Isaac Keyet

Part 2 out of 2 (Part 1)

The only time a web designer notices the Outline property is when you want to disable it, and you’re wondering how to do so or if it’s even possible. But you can actually use the property to do very clever things.

At a first glance, the Border and the Outline property look very much alike. They share the same rule structure, and they both put a border around any object you want. But there are two fundamental differences.

1. When the browser calculates the width of a floated object, it takes into account Width, Padding and Border.

Notice how setting a border adds to the total width, while the outline doesn’t.

2. Since borders take up space, you can have problem aligning elements on a webpage using borders. However if you use an outline instead, the “border” will just be a layer on top of the image and won’t push your element anywhere. Notice how the second image’s inside border still lines up with the text.

This is very useful for registration processes, if you want to show a field that needs to be corrected: Instead of applying a border and having the textfield move X amount of pixels horizontally you can apply an outline!

How to use Outline, examples

Example:
.classNameHere {
outline: 1px solid #000000;
}
Example 2:
.classNameHere {
outline: 2px dotted #FF66CC;
}

I hope you enjoyed this little introduction to the Outline CSS property!

I just got done with it, and it’s just for fun. If you look in this blog’s sidebar you’ll see a shiny iPhone with my latest visitors in it.

The reason I did it was just because the new MBL widget looks so much like an iPhone. Especially if you’re using a black and white color scheme for it, which I did. Anyway, I hope you like it!

Recently I faced the problem of either creating my own 16 square pixel icons, or use others. I started looking into how other services have solved the problem, and I realized after looking at Socialthing! that the best solution is also the most obvious and simple one: Just import the site’s own favicons!

Here are some examples of great 16×16 icons from well known sites:

• Facebook:
• Last.fm:
• CNN:
• Yahoo!:
• Twitter:

Almost all bigger sites out there have a favicon, so to find and download an icon just do the following:

1. Enter root web adress in your browsers adress field: http://www.sitename.com
2. Apply /favicon.ico to the adress, like so: http://www.sitename.com/favicon.ico
3. Hit Enter to go to the adress, and there you are. This is the perfect 16px icon for the website you’ve entered!

All browsers have their flaws, that’s for sure. But sometimes you see pure stupidity, and then it might be worth writing something about it.

If a web page doesn’t have a doctype, it usually means that the page is either very old or created by someone that don’t care or doesn’t know anything about doctypes. The strange thing though is that Internet Explorer treats those pages as something completely different than normal, modern web pages. If you don’t add a doctype to your HTML document, Internet Explorer will not rely on it’s rendering rules any more. For example: If you set both a width and a padding to an element, normal browser rendering makes the total width of the object to be width+left padding+right padding.

.box {
padding: 10px;
width: 200px;
}

The total width of .box becomes 220px. However, without a Doctype to rely on, Internet Explorer does not default to a simple Doctype like HTML 4.01 Transitional which would follow this rule. Instead it decides that the page is not worth a second chance, and some rules are rendered incorrectly. In this example, .box would actually become 200 pixels wide according to IE’s rendering.

You might think that this is not a big deal, but consider that other browsers are smarter than this, which makes the crossbrowser rendering of the web page a mess. It is also a fairly unknown and “not so easy to discover” kind of bug which makes it even harder.

Read about the existing Doctypes and why you should use them over at A List Apart: Doctypes.

UPDATE 2008-03-20: This bug is easily resolved by upgrading to the latest Beta version of Firebug (currently 1.1). Thanks to PatternHead!

I’ve experienced this bug for quite a while now, and it is really annoying. Basically you can’t inspect an anchor in Firebug, and there’s no way around it.

Today I had enough and decided to do a thorough search on the web to get rid of the problem.. Looks like it’s a well known bug. Someone suggested that I’d revert back to Firefox 2.0.0.11, as it didn’t have this bug. I found an old version, sadly a .exe though. I could not find any mac equivalent, until I stumbled across a Ukrainian .dmg file… So now my Firefox is in crazy Ukranian, but at least it works properly!

For those that haven’t heard, the swedish TechStar is now back in Boulder for 3 months. I’m working hard at our new (not very shiny but OK offices) on 1980 8th St, feel free to drop by.

It’s good to be back.

TechStars was a great experience for everyone involved, and we’re all keeping a close contact with the other teams and mentors. This video was posted on techstars.org and gives you insight in what we all think TechStars was: A pretty darn awesome experience!

TechStars: What’s it like? from David Cohen on Vimeo.

As you probably know I’m a cofounder and User Interface Designer at Intense Debate. We just released a big update to our revolutionary commenting system, that’s basically a total makeover graphically. I think you can tell that I’m excited!

One of the most noticable changes/improvements is the “User Information Box” that displays when you hover an avatar. It’s almost like a mini-profile-mashup from alot of different things. The idea is that it should tell you alot about the person you’re interested in, and still look OK if the person has not supplied much data. A screenshot of this new feature is next to this paragraph.

There’s much more to this update, if you’re interested I suggest you go read (and subscribe!) to our company blog: Inside the Debate.

It’s amazing how some things change rapidly and how others.. Well, doesn’t change at all. It’s 2008 and I still work as hard as ever. One thing’s for certain: This is the year. So much exciting stuff will happen this year.

I’m working on a little side project for Adept Web Solutions while Intense Debate stabilizes. I thought I’d post something about that on here later.. It’s cool stuff. I’m also hoping to update the blog a little bit, already getting tired of it.

I’m glad to report that Intense Debate has ended it’s Closed Beta period and is now entering an Open Beta! These are very exciting times, and it’s amazing to see how well our service performs with this sudden hiatus in the traffic. The Chameleon theme is also performing fairly well, even due to my complete rewrite. I’ve only had to fix one or two small things.

So if you have a blog, go check out the newest, and brightest shining star on the Internet for today: Intense Debate Comments. Installing it on Blogger and typepad with a widget is a breeze, a Wordpress install is really easy. www.intensedebate.com

If you have any complaints/questions/suggestions about the interface or the commenting experience altogether, please drop me a few lines. I’m always working on making the Intense Debate Comments your dream commenting system come true.