CSS tips: Widths calculations, and links with icons

I haven’t posted in a while, so let’s see if I can make up for that by posting two different CSS tips today.

These are more on the intermediate level side. If you’re an advanced CSS developer you may already know about these. Today I bring you:

1. Elements’ widths calculations in CSS under different browsers (most importantly, the difference between IE and Firefox).

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2. компютриBest method to implement links with icons next to them.

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Internet Explorer issue - maximum of 32 CSS @import

To be honest, I just ran into an issue that I thought was fairly ridiculous.

Internet Explorer restricts you to a maximum of 32 @import statements in your CSS file.

For the less advanced developers, you can import another CSS file from within one of your CSS files. Consider it like a #include in C programming, or an include statement in PHP. The syntax would look like this:

@import url("mystyle.css");

When you are developing a complex web application, you are likely to have many CSS files. Admittedly, we haven’t cleaned up the CSS structure and removed any outdated CSS stylings for a while, in our project. We shouldn’t have imported so many. But it struck me as ridiculous for Internet Explorer having such limits. (Needless to say, Firefox has no such ridiculous limits.) To me, it just seems like a programming flaw (using a 5-bit number as indexing for imported files?).

Reference: http://www.juniper.net/security/auto/vulnerabilities/vuln3394.html (the topic discussed in this link is not related, but pay attention to the end of the second paragraph: “Internet Explorer imposes a maximum limit of 32 imports that an individual styleSheet object can hold, and a depth limit of three on the number of style sheets that may be included within the style sheet chain.”)

Update (3/27/08): Apparently, IE doesn’t only impose a number of files limit — but even a file size limit for each CSS file. The IE CSS file size limit seems to be ~288kb. Again, Firefox doesn’t seem to have such limits. Way to go IE, for continuing screwing web developers up.

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Special announcement: Badware is gone

So, I was checking my blog’s statistics and found it weird how it suddenly had so much fewer visitors and no traffic referral from Google for a couple of days.

Then I was reminded that my Wordpress hasn’t been updated in a while. So I ran a check in the source code of my blog for some common hacks (usually an <iframe> code inserted somewhere), and guess what, I found some.

This lead to Google then listing my site as “harmful”. This is a special announcement entry to tell you all (however few regular readers I have) that the badware is removed, and Wordpress is updated to the latest and greatest.

This is also a post to tell you that, if you own a Wordpress blog running a version older than 2.3.2, you should update. More info could be found on this Wordpress support thread. I hope Google didn’t scare anyone off (especially potential new visitors of my blog) by saying it’s a harmful site. And I hope they do the review as soon as possible, as I submitted it for review arleady.

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PHP Web Applications Development — A Starter Tutorial

This is a beginner’s guide to setting up an environment to start doing web applications development in PHP. If you are anything past the beginner level, this article may not be any beneficial to you at all; so you may stop reading here.

A friend of mine has recently requested me to write a starter tutorial for someone (presumably, who already has some programming experience and web site development experience, as he does) to start doing web applications development, particularly in PHP. I thought, hey, maybe I should just write it up here, since I haven’t written anything here for a while.

In this tutorial, I will cover some simple steps on how to setup a web server (Apache), PHP, and a database (MySQL) on your machine. In particular, I will assume the use of the Windows machine. Why? Honestly — if you’re operating Linux already, shouldn’t you know enough to be able to setup all that on your own? I will also be writing some of my preferred methods of managing the server.

Continue reading PHP Web Applications Development — A Starter Tutorial…

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Facebook Applications

The Facebook platform has been released for a while now, and believe you me, I’ve been doing development on it since day 1 of that until now, non-stop. I think I can say with fairly good confidence that I’m an expert Facebook developer in PHP.

Facebook applications originally provided something with very good potential, but unfortunately, it isn’t really working in the way I would hope it should.

Continue reading Facebook Applications…

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Where do you draw the line between designer and developer?

As web 2.0 applications get more and more mature, the roles of web designers, web developers and web application developers become more and more blurry.

Years ago, web designers simply design web sites. They aren’t very different from traditional print designers. Sure, some of them might not only do the design, but also code up their designs in HTML. But a lot of times, web designers are only responsible for the visual designs, and they pass on their work to web developers to convert the visuals into actual web pages. Back then, there wasn’t even much of a term as “web application developer” — what is a web application in 1998? A form mail script? A guestbook? Nobody would do that for a living. Let’s rephrase that — you won’t make a living doing that.

Continue reading Where do you draw the line between designer and developer?…

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Multiple Browsers Testing

It’s been a while since I last posted something. I apologize for that, but I have been fairly busy in my job recently. So, this time I’m going to give you some useful information I’ve learned in my job lately.

It started from a time when one of my clients was using (are you ready for this) Firefox 1.0. If you are one of the unlucky souls who don’t understand the meaning of this — Firefox 1.5 had been the “standard” Firefox for about a year or more, and Firefox 2.0 has been out for at least a month or two (or more; and I’m not even the type who keeps myself that updated). He told me that the page didn’t look right and he was using Firefox, so I wondered for a while before finding out that he was on Firefox 1.0.

So I figured there is actually a need to install multiple versions of Firefox for testing. Surprise! There are actually ways to install multiple versions of Firefox as well as IE on your computer, without having multiple computers or doing any sorts of virtualization. Oh, and this guide is for Windows users. If you’re doing any sort of frontend design, Windows testing is your main target, no matter how much you like Mac or Linux yourself.

Continue reading Multiple Browsers Testing…

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Grand Opening

Hi everyone!

This is Bigi. It’s been a long time since I last owned a “public” blog - must’ve been a few years. The purpose of this particular one is to share what I find interesting in the topic of Web Development. When I say Web Development, it means everything from PHP, MySQL in the backend all the way to XHTML, CSS, JavaScript in the frontend.

I’m recently working on a project and I ran into many interesting things that I don’t want to just pass up without mentioning. It may be things you already know if you’re an expert, or it may be something you can learn from if you are a beginner, and it also just serves as a good record for myself to keep track of what kind of interesting things I’ve been picking up.

That’s all for the first entry. Any comments?

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