that Norwegian Guy

Using absolute positioning to hide and show a nested list is one of the better ways to create a dropdown menu, and it can almost be done using only CSS. IE6 needs a little javascript help to respect the :hover pseudo-class. The Sons of Suckerfish will help you there.

Now you have your perfect semantic validating SEO friendly nested list in order to make the drop-down menu the client wants. The CSS is in place and the dummy you’ve thrown up works.
But when you implement it into the site the drop-down partly hides behind the content further down. Offcourse - it has an higher z-index. Easy fix. But then the juggernaut IE comes along and crashes the party.

Keep reading →

Just a little heads up, and note to self - today is the Blue Beanie Day 2007 . A great way of preaching the way of the web standarista. The Blue Beanie Day is an event created by the Designing With Web Standards group on Facebook, a group so good almost worth joining Facebook for in itself.

Attending is easy, just snap a photo of yourself wearing a blue beanie. Or bluish headcover if you don’t want to be picky. And upload it to the Flicker Blue Beanie Day 2007 Pool, and change your profilephotos and avatars on whatever and any other social network you are part of.

I unlocked my own iPhone a little while ago, following a lengthy tutorial. Today I unlocked another one, but this time I decided not to go the lengthy connect/disconnect and SSH and so on route.

All I needed was following the instructions on iphone.unlock.no. This let me do everything directly on the iPhone without ever connecting it to iTunes. That means

• jailbreaking
• installing Installer.app
• unlocking the SIM-lock
• Enabling international menu

I did run into one problem though. When running the AnySIM application to unlock the SIM-lock the first time I left the original AT&T card in. Using my own card afterwards did not work very well. I went through the process of “virginizing” the phone, reinstalling the 1.1.1 software through iTunes and did the whole routine from scratch again. This is all also explained on unlock.no.

The second time around things went better, but this time the anySIM unlocking got stuck in the process, not finishing the loading bar. A click on the home button brought up the springboard though. Using installer.app I installed BSD Subsystem from the System category. This made the iPhone working happily.

Too sum up, unlocking went reasonbly well, even though it took me almost 2.5 hours witht he extra fiddeling around. That still beats my previous 4 hours spent unlocking. If you do it right it shoudn’t take more than 30 minutes. So - follow the instructions on unlock.no exactly, BUT - before unlocking the SIM-lock make sure you have got

1. BSD Subsystem installed
2. Your own SIM-card inserted, not the AT&T card.

One last thing not to confuse with all the unlocking being mentioned, is that some SIM-cards have their own PIN-code which you must enter in order to use the phone. When the iPhone prompts you to unlock SIM (3 attempts allowed) go ahead and unlock, this has nothing to do with the actual unlocking of the SIM-lock, but it’s to let the phone use your SIM. Confusing I know.

Happy unlocking.

Things that sometimes “magically” make Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 behave like expected from modern browsers.

• position: relative
• zoom: 1
• height: 1%

They are all due to Microsoft’s proprietary concept of hasLayout.

Feel free to add any other magic bullets in the comments.

If you are on Windows XP¹ and have upgraded to Internet Explorer 7, you know, the Internet with glossy buttons, you’ve perhaps noticed that the text looks a slightly smoother then before? That is because in IE7 Windows’ ClearType is enabled by default. You can do this systemwide if you like it. And if you for some unknown reason to mankind prefer IE6 you should do yourself a favor and follow these settings.

1. Click “Start” and open the Controlpanel.
2. Doubleclick the Display icon to open the Display settings panel
3. Select the Appearance tab
4. Then select the “Effects…” button
5. Make sure the checkbox next to “Use the following method for font smoothning…” is checked ²
6. Select “ClearType” from the dropdown
7. …and click OK, and then enable or ok again

That’s it. You’re done. Now your eyes will thank you for making it less stressfull looking at the screen all day.

If you want to know more check out Wikipedias entry on font rasterization.

1. None of this applyes to Windows Vista, as it is enabled by default. But feel free to correct me.
2. My version of Windows XP is in Norwegian, so my translations are likely to be somewhat off from a English version.

I believe the easiest way to differentiate them is to use <acronym> if you can speak it like a word, not spell them out like a group of letters. We say “ray-dar”, not are-aay-dee-ayy-are. So we get <acronym title="Radio Detection and Ranging">Radar</acronym>.

If spelling them out letter by letter it’s an <abbr>, like this <abbr title="Cascading Style Sheets">CSS</abbr>.

Thank’s to this comment on a old thread at evolt.org for cutting it clear.

Offcourse, Microsoft has decided not to support the abbr element in its browsers …

Some other resources for further discussion:

• <ABBR> vs <ACRONYM> in the HTML 4 Specification
• <abbr> vs <acronym>

I’ve been stuck on a piece of CSS lately, simply couldn’t get the :hover to work on an anchor <a> element, in IE6 offcourse. Setting the positioning, the positioning of the container element, floats, z-index’s. All to no use. In the end I gave in and posted my problem on css-discuss. This is the reply I got:

This is the trouble line: <a class="link">Les mer<⁄a>. For an anchor tag to take effect, it has to have the href=”" attribute set, otherwise the link won’t fire and it seems that IE6 isn’t
acknowledging your <a> tags without href, hence your lack of :hover effects.

What a headslapping moment. I was so fixated on the problem being with IE6, that I didn’t realize the problem was in the chair.

Firefox has all the plugins you can poke a stick at, but what to do when IE is doing its “thing”? Windows Explorer plugins to the rescue!

Westciv’s XRAY is a javascript bookmarklet that lets you click on items in your webpage and view some of the CSS information regarden the area you’ve selected.

Microsoft has their own IE Developer Toolbar that is similar to the Firefox Firebug plugin. It lets you inspect and alter the DOM, change settings, outline elements, find CSS etc.

That should make the bughunt slightly easier for everyone.

Update: I’m running multiple IE’s, and as a result (I assume) the webtools only work in IE7.

The HTML Tidy plugin for Firefox is a great little tool when viewing other webpages’ source. It shows any errors, where they are, and what they are. It also has a clean-up function for those pesky unreadable CMS made html codes, making it easier for the human eyes and brain to read.

If you’re on Windows you’ll get HTML Validator off the Firefox add-ons page. For some reason Mac-users must do a slight detour, which I found after some googling. Go to the HTML validator sourceforge index page, and find the file called tidy_macintel_xxxx.xpi on the date of 26-Oct-2006. That’s spesificly for the new Intel-Macs, but you’ll find any other version you’re interested in on the same page.

It’s a great companion to the Web Developer Toolbar and Firebug.

Update: The Mac-file I’m referring too is for Intel Macintosh’s only! The filenames on the sourceforge page gives you a fairly straight forward clue to which OS and make it’s for, so remember to read before installing.

If you try to install the macintel on a G5 or earlier Mac it will cause Firefox to completely give up on you. The fix is then to export your bookmarks, delete Firefox, re-install. And then start adding all the extensions you’ve lost in the process.

Today is Blog Action Day. What is that? It’s a reason for me to go off-topic and list up a few things I do to make the future a little bit more pleasant. I believe that doing yours for the environment is more important then weather to use strict or transitional doctype…

It doesn’t need to be any big changes. Here’s a little list of what I do at home today, perhaps there’s some you haven’t thought of, or some I haven’t thought of. That’s your cue to let me know.

1. Turn off lights and heating in rooms you’re not using.
2. Recycle paper. Those newspapers sure rack up quick!
3. Recycle aliminium.
4. Recycle plastic.
5. Recycle glass.
6. Return empty bottles.
7. Bring a fabric bag or backpack when you go grocery shopping instead of taking home a new plastic bag each time.
8. Use public transport.
9. Don’t use your car for local transportation.
10. If you have to use your car to work, try carpooling.
11. Ride your bike!!!
12. Buy local food. That is food that has traveled short. Go to your local farmers marked.
13. Eat less meat. Really, it’s not that hard!
14. Go on holidays that doesn’t require airplane rides. The train can also be nice.
15. Grow your own vegitables.

Some of those might seem pointless, but they aren’t! They help me keeping a conscious mind while doing normal everyday things. Also it makes you feel good about yourself. I don’t mind riding the bike through rain and snow instead of sitting in a nice warm car. The bike still gets me faster to work. And after I sold my last car my bank account is noticeably healthier.

There you go, my 15 ways to save the world. (Now there’s a heading that would fit Digg.)