Web Stew

I admit it, sometimes I'm just plain lazy when I write my code.  I know better but sometimes that time you just tested something in code manages to stick around a lot longer than you expected.

It happens to you too, even if you don't want to admit it.

This happened to me the other day actually, I mistakenly named a variable in my Javascript code "status".  This as it turns out was a big mistake.  The code I wrote ran fine in Firefox but when I flipped over to Internet Explorer to test nothing was working.  After an embarrassingly long time trying to find the error there it was, and to fix it all I had to do was change the variable name.

So in my function I had something like:

status=objectRef.innerHTML;

The problem is for some unknown and seemingly unfixed reason Internet Explorer references the variable status over to the window.status object.  Window.status is the text that displays in the status area at the bottom of your browser.  So if you set the variable status to a value in side your function the status area in your browser changes as well.
Read the rest of this entry »

It's true I love transparencies, unfortunately the great minds at Microsoft did not feel the way I did until they released IE7.  You see IE6 lacks the inherit ability to cope with the transparency layer in PNG files.  There are of course a lot of hacks to get around this which I will not go in depth into today.

If you want to read more about PNG's and IE6 read this post.

Instead I would like to show a technique that I have used recently to create dynamic interfaces using a minimal set of graphic files.

Here is the problem I'm trying to solve.  I have a site that has a wonderful gradient Menu bar/ Nav Panel/ Box/ whatever that needs to change color or have multiple colors.  Now what you could do is make a bunch of different back grounds for each color you want or (my technique) have a transparent PNG cover the solid CSS based background color and simply change the color in CSS to match.

Here is an example of what a typical transparent nav bar will look like...
Read the rest of this entry »