In a few weeks Internet Explorer 6 will be 9 years old, and with its popularity hovering around 17% I’ve noticed an interesting trend among Web developers that’s been growing over the past few years… a shadenfreude surrounding anything that mocks IE users, or diminishes their browsing experience. The Universal IE6 CSS file is a great example of this. It is a stylesheet intended to make a Website look bland and generic, but functional for IE6 users. Its a manifestation of the philosophy of “Design for better browsers, then design alternative solutions to handle IE6 bugs.” Another project, a Javascript library blurs the page intermittently for IE6 browsers, further to encourages this joy we experience from the pain of others who are:
- naive enough to think that IE6 is an acceptable browser
- shackled to a corporate IT policy that doesn’t want to retrain their in-house Windows XP experts
- working under the umbrella of an accounting department that won’t pay to upgrade the 8-year-old IE6-only Web-based expense reporting system
I’ve heard developers relishing every opportunity to use CSS rounded corners, CSS dropshadows, and any other trick that they can dredge up from the When Can I Use Website just to stick another finger in the eye of Internet Explorer 6 (and occasionally IE7) users. The item I came across online that has me thinking about this trend this morning was the following on a Web site promoting a package of beautiful free HTML5 video player code (yellow arrow and box my own):
The site is actually promoting code as being compatible with “Internet Explorer with Chrome Frame installed.” Chrome frame is a further Internet Explorer insult from Google, which is a package of the main functional part of the Google Chrome Web browser distributed as an ActiveX control (think plugin) for Internet Explorer. That’s like saying the Uhaul truck you are driving has air conditioning because the car its towing has air conditioning. This last thought, because of my own schadenfreude, unfortunately has me laughing out loud.
Christopher Ditto Browsers, Web Code
I received an email today from Nike, and couldn’t work out why their logo was visible BEFORE I clicked “Accept Images”. I did a little poking around and someone over there is a genius. I’ve toyed with the idea of using an HTML table with cell background colors in place of simple images, but never actually implemented it in a commercial email. Nike pulled it off and it works like a charm. It took 11,034 characters to create, but that’s not really any more than a moderately sized JPEG. Here’s the HTML table image of the Nike logo:
I recommend poking around with Firebug to see the full glory of it. The outer div, and the <style> tag content is my own, to override the CSS style settings on this page.
For anyone who has absolutely what this is all about… Over half of all emails, when opened, do not display images by default. If you are a company, like Nike, and someone opens your email, you are forced into simply hoping that they will click a button or link labeled with something like “Display Images” in order for them to see the full glory of your emailed promotion, which may be a large photo of your new product, photos of sale items, or inspiring action shot of products in use. Simply having a recognizable (and presumably liked) logo visible when the email is first opened is probably enough to encourage a higher rate of people to select “Display Images”.
My hat is off to Nike’s email folks for this simple, but effective (and ingenious) little HTML hack. It made me click to see the images of the email, but I’m still not ready to pull the trigger and purchase a pair of Vaporjet cleats or a Hypercool athletic shirt.
Christopher Ditto Browsers, Web Code
Working on updating the SkinnyScoop widget. Below is the current one, next one should be live in a month or so. Thought I’d use as a sample question:
“Do you ever feel guilty about your lifestyle when you think about the people in the world living in poverty?”
Then I realized that my style of question is probably more along the lines of:
Christopher Ditto Browsers, Web Code, Work
In angry rant that’s reminiscent of the classic f#ckthesouth.com rant, Mike Lacher channels energy into defending the most hated font in the world. For anyone who has absolutely no idea why anyone would hate Comic Sans, go here.
The rant is here:
I’m Comic Sans, A$$hole.
Christopher Ditto Fun
Today I built a nice looking iPhone application (an analog clock) and managed to build it in a language that I had never seen before in just an hour or so. This feat was entirely because of how simple the folks at Ansca have made programming for the iPhone.
Read more…
Christopher Ditto Fun, Web Code, Work
CSS Sprites are a growing trend, and they can save a lot of time in certain situations. The term sprite when used for video games is slightly different, but in the context of Web graphics, the term refers to a single image file that is cropped onscreen and used for different images that are seen on a page. One sprite, for example, may contain the mouseoff and mouseover states for all tabs and buttons on a site. With CSS, the correct tab or button can be displayed by simply cropping the desired section of the larger image. Amazon is doing it, Apple.com is doing it, YouTube.com, and others are starting to take the hint. Last night I sat down and tried to apply this technique to a Firefox XUL application.
Read more…
Christopher Ditto Browsers, Web Code, Work
Armed with a budget of $0, I decided to spend an hour or two last night trying to accumulate as much data as possible using only a zip code, a static HTML page, and some javascript. Not a single dollar was spent, nor a single image created. The page is up here.
I’m sure I’ll add to this project as I find more free data sources, but so far I have:
- Location Name
- Lat/Lng of Zip Center
- Weather Info
- Forecast Data (4 day)
- Recent Earthquakes within 100 miles
- Local Wiki Entries (5)
If you have any XML or JSON data source suggestions that take LAT/LNG or Zip Code as parameters, email me at christopher[ at ]dittoditto.com and I’ll add them to the page.
Christopher Ditto Web Code, Work
After trying a half dozen different methods for building Firefox add-ons, I have settled on a single ant script I put together. The following ant script (build.xml file) will create a directory, copy all files into it, delete irrelevant files, zip up the file, name it with an .xpi extension, and delete the temporary folder it made to do all of this. Read more…
Christopher Ditto Browsers, Web Code
At long last, my new open source Firefox add on, AnalogClock, is available for download from the Mozilla site. The clock uses the canvas tag to display an analog clock (with hands) in your browser status bar.
More info on my AnalogClock page.
Christopher Ditto Fun, Web Code
Just when I thought I had seen the gamut of interesting clocks on the Internet… a new one pops up. Thomas Sturm just sent me the link to Scroll Clock. It really needs to be seen to be understood, though it helps to be a Web development geek to fully grok its significance.
Christopher Ditto Web Code
