As some of you (e.g., Louis) may have noticed during the recent site redesign, I decided to switch the default doctype from XHTML 1.0 Strict to XHTML 1.1. Just in case you were wondering, XHTML 1.1 is different than XHTML 1.0 in three important ways 1: On every element, the lang attribute has been removed in favor of the xml:lang attribute On the a and map elements, the name attribute has been removed in favor of the id [...] • Read more »
Perishable Press
WordPress, Web Design, Code & Tutorials
- Viewing page 3 of 5
- View newer posts →
- ← View older posts
- Visit the Archives
Top tags for HTML:
Important Note for Your Custom Error Pages
Just a note to web designers and code-savvy bloggers: make sure your custom error pages are big enough for the ever-amazing < cough> Internet Explorer browser. If your custom error pages are too small, IE will take the liberty of serving its own proprietary web page, replete with corporate linkage and poor grammar. How big, baby? Well, that’s a good question. In order for users of Internet Explorer to enjoy your carefully crafted custom error pages, they [...] • Read more »
How to Add Meta Noindex to Your Feeds
Want to make sure that your feeds are not indexed by Google and other compliant search engines? Add the following code to the channel element of your XML-based (RSS, etc.) feeds: <xhtml:meta xmlns:xhtml=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml” name=”robots” content=”noindex” /> Here is an example of how I use this tag for Perishable Press feeds (vertical spacing added for emphasis): • Read more »
Open External Links as Blank Targets via Unobtrusive JavaScript
Beginning with this article, I am serving up a short series of unobtrusive JavaScript functions that I use to enhance the functionality of Perishable Press. In this post, I present a comprehensive JavaScript method of opening external links in new windows (or tabs, depending on the browser). One way of opening links in new windows is to insert the HTML target=”_blank” attribute into all necessary anchor elements (<a href=”"></a>). This method works well, but generates validation errors [...] • Read more »
Prevent JavaScript Elements from Breaking Page Layout when Following Yahoo Performance Tip #6: Place Scripts at the Bottom
By now, everyone is familiar with the Yahoo Developer Network’s 14 “best-practices” for speeding up your website. Certainly, many (if not all) of these performance optimization tips are ideal for high-traffic sites such as Yahoo or Google, but not all of them are recommended for smaller sites such as Perishable Press. Nonetheless, throughout the current site renovation project, I have attempted to implement as many of these practices as possible. At the time of this writing, I [...] • Read more »
New Mobile CSS Styles for Perishable Press
The amount of time I spend surfing the Web from a mobile device has steadily increased since the acquisition of my new favorite mobile device. Unfortunately, many sites have yet to implement (or even consider) support for mobile devices. Without proper formatting, such sites are virtually useless, requiring unnecessary download times, displaying unreadable pages, and serving unusable content. Given the inevitable ubiquity of mobile access to the World Wide Web, providing reasonable support for handheld browsers is [...] • Read more »
Absolute Horizontal and Vertical Centering via CSS
Recently, a reader named Max encountered some scrolling issues while implementing our absolutely centered layout technique. Of course, by “absolutely centered” we are referring to content that remains positioned dead-center regardless of how the browser is resized. After noticing the scrollbar deficiency, Max kindly dropped a comment to explain the issue: …the div solution works well, only one problem maybe somebody can help: if you make the browser window smaller then the div is -> the scrollbar [...] • Read more »
Bare-Bones HTML/XHTML Document Templates
In this post I have assembled a concise collection of conforming, bare-bones document templates for the following doctypes: Document Templates XHTML 1.0 XHTML 1.0 Strict XHTML 1.0 Transitional XHTML 1.0 Frameset XHTML Basic 1.0 XHTML 1.1 XHTML 1.1 XHTML Basic 1.1 HTML 4.01 HTML 4.01 Strict HTML 4.01 Transitional HTML 4.01 Frameset • Read more »
Rethinking Structural Design with New Elements in HTML 5
HTML 5, also known as Web Applications 1.0, provides new markup elements that will change the way you design your web pages. The new elements replace commonly used divisions in web documents, facilitating an even greater degree of separation between structure (HTML) and presentation (CSS). Indeed, in many documents, the new elements will structure the document while providing enough hooks to render obsolete previously required divisions, classes, and identifiers. Let’s take a look.. New Structural and Semantic [...] • Read more »
Unicode Character Reference for Bloggers
Virtually every article written here at Perishable Press requires at least one or two “special” characters. Some of these characters — such as quotation marks, hyphens, and dashes — are very common, while others — such as the copyright symbol, bullet, and arrow — happen less frequently. As a blogger, I find myself repeatedly using a select handful of very common special characters. Very rarely do I ever find myself blogging a latin “Ä” (i.e., capital letter [...] • Read more »
Wrapping Your Head around Downlevel Conditional Comments
If you think you understand the logic behind Microsoft’s downlevel conditional comments, you are sadly mistaken. Sure, they seem simple enough on the surface, but as you really try to wrap your head around how and why they work, the subtle complexities of downlevel conditional comments may leave you dazed and confused… In our previous article on Internet Explorer’s exclusive browser-detection method, downlevel conditional comments (DCC), we present an introductory exposition, defining expressions and providing several generalized [...] • Read more »
The Friendliest Link Targets in the Neighborhood
The target attribute for anchor elements (<a></a>) specifies the location in which the referenced document should load. For example, to open a link in a new window, we would use a target value of _blank. Although this is a commonly employed technique, the target attribute has been deprecated by the W3C and is not valid (X)HTML. Regardless, the target element remains a useful tool for practicing designers and developers. Here, we present the attribute values for the [...] • Read more »
Standards-Compliance Throwdown: MS-IE5/6 DNS/404 Error-Page Redesign
Default DNS Error page for Internet Explorer First of all, congratulations if you are geeky enough to understand the title of this article. Many would be like, "CSS, MS.. IE, error ..what..?" Whatever. If you get the title, you will get the point of this utterly pointless exercise. If that is the case, prepare for a delightful romp through geekland. Otherwise, save your precious time and stop reading here (exit strategy). Well, okay, for the seriously unenlightened, let [...] • Read more »
URL Character Codes
URL’s frequently employ potentially conflicting characters such as question marks, ampersands, and pound signs. Fortunately, it is possible to encode such characters via their escaped hexadecimal ASCII representations. For example, we would write "?" as "%3F". Here are a few more URL character codes (case-insensitive): • Read more »