idea by any means, but is generally considored to be a positive practice to implement on any site.

Continue reading ECommerce Content Source Ordering for Product Detail Pages

Image Masking with CSS and HTML

A recent web design called for the following:

  • the client must be able to upload their own banner images
  • the banner image was not square and had a transparfent mask around over it (in Photoshop, the banner image was underneath a clipping mask)
  • The design must function in a range of legacy browsers

This presented a major headache. Usually uplaoding a totally square image is easy – a client can do this with ease themselves. However, the client in question has no experience using using Photoshop (and why should they to update their website?) and wouldn’t be able to upload a masked image. Additionally, using some of the new CSS3 image masking properties are out, as I need to support IE6 and above.

So, the solution here is to use a transparent image to overlay the square image – meaning a client can upload a square image and have it show masked on the live website – see the final result of what we’ll be making.

Continue reading Image Masking with CSS and HTML

Create a CSS Hover Effect Image Gallery

After browsing through a a few web portfolios lately I’ve noticed a rather noce efefct – whereby when the user hovers over a thumbnail an image appear – this may be a zoom icon (for images) or a play button (for videos). In thus article I’ll quickly run through the simple steps on who we create a a funky css hover effect image gallery. This is a very useful technique for any sort of site that display thumbnails links.

The HTML

<div class="thumb_wrap">
<a href="#link" class="thumb_link">
<span><img src="play.png" alt="play" class="play_video" /></span>
<img src="thumb.jpg" alt="thumbnail" />
</a>
</div>

I’ve simply nested a span tag containing the hidden play button. Additionally, to keep everything XHTML valid, the hyperlink doesn;t contain block level elemnts.

The CSS

a img {
border:none;
}

.thumb_wrap {
width:194px;
height:110px;
margin:0 25px 0 0;
float:left;
}

img.play_video {
position: absolute; 
margin:40px 0 0 80px;
display: none;}

The CSS is simply sets the image’s position absolutely (to ensure nothing gets pushed out of line).

The JQuery

The give the show effect a nice fade in style and in order the show our hidden image I’ll add a small piece of JQuery that finds the image within our span tag and fades it in. The latter is done when the user hovers over the image, when the mouse leaves, the image is hidden again. The folllwing would go within the head tag (I’ve also let Google CDN host my JQuery file):

<script type="text/javascript">
$(document).ready(function() {

$(".thumb_link").mouseover(function(){
 $(this).find('img.play_video').fadeIn('slow');
});

$(".thumb_link").mouseout(function(){
 $(this).find('img.play_video').hide();
});

});
</script>

…..and that’s it. You now have a cross browser compatible (IE 6 plus) image gallery effect, that is very easy to implement. See the image gallery in action.

CSS Sprities and Website Optimization

One of the latest and most well established design practices are CSS sprites. This is the practice of combing multiple images into a larger and single, composite image. By using the CSS background-position property selected portions of that master image (or sprite) are displayed. The main issue here is how can a larger image witha larger file size be beneficial, especially when compared to several smaller images? The answer lies in HTTP requests and Yahoo’s 80/20 rule explains this much better than I could! To summarise, the numbers of HTTP requests to the websites is drastically cut, thus loading the page much faster in  single request. Another major beenfit is that not Javascript is required for mouseover code, so you can make image rollovers easily. I have used this technque in the past, but like a lot of people never knew it was called sprites.

In fact, using sprites are so effective many of the internets biggest site’s are using them, all in slightly different ways. On such sites a truely huge number of requests are saved every day. For example, Youtube, Google, AOL,  Amazon and Apple all use CSS sprites. Take the mimilist example of Google (left):

Google CSS Sprite

Youtube, does things slightly different and uses a absolutely very simple sprite and applied the background-position property to each link class. Here’s the simple HTML used for the list: Continue reading CSS Sprities and Website Optimization