Webdev: September 2003 Archives

Visitors using older browsers like IE might have noticed that I recently started serving advertisements through Google. People using more modern browsers as Mozilla or Firebird might not have noticed this, since these advertisements are not visible for them. This is not because I want to tease IE users ---everybody is free to use any software to visit my site---, or give compliments to Moz users ---their clicks are also worth some money---, but only because Google's scripts are not working when send as application/xhtml+xml. I found the following errors in my Javascript console:

Error: w.google_ad_client has no properties Source File: http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js Line: 37

Error: google_ad_width is not defined Source File: http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js Line: 128

A good holiday is a holiday without internet connection. I had a quite good holiday, so you haven't read any news from me lately. I did connect to the internet once in a while, but that was only to fix the computer of my parents and to install Mozilla Firebird (if you're learning to surf the internet, you better do it right). I won't bother you with my holiday stories, since we didn't do that much. I was happy to see my friends and family again, and for those that I could not meet: sorry, maybe next time better.

For them moment I have plenty of things to arrange, so I won't fix the menu bar on this site to work with IE and probably I won't write a lot neither. That's all for the moment, I better continue processing my overly full inbox...

I use this site a lot for testing out things. You could say that this site is Forever under construction. Today I have been testing again, and as a result, it looks more horrible in Internet Explorer. And since I am going on holidays, I am not going to fix it until next week. Sorry for the inconvenience.

I have been working on the menu. The whole page header is situated inside a <div>, with an inline ordered list with bottom border as menu. Until today, I did nothing to position the menu, which resulted that the menu walked outside the header if you changed the font size. Not too beautiful...

So today I relatively positioned the header, and specified an absolute position of the menu, so it is always at the border of the containing positioned element, the header. It solves the problem perfectly, but not in IE. I tested the new stylesheet in IE6, and the menu appeared at the bottom of the screen instead of the bottom of the header. I don't know yet why IE is behaving like this, but promise to look further into it next week.

If you are creating (X)HTML code, you always have to make sure that you use the right tags elements to specify the meaning of certain parts of the text. After that you can use stylesheets to determine how these parts will look. This is what they call the semantics of the text.

A lot of web designers abuse tags to accomplish a certain look. If they want a bigger text, they use the <h2> tag element, while the text is not a header at all, if they want to indent a text, they use <blockquote>, even though they are not quoting. I won't go into detail why this is a bad thing, there are plenty of resources explaining this better than I could. But a lot of designers like me who try to do it correctly still make some mistakes. Today I realised that my pages have two semantically errors:

For my navigation lists, I use --- as many other sites --- unordered lists (<ul><li>XXX</li></ul>). But my navigation links do have an order! My archive links are ordered chronological, so the correct thing would be to use the ordered list (<ol><li>XXX</li></ol>) instead. By default, an ordered list is shown with numbers in front of each item, but it is very easy to remove them, just as I removed the bullets from my unordered navigation lists. I have seen many sites doing this wrong, and most examples of you will find on internet also use unordered lists.

Another thing I thought about today is that when I display trackbacks (comments on another site about my text) I am quoting another site. Therefore, I should be using the <blockquote> tag element (or <q>). I have looked around at other sites, but nowhere have I found trackbacks marked up as quotes.

You might think that these are minor issues, but since I am rewriting my templates anyway, I better do it right, not?