All browsers have built-in, predefined presentational features that apply to the rules we all commonly use. For example, links are blue and underlined by default… Everyone’s seen this.

A colleague pointed me to this interesting post by Eric Meyer  about clearing out all of the default presentational effects that browsers apply to documents with no specific CSS styling. This post in turn refers to Tantek Celik’s post about his file ‘undohtml.css’ that strips out these defaults.

I’ve actually been using most of the elements described in Tantek’s file for quite a while now in the top of all my CSS files - they were collected over the last two years as I ran into problems. But it’s nice to have it in a separate file and more complete than my own version.

Ah, it’s been sooooo busy but I actually took a few minutes to browse this site this morning. There are some good ones on here - check out La Trobe.

Ran across this horror re-cut of Mary Poppins tonight. And quite a while ago, I found this  nicely-done rehashed trailer for The Shining.

Today I’m coding a site that needs little ‘TM’ text attached to all the product names. I wasn’t sure how to do this but Wikipedia to the rescue:

/* keep superscript text from breaking the line-spacing */
#bodyContent sup {
font-size: smaller;
vertical-align: baseline;
position: relative;
bottom: 0.33em;
}

This code plays nicely with FF, IE7 and 6, and Opera.

Today I was working on an ad banner for one of my clients. This banner used a large background image, but they wanted to make a button in the image clickable.

I wasn’t sure how to do this but I found a handy tutorial on A List Apart.

Now I didn’t write this - I’m just summarizing the important points. I’d refer you to the original article for more information, it tells how to make multiple clickable areas on a background image.

In your XHTML file, add in this code:

RitzPix Share Online!

This defines an area ‘button’ that we’ll use for the clickable area and sets its link target. The author used the semantically meaningless ‘i’ tag to wrap it, as I did here (but Wordpress keeps changing it to em’s no matter what - it’s supposed to be ‘i’), but we’ll make that text invisible in just a minute.

Now for the CSS: apply a background image to an element (probably a wrapper or something similar). Then create the ‘button’:

#button a {
position: absolute;
top: 594px;
left: 440px;
height: 26px;
width: 118px;
text-decoration: none;
}

Position it where you want it on the page. Finally, we’ll need to hide the link text (but still provide it for accessibility purposes). This bit of code will make the text within the ‘i’ links invisible:
#menu a i { visibility: hidden; }

And that’s it! This works fine in IE7, IE6, FF, Opera and Netscape.

I don’t often do product reviews but in this case one is deserved.

I started using a business number on Skype several months ago and bought a pair of headphones with a microphone. Admittedly I didn’t buy top-of-line but what I purchased was about mid-range in price and with a fair number of decent recommendations online.

I discovered that Skype can be good for gaming.

Suddenly the headphones started getting a lot more use and after a month I couldn’t stand them anymore. My ears hurt while I was wearing them and I couldn’t wait to get them off…

I bought another pair, a smaller, lighter and behind the neck style. Those lasted about two months, but again, they lacked enough adjustability to make them comfortable for long-term use.

My husband bought me a third pair for Christmas - and they are wonderful. They’re also cheap - about $20 at Best Buy.

They’re Altec Lansing AHS322’s. They are by far the most comfortable headset I’ve ever owned. Like many excellent products, when they’re doing their job you don’t even notice them. My ears never hurt. They’re extremely lightweight and very adjustable and the boom mic is just a twisty wire, easy to position.

Again, they’re cheap. They’re wired. The sound quality is IMHO very good, but not blow-your-head-off outstanding. Their literature says that these are very popular for call centers - and that implies a high degree of comfort, which by this point was my main concern.

Highly recommended if you want lightweight and decent sound quality for very little cash.

I admit I’ve never built a site using ASP and I know nothing about .NET.  But today someone asked a question in the WebProWorld forum about why a site might have been built in .ASP in the first place and I found one of the answers interesting.

Poster kgun said this (quoting here):

• Static (X)HTML pages. No need for server scripting lik asp or php.
• Static XML driven sites, like an XML CMS. No need for server scripting lik asp or php. XML driven sites can be great, since you can transform the same datasource (XML files) to different formats, HTML, PDF, WAP (for wireless applications), other XML formats like RSS and Atom etc. by using XSLT (Extensible Stylesheet Transformation Language). That makes XML driven sites very flexible. These technologies can of course be combined with the technologies mentioned below. That is the future and what I call web-, internet- or net 2. I am sure some webmasters are already writing all their sites in XML and trasforming it to (X)HTML by using XLST if / when needed. Note, you can get problems with older browsers with XML driven sites depending on how you transform the source file(s).
• Dynamic sites based on browser scripting in JavaScript. No need for server scripting like asp or php.
• Dynamic database driven sites. Then you need a server scripting language like asp or php.
• Web applications driven by an AJAX engine. Then you need to combine asynchronous (browser) JavaScript with serverscripting in asp, php or .NET

This was good - it’s something I can show my clients when they ask.

I have one client with a nice static site that was built in HTML 4.0 Transitional and is hosted on a Windows server. There’s no need for any server-side scripting on this site, and thus especially no need to be hosted on Windows rather than Linux, am I correct?

A friend sent me this link to a color palette tool from Adobe called Kuler.

What a slick site. You can create a five-color custom palette starting from any combination from the color wheel. Well-executed, minimalist and quite striking visually.

I’ve posted a few of the color palettes from the layouts I made yesterday - my username is dac.