Birnam Designs Blog -- sharing tips, resources, ideas, and more on web development and design

I really had a lot of hope for IE7. I was eager for the Big Day when IE7 would be pushed out to millions of computers around the world, changing the landscape of the internet overnight. Suddenly the support for PNG transparency would be in the majority of internet users! Suddenly CSS bugs would be vanquished, and multi-headed hydra designs would be a thing of the past as IE7 would bring better standards support to the majority of the population!

Oh well. It was a noble thought.

As developers all over the internet are discovering, IE7 simply replaces old bugs with new bugs. Most of what I’m seeing now seem to be pure rendering issues, such as the inability to redraw backgrounds in negatively-margined div elements after the users scrolls out and scrolls back in. I’m seeing some positioning bugs. And big problems with opacity support.

So now I’m stuck importing yet another stylesheet declaration into my html.

The new “anti-alias for readability” setting for text in Flash 8 and up looks really good. The only problem is that there are sometimes unexpected behaviors related to text wrapping. That’s because, by default, the advanced antialiasing uses “grid fitting”, which is not used by traditional (anti-alias for animation) text. Grid fitting is a text rendering technique that aligns horizontal and vertical lines in the font glyphs to a whole pixel. For instance, say you have a lower-case ‘L’ that is draw as a one-pixel wide bar. In order to render it as crisply as possible, that one-pixel wide bar should be lined up with the monitor’s actual pixels.

Unfortunately, this alignment process can alter the width of the text, which can alter the wrap points in multiline textfields. This normally wouldn’t be noticeable in static text fields, but it is very obvious if the textfield is being animated. Especially when being scaled! The text will jump around as the wrap points keep changing.

Fixing the jumping wrap problem »

I recently ran into a really puzzling problem. I was creating an administrative interface in Flash, which included a few form elements (flash components) and some custom buttons. One of the buttons was a toggle switch, with a funny behavior! I could only click the button once! Subsequent clicks were ignored until I moved the cursor. Just a single pixel would suffice, but for some reason it needed to reactive the onrollover event for the button.

After hours of searching for clues online, I found some clues...

Well that didn’t take long. I found an easily-replicable bone-fide bug in Photoshop 9 (aka ‘CS2′). Here are the steps:
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Note: this post has been imported and re-editing from a personal blog. Time-sensitive material may no longer be relevant.

If you want to embed video into a webpage, one of the parameters you can use is “autostart.” The autostart parameter options are true and false.

Problem: Firefox does not read ‘false’ correctly. It will autostart the video with settings of both ‘true’ and ‘false.’

Solution: use ‘0′ (zero) instead. In most programming languages, ‘true’ and ‘false’ are really just pseudonyms for ‘1′ and ‘0′. Or to be more precise, false is zero and true is non-zero. Firefox does not seem to be converting the text “false” into the programming concept ‘false’ and instead reads it as non-zero, therefore true, because the text isn’t blank.

Note: this post has been imported and re-editing from a personal blog. Time-sensitive material may no longer be relevant.

Have you ever had a problem with Firefox where the window size/position doesn’t seem to be saved like with most applications? Every time you open Firefox is appears in the same unusual position at an unusual size. It’s annoying. And here’s what to do:

Locate the “localstore.rdf” file in your Firefox profile, and delete it. Don’t worry, Firefox will make a new, fresh one when it restarts.

Of course, the corruption of localstore.rdf might be an indicator of a larger disk corruption, in which case this fix might not keep you happy for very long — but it’s worth trying.

If you’re having trouble locating your Firefox profile (and you’re on a Windows machine), look in C:\Documents and Settings\[your user login name]\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\default.xyz Replace “C:\” with your systems root drive, and insert your login name in the indicated spot. Your profile might be in “\Mozilla\Profiles\” instead of “\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles” depending on what version of Firefox you’re running. And the “default.xyz” will almost certainly be different on your system (the extension is random, from what I can tell), but it’s normally the only folder in “Profiles.”