Christian Heilmann

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Archive for March, 2006

AJAX/DHTML library scorecard

Monday, March 6th, 2006

Just when I thought I am going research crazy I stumbled upon the AJAX/DHTML library scorecard at musingsfrommars.org.

The article reviews a lot and I mean a lot of DHTML/AJAX/JS libraries and categorises them into grades how cross-browser they are. If you want to pick a library to use instead of rolling your own solutions and you don’t want to leave a certain number of visitors standing in the rain, check this scorecard beforehand.

Great job!

The only annoying thing is the page itself. I’d have liked to print the lot out, but it won’t do that on Firefox.

Evolt.org wants you to give it a lick of paint

Monday, March 6th, 2006

Evolt.org, has announced a redesign contest. Quoting Martin Burns:

Hi folks
Ever looked at the evolt site and thought “I could do better than that”?
Ever thought “All very nice, but it’s a bit 1999”?
Ever thought “It’s not using half the potential that Drupal (plus
modules) gives it”?
Ever thought “Wish we could be as gorgeous as $insertsitehere”?
Well, now’s your chance. Evolt.org is proud to announce a grand
Design Contest, to
redesign www.evolt.org. If your entry wins, it becomes the new design – simple, eh?
Background, rules and so on at the 2006 WEO Design Contest
but the key things are:
1) The site’s staying in Drupal
2) Ease of implementation is as important as beauty of design
3) Entries in by end April

Give us a hand and have a go!

Mapsurface.com and me are watching you!

Sunday, March 5th, 2006

Glenn Jones of Mapsurface.com just sent me my login details for this cool tracking tool.

Try it now by pressing ALT+X on your keyboard (seems not to work in Opera though).

What I love about it:

  • The slick interface
  • The validity – it stays in the head of the document as two includes and doesn’t do any document.write nasties in the body
  • The on-demand nature – you might not want to wait for my tracker to run

What I think needs to change:

  • You should be able to password – protect the stats

If that were the case, I’d try and approach a lot of clients with this goody.

Linking both text and icons with rollover state

Thursday, March 2nd, 2006

Common issues Following a comment I put on the amazing redesign of Veerle’s Blog, she answered that she needed to use two links – one for a text and one for an icon to make the icon clickable.

It can be done in one link in various ways (embedding an image for example) ,but the coolest seems to be to use a background image in CSS, and add enough padding to show it as a background. This also allows you to easily create a rollover state with CSS and an appropriate picture.

Check the example page

The code:


articles RSS

And the CSS trick:

p.rss a:link,
p.rss a:visited{
padding-right:28px;
line-height:17px;
font-size:.85em;
text-decoration:none;
color:#9b9c93;
height:25px;
float:left;
background:url(rssani.gif) top right no-repeat transparent ;
}

p.rss a:hover,
p.rss a:focus,
p.rss a:active{
background-position:100% -91px;
}

Even more DOMtab updates!

Wednesday, March 1st, 2006

Following feature requests in the comments below via I updated DOMtab once again. You can now link to tabs via the URL and get previous and next links!

DOMtab is a JavaScript that turns a list pointing to different content sections (like an FAQ) into a tabbed interface. Users without JavaScript will still get all the functionality, except they will have to scroll the page. DOMtab automatically removes any “back to top” links when the tabbed interface can be achieved.

  • The look and feel is completely styleable
  • You can use as many tabbed menus in a page as you wish to use.
  • Creation of a link that shows all the sections – for example to print out the page.
  • Automatic highlighting of tabs via anchors in the url (this also allows to use forms in the tabs – just add the anchor name to the action) new
  • Previous and next links for navigating through the tabs – in case you want to have a step by step approach new

Go and check DOMtab version 3.1415927 now