IE annoyed me today… again.
Just posting some bugs I came up against today while working on the new home page… on this lovely spring day.
Negative Margins
I am putting together content for the home page draft, I put in a h1 but the first h1 is really off. All others are OK though. I do some digging, check the code, stick borders around stuff and notice an oditty. So I bug a certain Ottawa Alumni and then we sort of narrow it down to h1 and h2. Then I get pointed to the negative margins bug. Seems the #primarycontent h1 and #primarycontent h2 have a negative margin value in UWblank.css.
This will cause you problems. Not sure the fix other than getting rid of the negative margin value in UWblank.css. It is still there on the production version.. my development version doesn’t have it anymore. You could try resetting the #primarycontent h1 and h2 in your custom CSS. Sorry to inflict a bug fix upon the masses 
Whitespace in the code and in the browser
I hate this one, I mean hatewhitespace on lists in IE… oh my goodness. – the options are in the comments of that post. I went with: * html ul li a {height:1em;} in my custom CSS file and all is well.
PHP includes, relative links, and DW templates
This one required a URL be created. What I have done is broken the template for the homepage into serveral includes for the header, footer, and right nav. This is great, DW will manage my relative links to the PHP includes as long as they aren’t in the ‘Templates’ directory. Which is a huge annoyance – when including PHP in your template make sure the extension is .dwt.php and the stuff you include is not in your ‘Templates’ directory.
But what also happens is the relative links inside an included chunk of html does not get managed. No biggie, I can ../../ the link and all should be good. Well no cause that puts it back to the root of the site or development box (pole). So I got IST to create a URL and everything works. When in production that include will have a proper full URL referencing stuff but for testing I just needed it to work. Grr.
Next post: devising a site plan with the new CLF
Collection of references for the day
The last link is a site I always go through to a ton of information. What a great collection of stuff!
- Meaning of Semantics By Molly Holzschlag
- Bad Terminology Can’t Hurt That Much, Can It?
- Understanding usability
- Form Usability
- User testing backlash
- CSS for handhelds – css-discuss
- Nifty Corners indeed.
- The collection of web resources from UMD – web.uwaterloo.ca couldn’t begin to touch this reference site.
SXSW coverage of coverage
If you have a few favorite design blogs I would bet you have heard of South by Southwest Festivals. It is one heck of a conference that brings together some of the more interesting minds in web design, development, etc. One panel had a UW Alumni sitting on it – Accessibility: Can’t we all just get along – Derek Featherstone. Upon reading Joe Clark’s coverage of the panel I just had to share. If you go to his home page you will get a decent idea of the accessibility topics discussed at the conference.
For photos, And all that Malarkey features some links to Flickr galleries. If you are wondering, Derek has a nice photo on the couch with Andy Budd who also has some great coverage of the event. If you go through the coverage of SXSW (which there is a lot of considering all the bloggers) you see some scary faces
Notes from folks that were there:
Netscape 8 = Firefox 1.0 + IE 6
Seems Netscape 8 is in Beta now. There is another mention on the WASP site as well as just above it a mention on how Firefox works. What I think is interesting is that Netscape 8 is trying to get the best of both worlds – IE and Moz rendering. As the WASP buzz mentions it has been done before but not by a familiar brand name like Netscape Ok just please don’t break the CLF basic layout!
Browser stats on a few UW sites
We have recently just changed how we (CPA) read our log files for various web sites. This is useful for a number of reasons but the one I am most interested in at the moment is browsers. This is just a preliminary look, next week or so I will post a more detailed report on web stats as the sample should be big enough to be sure.
Note: Moz based browsers means all browsers based on the Mozilla Projects work – Netscape 6+, Mozilla, and Firefox. In the table I combined Netscape and Mozilla but not Firefox.
So far (and please excuse the quality of this table, textpattern isn’t great for this it seems):
| Site | Windows | Mac | Linux | Browsers | IE | Firefox | Moz/Netscape |
| Web.uwaterloo | 89% | 6.6% | 1.5% | _ | 75.1% | 13.9% | 5.6% |
| Quest | 96.3% | 2% | 0.7% | _ | 85.7% | 9.2% | 3.4% |
| CPA | 91.3% | 4.6% | 2.4% | _ | 79.2% | 11.7% | 4.6% |
| Bulletin | 90.1% | 5.1% | 1.7% | _ | 72.2% | 14.9% | 8.8% |
| UW home | 97.1% | 1.2% | 0.8% | _ | 89.2% | 6.6% | 2.4% |
At first glance it looks really odd but it does suggest Firefox is making its way into the UW web user groups. The home page has 97.1% windows users but only 89.2% IE (stats folks help me out here – windows users with Firefox is?) with similar trends on all web sites. The surprising one to me is the Daily Bulletin, just over 24% of users of this popular site (3156 unique visits yesterday) are using Moz based browsers even though the DB has issues displaying in Moz based browsers sometimes. Quest too is a bit of surprise with 12.6% of Moz based browsers at least checking out the front end.
To put a little perspective on it, the info server reports this month so far that 86.55% are IE, 11.88% netscape (analyzer that looks at all of info doesn’t know about Moz based browsers so netscape means all Moz based browsers). In April 2004 it reports 91.66% IE, 6.76% netscape. I do believe most staff computers have IE only now as well.
In my more in depth look I will have more detailed user numbers and such with more web sites, just wanted to post a bit now to have something to compare with in a week or so.
