Author Archive

HTML Character Entities References in CSS Content Property Values

2010 June 3rd

Say the following ruleset is wanted:
li.toupee:after {content: ” »”;}

This won’t always work but the following ruleset will:
li.toupee:after {content: ” \00BB”;}

So, how to get from » to \00BB:

Find the Character Entity Reference (W3C) wanted
Find a code starting U+ in the entity description, for example U+00BB for » (raquo)
Copy the number part of the code, 00BB
Paste the number into your CSS Content property value
Place a “\” before the number, \00BB
Done

A little more info can be found by reading the Strings section of Syntax and Basic Data Types (W3C).

ZX CSS Layout

2010 May 25th

ZX is a bunch CSS classes to help authors and developers create flexible and consistent cross-browser layouts. And make applying Media Queries easier. That’s the plan anyway.

The ZX CSS Layout example page ain’t pretty but hopefully there’s enough information to understand what’s going on and to try it out.

There are quite a few of these layout helping CSS frameworky type things around, a couple I’ve listed, and they’re definitely worth trying out to see which shoe fits the bill oddie, or something like that.

Google Analytics Asynchronous Snippet Update Excitement

2010 March 25th

Today was an exciting day for me. I discovered that my tweak to Google’s Asynchronous Snippet was published a couple of days ago. (more…)

Google Analytics Asynchronous Snippet for the Head Element

2010 February 19th

The below snippet worked with my test page where the current asynchronous snippet when placed in the head element would cause IE6 to stumble with “Operation Aborted”. The test page markup can be found at the bottom of the post. (more…)

CSS :content and :section pseudo element selectors

2009 March 13th

I believe there is a useful and yet missing CSS3 selector. I’ll explain with a rough example: (more…)

jQuery.animate-sprite

2009 March 9th

A bit of fun with a jQuery and background image sprite.

Current version 1.0.4 alpha.

jQuery plugin template

2009 February 7th

Wanting a quick way to create a plugin in jQuery I found A Plugin Development Pattern (Learning jQuery), by Mike Alsup, via Improving upon the jQuery Plugin Template (Google Groups). Later, much later, I looked in the more obvious place; Plugins/Authoring (jQuery). I work best from hacking examples, so Mike Alsup’s pattern/template was the most useful to me. (more…)

Progressive JPEGs for thumbnails?

2009 January 13th

Just had a thought that maybe the browsers could sort this out. A browser could detect when a JPEG is shown smaller than full-size and choose to download only what is needed.

For example, if a JPEG is displayed 100% or larger then the full image is downloaded. If displayed at 20% then maybe only the first pass is downloaded. If then changed to 100% with Javascript or CSS or both, then a browser would download the rest of the image.

Progressive JPEGs for thumbnails?

2009 January 8th

Not possible as far as I’m aware, but thumbnails do annoy me. Either they are processed smaller version of the full image – a form of duplication. Or the full version is used but displayed smaller – bandwidth, page loading times and browser image resizing beauty niggles.

Progressive JPEGs load progressively with each iteration enhancing the previous. The first iteration will be poor quality but probably good enough to pass as a thumbnail. Then if the full image is wanted the browser will just download what it doesn’t already have.

Anyone know if this is possible?