Just taken us all morning to track down a bug that only happened in IE8. Turns out that selectors on hrefs don’t work in IE8, so these don’t work:


$('a href="#anchor"]')
$('a href$="#anchor"]')


We tried the latter to get round the issue reported in this post, but no luck.

Looking to upgrade all the code to jQuery 1.7.1 this afternoon, so will let you know if this fixes it.

Here’s a nice obscure one I found recently. To set the focus at the end of a Text Input Field, try this:
var val = $(elem).val()
$(elem).focus().val('').val(val)


Looks a bit strange, but you need all those bits to get it working cross-browser!…

We’re heavily involved in the development of the new SKY TV web site at the mo’. The new TV Guide has been live for a while, and is well handy if you want to record stuff when you’re at work. New show pages have just been completed, for instance NFL At Wembley.

Looking good!

Have you ever noticed that you get a little ‘broken page’ icon in the address bar of some sites in Internet Explorer? This basically means that IE can’t understand the HTML you’ve given it (even though it may well be valid W3C HTML!), so it goes into something called ‘Quirks Mode’, potentially making the site look pony.

If you see this, hit F12, and you’ll see what browser mode, and document mode, IE is running in. On a recent high profile site we worked on recently, if you ran the site in IE9, the browser went into IE9 browser mode, but IE8 document mode. This means IE9 is emulating an IE8 browser. Now the site looks fine in IE8, but IE9′s emulation of IE means it ignored loads of thing, and the site looked absolutely awful.

Now, there is an alleged fix – use the meta-http-equiv meta tag. Like this:

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=Edge" />

…which is a bit rubbish to start with. It tells IE to use the latest document mode – er, itself, in this case – pretty pointless?

Now, this doesn’t necessarily work, but it’s worth than that. For us, it worked on our internal network, but not externally! How mental is that? (there is something on the Microsoft web site about it behaving differently on intranets, but I’d wasted too many days trying to solve the issue by then to have time to read it…)

After much pain, we discovered that the reason IE9 in IE8 document mode didn’t work is that it didn’t understand all the new HTML5 constructs we were using – header, article, section, aside, etc. Changing all these to CSS-classed divs solved the issue. IE8, of course was fine!

So, well done Microsoft – we try and build semantic mark up, and use the latest technology, and have to take it all out so that your latest browser can render our site.Maybe we should re-build it all in tables just to be sure!

Not sure this even needs explaining. Enjoy

I never knew you could import a PDF into GIMP, and save each page as a seperate image! Cool…

I’ve just discovered the Google Fonts API – how cool! No longer will be tied to half a dozen boring fonts when we need dynamic text! No more creating a new image using GIMP or Photoshop every time we need to add a page heading. Here’s an example I knocked up in about 5 minutes:

http://hogsmill.com/googlefonts.html

Everythign opn this page is just HTML and CSS! No images, and no browser-spcicif loaded fonts. Cool, huh? I love it!…

I never knew you could force a browser to always show a right-hand scrollbar! This is useful if more content gets added after the page has loaded – if a short page becomes too long, or you resize the browser to make it smaller, the scrollbar appears and there’s a “jump” which looks copletely naff.

So, check this post http://snippets.dzone.com/posts/show/217 – lots of ideas, but my vote goes to:

html {overflow-y: scroll;}

Sweet!

Yes, the long-awaited Hogsmill CMS demo system is almost up and running. Watch this space…

What has happened to freelancer.co.uk – it is now completely useless! I used to get a maneagable amount of relevant projects from the UK, now I get about 50 mails a day, mainly from the US, so of no interest whatsoever. This is completely unmanageable, as I do not have time to read hundreds of irrelevant job posts per day.

I used to really like freelancer.co.uk, but now it is just a crappy SPAM-generator, and of no use to me whatsoever.

What have they done to it?

Oh, and the support ticketing system doesn’t work. Says I haven’t filled in all the fields when I blatantly have. What a pile of cack this site now is. As there seems to be no way to contact these people, maybe they’ll read this and sort it out. I doubt it, somehow – they clearly don’t give a monkey’s about their existing customers!