Steven Reimer

Yet again, IE 6 CSS is on my plate today at work. Drop-down menus specifically. Always interested in getting my work done in the least amount of effort I hit the Internet up for a better IE 6 fix all.

My expectations were low, but behold! I came across this gem from Peter Nederlof appropriately named Whatever:hover.

The biggest problem with IE 6 is that it doesn't support the :hover selector for anything other than an anchor. What this fix does is this: ( quoted from the site)

• Search all stylesheets for :hover rules IE doesn't support
• Insert a new rule IE does support, like one with class names
• and finally, set up script events for switching class names

I implemented this expecting to have to do at least some customization, but again, I was pleasantly surprised that it just worked! A big thanks to Peter for making web developers' lives a little easier.

I learned a CSS trick today - centering an absolutely positioned div. It is quite simple, really. Set top to 50% and set the left-margin to a negative value of half of it's width.

For example:

#centered_div {
  position: absolute;
  width:500px;
  top: 0;
  left: 50%;
  margin-left: -250px;
}

Cleverly simple.

Dan, this one is for you.

You know that outline on href's you see when you click the link? I used to get rid of that with an "onclick=blur()". Well, I just found a way easier method.

a { outline: none; }

And I call myself a web developer. How did I not know this?

Now with 50% more shininess!

Lately, I have been experimenting with Scriptaculous and Prototype JavaScript libraries. I used to be wary of using third party libraries for either backend or frontend applications. But now, because of some recent requirements for a website I looked to some libraries to implement these features quickly. I found that over the past year or so, Scriptaculous libraries had matured greatly.

So if you look to the title of my website, you'll notice it's changed from v5.0 to 5.1b to indicate the implementation of these libraries throughout this site.

Take a look at the experimental section to see what I'm currently toying with.