rowid,title,contents,year,author,author_slug,published,url,topic 318,Auto-Selecting Navigation,"In the article Centered Tabs with CSS Ethan laid out a tabbed navigation system which can be centred on the page. A frequent requirement for any tab-based navigation is to be able to visually represent the currently selected tab in some way. If you’re using a server-side language such as PHP, it’s quite easy to write something like class=""selected"" into your markup, but it can be even simpler than that. Let’s take the navigation div from Ethan’s article as an example.
As you can see we have a standard unordered list which is then styled with CSS to look like tabs. By giving each tab a class which describes it’s logical section of the site, if we were to then apply a class to the body tag of each page showing the same, we could write a clever CSS selector to highlight the correct tab on any given page. Sound complicated? Well, it’s not a trivial concept, but actually applying it is dead simple. Modifying the markup First thing is to place a class name on each li in the list: Then, on each page of your site, apply the a matching class to the body tag to indicate which section of the site that page is in. For example, on your About page: ... Writing the CSS selector You can now write a single CSS rule to match the selected tab on any given page. The logic is that you want to match the ‘about’ tab on the ‘about’ page and the ‘products’ tab on the ‘products’ page, so the selector looks like this: body.home #navigation li.home, body.about #navigation li.about, body.work #navigation li.work, body.products #navigation li.products, body.contact #navigation li.contact{ ... whatever styles you need to show the tab selected ... } So all you need to do when you create a new page in your site is to apply a class to the body tag to say which section it’s in. The CSS will do the rest for you – without any server-side help.",2005,Drew McLellan,drewmclellan,2005-12-10T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2005/auto-selecting-navigation/,code 319,Avoiding CSS Hacks for Internet Explorer,"Back in October, IEBlog issued a call to action, asking developers to clean up their CSS hacks for IE7 testing. Needless to say, a lot of hubbub ensued… both on IEBlog and elsewhere. My contribution to all of the noise was to suggest that developers review their code and use good CSS hacks. But what makes a good hack? Tantek Çelik, the Godfather of CSS hacks, gave us the answer by explaining how CSS hacks should be designed. In short, they should (1) be valid, (2) target only old/frozen/abandoned user-agents/browsers, and (3) be ugly. Tantek also went on to explain that using a feature of CSS is not a hack. Now, I’m not a frequent user of CSS hacks, but Tantek’s post made sense to me. In particular, I felt it gave developers direction on how we should be coding to accommodate that sometimes troublesome browser, Internet Explorer. But what I’ve found, through my work with other developers, is that there is still much confusion over the use of CSS hacks and IE. Using examples from the code I’ve seen recently, allow me to demonstrate how to clean up some IE-specific CSS hacks. The two hacks that I’ve found most often in the code I’ve seen and worked with are the star html bug and the underscore hack. We know these are both IE-specific by checking Kevin Smith’s CSS Filters chart. Let’s look at each of these hacks and see how we can replace them with the same CSS feature-based solution. The star html bug This hack violates Tantek’s second rule as it targets current (and future) UAs. I’ve seen this both as a stand alone rule, as well as an override to some other rule in a style sheet. Here are some code samples: * html div#header {margin-top:-3px;} .promo h3 {min-height:21px;} * html .promo h3 {height:21px;} The underscore hack This hack violates Tantek’s first two rules: it’s invalid (according to the W3C CSS Validator) and it targets current UAs. Here’s an example: ol {padding:0; _padding-left:5px;} Using child selectors We can use the child selector to replace both the star html bug and underscore hack. Here’s how: Write rules with selectors that would be successfully applied to all browsers. This may mean starting with no declarations in your rule! div#header {} .promo h3 {} ol {padding:0;} To these rules, add the IE-specific declarations. div#header {margin-top:-3px;} .promo h3 {height:21px;} ol {padding:0 0 0 5px;} After each rule, add a second rule. The selector of the second rule must use a child selector. In this new rule, correct any IE-specific declarations previously made. div#header {margin-top:-3px;} body > div#header {margin-top:0;} .promo h3 {height:21px;} .promo > h3 {height:auto; min-height:21px;} ol {padding:0 0 0 5px;} html > body ol {padding:0;} Voilà – no more hacks! There are a few caveats to this that I won’t go into… but assuming you’re operating in strict mode and barring any really complicated stuff you’re doing in your code, your CSS will still render perfectly across browsers. And while this may make your CSS slightly heftier in size, it should future-proof it for IE7 (or so I hope). Happy holidays!",2005,Kimberly Blessing,kimberlyblessing,2005-12-17T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2005/avoiding-css-hacks-for-internet-explorer/,code 313,Centered Tabs with CSS,"Doug Bowman’s Sliding Doors is pretty much the de facto way to build tabbed navigation with CSS, and rightfully so – it is, as they say, rockin’ like Dokken. But since it relies heavily on floats for the positioning of its tabs, we’re constrained to either left- or right-hand navigation. But what if we need a bit more flexibility? What if we need to place our navigation in the center? Styling the li as a floated block does give us a great deal of control over margin, padding, and other presentational styles. However, we should learn to love the inline box – with it, we can create a flexible, centered alternative to floated navigation lists. Humble Beginnings Do an extra shot of ‘nog, because you know what’s coming next. That’s right, a simple unordered list: If we were wedded to using floats to style our list, we could easily fix the width of our ul, and trick it out with some margin: 0 auto; love to center it accordingly. But this wouldn’t net us much flexibility: if we ever changed the number of navigation items, or if the user increased her browser’s font size, our design could easily break. Instead of worrying about floats, let’s take the most basic approach possible: let’s turn our list items into inline elements, and simply use text-align to center them within the ul: #navigation ul, #navigation ul li { list-style: none; margin: 0; padding: 0; } #navigation ul { text-align: center; } #navigation ul li { display: inline; margin-right: .75em; } #navigation ul li.last { margin-right: 0; } Our first step is sexy, no? Well, okay, not really – but it gives us a good starting point. We’ve tamed our list by removing its default styles, set the list items to display: inline, and centered the lot. Adding a background color to the links shows us exactly how the different elements are positioned. Now the fun stuff. Inline Elements, Padding, and You So how do we give our links some dimensions? Well, as the CSS specification tells us, the height property isn’t an option for inline elements such as our anchors. However, what if we add some padding to them? #navigation li a { padding: 5px 1em; } I just love leading questions. Things are looking good, but something’s amiss: as you can see, the padded anchors seem to be escaping their containing list. Thankfully, it’s easy to get things back in line. Our anchors have 5 pixels of padding on their top and bottom edges, right? Well, by applying the same vertical padding to the list, our list will finally “contain” its child elements once again. ’Tis the Season for Tabbing Now, we’re finally able to follow the “Sliding Doors” model, and tack on some graphics: #navigation ul li a { background: url(""tab-right.gif"") no-repeat 100% 0; color: #06C; padding: 5px 0; text-decoration: none; } #navigation ul li a span { background: url(""tab-left.gif"") no-repeat; padding: 5px 1em; } #navigation ul li a:hover span { color: #69C; text-decoration: underline; } Finally, our navigation’s looking appropriately sexy. By placing an equal amount of padding on the top and bottom of the ul, our tabs are properly “contained”, and we can subsequently style the links within them. But what if we want them to bleed over the bottom-most border? Easy: we can simply decrease the bottom padding on the list by one pixel, like so. A Special Note for Special Browsers The Mac IE5 users in the audience are likely hopping up and down by now: as they’ve discovered, our centered navigation behaves rather annoyingly in their browser. As Philippe Wittenbergh has reported, Mac IE5 is known to create “phantom links” in a block-level element when text-align is set to any value but the default value of left. Thankfully, Philippe has documented a workaround that gets that [censored] venerable browser to behave. Simply place the following code into your CSS, and the links will be restored to their appropriate width: /**//*/ #navigation ul li a { display: inline-block; white-space: nowrap; width: 1px; } /**/ IE for Windows, however, displays an extra kind of crazy. The padding I’ve placed on my anchors is offsetting the spans that contain the left curve of my tabs; thankfully, these shenanigans are easily straightened out: /**/ * html #navigation ul li a { padding: 0; } /**/ And with that, we’re finally finished. All set. And that’s it. With your centered navigation in hand, you can finally enjoy those holiday toddies and uncomfortable conversations with your skeevy Uncle Eustace.",2005,Ethan Marcotte,ethanmarcotte,2005-12-08T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2005/centered-tabs-with-css/,code 332,CSS Layout Starting Points,"I build a lot of CSS layouts, some incredibly simple, others that cause sleepless nights and remind me of the torturous puzzle books that were given to me at Christmas by aunties concerned for my education. However, most of the time these layouts fit quite comfortably into one of a very few standard formats. For example: Liquid, multiple column with no footer Liquid, multiple column with footer Fixed width, centred Rather than starting out with blank CSS and (X)HTML documents every time you need to build a layout, you can fairly quickly create a bunch of layout starting points, that will give you a solid basis for creating the rest of the design and mean that you don’t have to remember how a three column layout with a footer is best achieved every time you come across one! These starting points can be really basic, in fact that’s exactly what you want as the final design, the fonts, the colours and so on will be different every time. It’s just the main sections we want to be able to quickly get into place. For example, here is a basic starting point CSS and XHTML document for a fixed width, centred layout with a footer.Sidebar content here
Your main content goes here.
Ho Ho Ho!
Notice that you can’t just put the quoted text directly between theProgressive Enhancement, as a label for a strategy for Web design, was coined by Steven Champeon in a series of articles and presentations for Webmonkey and the SxSW Interactive conference.
tags. In order for your markup to be valid, block quotes may only contain block-level elements such as paragraphs. There is an optional cite attribute that you can place in the openingtag. This should contain a URL containing the original text you are quoting:Great! Except… the default behavior in most browsers is to completely ignore the cite attribute. Even though it contains important and useful information, the URL in the cite attribute is hidden. You could simply duplicate the information with a hyperlink at the end of the quoted text:Progressive Enhancement, as a label for a strategy for Web design, was coined by Steven Champeon in a series of articles and presentations for Webmonkey and the SxSW Interactive conference.
But somehow it feels wrong to have to write out the same URL twice every time you want to quote something. It could also get very tedious if you have a lot of quotes. Well, “tedious” is no problem to a programming language, so why not use a sprinkling of DOM Scripting? Here’s a plan for generating an attribution link for every block quote with a cite attribute: Write a function called prepareBlockquotes. Begin by making sure the browser understands the methods you will be using. Get all the blockquote elements in the document. Start looping through each one. Get the value of the cite attribute. If the value is empty, continue on to the next iteration of the loop. Create a paragraph. Create a link. Give the paragraph a class of “attribution”. Give the link an href attribute with the value from the cite attribute. Place the text “source” inside the link. Place the link inside the paragraph. Place the paragraph inside the block quote. Close the for loop. Close the function. Here’s how that translates to JavaScript: function prepareBlockquotes() { if (!document.getElementsByTagName || !document.createElement || !document.appendChild) return; var quotes = document.getElementsByTagName(""blockquote""); for (var i=0; iProgressive Enhancement, as a label for a strategy for Web design, was coined by Steven Champeon in a series of articles and presentations for Webmonkey and the SxSW Interactive conference.
tags. You can style the attribution link using CSS. It might look good aligned to the right with a smaller font size. If you’re looking for something to do to keep you busy this Christmas, I’m sure that this function could be greatly improved. Here are a few ideas to get you started: Should the text inside the generated link be the URL itself? If the block quote has a title attribute, how would you take its value and use it as the text inside the generated link? Should the attribution paragraph be placed outside the block quote? If so, how would you that (remember, there is an insertBefore method but no insertAfter)? Can you think of other instances of useful information that’s locked away inside attributes? Access keys? Abbreviations?",2005,Jeremy Keith,jeremykeith,2005-12-05T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2005/dom-scripting-your-way-to-better-blockquotes/,code 326,Don't be eval(),"JavaScript is an interpreted language, and like so many of its peers it includes the all powerful eval() function. eval() takes a string and executes it as if it were regular JavaScript code. It’s incredibly powerful and incredibly easy to abuse in ways that make your code slower and harder to maintain. As a general rule, if you’re using eval() there’s probably something wrong with your design. Common mistakes Here’s the classic misuse of eval(). You have a JavaScript object, foo, and you want to access a property on it – but you don’t know the name of the property until runtime. Here’s how NOT to do it: var property = 'bar'; var value = eval('foo.' + property); Yes it will work, but every time that piece of code runs JavaScript will have to kick back in to interpreter mode, slowing down your app. It’s also dirt ugly. Here’s the right way of doing the above: var property = 'bar'; var value = foo[property]; In JavaScript, square brackets act as an alternative to lookups using a dot. The only difference is that square bracket syntax expects a string. Security issues In any programming language you should be extremely cautious of executing code from an untrusted source. The same is true for JavaScript – you should be extremely cautious of running eval() against any code that may have been tampered with – for example, strings taken from the page query string. Executing untrusted code can leave you vulnerable to cross-site scripting attacks. What’s it good for? Some programmers say that eval() is B.A.D. – Broken As Designed – and should be removed from the language. However, there are some places in which it can dramatically simplify your code. A great example is for use with XMLHttpRequest, a component of the set of tools more popularly known as Ajax. XMLHttpRequest lets you make a call back to the server from JavaScript without refreshing the whole page. A simple way of using this is to have the server return JavaScript code which is then passed to eval(). Here is a simple function for doing exactly that – it takes the URL to some JavaScript code (or a server-side script that produces JavaScript) and loads and executes that code using XMLHttpRequest and eval(). function evalRequest(url) { var xmlhttp = new XMLHttpRequest(); xmlhttp.onreadystatechange = function() { if (xmlhttp.readyState==4 && xmlhttp.status==200) { eval(xmlhttp.responseText); } } xmlhttp.open(""GET"", url, true); xmlhttp.send(null); } If you want this to work with Internet Explorer you’ll need to include this compatibility patch.",2005,Simon Willison,simonwillison,2005-12-07T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2005/dont-be-eval/,code 314,Easy Ajax with Prototype,"There’s little more impressive on the web today than a appropriate touch of Ajax. Used well, Ajax brings a web interface much closer to the experience of a desktop app, and can turn a bear of an task into a pleasurable activity. But it’s really hard, right? It involves all the nasty JavaScript that no one ever does often enough to get really good at, and the browser support is patchy, and urgh it’s just so much damn effort. Well, the good news is that – ta-da – it doesn’t have to be a headache. But man does it still look impressive. Here’s how to amaze your friends. Introducing prototype.js Prototype is a JavaScript framework by Sam Stephenson designed to help make developing dynamic web apps a whole lot easier. In basic terms, it’s a JavaScript file which you link into your page that then enables you to do cool stuff. There’s loads of capability built in, a portion of which covers our beloved Ajax. The whole thing is freely distributable under an MIT-style license, so it’s good to go. What a nice man that Mr Stephenson is – friends, let us raise a hearty cup of mulled wine to his good name. Cheers! sluurrrrp. First step is to download the latest Prototype and put it somewhere safe. I suggest underneath the Christmas tree. Cutting to the chase Before I go on and set up an example of how to use this, let’s just get to the crux. Here’s how Prototype enables you to make a simple Ajax call and dump the results back to the page: var url = 'myscript.php'; var pars = 'foo=bar'; var target = 'output-div'; var myAjax = new Ajax.Updater(target, url, {method: 'get', parameters: pars}); This snippet of JavaScript does a GET to myscript.php, with the parameter foo=bar, and when a result is returned, it places it inside the element with the ID output-div on your page. Knocking up a basic example So to get this show on the road, there are three files we need to set up in our site alongside prototype.js. Obviously we need a basic HTML page with prototype.js linked in. This is the page the user interacts with. Secondly, we need our own JavaScript file for the glue between the interface and the stuff Prototype is doing. Lastly, we need the page (a PHP script in my case) that the Ajax is going to make its call too. So, to that basic HTML page for the user to interact with. Here’s one I found whilst out carol singing: Easy Ajax As you can see, I’ve linked in prototype.js, and also a file called ajax.js, which is where we’ll be putting our glue. (Careful where you leave your glue, kids.) Our basic example is just going to take a name and then echo it back in the form of a seasonal greeting. There’s a form with an input field for a name, and crucially a DIV (greeting) for the result of our call. You’ll also notice that the form has a submit button – this is so that it can function as a regular form when no JavaScript is available. It’s important not to get carried away and forget the basics of accessibility. Meanwhile, back at the server So we need a script at the server which is going to take input from the Ajax call and return some output. This is normally where you’d hook into a database and do whatever transaction you need to before returning a result. To keep this as simple as possible, all this example here will do is take the name the user has given and add it to a greeting message. Not exactly Web 2-point-HoHoHo, but there you have it. Here’s a quick PHP script – greeting.php – that Santa brought me early. Season's Greetings, $the_name!""; ?> You’ll perhaps want to do something a little more complex within your own projects. Just sayin’. Gluing it all together Inside our ajax.js file, we need to hook this all together. We’re going to take advantage of some of the handy listener routines and such that Prototype also makes available. The first task is to attach a listener to set the scene once the window has loaded. He’s how we attach an onload event to the window object and get it to call a function named init(): Event.observe(window, 'load', init, false); Now we create our init() function to do our evil bidding. Its first job of the day is to hide the submit button for those with JavaScript enabled. After that, it attaches a listener to watch for the user typing in the name field. function init(){ $('greeting-submit').style.display = 'none'; Event.observe('greeting-name', 'keyup', greet, false); } As you can see, this is going to make a call to a function called greet() onkeyup in the greeting-name field. That function looks like this: function greet(){ var url = 'greeting.php'; var pars = 'greeting-name='+escape($F('greeting-name')); var target = 'greeting'; var myAjax = new Ajax.Updater(target, url, {method: 'get', parameters: pars}); } The key points to note here are that any user input needs to be escaped before putting into the parameters so that it’s URL-ready. The target is the ID of the element on the page (a DIV in our case) which will be the recipient of the output from the Ajax call. That’s it No, seriously. That’s everything. Try the example. Amaze your friends with your 1337 Ajax sk1llz.",2005,Drew McLellan,drewmclellan,2005-12-01T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2005/easy-ajax-with-prototype/,code 315,Edit-in-Place with Ajax,"Back on day one we looked at using the Prototype library to take all the hard work out of making a simple Ajax call. While that was fun and all, it didn’t go that far towards implementing something really practical. We dipped our toes in, but haven’t learned to swim yet. So here is swimming lesson number one. Anyone who’s used Flickr to publish their photos will be familiar with the edit-in-place system used for quickly amending titles and descriptions on photographs. Hovering over an item turns its background yellow to indicate it is editable. A simple click loads the text into an edit box, right there on the page. Prototype includes all sorts of useful methods to help reproduce something like this for our own projects. As well as the simple Ajax GETs we learned how to do last time, we can also do POSTs (which we’ll need here) and a whole bunch of manipulations to the user interface – all through simple library calls. Here’s what we’re building, so let’s do it. Getting Started There are two major components to this process; the user interface manipulation and the Ajax call itself. Our set-up is much the same as last time (you may wish to read the first article if you’ve not already done so). We have a basic HTML page which links in the prototype.js file and our own editinplace.js. Here’s what Santa dropped down my chimney:Edit-in-Place with Ajax Edit-in-place
Dashing through the snow on a one horse open sleigh.
So that’s our page. The editable item is going to be thecalled desc. The process goes something like this: Highlight the area onMouseOver Clear the highlight onMouseOut If the user clicks, hide the area and replace with a