I recently added OpenSearch functionality to Perishable Press. Now, OpenSearch-enabled browsers such as Firefox and IE 7 alert users with the option to customize their browser’s built-in search feature with an exclusive OpenSearch-powered search option for Perishable Press. The autodiscovery feature of supportive browsers detects the custom search protocol and enables users to easily add it to their collection of readily available site-specific search options. Now, users may search the entire Perishable Press domain with the click of a button. […] Continue reading »
Controlling the spidering, indexing and caching of your (X)HTML-based web pages is possible with meta robots directives such as these: <meta name="googlebot" content="index,archive,follow,noodp"/> <meta name="robots" content="all,index,follow"/> <meta name="msnbot" content="all,index,follow"/> I use these directives here at Perishable Press and they continue to serve me well for controlling how the “big bots”1 crawl and represent my (X)HTML-based content in search results. For other, non-(X)HTML types of content, however, using meta robots directives to control indexing and caching is not an option. An […] Continue reading »
![[ Content Negotiation ]](https://perishablepress.com/wp/wp-content/images/2008/misc-chunks/content-negotiation.jpg)
In this article, I discuss the different MIME types available for XHTML and explain a method for serving your documents with the optimal MIME type, depending on the capacity of the user agent. Using either htaccess or PHP for content negotiation, we can serve complete, standards-compliant markup for our document’s header information. This is especially helpful when dealing with Internet Explorer while serving a DOCTYPE of XHTML 1.1 along with the recommended XML declaration. According to the RFC standards1 produced […] Continue reading »
![[ Global CSS Reset ]](https://perishablepress.com/wp/wp-content/images/2008/misc-chunks/global-css-reset.png "Global Styles")
Just a note to let everyone know that I have updated my previous CSS reference article, A Killer Collection of Global CSS Reset Styles. The updated version features two more excellent CSS resets, as well as the updated Meyer reset and a link to Eric’s official CSS Reset page. The two new reset styles are the Tripoli Reset and Tantek’s Reset. Continue reading »
![[ Screenshot: WordPress Autosave Message (Saved at 2:34:02.) ]](https://perishablepress.com/wp/wp-content/images/2008/wp-autosave/time-saved.gif "WordPress automatically saves your work every two minutes")
After upgrading WordPress from version 2.0.5 to 2.3.3, I did some experimenting with the “post autosave” feature. The autosave feature uses some crafty ajax to automagically save your post every 2 minutes (120 seconds by default). Below the post-editing field, you will notice a line of text that displays the time of the most recent autosave, similar to the following: Continue reading »
I use the CSS clearfix hack on nearly all of my sites. The clearfix hack — also known as the “Easy Clearing Hack” — is used to clear floated divisions (divs) without using structural markup. It is very effective in resolving layout issues and browser inconsistencies without the need to mix structure with presentation. Over the course of the past few years, I have taken note of several useful bits of information regarding the Easy Clear Method. In this article, […] Continue reading »
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 ways1: 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 attribute The “ruby” […] Continue reading »
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 need to exceed 512 […] Continue reading »
Using CSS to style semantically meaningful (X)HTML markup is an important key to modern web design practices. In a perfect world, every browser would interpret and apply all CSS rules in exactly the same way. However, in the imperfect world in which we live, quite the opposite frequently happens to be the case: many CSS styles are displayed differently in virtually every browser. Continue reading »
Recently, while deliberating an optimal method for eliminating nofollow link attributes from Perishable Press, I collected, installed, tested and reviewed every WordPress no-nofollow/dofollow plugin that I could find. In this article, I present a concise, current, and comprehensive reference for WordPress no-nofollow and dofollow plugins. Every attempt has been made to provide accurate, useful, and complete information for each of the plugins represented below. Further, as this subject is a newfound interest of mine, it is my intention to keep […] Continue reading »
In this post I have assembled a concise collection of conforming, bare-bones document templates for just about every DOCTYPE for HTML, XHTML, and more. Continue reading »
![[ Image: Two Hip Characters ]](https://perishablepress.com/wp/wp-content/images/2007/misc-chunks/essential-characters.gif)
Virtually every article written here at Perishable Press requires at least one or two “special” HTML 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. The vast majority of special characters, however, like the latin Ä (i.e., capital letter “A” with a diaeresis), and the mathematical symbol ⊃ (i.e., superset), rarely see the light of day on […] Continue reading »
![[ Preload Images with CSS ]](https://perishablepress.com/wp/wp-content/images/2007/misc-chunks/preload-images-css.jpg)
Clean, easy, effective. You don’t need no stinking JavaScript to preload your images. Nope. Try some tasty CSS and (X)HTML instead! Here’s how to do it with only two easy steps.. Step 1 — Place this in your CSS file: div#preloaded-images { position: absolute; overflow: hidden; left: -9999px; top: -9999px; height: 1px; width: 1px; } Step 2 — Place this at the bottom of your (X)HTML document: <div id="preloaded-images"> <img src="https://perishablepress.com/image-01.png" width="1" height="1" alt="" /> <img src="https://perishablepress.com/image-02.png" width="1" height="1" alt="" […] Continue reading »
![[ Image: Fred Rogers with Shoe ]](https://perishablepress.com/wp/wp-content/images/2007/misc-chunks/mister-rogers.jpg "R.I.P. Mister Rogers (March 20, 1928 — February 27, 2003)")
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 target element: Continue reading »
In his excellent book, Search Engine Optimization for Dummies, Peter Kent explains that many search engines actually get their search results from one (or more) of the larger search engines, such as Google or The Open Directory Project. Therefore, the author concludes that it may not be necessary to spend endless hours registering with thousands of the smaller search sites. Rather, the author provides a brief list of absolutely essential search sites with which it is highly recommended to register. […] Continue reading »
URLs 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), for easy copy/paste reference. Continue reading »
