Yes, it’s another post about Microsoft and its poor implementation of Internet Explorer. This time it’s version 8 and its rendering of lists, and in specific, links within list items. Most humorously, Microsoft’s own documentation (separate issue; about rounded corners) gave me a laugh when it said “Microsoft is committed to providing a browser that accurately supports Web standards.” Maybe it’s just me, but I’ve given up waiting for the day that IE actually supports anything correctly . (more…)

There’s a tool for everything somewhere on the web.

Whilst about 99.5% perfect (some indentation issues remain), I’ve found a pretty nice, easy to use, and very feature-rich HTML code formatter.  See http://www.mycoolform.com/index.php?lang=en for the formatter.

It’s something I was looking for a while back but didn’t have so much luck to stumble onto something so useful.  Previously, I was looking for something that would fix up some HTML to XHTML and whilst I’m sure something was out there, the problem was I needed something that would do the job, but stay away from TAL attributes on my elements.  The things that I had found did “too good” of a job and dumped those elements, which is fair enough because things like ‘tal:content=’ isn’t valid XHTML.

This formatted though does new lines, auto-indentation, change of case for tags and attributes (hello XHTML compliance), comment removal and white space elimination.  Great stuff; so many thanks to its author (who is anonymous I guess?).

So, you’ve got a website that you’ve made and you’ve used a Flash movie on it.  Okay, no worries.  Now, what if you tried to add a (non-form-element) drop-down menu or some AJAX-ed content into the site, and found the Flash movie actually acted as an overlay?

This problem doesn’t seem consistent.  Different OSs, browsers, and Flash versions don’t indicate consistency – that’s what I’ve seen anyway.  Nevertheless, the problem persists for some users and it’s down-right annoying.

The fix?  Make your Flash code look similar to this:

<object data="my-movie.swf" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" height="100" width="200">
<param name="movie" value="my-movie.swf" />
<param name="quality" value="high" />
<param name="embed" value="transparent" />
<param name="wmode" value="transparent" />
<param name="menu" value="false" />
<img src="alternate.jpg" alt="ARCS - Revolutionising Collaboration" height="100" width="200" />
</object>

That there should be entirely XHTML compliant (and completely cross-browser compatible) code for creating a Flash object on your page that’ll place nice with other content.