Archive for May, 2011

IE hacks within standard CSS

Tuesday, May 31st, 2011

Updated! To include IE8 hacks

I do not like using conditional statements to load up another stylesheet for IE (Internet Explorer) . . . so it’s always a pain for me to make sure IE behaves. Normally, I’m successful and on those moments when I’m not, I just use these simple hacks – putting an asterisk(*) right before the style will be applied to IE’s v.6 and v.7 browsers while all other ignore it . . . and if you specifically just want to target IE v.6, then use the underscore(_). For IE8, look at the sample code below:

here’s an example:

{
margin:10px; /* works in all */
margin-top /*\**/:10px\9 /* targets IE8 */
margin-top:10px\9 /* targets IE6, 7 & 8 */
*margin:10px; /* targets IE6 and 7 */
_margin:10px; /* targets IE6 */
}

Book Reviews

Monday, May 30th, 2011

The Book of Awesome by Neil Pasricha
A collection of short (sometimes one-liners) blurbs about life’s wonderful moments. This book reminded me of how NOT to take myself too seriously and to enjoy and appreciate each event however, small or insignificant it may seem in the grand scheme of things. After all, life is a collection of small, seemingly inconsequential series of events. A very nice and light read . . .

The Accidental Billionaires by Ben Mezrich
This is the book that the movie “Social Network” is based on. While the movie closely resembles the book, there are quite a few valuable insights from the book that is not in the movie and a few scenes in the movie that is noticeably absent in the book . . . overall, it captures the personalities of both Mark Zuckerberg and Eduardo Saverin in a whole different light — as this book is based on only one side (Eduardo’s) of the story, it does a good job of narrating the sequence of events leading up to what Facebook is now. Having read the book, I now completely understand why Mark did what he did and while I may not totally agree with his methods, I might have done the same if I were in his shoes, so I can’t really blame him . . . Eduardo, seemingly the “good guy/victim” in the movie also has his faults and the book does a good job of exposing that (the movie didn’t really do a good job of showing his flaws). And while I still sympathize with Eduardo, I don’t completely agree with his actions that may have lead to the eventual end of their (his and Mark’s) friendship. They sort of cancel each other out, in my opinion after having seen the movie and read the book . . . as the saying goes, it does take two to tango.

Pete Sampras : A Champion’s mind by Pete Sampras, Peter Bodo
A short biography of Pete’s rise to become one of the best tennis players to ever play the game . . . this book narrates what goes on in Pete’s mind while he was still a junior tennis player and what made him become the most dominant player in his era. I plan to read Andre’s biography as well and while I cheered for Andre whenever they played against each other – I have newfound respect for Pete Sampras, he is truly a class act and there may never be another one like him.

Web Design Inspiration Bookmarks

Wednesday, May 11th, 2011

I’ve recently just finished compiling the contents of the book – The Web Designer’s IDEA BOOK vol.2 published by HOW into a bookmark file.

It’s compiled into folders and laid out similarly to the book. This makes it easier to be able to browse the directory of sites. We, as designers need all the inspiration we can get and I thought that it might be of use to somebody out there, so in the spirit of the internet – I’m sharing it.

Here it is – Web Designer’s Idea Bookmarks. Just save this file (right click, then save target/link as) and then add to your browser’s bookmark file via the Import feature. Enjoy!

jpg bug in Internet Explorer

Wednesday, May 4th, 2011

I’m oftentimes reminded how quirky Internet Explorer really is – just this morning, I came to work and in my email inbox – a co-worker reported missing images on the website I was working on. I quickly fired up my browser (not IE) and took a look-see . . . well, they are there. So I replied to the email requesting a refresh hit, thinking to myself that is often the case when I’m dealing with a client who isn’t particularly tech-savvy . . . but then, I remembered quite a while back in the days of IE6 when images just would not appear because they were encoded in CMYK – clearly, they should’ve fixed that thing by now right?? I fired up IE and took a look . . . and what I saw was another reminder why Internet Explorer is the world’s worst browser – please explain to me again why they have the largest market share??!

If you encounter this problem, go to Photoshop and open up the jpg in question. And then, hit Save for web . . . and that should fix it. All this extra work is making me hungry . . .