Zen Coding – a new way to write HTML lightning fast
The other day I purchased a new editor called Coda. I might review this fantastic little piece of software at a later date, but one of the reasons I purchased it was to use some of the many plugins the community has created for it. One of these plugins has been produced for several editors and could change how you code. It’s called Zen Coding, and it will make you write large chunks of HTML a lighting speeds.
What is Zen Coding?
Zen Coding is hard to explain, but if you have been working with HTML and CSS for awhile now you should be able to pick it up very quickly. It’s easy to learn and best shown by example, so lets start with an example.
Outlook 2007 losing font-family declaration
Email clients are one of the pinnacle frustrations for web designers. The limitations are far greater than those of web browsers and you can always count on Microsoft’s Outlook 2007 being at the forefront of compatibility problems and bug issues. If you create emails that have to support Outlook 2007′s wonky Word rendering you may have noticed on occasion that your specified font-family disappears. There’s a few ways to fix this, but some are better than others.
How to fix floated images and list overlap
The other day I was looking at my blog and saw that one of the posts had a left floated image followed by a bulleted list. The problem was that the list was not indenting properly the way it did when next to a paragraph without a floated element. After a bit of searching and hair pulling I found a discussion that solved my problem.
15 Awesome web design & development sites you should know about
This is a small list of invaluable websites I use to further my knowledge of everything web and to help out with inspiration, tools, resources and tutorials. It’s a list not aimed at any one facet of web design and development, but the many facets and processes that make a website possible.
It is becoming more and more important to at least have a basic understanding of all the information that goes into making a fantastic website. Knowing limitations and pushing those limits makes web design and development fun, interesting, and challenging. If you work in this field you probably already know that web work is all about constantly learning new technologies, tools, tips and tricks.
CSS tip, declare your font family once
Here’s a CSS tip that I wish more people would follow. When setting up a font on your site, say Verdana, there is no reason to declare it on every H tag, P tag and class you are using. Throw it up in the body and be done with it. The same goes for font sizes, colours and anything else that will be uniform across the site. Once you have done this you can override it for specific tags and classes when you need too.
body {
font-family:Verdana, Arial, sans-serif;
font-size:12px;
margin:0;
line-height:130%;
color:#333333;
}
This will make your life easier and everyone else who has to work with your files will thank you. I think we should always be looking for ways to make our CSS smaller, cleaner and easier to read.
Space below images in Firefox and email newsletters
One thing that is consistently presented to me by other web designers and users is space below images and usually in Firefox, but it can also happen in email newsletters. You will usually notice it when you need images to vertically butt up against each other. This results in a white line or whatever the background colour is set too appearing between two vertically stacked images. Fear not, the fix is extremely easy and you have two good options.
Facebook Development: breaking the application canvas with iFrames
I recently started developing an application on Facebook. It’s actually quite interesting although the Facebook developer interface leaves a lot to be desired. If a chat program operated the way Facebook does it would go something like this. To add a user you must first add the addUser application. Once this is completed you can add the first use through the addUser applications, but after that you must go to the first added user to add an additional user, it’s really a… but I digress. This post is about Facebook’s application canvas and specifically developing applications with the iframe option enabled.
Outlook 2007, inline styles, and links
I recently discovered yet another weird Outlook 2007 bug with email newsletters. Every web designer has probably gone through the nightmare of Internet Explorer and then tried to explain to non-web people why it just plain sucks. Outlook 2007 raises the bar to a whole new level of awfulness, but enough with the ranting.
Internet Explorer 6 and redirected anchor links
Why are my are my anchor links not working in IE6?
As a web designer I constantly run into browser bugs and 90% of these bugs belong to either IE6 or IE7. Remarkably these two browsers don’t even consistently break the same way. What is messed up in IE6 may be completely messed up in a different way in IE7. The standards compliant WebKit and Gecko engines used by popular browsers like FireFox, Safari and Chrome rarely see many of these annoying bugs, but the masses use IE, so we as designers and developers must make them work.
Gravatars, what are they and how do I get one?
A few days ago I added Gravatar functionality to my blog. A Gravatar is a unique picture or icon of yourself which is stored online and globally accessible by blogs that implement Gravatar, or globally recognized avatar. When you post or comment to Gravatar enabled blogs your own avatar will show up on that blog if you have signed up for one on the Gravatar site. It’s a nice way of making your posts more unique and personalized.
