Writings

Thumbnail Articles
RSS etc.

RSS etc.

Syndication & RSS Feeds

As well a conventional Web page, the blog is available as an RSS feed. RSS is a technology that notifies you when a site is updated, and allows you to read the updated content without viewing the site itself. This page explains more about RSS feeds and what to do with them.

War & Politics

War & Politics

The day the earth stood still

On 12 September 2001 I had to write something. I needed an outlet; some kind of response. Not knowing what to write, I wrote how the events of the previous day had unfolded in a London office.

Thumbnail Sandbox Experiments
Sandbox
Support for soft hyphens

Typographers aid ‘justification’ of text by using a hyphen to split long words across two lines. HTML specifies that ‘soft’ hyphens can be used to indicate where a word could be divided in this manner, yet few modern browsers seem to support it.

JavaScript-enhanced image replacement

A script to make image replacement techniques work when CSS is on and images are off.

Supressing blinking text

The CSS text-decoration property can be used to make text blink, just like our old friend the blink tag. Fortunately this implies that the opposite is true: CSS can be used to suppress the blink tag.

Onload image fades without Flash

A function to show an ‘image loading…’ message and subsequent fade-in of a photo. Inspired by the Flash-like effect on Couloir.

Dynamically underlining accesskeys

Using the DOM to automatically underline the letter of a link text which matches its accesskey.

clear:none bug in Safari

There is a CSS bug in Safari 1.2 where clear:none does not over-ride clear:left.

Discovering DOM Scripting

DOM scripting is much more than getElementById. Elements can be isolated and manipulated without having an id at all. To demonstrate this I’ve put together a simple script which redefines the styles of a class.

Experiments with wide images

Probably the biggest problem with liquid layouts is how to contain and display fixed width elements such as images and flash movies. Inherently with a liquid layout one never knows how wide a container will be. This can lead to situations where an image is wider than its container and breaks the layout.

These are attempts to show wide images in a variable width column, using CSS techniques to shrink or crop the image.

Experiments with three images

Probably the biggest problem with liquid layouts is how to contain and display fixed width elements such as images and flash movies. Inherently with a liquid layout one never knows how wide a container will be. This can lead to situations where an image is wider than its container and breaks the layout.

These are attempts to show three images side by side in a variable width column, using CSS techniques adjust the layout.

CSS border renderings

How browsers render different styles of borders (dotted, dashed, etc) at different widths.