IE 8 beta 2 1px Background Image Zoom Bug

IE 8 beta 2 has a nasty little bug with Background Images. If they have a width or height of 1px because you use it for repeat-x or repeat-y backgrounds you will get very dissapointed if zooming your Template smaller than 100%.

Somehow IE calculates 1px < 100% must be 0px which means the background dissapears even with repeat statement.

Workaround ist to use bigger sizes, at least 2px but i am not sure if you will get problems at < 50% so i use 10px now, at least for IE8 (conditional comments are a savior).

Firefox 2 missing Addons

Firefox 2 has been out for some time now and there are still some Addons which have not been updated from their authors.

But since there is a big community there are several updates from other people to get the add on running on FF 2.

• Add'n Edit Cookies (Erics Comment has a link: http://zektek.com/cookie.xpi)
• ScreenGrab
• Tails Export

Firefox will not start after installing SiteAdvisor

Today my Firefox did not start which was quite annoying for a Monday morning. The Safe Mode feature of FF was very helpful since i easily was able to find the course of the problem.

I have installed the SiteAdvisor extension from McAfee and after some googling i found this Article.

On Friday i changed my Proxy Settings from Direct Connection to Automatic (we had some problems with our servers) and forgot to undo this...

quite annoying "Feature" of the Extension.

ie6 floates just the background...

I had the problem that the background in a floated environment was not shown in ie 6 and clear:both was not helping much.

Pinpointing the problem down over 1 hour i found the reason in the width of the floated div. It was exact 1 px wider than ie liked it. So if i set it 1 px smaller the background as shown right, if i set it 1 px wider the content is also moved down. (since we are talking about 2 boxes floated, and the right one is the problem).

So it seems like ie is floating the background and the content separately.

I looked also in IE 7 (Vista Beta) and the problem is there also... and i found what seems like the peekaboo bug??..

Since i am really in a hurry and don't have time i have to postpoint writing a testcase for it.

labeling the world

Using labels for any form has become a standard habitat for me. From time to time i get angry when i am using some form on the internet which does not know about labels.. so you have to click right on the element.. not left... ah...sh*$$ not right.. now i have it ;-(

At first i did not think much about it but now, it's always an indicator if the site i am looking at is well programmed or not.

Unfortunately css3 is not starting early enough and we have to keep with css 2.1 and Windows without Cleartype activated.. which means the designers want graphics everywhere .. even in a form. (From time to time).

Using Firefox as my primary Browser i did not detect the error at first, but it looks like IE does not like images in labels.. which means, it does not work.
<label for="foo"><img .... /></label>

I don't know if it's a bug in IE or it is not in the specification for html, so shouldn't work at all.. but i tested it also with IE 7 Beta 2.. it does not work.

clear:both margin bug?

Monday i compared a project on IE and FF 1.5 and was puzzled by a problem at FF since it worked when i programmed it. So i installed FF 1.0.7 again and "tata" everything worked as expected.

Seems like that FF 1.5 and 1.0.7 changed it s way of behaving when using on a div both: clear and minus margin.

When using minus margin and clear, FF 1.5 is ignoring the minus margin.

I created a testpage and posted it at quircksmode.

venkman for Firefox 1.5

I just installed Firefox 1.5 and tried to update my venkman.. *shocking* it's not working!!
Without Venkman i can't work properly.. i need it, i want it, o baby, o baby...

Well i found a link in the comments of the mozilla.org page of venkman:
http://getahead.ltd.uk/ajax/venkman

Now get it ;-)

Firefox ignores http-equiv Attribute in Meta Tag?

I just solved a bug which was keeping me busy the last hours. A Form for multilingual input went crazy in IE since it always mixed up the special characters.
The funny thing was, Firefox had no Problems with it at all.. so i tested different charsets, but IE never showed any change in reaction and i almost went beserk until i found an error in typing of the meta tag:

<meta equiv="type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">

You see the failure in http-equiv, which should say Content-Type. IE is very particular here, but Firefox seems to ignore it, since it reacted to all my changes perfectly...

For those who want's to see the right meta tag, here it is:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">

css3 multi-column layout with javascript

I just got a link from a friend with an ingenous code. It provides the posibility to change normal Text plots into a multiple columns layout.

The cool thing, it is a javascript providing the possibility to use the new css3 features for multi-columns in css.

check it out!
http://www.csscripting.com/css-multi-column/

Webdesign Tools

Just for info for people having trouble getting mails in the last time ;-)

Opera is now freeeeeee... no banners noting more: http://www.opera.com

And then there are some Toolbars which are making our lives a little bit less complicate:

WebDeveloper Toolbar for Firefox:
Web Standards Project BUZZ post
Download the extension here

Finally there is something really great.. a WebDeveloper Toolbar for IE... all those hours of searching the damn problem in IE while everything looks ok in Firefox... now you have the tool!
Web Standards Project BUZZ post
Download link to microsoft

Thunderbird Attachment Problems

Since i had a Harddiskcrash and reinstalled my System new, i also changed my local Email Program to Thunderbird.

But now i have serious Troubles getting Attachments from Outlook Sender... the Attachments i receive all are called Part1.2 ..

I am having a gmail Account and therefore i also checked it over the Browser.. the Attachments look all very good.

In the web i just found the following:

Actually it's a compatibility issue between Outlook and Thunderbird (Mozilla). It is because Thunderbird cannot decode the MS-TNEF MIME format HTML or Picture which was composed into the mail body by Outlook. You can find the MS-TNEF BASE64 encoding part in the mail source, and Thunderbird regards this part as an attachment named Part1.2.
------_=_NextPart_000_01C4E756.ED7E9F5E
Content-Type: application/ms-tnef
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64

since that Post was written December 21, 2004, i hoped there is already a fix or something for it.. but i am unable to find one...

any ideas?

FireFox 1.5 Beta and Extensions

As everywhere posted the beta of Firefox 1.5 is out. I have to say, the new handling of the tabs is ingenious..
Unfortunately some extensions are not working with the beta.. now i hope there will be updates to them or the final of Firefox will be able to work with them...

I mean, the last update from Venkman was in August 11, 2004... so i don't think there will be a new one in the next days... and without Venkman javascript coding will get as ugly as before Venkman ;-(

FireFox and Flash Player 8 Beta

If you have found this link http://www.macromedia.com/software/studio/experience/ to macromedias demo for studio 8 you will have to install the new Flash Player 8 Beta...

My advice: don't! After installing the damn thing no flash file was working any more until i found a post in a forum where they said that add block does not work with the new Player ... i tried to install Flash Player 7 but it will not work.. so i had to disable Add Block in my Extensions...

Hopefully they will have an update soon.. or i have to reinstall Firefox ...

CSS vertical-align and images

For webdesigners aligning images vertical in a div is a problem which could be easily solved if IE would support the full display posibilities like "table" (CSS 2.0).. but as usual it does not work that way.

Since i don't like to use tables in a css design until it is really necessary (like information in table design or forms) i searched further more to find a solution that did not need a table i found one way that worked.

You have to use position relative and absolute for it. In short you have 3 different div's and you use 2 different ways, one for IE and one for the rest which have full CSS 2.0 support ;-)

Here the links:
http://www.jakpsatweb.cz
http://workingbath.com/

CSSBug macIE: space in classname

If there are Spaces in classnames, macIE uses an internal css class called .infobox.
So if your document contains a css class called .infobox, macIE will use it ;-))

Here is a TestPage.

DOM Inspector

The DOM Inspector is a very good Tool, and needed desperately while programming websites. FireFox for instance has it's own and you can install it with FireFox for free.

Internet Explorer on the other hand has nothing shipped with it. Now i read at IE Blog that there will not be any Inspector, because "3rd Parties have already programmed it"... and you can download it ... or better say B U Y it from them...

What the hack ... buy????

Well, again one point for FireFox.. they are not as lousy programmers as at microsoft ;-)

IE position relative - absolut container bug

Another IE Bug, or better, one that is old but still problematic..
Today i built a side where i needed one element to be positioned absolute.. so i made a structure like this: (I have changed to round brackets)

(div class="headline")(/div)
(div class="container")
    (div class="logo")(/div)
    (div class="content")
        content
    (/div)
(/div)

Then i have to add the follwing css attributes:
.container {
position: relative;
}
.logo {
position: abolute;
}
.content {
margin: 0 50px;
}

Actually there where more, but i want to keep this short.
On Firefox everythink looks great, but when i looked in IE i got a different view.
IE positioned the logo not at the left border, the one of container, it positioned it at the left border of content... it added the whole 50px margin..

Workaround:
The problem is, that the .container has no content in it, only the div .content, so IE just ignored it. You have to add content to it. In my case, i just positioned headline into the container, since container has no other attributes than position relative, it did not make any difference and volia everythink works perfect.