Hand-held Style Sheet

I finished the Hand-Held style sheet last night and have only tested it in Opera’s small screen mode. Looks OK. I am hoping that realted devices such as the iPhone, Blackberry, and others support this media type.

Dean Edward’s IE7

I have implemented this primarily as a way to get IE6 to work properly due to its lack of support for hover events on non-anchor elements. I need this so the Main Navigation area will work properly, since we hav a significant amount of users that use IE6 still. =(

It seems to correct the issues just fine, but I do notice a little bit’o latency involved. I guess I cannot complain too much. =) I also learned that when testing this on a test box where you have IE 7 installed as well as the previous versions of IE that the conditional comments will not register since it thinks you have IE 7 running even if you are looking at IE 7. =)

Google Based Site Search Engine

Now I have the scripting behind the Google based site search engine to fix. I also need to make sure the Google Analytics is working properly too.

It seems that with IE7 coming that we might actually be able to count IE7 as a modern browser…. What did I just say? I said that we might be able to count IE7 as a “modern” browser. This is very welcome and strongly desired by the web developer community. Does IE7 mean the end of CSS hacks? No! Does it mean that we will have to hack for IE7? If IE7 has truly joined the ranks of modern browsers then we will not have to. This is a wonderful prospect. However, the need to hack for legacy browsers: IE5, IE6, and older versions of Netscape and Opera, and others will still remain depending on the users of your site. If all of your IE users instantly convert to IE7 as soon as it is publicly available count yourself lucky, but I do not think that this is going to be the rule for what happens, especially in the Enterprise sector, until it has been out for a while and the side effects are known and it has been well tested with their web based applications

IE7 does not mean the end of CSS hacks as we know it, but may be a harbinger that in the future years when most everyone has have upgraded their PCs to get rid of old versions of legacy browsers and most everyone is using IE7 and updated versions of Firefox or Opera then hacks may be a thing of the past. I look forward to the day but it is not going to be any time in the very, very near future.

Font Sizes

This odd 100.01% value for the font size compensates for several browser bugs. First, setting a default body font size in percent (instead of em) eliminates an IE/Win problem with growing or shrinking fonts out of proportion if they are later set in ems in other elements. Additionally, some versions of Opera will draw a default font-size of 100% too small compared to other browsers. Safari, on the other hand, has a problem with a font-size of 101%. The current “best” suggestion is to use the 100.01% value for this property.

• Community MX
• css-discuss: BrowserBugs

Font Type

• Scott Connect: Accessible Web Typography
• Building Accessible Websites by Joe Clarke