I may have been slow off the mark on this but I recently discovered keyboard equivalents to browser and forward buttons. They are: Alt+[Let Arrow] for back and Alt+[Right Arrow] for forward. I may have first discovered their existence in Firefox but they seem to be more widely available than that with the same trickery working in Chrome and Internet Explorer having them too. The existence of these keyboard shortcuts might provide some pause for thought too for those web application developers who plan on disabling the Back and Forward functionality in browsers but being able to save mouse mileage with keyboard can’t be bad.
Tag Archive for browsers
Another way to control line breaks in (X)HTML
While you can use <br /> tags, there is another way to achieve similar results: the or non-breaking space entity. Put one of them between two words and you stop them getting separated by a line break; I have been using this in the latest design tweaks that I made to my online photo gallery. Turning this on its head, if you see two words together acting without regard to normal wrapping conventions, then you can suspect that a non-breaking space could be a cause. There might be CSS options too but their effectiveness in different browsers may limit their usefulness.
A case of “peekaboo” behaviour in Internet Explorer
I recently changed the engine of my online photo gallery to a speedier PHP/MySQL based affair from its PHP/Perl/XML powered predecessor. On the server side, all was well but a peculiar display issue turned up in Internet Explorer (6, 7 & 8 were afflicted by this behaviour) where photo caption text on the thumbnail gallery pages was being displayed erratically. As far as I can gather, the trigger for the behaviour was that the thumbnail block was placed within a DIV floated using CSS that touched another DIV that cleared the floating behaviour. I use a table to hold the images and their associated captions in place. Furthermore, each caption was also a hyperlink nested within a set of P tags. The remedy was to set the CSS Display property for the affected XHTML tag to a value of "inline-block". With a cascade of DIV, TABLE, TR, TD, P and A tags, finding the right tag where the CSS property in question has the desired effect took some doing. As it happened, it was the tag set, that for the hyperlink, at the bottom of the stack that needed the fix. Of course, it’s all very fine fixing something for one browser but it’s worthless if it breaks the presentation in other browsers. In that vein, I did some testing in Opera, Firefox, Seamonkey and Safari to check if all was well and it was. There may be older browsers like versions of IE prior to 6 where things don’t appear as intended but I get the impression from my visitor statistics that the newer variants hold sway anyway. All in all, it was a useful lesson learnt and that’s never a bad thing.
Firefox 3, RealPlayer, Ubuntu and BBC’s iPlayer
With the record attempt due today for Firefox 3 downloads, I thought that it would be a good time for me to update my advice for getting BBC’s iPlayer going in Firefox running on Ubuntu. First, you need RealPlayer 11 for Linux. Once downloaded, the file RealPlayer11GOLD.bin needs to be made executable before running it with administrative privileges. The following command do this:
chmod +x RealPlayer11GOLD.bin
sudo ./RealPlayer11GOLD.bin
There is a catch though and it is that while the RealPlayer 11 installation is seamless for Firefox 2, the same cannot be said for Firefox 3 because directory locations have been changed such plugins are now found in /usr/lib/firefox-addons/plugins. The result that copies of or symbolic links to nphelix.xpt and nphelix.so are needed in that location. The following commands do the trick:
sudo ln -s /opt/real/RealPlayer/mozilla/nphelix.xpt /usr/lib/firefox-addons/plugins/nphelix.xpt
sudo ln -s /opt/real/RealPlayer/mozilla/nphelix.so /usr/lib/firefox-addons/plugins/nphelix.so
To cap all of this, I have seen advice that libtotem-complex-plugin.so needs to be removed from the Firefox plugins directory as well. I am not sure about this but I did that and all is working well for me. Let’s hope that continues to be the case.
Missing borders in Internet Explorer
It’s quite hard to describe this observation in a title so here goes with a longer description in a post. One thing that I spotted with the Prosumer theme used on this blog is that the links on the horizontal navigation bar underneath the mast head were not appearing as they should. The links have been formatted using CSS to appear in boxes with borders that are more apparent when you hover over them. In IE, the top and bottom borders were missing. After a spot of digging, I came up with the line-height property being the cause and I was right: the extremities of the boxes surrounding the text were being cut off because they exceeded the allotted space. As if to emphasise that IE7 isn’t as major a leap forward from IE6 as we would have liked, the problem affected that browser as well.
Aside: Link text colours weren’t being honoured by IE7 like they are by IE6, Firefox and Opera so another tweak to the CSS was needed.