Easy Reader

That’s right, we’ve dropped our CSS to celebrate CSS Naked Day. Your turn.

Eric has a very enlightened post for those of you out to document bugs in IE7 Beta 2. He also echoed my feelings that this is a beta people!

Trying to fix a site that’s “broken” in IE7B2 is kind of like deciding to raze your profitable gas station just because you heard car companies are experimenting with hydrogen fuel cells. When the final version of IE7 comes out, then you can worry about what to do. Maybe your site won’t be “broken” any more, and you won’t have to do anything.

As Eric also mentioned, over on the IE Blog, they’ve posted an entry about the current state of CSS fixes in IE7 and what you should be able to do now. Also, for those of you who (like me) uninstalled the beta because it caused you to lose your IE6, here are instructions on how to have both (found somewhere in the comments on digg.com):

• Extract IE7B2P-WindowsXP-x86-enu.exe to a temporary folder. (using WinRAR or some such)
• Working within the extracted directory, delete the following:
  • update (folder),
  • install.ins,
  • spmsg.dll,
  • spuninst.exe, and
  • spupdsvc.exe
• Create a blank text file within the directory and name it “iexplore.exe.local”
• Move the directory to a location in which you want to store the (now) standalone version of Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2 (e.g. Program Files)
• Execute iexplore.exe

Microsoft released Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2 for public consumption yesterday. Based on everything I’d been reading, the development team seemed to be moving in the right direction. I decided to take it for a test drive to see how things were coming along.

The answer is “not well” I’m afraid. I took my first journey in the new browser over to my friend Andy’s house. I did this mainly because I love how Andy handles IE. It’s beautiful. I wanted to see if IE7 did the right thing and got the real design for And All That Malarkey. As it began rendering, my heart was racing and I was ecstatic to see the beautiful blues and reds of Andy’s blog coming through. Then, something a little odd happened. Somehow IE7 missed the boat and the page was rendered virtually unreadable (except the latest articles section) because a bunch of And All That Malarkey logos kept popping up everywhere.

Now according to Chris Wilson over at Microsoft (who’s team has been working closely with the wonderful folks at WaSP to make IE7 standards-compliant):

Beta 1 makes little progress for web developers in improving our standards support, particularly in our CSS implementation. I feel badly about this, but we have been focused on how to get the most done overall for IE7, so due to our lead time for locking down beta releases and ramping up our team, we could not get a whole lot done in the platform in beta 1. However, I know this will be better in Beta 2

At the same time, I know Andy’s a stand-up guy and his CSS is top notch, easily some of the best I’ve seen, this problem’s gotta lie with IE7. I guess you can only expect so much from a beta (even a “beta 2”), but that’s a doosie of an error. At least IE7 was easy to uninstall and I’ve got some commentary to leave on the IE7 Beta 2 feedback form.

While working on a new site for a client, I stumbled upon an application of the Leahy/Langridge method of image replacement… to images. As far as I know, it had not been attempted before and, frankly, I was a little amazed it worked.

The technique, which I am calling iIR for “img Image Replacement” (a bit of a mouthful, I know), helps you keep you code leaner and meaner without sacrificing stylability or accessibility. You can read the article on the Easy Designs and feel free to drop your comments below. Maybe you can think of a better name for it too.

This has been one crazy Fall work-wise, so I apologize for the scarcity of posts, but I do have a few holiday treats for you.

From my day job at Cronin and Company, we’ve got Cronin’s “Grab Bag of Goodness.” As with most internal projects, this was a major rush job. I take no credit for the design (which was handed to me with no wiggle room), but when it comes to the CSS and DOM Scripting, that I’ll proudly take credit for. Use the code “9301” to get in. Of particular note in this piece:

• Taking a page from Dan’s Bulletproof Logos, most all of the text is in (shock) images. Toss in the text as an alt attribute and with images and CSS off, you’re still golden. As this was a one-off, sIFR seemed like overkill.
• Ooh, check out that marquee. Brings back memories, doesn’t it. Well, this one’s a little different. The markup is an ul and each item is a li. CSS makes it all display: inline; and then JavaScript keeps reducing the margin-left of the first li by 2px until the absolute value of it’s margin-left is greater than the li’s width. That li is then plucked from the front of the list and appended to the end. Though I am not a big fan of scrolling marquees, this was a pretty fun experiment.
• Those animated icons you can click to make a donation are actually form controls. Originally, I had made them into custom submit inputs, but Safari’s inability to customize certain form controls made me abandon that element in favor of button. It’s a great effect too (IMHO).

Then there’s the Easy Designs holiday card. I will spare the commentary on this one with the exception of giving major props to Dave for building the game in a day. I’m pretty darn proud of it, especially since we pretty much went from concept to execution in a matter of days (yeah, procrastination’s a bitch). If you’re interested, you can see a rough approximation of the email that went out (our first Campaign Monitor mailing) or simply play the game.