Coffee on the Keyboard

IE8 and Version Targeting

Two months after the whole of the internet has had their say, I thought I’d throw some new kindling on the fire of Internet Explorer 8’s version-targeting mechanism. It’s crap.

The key issue is the default behavior: if I never change my server configuration or every page on my site, they will “forever” be locked in IE7 mode. This is a blow to the heart of the idea of progressive enhancement, or even graceful degradation, and will certainly not encourage developers to make their sites IE8—and thus Acid2—compatible.

Why worry about learning the rules when you have a broken version “forever?”

And what of this “forever?” How long can Microsoft reasonably include every previous version of IE in their new releases? Five years? Say to IE 9? 10 years to IE 10 or 11? At that point there will be 5 separate rendering engines, IE 6 and up, embedded in that increasingly large, increasingly slow program.

Of course, there is also the issue of implementation: Microsoft has said unto us that this shall be. If they really want to get on the standards bandwagon, shouldn’t this have been brought to the W3C, at least for advice?

I have a much more radical suggestion they may not like. Microsoft should abandon “Internet Explorer.” Not the product, but the name, and specifically the abbreviation “MSIE” in the browser string.

They’ll also need to dump the window.ActiveXObject class, perhaps replacing it with a window.ActiveXControl or window.AXObject class. These are the most common ways of identifying IE. If IE shows up like any other standards-compliant browser, there should be no problems for older pages.

I tried to find something good to say about this, but I can’t. It’s a bad idea from the bottom up. Unfortunately, we’re stuck with it.

So I will take Microsoft’s built-in cheat—a not-so-tacit admission that this idea is not viable in the long-term—and adjust my server to send IE=edge with every page. That way I get to keep the progressive enhancement that has served me so well.

Tags: IE8, version targeting
Posted in Browsers, CSS, Standards

CSS: Good; Everything Else: Bad

Images, flash, frames. These are the “traditional” methods for making a web site “more interesting” or “better looking.” But these hold-overs from the AOL era are the bane of bandwidth, text-only browsers, and non-visual users.

HTML, of course, was originally written to define the structure of a web page, never it’s design. In essence, HTML was intended to be much like XML today. But, when HTML was created, there were no style-sheets, so HTML was forced to include some design information, like <font> tags and the bgcolor attribute. Developers quickly turned to images, JavaScript, frames, and Flash to make their lives easier, but in the process made everyone else’s life harder.

Images and Flash will both suck bandwidth, so why would you use them to display text or a navigation bar? Save images and Flash for what they’re supposed to be: pictures and animations. Frames reek havoc on text-only browsers and screen-readers (hence the rarely-used <noframes> tag) and have been considered blase web-design for years.

So how can you save bandwidth, insure accessibility, and still get all the effects you want? CSS. Let’s go over a few of the quick-and-easy ways to use CSS to replace the bandwidth-heavy, inaccessible design you’re using now:

1) Frames: Fixed Sidebars
Perhaps the most common use of frames was the sidebar, a window on the left (or right) that contained anything from helpful information to your site’s navigation, appeared on every page, and didn’t scroll with the rest of the site.

If you want to do the same thing, use the CSS “position: fixed” definition. For instance:

#sidebar {
position: fixed;
top: 0;
left: 0;
width: 160px;
height: 100%;
background: #00f;
}

This will make a non-scrolling, 160-pixel wide sidebar on the left of the screen. (You could always use “right” and “bottom,” too.) Now, in your HTML file, create a <div> with the id=”sidebar” attribute:

<div id="sidebar">
...all your links go here...
</div>

You can put this anywhere in the HTML source, and it will appear in the correct place. In a good screen-reader, if you put this toward the bottom of the HTML source (for instance, after all the content of the page) then the user would hear the content before having to hear the list of links again.

2) Images: Positioning Text
This is really just poor web-design. Unless it’s desperately important that you use a particular, rare font, you should never use images to display text. If it’s important that the text appear a certain way or in a certain position, make use of the box-model and nested <div>s. For example, let’s say you wanted a 480-pixel wide layout, regardless of the users’ screen resolution, with a right gutter and a title and slogan in the top-left. You might do something like:

#main {
width: 480px;
height: 100%;
margin: 0 auto;
padding: 0;
position: relative;
top:0;
left:0;
}
#gutter {
width: 120px;
height: 100%;
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
border-left: 1px solid #000;
position: absolute;
top: 0;
right: 0;
background: #2c2;
color: #fff;
}
#header {
width: 360px;
margin: 0;
padding: 6px;
position: relative;
top: 0;
left: 0;
font-family: Tahoma, Arial, san-serif;
font-size: 140%;
text-align: center;
}

With the corresponding HTML:

<div id="main">
<div id="gutter">
...gutter code here...
</div>
<div id="header">
<p>Page Title</p>
<p>Page Slogan</p>
</div>
</div>

Which gives something like (borders added to show box model):

Now, of course, with just a little editing of the CSS file (and none of the HTML) you can move the gutter, change the background, change the page width, change the font, and it’s all in text-format, that will display correctly to text-only or visually-impaired browsers, and save huge percentages of bandwidth.

3) Flash: Cool Navigation Bars
This gets a little more complicated. In general, it’s hard to define the box around <a> tags, so you’ll probably want to do something like this:

#nav
{   margin: 4px auto 0 auto;
 position: relative;
 top: 0;
 left: 0;
}
#nav ul
{   display: inline;
 list-style-type: none;
}
#nav li
{   display: inline;
 border: 1px solid #000;
 padding: 2px 4px 0 4px;
 margin: auto 4px 0 4px;
}
#nav li.here
{   border-bottom: 1px solid #FFF;
}
#nav li:HOVER
{   border-bottom: 1px solid #FFF;
 font-weight: bold;
}

Now in each <li> tag you’ll make a link to the page you want. This particular set of code gives you a horizontal list. I use a version of this on my projects page, so you can see it in action. If you remove the display: inline parts, you’ll get the vertical list you need for a column. Of course, the margin, padding, and all the colors can be customized however you want, to make it look right. (I got this from the AListApart article “Taming Lists“, which you should read for more information.)

So there you go…
It’s not all the info you’ll ever need, but it solves three of the most heinous wastes of bandwidth I’ve seen on the web, as well as all the problems people have with accessibility. These methods can both look great, and be completely usable by everyone, something Flash, frames, and images can’t.

Posted in CSS, Code, How To