Lessons Learned

October 22nd, 2004 • General

After finally redesigning Codeflakes to make look at least a bit more professional, here’s a couple of lessons I learned, some things you might already know, but it’s never harmful to be repetitious:

• Floats are evil, long live floats.

  Well my only gripe on floats is that they’re too difficult to maintain, but with some effort, they can do wonders.

• Cross-browser transparency can only be achieved with PNG (GIFs are almost dead you know). Opera doesn’t support either propriety or standard CSS opacity attribute. However, if you don’t care much about Opera, transparent layers in IE and Gecko can be easily done like this:

  #div {
      /* Propriety IE. This line causes your CSS not to validate */
      filter:alpha(opacity=80);
      
      /* Standard W3C, should work in Mozilla 1.7 and up */
      opacity: 0.8;
      
      /* Gecko propriety, for earlier versions of Mozilla */
      -moz-opacity: 0.8;
  }
  

• When you use position:relative for a parent layer, children layers’ positioning becomes dependent on the parent’s position rather than the page, so top: 0; positions a child layer at the very top inside the parent, not at the top of the page.

  Yeah, I know it’s an old one, but I thought it’s worth mentioning.

• This really depends on personal preferences, but I think Bitstream Vera Sans looks much better than Verdana on the screen. Verdana has harder edges and isn’t as smooth as Bitstream. But that’s probably just me.

• Use XHTML Strict whenever possible, you never when you have to XSL-transform it. Plus, it sounds cooler.

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