Blog – ShiftEleven

Internet Explorer frustrates the living hell out of me. Event though IE 7 is finally out, it doesn’t mean that IE 6 can be ignored. I really look forward to the day when my CSS(cascading style sheet) files aren’t full of unnecessary classes and hacks because the major browser vendors got it right and because everyone has casted away the garbage. Until then, I am still in search of tricks to simplifying my life.

One of these tricks is to make IE pretend like it knows how to use the :hover pseudo-class on all tags.

If you have ever tried to do a suckerfish dropdown then you have gone through the same thing: excitement as you have learned how to use structural markup to create a dropdown and then frustration as your work has been nullified by IE. The fix involves creating duplicate selectors of those using :hover, but instead of using :hover, replace it with a class name .hover. Making what are essentially duplicates and managing more content doesn’t sit well with me. The other trick to getting suckerfish to work in IE is to use JavaScript. The script will add a class definition to the tag when a user’s mouse if over the element and then removes the class when the users mouse is no longer over it. Since this method uses JavaScript to solve one problem, why not make it solve both?

Read the rest of this entry »

Nobody likes to see exceptions when running an application; it means something went wrong and you should have been on top of it. But with that, often times I find people will write code to prevent exceptions rather than just allowing them to occur and then using it in their favor.

Take this bit of ruby code in a rails controller as an example:

class ArticlesController < ApplicationController
  def show
    @article = Article.find(params[:id])
  end
end

That’s pretty solid, but what happens if someone passes in an ID that does not exist? Well in rails’ production mode, it would return a 404 error

Makes sense! That article doesn’t exist, so it can’t be found. I have dabbled with a little SEO(Search Engine Optimization) and usability and just a 404 isn’t cutting it for me. I think we can redirect our user back on a right track. For one, we know the user is trying to read an article, so why not redirect the user to a list of all the articles and give them a little warning?

Read the rest of this entry »