A few weeks ago I created an inline editing system for a Content Management System. It allowed a user to click on a page element and edit it inline. The updated data was then submitted through an AJAX request.

I have recently discovered an issue with some of the JavaScript code that I wrote in the event handling routine.

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I'll say this up front, I'm not a CSS guru. I like CSS, but it can be incredibly frustrating. One of the clients I am currently producing work for requires a high level of Accessibility. High enough that we need to avoid using JavaScript unless any script has a "Non" JavaScript equivalent.

The site navigation is through a top level horizontal menu, but what if we also want a drop down menu? Can we do it in CSS only, and it still be Firefox, Internet Explorer 6,7 and 8 compatible?

Yes, we can, but it's a lot of code, and it's not pretty. The basic concept behind most CSS menus is to use a list, and transform each list item to suit your styling. So we will create a div, with a class of menu. Then create a list inside it.

Notice that there are some specific if statements relating to different versions of Internet Explorer. these basically make the functionality the same for each version, they are compensating for the differences in code handling between IE versions.

Next create a set of CSS styles to alter the appearance of the list. I am not going to go into the CSS line by line, as it is commented, but I'll explain the methodology behind it.

The top level menu item is always displayed, but the list is hidden using "visibility:hidden". When the user mouse's over the menu div the CSS applies a:hover ul{visibility:visible;. This makes the list visible.

There are also a lot of other browser specific hacks present, as the aim was to get the menu working in every Internet Explorer version, and be Accessible.

There is a demo of this here: CSS menu demo

I'm not really a design kind of person, I like designing things, and I'm learning more and more CSS all the time, but it's the server side coding that I love like Apple Pie and custard.

Recently I've had to do a bit more design work, so I've been tripping all over myself to get CSS working in IE6,IE7,IE8 and firefox. I've learnt a few interesting things in the last few days, and I know I'm going to need to use them again. Some are considered 'hacks', some are just clever CSS techniques. They all feel a bit like secret rules of a club I'm not really a member of yet though.

So I'm making a handy list, so I don't loose them. I hope to refine and add to this on an ongoing basis, so if you know a better / easier way please let me know. After all coding standards are for life, not just Christmas, and I don't like the idea of anything being a hack, even if it is CSS.

Adding a 1px high line to IE

It seems that some versions of IE will display a div without content as the same height as your font size. Add html comments to it to drop it down to the right height:

IE is adding padding and margins to everything by default

I think there is a lot more information about this out there, but for now I've found that adding the code below will kill most of IE's random padding/margin issues.

I've built a JQuery accordion and the content doesn't move correctly

When expanding a JQuery accordion element the content underneath it is not moving down, and the accordion is expanding over it. This was a simple fix, but a bit of a pain to find. Just do not specify a height attribute on the div that hold the accordion, IE will stick to the height, but firefox will let it grow to be longer.

Styling form element borders

If you have a CSS rule like the one above that removes all the margins, padding and borders then all your form elements will have no border. IE your text fields and textareas etc will not have a clearly defined edge to them. By adding the line of CSS under this (select,input, etc) you can set the style width and colour of your form elements so that you control them, rather than the browser defaults. In Internet explorer this will also add borders to the checkbox and radio form elements. There does not seem to be any way of writing a CSS style to remove this inherently, so create a style of borderless and set all your radio and checkbox fields to "class=borderless".

Strange IE positioning fix

Sometimes in IE (mainly 6) using position: absolute just does not render the div on screen. I am not sure why. Adding a "clear: both;" or a "clear: left;" or a "clear: right;" appears to fix this.

Easy centering of elements

I used to struggle with centering elements on a page all the time, but now you can do something like this:

This will center a block of text and give it a width of 6.

For images you can do this:

That will auto center the image inside its containing div.

Whilst building a form recently I hit a real noob stumbling block. I was trying to set a select value to selected if the value had previously been submitted, something like this:

Pretty straight forward, you'll all agree. The issue comes in where I had entered selected="selected". This isn't the correct code for a select option.

Handily Firefox will cache the form structure and form data, so that when you refresh the page it just loads up the cached version. This is great if you coded it correctly, otherwise it happily serves you up your coding errors again. So don't refresh your forms in testing.

Add ?test=1 or something to make the request a new URL.

Long buttons in Internet Explorer:

The same buttons in Firefox:

After looking at setting the margins, or the padding to 0, or even negative numbers nothing was working. Turns out you need to set the width to auto, and just let the text push out the width of the button using 'overflow:visible'. This is the CSS that generates the above buttons:

A recently 'feature' that has been added to Google is the way they are handling un styled elements.

In the last few weeks Gmail has started stripping the paragraph margins from its HTML emails. Basically is destroys the spacing from P tags, so that instead of being new lines, they are more like line breaks.

Checking the element in firebug shows that:

If you disable the style, then the html reverts to back to what you probably thought it should look like.

I'm guessing that as Gmail hasn't found an associated style with the element (P) it is applying its own.

You could change all the inline P's:

But that's hassle and not best practice really. I'll apply a CSS fix to it, and see if Gmail accepts that.

It appears that the character entity ' is not a valid HTML entity. It was just XML, and thus XHTML.

If you are using a browser that doesn't support XHTML then you probably shouldn't use it, as it will appear as a normal text string. I found this whilst testing something in IE 8, as that is not XHTML compliant.

So just use the ' character, or if you really feel that you have to escape it use:

'

Just be careful with that one, as it will cause coldFusion to flip out. Then you may need to escape your escape characters, and then where will you be?