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.

I have been a Safari subscriber for a while now and access to O’Reilly titles has been the main reason behind it. However, I recently discovered that O’Reilly is offering full eBooks of some of its titles. Why the offering is far from complete, this is progress and the prospect of donloading complete books with proper page numbering and an index is an appealing. Previously, I was downloading the individual chapters from Safari and compiling the books in that way, a less than user friendly approach. So, do I continue the Safari subscription or not?

It’s when you pop from one operating system to another that you realise how operating system specific it is that fonts are. For instance, only one of the names in the following list are understood by Firefox on Ubuntu, the last one: Trebuchet MS, Lucida Grande, Verdana, Arial, Sans-Serif. The reason that San-Serif is understood is that it’s a general font class name in the world of CSS. However, that does not mean that you still are not at the mercy of operating system fonts. In fact, font sizes vary and 16px in one font isn’t the same as 16px in another; that can mean broken layouts if you are sufficiently clumsy.

As it happens, the main menu bar on my hillwalking blog should all fit on one line but it took up two lines when viewed on Linux. If it did that neatly, there wouldn’t be much of a problem but it didn’t. Some CSS hacking could have repaired the situation but I went for a simpler solution for now: picking a Linux sans serif font that fitted the bill better. So popping in mentions of "Nimbus Sans L" in appropriate places in my stylesheet was the way that I went. I don’t know how this appears in other Linux distributions but the wonders of virtualisation should allow to find out.

If I was really concerned about the fonts that were being used, I could have gone with a server-side approach: embedded fonts. I haven’t tried this for a while but differing browser support was a major issue when I did: you had to create a set of files for IE and for Netscape when I was investigating such things, hardly convenient even in those days when Opera was merely a speck on the horizon and Mozilla was nascent. It’s a valid approach for those exclusive fonts but so is questioning why you are using them in the first place. Adobe’s Flash is another option for those who obsess with fonts though how users take to this remains an open question, as does the accessibility of the approach.

I will be sticking with testing how things look in different operating systems and virtualisation is an excellent enabler of this, as are Live CD’s. The latter is particularly useful for Linux distributions which the former has application with more scenarios: names OpenSolaris and, with a spot of tinkering, OS X come to mind. It sounds like an intriguing proposition and Firefox is virtually a de facto cross-platform standard these days anyway. Mind you, seeing how websites are rendered by Safari running on OS X might be of interest to some.

Looking at from the user’s point of view rather than the web developer’s, there remains a question regarding the visiting of websites that break because of the font conundrum. If you find this happening to you a lot, it may be an idea to bring in some TrueType or OpenType fonts. With Ubuntu, this is straight forward: fire up Synaptic, search for msttcorefonts and install that package along with any of its dependencies. Logging off from and on to the system will make the new fonts available. There was a time when more work was needed than that…

Steve Jobs recently surprised an audience at Apple’s Worldwide Developer’s Conference with the announcement that the Safari web browser is being made available for Windows. While everyone else is awaiting Apple’s forthcoming iPhone, the Safari announcement is a more important one to me; not being big on phones, I will let the iPhone excitement pass me by. Without either buying a Mac or running OS X in a virtual machine, there was no other way for me to test my web pages in Safari bar looking for a rendering site on the web. Now, that has all changed and I have downloaded the beta to have a look; it should iron out any rough edges that Mac users have been seeing.

Update: Safari seems to have got a mixed reaction from Windows users; some have tried it with Vista and cited issues. Another gripe has been its memory footprint but I have seen Firefox take up 100 MB.

Being a Safari subscriber, I found a pleasant surprise awaiting me in this month’s email newsletter: eBooks from SAS Publishing are now available on Safari. Having a quick look, I found a small but useful selection. Topics like the SQL procedure, the Macro language and Enterprise Guide caught my eye but there’s more than this on offer. It’ll be interesting to see where this leads…

Having exhausted the trial time on PhotoShop Elements 5, I am now having a look at its big brother PhotoShop CS2. That has got me thinking about PhotoShop books so that I become more of the possibilities and how to use them. Having a Safari subscription as I do, that naturally became my first port of call and I seemed to find two that answered my needs. Both are by Scott Kelby and they now lie on my Safari bookshelf: The Photoshop Elements 5 Book for Digital Photographers and The Photoshop CS2 Book for Digital Photographers. Even so, I am tempted to get a dead tree version of one of them and that presents a chicken and egg dilemma: the books could help choose which software to buy and the software dictates which of them will be the more useful. That said, I suspect price and features will swing it the way of Elements 5; paying over £400 for software whose capabilities I may never need does not sound financially sensible.

Update March 5th, 2007: I have now got my mits on the dead tree edition of Scott Kelby’s The Photoshop Elements 5 Book for Digital Photographers as well as Brad Hinkel’s Focal Easy Guide to Photoshop CS2. Now for some reading…