Category Archives: Front-end code

Removing empty HTML tags from TinyMCE

A little post for those that run into the same problem I had with TinyMCE and blank instances not quite being blank. I created a little configuration to remove empty HTML tags.

Stackoverflow dev day London - Roundup

I’ve just gotten back from a great day at the Stackoverflow Dev Day, I didn’t take my usual copious notes, but I thought a flavour of proceedings would be good to get down. For those who don’t know me, I have to add the caveat that I’m not a …

Local W3C validator on OSX

You may have noticed the W3C was asking for contributions for the running the validator. There is a way that you can support the W3c validation service - by not using it. The public version that is. If you use OSX, you can install it locally.

Strange sIFR / screen-reader bug

I was writing a little accessibility article for .net magazine about text-replacement techniques, including sIFR. I was blithely saying that "yea, don't worry, it's fine" with a couple of caveats. But, rather than rely on memory I did a quick test, and discovered something strange.

Nested conditional comments

In a recent test with Internet Explorer's conditional comments, some of the more complex operators didn't seem to work. For example, trying to target IE 6 and 7 defensively, the 'and' operator didn't work. However, there is another solution.

Where SEO and accessibility collide

Recently a link to a Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) cheat sheet came across my radar, and I was curious what sort advice is given for SEO these days. I'm not an SEO expert, but I thought a short analysis of how SEO and accessibility overlap or conflict would be useful.

Galleries in WordPress 2.5

The gallery example as published, showing the 6 example pictures.

The recent (and quite significant) overhaul of Wordpress' admin area is very good, streamlining your blogging and making previously diffiicult things quite simple. One of the new features is the ability to automatically create a gallery within a post of all the picture uploaded to that post. I wasn't very happy with the code output for galleries, so I took it apart and tried to improve it.

Font-based layouts becoming fashionable?

Layouts are becoming an issue again. The (browser) landscape is changing, as are the fashion in layouts, but not really in unison. I can understand giving a greater weight towards design aspects, and maintaining the grid, however, I find the timing curious, as these changes seem likely to be obsolete soon.

CSS - the antithesis of frameworks

There has been a little buzz about some CSS libaries, such as Blueprint, although YUI's grids & other parts have been around for a while. I've kept an eye on these, but they have never seemed suited to CSS for one reason.