Archive for the 'Web Development' Category

MSIE 4095 Selector Limit

Web applications concatenate CSS files to improve performance, which can result in large numbers of style rules in a single file. Enter the 4095 selector limitation for IE browsers. An IE bug whereby the browser will only apply style for the first 4095 selectors declared per file. Impacted browsers include IE6, IE7, IE8 and IE9.

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Analyzing User Agent Strings

The user agent string, a piece of data transmitted in the HTTP header during a web request, contains information valuable in determining browser type and often basic system information.

Example user agent string sent from a web browser during an HTTP request:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US) AppleWebKit/532.5 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/4.0.249.89 Safari/532.5

The above example, for instance, provides information such as browser and browser version, user locale (language), OS, system architecture and the layout engine used. When authoring documents for the Web, information from the user agent string can be valuable in determining how best to mark-up documents.

Getting the information is easy.

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Building a Better Lightbox

Screenshot of a Lightview modal dialog

Screenshot of a Lightview modal dialog

Though modal dialogs are not a new concept in UI design, the number of homegrown Lightbox clones appearing on the Web since major JavaScript libraries like Prototype and jQuery hit the scene has been staggering. Unfortunately, many of the clones developed leave some key usability considerations unaddressed, and struggle with common problems in accessibility. Some key usability features that should be considered during creation of a Web-based modal dialog include (1) manage focus and allow tab navigation (2) disable elements outside the modal dialog (3) give users an out and (4) provide graceful error recovery.

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Web Development and Debugging Tools

Following is a  list of cross-browser/platform web development and debugging tools useful for client-side developers. Depending on the application, one or all of these tools can be valuable in completing work on a website front-end.

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