BlogmyQuery – BMQ

When trying out the beta of Internet Explorer 9 I noticed that there still seems to be no way of increasing or decreasing the size of text set in pixels without zooming the entire page.

With full page zoom being the default, many people don’t realise that you can in fact change text size only, without zooming the entire page. Sure, increasing text size in IE is not as useful as in browsers like Firefox and Safari since it only allows a pretty limited size increase. But still, the option is there and does nothing on sites that use “px� as the unit for font-size in their CSS.

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Posted in Accessibility, Browsers, Usability.

Almost five years ago I posted an article titled Google, SEO and using CSS to hide text. In the article I brought up the possibility of getting in trouble with Google and other search engines for using CSS to hide text for accessibility reasons.

Both at the time and several years later the general reasoning among developers (at least as far as I am aware) has been that as long as your intent is not to fool the search engines you should be fine. But is that still the case?

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Posted in Accessibility, Search Engine Optimisation.

As I mentioned in Diving into WordPress I’ve started working with WordPress a bit. I’m getting the hang of it, but one thing that had me pulling my hair in frustration was creating a traditional hierarchical website submenu. I’m thinking of the kind of menu that normally appears in a sidebar when you’re in one of the sections of a horizontal top level menu.

There are multiple ways of creating menus in WordPress, but despite spending hours and hours searching the Web and testing plugins and code examples I couldn’t find a single example of a submenu that works the way I want it to (which happens to be the way submenus work in most other CMSs I have worked with).

So I ended up coding one myself.

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Posted in Content Management, WordPress.

I’ve been working with WordPress for a few client projects lately.

WordPress has many great features and feels reasonably developer-friendly. I especially like the theme concept which lets you keep all your customisation separated from the core WordPress install and makes version control of your files easy.

However, there are quite a few things that really annoy people like me who like clean markup and want absolute markup control. And there are other things not strictly related to markup that aren’t as intuitive as they could be, at least not to someone new to WordPress.

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Posted in WordPress.

Tools like Firebug for Firefox, WebKit’s Web Inspector and Opera’s Dragonfly are indispensible tools for front-end Web developers, letting you view the DOM as the browser sees it.

And that’s where these tools can actually cause some problems, or at least a bit of confusion. When you choose “Inspect element� or otherwise bring up one your browser’s DOM inspector, what you’re looking at is the document tree after the browser has applied its error correction and after any JavaScripts have manipulated the DOM. It is not necessarily the same as what you see when you choose “View source�.

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Posted in (X)HTML, Browsers.