Using shorthand CSS can save some 1’s and 0’s in your stylesheets which add up if you have a busy web site. Just think, all those extra lines of codes taking up valuable bytes are adding up on that server. It may seem minimal at first but it does take up some space once you have enough sites on your server. Even if you don’t care that much about bandwidth or server stress- you are wasting valuable keystrokes by typing extra attributes and properties in your CSS. (more…)

Popularity: 34%

Safari is one of those tricky browsers that aren’t the most cooperative but there aren’t many hacks for it that will work. Unlike IE that allows you to target the browser directly easily, Safari doesn’t offer that solution within XHTML. I could only come up with 2 ways to use CSS hacks or tricks for Safari specifically. The best step towards making sure all browsers work the same for your site is to use valid XHTML Strict code, this helps most of the time. But, sometimes you do have to venture away from that ideal. (more…)

Popularity: 26%

You ever had that frustrating div that would stop just short of wrapping your content like it is supposed to? Usually this div will have a background image or color that you need to go all the way around the content. There are cases where this has come up for me and there are usually two things you can do one of them is to fix the problem as you have accidentally set a property to it that doesn’t need to be there in the CSS. The other is you can add something to it to help wrap the div around your content. I’ll talk about both of these methods a little more in depth but they are quick and easy solutions for the stubborn div. (more…)

Popularity: 10%

I get this question quite a bit for people that need to test their web sites on IE6 mostly that already have IE7 installed. I have found a great piece of software from TredoSoft that does just this. It basically installed IE 3.0, IE 4.01, IE 5.01, IE 5.5 and IE 6 on your computer to let you test your web page on them. This is all assuming you have IE7 already installed. If for whatever reason you don’t want to replace your IE6 with IE7 they also have a stand alone IE7 that you can install to test your web pages on.

I mostly use this software for testing web pages on IE6 standalone. This is a very useful software for testing your web page. For those of you wishing to test Safari you may know that it has been released for PC, but it is still a little buggy.

Unfortunately I don’t have a good way right now to test other browsers on your Mac but I will keep an eye out for something that does. Hopefully the company will create IE6 stand alone for the Mac soon. Currently it does work for Windows XP and Vista though.

Popularity: 20%

This week it is a hack that I am providing for everyone to enjoy, it allows you to easily add a quick style within your existing style sheet to target internet explorer. This can help so you don’t have to check your ie CSS file if is just a simple margin adjustment. Which as we all know internet explorer has some issues with, especially internet explorer 6. The underscore hack is pretty basic but I will go over the various uses for it and touch on what browsers it affects and which browsers ignore it. (more…)

Popularity: 8%

This is part of a new segment I will be starting, there will be others but I figure this is a pretty good one to have. There are a lot of weird things about IE6 (and lower) and even IE7 browsers that make most web developers want to tear their eyes out and ignite them where they fall. For this reason there are a lot of CSS hacks that make Internet Explorer behave. This week I am going to discuss the most useful hack of them all, which really isn’t a hack it is more of a feature. (more…)

Popularity: 23%

Dustin Diaz has come up with a wonderful idea about an annual CSS Naked Day that will basically be a day without the use of CSS in your web design to show the benefits of CSS over old HTML or XHTML based designs. It shows how much of a difference the CSS makes to the way your overall web site looks. He currently has a list of over 40 web sites that are going to be participating on April 5th with the CSS Naked day. (more…)

Popularity: 5%

With smartphones growing in popularity and more people around the world browsing the web from their mobile phones the web is growing increasingly smaller. Currently there is even a TLD (Top Level Domain) .mobi that is designed to be used specifically for mobile devices. This means that there is a big push from consumers to be able to have content on their phones work for their phones. (more…)

Popularity: 2%

Ok, so as many of as know there is a lot more then meets the eye when it comes to web page designing. You have to ensure that your web page is compatible in most of the browsers and that it works the way you want it to work on the end user’s side. So just making the web site look pretty is at best of the battle. It may be even less with ugly web sites like MySpace and YouTube being so popular, look at Google… simple, functional and to the point. These are all the most visited web sites on the Internet and they are close to the ugliest, but this isn’t about that. This is about XHTML validating your web sites and attempting to use an advertiser that complies.

I finally after a day and a half of working through all of the included pages in this web was able to get the web site W3C validated for XHTML 1.1. Which is an awesome thing to have, especially when it comes to SEO (Search Engine Optimization). The search engines will favor the web sites that meet W3C standards because if they do, they are obviously web sites with good content because they adhere to the standards. (more…)

Popularity: 3%