Tag Archive for Opera

Some oddness with table cell display in Opera resolved

July 14, 2009 No comments
Sidebar displayed in Opera

Blog sidebar displayed in Opera before fix was applied

A while back, I reported a baffling problem with Opera managing to miss out an entry in the calendar widget on my hillwalking blog. After a bit of fiddling, I managed to track down the problem: setting position:relative in the CSS for hyperlink tags on my theme. Commenting out CSS declarations may seem a low technology way of finding problems like this but it still retains its place as this little episode proves. Changing it to position:static for the hyperlinked numbers in the table fixed the issue while I left the defaults as they were in case they had an adverse impact elsewhere. If all of this sounds rather too empirical in its approach, then I can only agree with you but a fix is a fix nonetheless. However, display:block is also set for the table entries so that may have a part to play too. Regardless of the trial and error feel to the solution, I could not find the problem documented anywhere so I am sharing it here to help any others who encounter the same sort of weirdness.

Software, Web, Web Development, Web Tools

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position: static?

September 12, 2008 No comments

CSS positioning seems to be becoming a nightmare when it comes to IE6 support. While I am aware that the likes of 37signals have stopped making their products work with it, there remain a lot of people who stick or are stuck with the old retainer. I am one of the latter because of the continued use of Windows 2000 at my place of work, though a Windows Vista roll-out has been mooted for a while now. If nothing else, it keeps me in the loop for any inconsistencies that afflict the display of my websites. Positioning of an element within the browser window rather than within its parent element is one of these and it looks as if specifying a position of relative in a stylesheet is part of this. Apparently, it could be down to its non-triggering of IE’s haslayout property. It might be a hack but I have found that static positioning has helped. I’ll continue to keep my eye out for a better solution if it exists but the static option seems to have no detrimental effect in IE7, IE8, Firefox, Safari, Chrome or Opera.

Web Development

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A case of “peekaboo” behaviour in Internet Explorer

July 1, 2008 One comment

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.

Web Development

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Opera and table display

March 15, 2008 No comments

Sidebar displayed in Opera

I have encountered something very strange with my hillwalking blog and I have to admit that am at something of a loss as to how to resolve it. Opera (version 9.x), it seems, is not displaying the date corresponding to the first post of a particular month. You can see the effect at the right for the current month and, yes, the tenth of the month has a post associated with it. What compounds the mystery is that the same issue doesn’t affect this blog so some further investigation is very much in order. However, the cascading element of CSS doesn’t help much when trying to track down the cause of this sort of thing. While, it’s irritating, I don’t have any definite answers yet and so would appreciate some suggestions. In the meantime, I’ll be staying on the lookout for a fix. Curiously, all’s fine on Firefox and IE.

Web Development

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Mucking about with WINE

January 25, 2008 No comments

It was the prospect of having Photoshop Elements going on Linux that got me thinking about working with WINE. The cause of that was Elements’ inability to edit, create and save files to a VMware shared folder. As it turned out, there was more to my WINE adventures than getting Elements working. Because I was in learning mode, those adventures turned out to be messy ones with WINE getting uninstalled and reinstalled a number of times. For the last of these, I forced matters by installing from a DEB package rather than going through Ubuntu’s normal channels. The openSUSE journey was a bit more orderly and that VM option remains if I want to go experimenting more.

Along the way, I got the Windows version of Opera going as a test. When trying out WINE in former times, I never tried installing applications into it like I do now. I don’t know if this was because I hadn’t made an important connection or that wasn’t the way that things used to be. Flushed with the success of Opera, I went further and discovered that Dreamweaver 8 and Altova’s XMLSpy 2007 Professional work without my breaking a sweat. Photoshop Elements was another story and one that I have told before. Apple’s iTunes was another thing that I tried but without success, even with a useful guide on Wine Review; for some reason, I’m having trouble getting the installation to complete successfully. I think that I’ll leave my tinkering at that for now but my general impression is that WINE works well these days, even if there is the odd crash or inexplicable disappearance of an application window. The latter happened with Dreamweaver and XMLSpy and I needed to log off and back on again to clear the slate for further progress.

Linux, Software, Windows

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LVHA…

October 12, 2007 No comments

On my web design journey, I have learned the wisdom that CSS styles for hyperlinks should be defined like the following:

a:link {…}

a:visited {…}

a:hover {…}

a:active {…}

List out the names of the pseudoselectors and you’ll soon work out where they got LVHA: Link, Visited, Hover and Active. However, I have recently spotted the following being used:

a {…}

a:hover {…}

The trick here is to define your style globally and only define specifics for the relevant pseudoselector, hover in this example. It works well in the likes of Mozilla and Opera but Internet Explorer is another story. Even IE7 needs the LVHA treatment. I spotted this when I observed unexpected changes in the appearance of link text after visiting the link: visited links startes to change colour. While I know that the likes of Jakob Nielsen frown upon non-changing link colour, I choose to ignore this and keep it constant so following the LVHA approach is needed to keep things as I would like them.

Web Development

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