ashley sheridan.co.uk

  • Front End Development

    There is a reason why I prefer to develop things in the back-end of a site, and that reason is because I know the setup of a server if I'm not in a position to dictate it myself. That means that everything just works! A recent dicussion on the PHP General mailing list about CSS highlights the problem with front-end development. Essentially, websites can be viewed on a huge variety of devices, none of which behave the same. The discussion on the mailing list was generally about tables vs CSS for laying out pages. Now, I'm an advocate of the latter, and prefer to keep my code free of tables that shouldn't be there. I'll use tables only for tabular data, and leave it at that. The crux of the issue though, is not developers intent, but support on the part of UA's. I won't turn this into a browser bashing rant as all browsers have their idiosyncracies, but it is well know that some have more than others. Time and again my testing period has been greatly increased because of the problems associated with browser compatibility, as each and every part has to be tested across as many platforms as possible, the sort of test which is impossible to automate.

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  • Google is Good, Hackers are Bad

    Had a bit of a panic today, when I was attempting to administer my blog away from home. The network I was on did not allow me the luxury of connecting to my hosting admin panel because of closed ports, and phpMyAdmin fails to work because of a new security 'feature' of my hosting that works against the network I was on. Needless to say, the process of updating and adding new entries is long and arduous, and involves a lot of manual code written in PHP. This is not ideal, so I generally wait until I'm at home to manage.

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  • Explorer Loading Bug

    Twice this week have I come across this, being completely oblivious to it in the past, but IE has a strange bug that makes itself known when you are using Javascript to update a page that has not quite finished loading. This happened on two different sites, one developed by myself, the other by a colleague at work.

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  • Hover Bug

    I recently came across a bizarre CSS bug today, with the :hover selector. Firefox incorrectly interprets the selector when the tag name is not specified in the CSS path. The below example illustrates the bug:

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What have I been saying recently?

@firefox even faster than CTRL/command click, middle click with the scroll wheel. Great for closing tabs too.

Back again at the office for #tmwhackday tension mounting and last minute "tweaks" being made. S*** just got real!

So, after getting through over a dozen pizzas at #tmwhackday , this is what greets me at home! http://t.co/jKmvE54Y