Fuddland

Entries concerning the world of web design, [X]HTML, CSS, etc.

This category is a subcategory of WWW.

Okay, not me specifically. Via Design Detector it is revealed that the BBC Online Web Development team have been advised to not even bother to test their sites in Opera [or the Mac-based Safari], instead deciding that if they try and code as closely as they can to W3C standards, that should be good enough for it to work.

Of course, that’s the dream — not to mention the whole point of having standards — but still, it’s a shame they don’t even test their pages in some of the lesser-used [but superior!] browsers. If they did, perhaps they’d have as much trouble as I’ve had trying to get their “Audio on Demand” and “Listen Live” features to work without having to open up the full, bloated Real Player or — and this was the really bugbear — having to resort to using IE.

Read the rest of “The BBC hate me!”…

When I wrote the previous entry, I noticed that the link to Daisy’s comment did not necessarily make the comment appear at the top of the page, because there was not enough text below it. In order to make it a little clearer to which comment you’ve just jumped, I knocked together a quick bit of JavaScript which alters the background colour of the relevant comment. [I know others must have done this already, but after four fruitless seconds of googling, I decided it’d be quicker to do it myself.]

Read the rest of “JavaScript highlighter”…

Damn impressive: SSCrabble is a fully-functional [single-player] version of the game which uses only CSS, XHTML and Javascript — no Flash and no Java applets. One neat advantage of this apart from the small size and low CPU demand, is — due to the CSS using relative sizes — you can resize the text in your browser to suit your visual needs.

Clever stuff from The Man in Blue, and I have to say his weblog design is one of the most pleasing I’ve seen. Beautiful shading and shadow effects, and nice touches like custom images relevant to each entry.

[via Cheah]

This is the kind of thing only I would worry about. I could try and blame Richard and his throwaway comment about ordered lists, or mrtn for very kindly buying me Eats, Shoots & Leaves, but if I’m honest I’d been thinking about this anyway.

I’m always interested in discussions about correct and valid HTML or XHTML mark-up, and am getting mildly obsessive about making sure I use the right tags for the right job. Only recently I’ve got into the habit of putting <cite> tags around any book titles I mention, because this helps search engines when they’re indexing your site.

Similarly, using <abbr> and <acronym> tags gives important clues to search engine spiders about the topic of the text it is indexing. For example, if a page referring to “bugs in IE” is actually talking about bugs in Internet Explorer, marking-up the first instance of “IE” as <abbr title="Internet Explorer">IE<abbr> makes all the difference.

This week I are been mostly thinking about lists.

Read the rest of “Punctuating unordered lists”…