Archive for the ‘Web Standards’ Category

Easter egg CSS circles

Sunday, March 29th, 2015 by Jesper Rønn-Jensen

Easter eggs instead of circles on your CSS. It’s easier than I thought.

screenshot-with-easter-eggs-css-cropped

Get started using advanced web fonts today

Friday, February 24th, 2012 by Jesper Rønn-Jensen

I saw this example on a blog today:

Why WebStandards Matter

Friday, March 12th, 2010 by Jesper Rønn-Jensen

I just revisited “Why Web Standards Matter (Case Study)”, that I wrote on the background of a customer problem back in 2006. The points are actually relevant event with the more recent and faster browser versions that we have today. I did a small change to express my opinion better. Changed “JavaScript should generally be […]

Script identifying CSS shorthand possibilities

Wednesday, October 21st, 2009 by Jesper Rønn-Jensen

For my own convenience I created this script to identify css files where colors like #aaaaaa can be rewritten in the short form #aaa (saves bandwith, but can also make it easier to identify similar colors) grep -nE ‘#([0-9a-f])\1([0-9a-f])\2([0-9a-f])\3’ **/*.css output from a random project: css/actions.css:19: color: #000000; css/actions.css:38: color: #000000 !important; css/actions.css:53: color: #ffffff […]

Print CSS Background Logo Hack

Tuesday, September 29th, 2009 by Jesper Rønn-Jensen

I learned this nice little hack to bypass the standard browser setting that normally prevents background images from being printed. The hack makes use of converting the background-image to a list item with an image. /* Hack, to trick the browser to print another logo Unfortunetaly, Firefox on Windows doesn’t show logo on print — […]

CSS Styling Buttons Problem with Underlined Text

Wednesday, September 16th, 2009 by Jesper Rønn-Jensen

I ran into the challenge the other day to style a<button> element to make it look like a link (with underline and everything). Unfortunately, the <button> element does not react to text-decoration: underline; But according to a discussion at the CSS Creator forum, there is a way out: I was just messing around with it […]

2 Must-Know HTML Table Colum Features Any Webdeveloper Should Be Aware Of

Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009 by Jesper Rønn-Jensen

I was reading up on the good old HTML specification and discovered a feature I had always wanted — and it’s already there:
Creating widths of columns that will work like percentages, but will also pay attention to any small, fixed-width columns.

Take a look at HTML’s proportional widths and amount alignment features.

HTML Guide Textmate Snippets Open Sourced

Wednesday, February 25th, 2009 by Jesper Rønn-Jensen

One year ago I published “Design Guide or HTML Markup Guide” with link to the HTML guide we did for the biggest Danish business internet portal. The HTML guide is a really useful tool for every public authority that must deliver applications for the portal. As a help for my own work back then, I […]

CSS Fun: Flag Deprecated HTML Tags

Thursday, January 8th, 2009 by Jesper Rønn-Jensen

Introducing Tiny JavaScript Number Formatter

Monday, August 18th, 2008 by Jesper Rønn-Jensen

For a current project, I created a tiny number formatter that inserts thousand delimiters in a string: 10000 to 10,000 etc. Just add css class=”numberformat currency” to a text field, and it will be formatted automatically. It is based on the Prototype JavaScript library. You can get it from it’s GitHub repository page. Feel free […]

Adding Deprecation Warning in JavaScript Console

Thursday, July 17th, 2008 by Jesper Rønn-Jensen

I used this quick trick today to help me clean up and refactor some javascript functions today: if (“console” in window) console.warn(‘DEPRECATED function call to ‘+ arguments.callee +’\nCalled by:\n’+ arguments.callee.caller ); Which results in a fine deprecation warning in the console: There is plenty of space for improvement here. Feel free to use or tamper […]

IE CSS Bug: Limited @include Statements

Tuesday, July 1st, 2008 by Jesper Rønn-Jensen

I found out that Internet explorer only interprets 32 @include statements in CSS for a webpage. The rest is silently ignored. Tested with IE7. Has anybody tried this with IE8? For more info see: Internet Explorer issue – maximum of 32 CSS @import PS. Silent ignorance is just about the worst form for ignorance when […]

Fixes to Common CSS Problems

Monday, June 16th, 2008 by Jesper Rønn-Jensen

Just home again from two weeks vacation, I found this in my delicious popular feed (i usually scan the delicious popular feed for links others find interesting). Using CSS to Fix Anything: 20+ Common Bugs and Fixes Good explanations to some of the usual I run into. For instance, the double margin float bug in […]

Design Guide or HTML Markup Guide

Friday, February 8th, 2008 by Jesper Rønn-Jensen

At a recent project, there was a requirement to describe the CSS used on a site, as a documentation, other developers could use. We decided to go a bit further — not only documenting the CSS classes — but making a guide that developers could find easy to use. Also we wanted developers with little […]

Sharepoint 2007, Accessibility, and Impossible UI Customization

Sunday, January 20th, 2008 by Jesper Rønn-Jensen

Emil Stenström’s recent “Sharepoint 2007 from an interface developer’s view” is definitely worth reading if you care about webstandards, accessibility and decent frontend code in general. Here are some of the quotes that really stand out in an excellent article that i really recommend you read before picking your web development platform. One major problem […]

Usability of Map With Positions in CSS

Friday, December 21st, 2007 by Jesper Rønn-Jensen

These days I’m working on the HTML and CSS for this map, but I want to hear your opinions as what to recommend from a usability point of view: The top map where the cities are placed on the map directly (it’s a HTML list) The bottom map where the list is to the right […]

1996 Humour Ahead: Spacer.gif, Table Layouts

Thursday, December 6th, 2007 by Jesper Rønn-Jensen

In case you missed it, Dustin Diaz has written this excellent parody on what the hottest web techniques were like before webstandards and css were invented. Seven hottest web 1.0 techniques to trick out your webpage. 2) Animation without JavaScript Believe it! It’s true. Drop those old scripts that made your website scroll and blink […]

How to Run JavaScript From Watir Scripts

Tuesday, November 20th, 2007 by Jesper Rønn-Jensen

What’s Watir? Read “Watir: Another sweetspot for Enterprise Ruby” Is it possible to run JavaScript functions or execute code from within your Watir test scripts? As a matter of fact it is, but I had a hard time finding the proper documentation for it. Here is what to do and how: Call JavaScript Functions from […]

Blue Beanie Day – A day for Web Standards and Accessibility

Sunday, November 18th, 2007 by Thomas Watson Steen

I just got an event invitation on Facebook asking me to join “Blue Beanie Day“. Two questions quickly popped into my head: What is a Blue Beanie? Where do I get one? If you are into web standards and accessibility you have already seen a blue beanie on the cover of Jeffery Zeldman’s great book […]

Firefox Tip For Framebuster JavaScript

Monday, October 22nd, 2007 by Jesper Rønn-Jensen

I have for long been struggling with an internal legacy application that wraps the content page in a frameset. Very annoying because I have spent some time to reverse engineer a poor-mans API to the application. Problem: An inline “reverse” framebuster script that makes sure that everything is nicely(?) wrapped in the frameset. As you […]

Web Site Investigation Toolbox Update

Friday, October 12th, 2007 by Jesper Rønn-Jensen

bookmarlets.png I figured the original bookmarklet toolbox needed an update. Added Quirksmode detection, layout grid and updated PageInfo to accept framed pages.

Sharepoint Meets Web Standards

Monday, June 4th, 2007 by Jesper Rønn-Jensen

Cameron Moll posted detailed tips on how to modify a standard Microsof Sharepoint 2007 installation into something with an acceptable output that’s valid XHTML and CSS, and less bloated with a much smaller footprint. In other words, a workaround for making Sharepoint work a little better out of the box. First of all, it’s a […]

Debugging CSS: My Best Productivity Tip Ever

Monday, April 30th, 2007 by Jesper Rønn-Jensen

Firebug keeps surprising me. I’ve recently been working on code for several web designs and this little trick helped me to understand existing HTML and CSS much faster. Just to give an example I use our Justaddwater RSS feed page (but could be any page). Before you start, get Firebug for Firefox (if you haven’t […]

MTV Chooses Web Standards And Flunks Flash Website

Sunday, April 29th, 2007 by Jesper Rønn-Jensen

UX Magazine reports that MTV drops their Flash based website in favor of a common-sense web standards based solution. It seems the Flash version was not complementing their content and the users were bitching about it… as they mention on their blog. I for one am glad to see this happen. As good as Flash […]

E-Texteditor For Windows

Saturday, April 28th, 2007 by Jesper Rønn-Jensen

I have been looking a fast, intuitive editor for my Windows laptop. Now I stopped looking. E-texteditor for windows is very intuitive and easy to use. I highly recommend watching the screencast (a short tour of some of the best features). Although it’s still in beta, it seems so much better than the alternatives. I’m […]

Rounded Corners the Technorati Way

Thursday, February 15th, 2007 by Jesper Rønn-Jensen

It’s been a while where web standards don’t get the attention it deserves on this blog. In that spirit, here’s a behind-the-scenes view on how Technorati makes rounded corners on a faded background. I remember Eric Meyer mentioned this solution back at a workshop in 2005 (before he could actually tell that it was for […]

Humorous Vista Features (from The Onion)

Wednesday, February 14th, 2007 by Jesper Rønn-Jensen

The Onion has a humorous feature list from Microsoft Vista in the recent issue: Microsoft Vista Released Microsoft released its new operating system, Vista, on Jan. 30. Here are some of its features: Microsoft Word’s helpful paper-clip icon now blinks at rate of normal humans Enhanced graphics on “System Is Not Responding” pop-up window Five […]

Who Invented the Spacer.gif (Part 2)

Sunday, February 11th, 2007 by Jesper Rønn-Jensen

All of a sudden, Joe Kleinberg posted a comment on “Who invented the Spacer.gif“, with the claim that he actually invented the technique [before David Siegel]:

Handy JavaScript Cookie Editor

Monday, January 29th, 2007 by Jesper Rønn-Jensen

2 years ago I wrote a small javascript to view, edit and delete cookies. The really cool thing about this user interface is the inline editing of cookie names and values. I really like the principle that you hover the value that you inspect, can see that it’s editable. Then click directly and the text […]

Microsoft’s Commitment to Web Standards

Friday, January 19th, 2007 by Jesper Rønn-Jensen

Molly interviewed Bill Gates on Microsoft’s commitment to web standards. Today, Roger added his comments in his article: Bill Gates on Web standards: Huh?. In a brief discussion about web standards, Bill seems to interpret web standards as ws*, xml, etc. He does not really mention html, xhtml, css or similar approaches, which is why […]

More visual HTML jokes

Friday, January 5th, 2007 by Jesper Rønn-Jensen

More visual HTML tags inspired by Neatorama’s “Visual HTML joke” that got digged recently.

female body for html body tagsubmarine for html sub tag

The IE PNG fix vs. Accessibility

Monday, November 6th, 2006 by Thomas Watson Steen

It is no secret that all versions of Internet Explorer on Windows prior to version 7.0 has a flaw in its PNG renderer. The flaw basically involves the rendering of the alpha transparency and means that the images cannot fade nicely into the background. The IE PNG bug explained In the screenshots below you can […]

CAPTCHA usability: Humane alternative to CAPTCHA

Monday, October 23rd, 2006 by Jesper Rønn-Jensen

Revisiting CAPTCHA: Since W3C wrote about “inaccessibility of CAPTCHA” almost a year ago, a new technique has emerged: Using technology, to make it easier for humans, and challenging for robots to fill out a form, and using a more traditional fall-back method in the rare cases where the system cannot detect if a human is […]

Technique — locating problems in HTML

Monday, September 18th, 2006 by Jesper Rønn-Jensen

Technique for using the toolbox: Locating problems in HTML. I decided to make a little toolbox that’s easy to apply on web pages, when investigating problems with web pages. Basically, it’s the tools I used when investigating the case I described in “Why web standards matter (case study)” I split this into two posts. This […]

Toolbox — locating problems in HTML

Monday, September 18th, 2006 by Jesper Rønn-Jensen

I decided to make a little toolbox that’s easy to apply on web pages, when investigating problems with web pages. Basically, it’s the tools I used when investigating the case I described in “Why web standards matter (case study)” I decided to split this into two posts. This first one is about the toolbox. The […]

IE 7, web standards and CSS support

Monday, August 28th, 2006 by Jesper Rønn-Jensen

The Internet Explorer team is preparing to ship the next major version of the world’s most popular browser. The IE team has written an update on which CSS bugfixes that will make it into the final release. Update of existing CSS on websites Before we get to that rather long list, I feel it’s important […]

Why Web Standards Matter (Case Study)

Thursday, June 29th, 2006 by Jesper Rønn-Jensen

Project managers often have a hard time understanding web standards and why they matter. In this case, my arguments made a perfect business case for the managers of a particular project.

Mobile Web Best Practices

Wednesday, June 28th, 2006 by Thomas Watson Steen

Yesterday the W3C released a Candidate Recommendation document called “Mobile Web Best Practices 1.0“. With this document W3C is offering a set of guidelines to help web developers deliver a better user experience to mobile users. The deadline for providing feedback to W3C is the 27th of August 2006 and all developers are encouraged to […]

Ten reaffirmations from London @media 2006

Sunday, June 25th, 2006 by Luis Villa

Hi, this is Luis Villa, Thomas and Jesper’s former colleague at Capgemini Spain. They couldn’t make it to @media in London last week, so they asked me to give a summary of the event. London @media 2006 was a Conference about frontend and web user interface in all its dimensions: strategy, design and building and […]

Blog Usability: Too many RSS feeds

Wednesday, June 14th, 2006 by Thomas Watson Steen

After reading “Pick a Format (Any Format)” by Nick Bradbury (tip by: Jeremy Voorhis on Octoblog) we must say that we totally agree. The point in the post is simple: I keep running across sites that offer the same exact content as an RSS feed and an Atom feed. What’s the point of this? Making […]