Job Interview

29 Mar 2008 — Jez D

On Thursday 27 Mar 2008, I had a job interview in Manchester, UK. It was the first one I have had for a long time, so, I was very apprehensive.My car. Yes, that really is part of the reg number. Fortunately, I arrived early enough to have time to cruise around looking for a suitable parking space.

Anyway, I parked up and entered the 18 storey building where the interview was to be held. I booked in at reception and was told that the company I was there to see lives on the 14th floor. Thank God the lifts were in good working order!

The Company

I am not going to name the company, but I will say it is a large new media agency with approximately 1000 clients around the UK. They have a small team of developers and designers, and were looking for PHP programmer to join the team.

The Interview

I thought that, generally, it went pretty well. MySQLThe interview was really more of a chat about what they were looking for and what I can do. They were looking for a programmer competent in PHP, XHTML, CSS and MySQL. It appeared to be ideal for me.

The interviewer acknowledged that accessibility and standards had not been a priority when designing the websites. As standards and accessibility have become a kind of obsession of mine, I had brought it up during the interview. Maybe this was a mistake!

He showed me plans detailing the structure of the websites they build. PHP I was elated, as they build them exactly the same way I built my personal website. That filled me with confidence. Then when he asked if I was able to create tableless websites, I was over the moon because that’s the only way I do it now.

The interview lasted just 25 minutes and I was brought down to earth at the end when he informed me that I was just one of five people he was interviewing that morning for the role. One of my competitors was a programming expert from Russia!

Update

Well you may be surprised to hear that I was offered the job. I was certainly surprised – particularly when I was up against the Russian programming expert!

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Validation Warning – Byte-Order Mark found in UTF-8 File

26 Mar 2008 — Jez D

Morning,

Yesterday, when I was working on a website for a friend, I tested my code via the W3C.org website and, even though it validated OK, I was shown the following message:

Warning Byte-Order Mark found in UTF-8 File

“What the heck does that mean?”
According to W3C, this in itself is not a problem. But, it may present difficulties with older browsers. Well, I can’t have that!

With IE6+ there does not seem to be any visible oddities, but, Firefox 2 has added this to the top of the page:



How bizarre! I checked my source code and there is nothing in there that would explain these characters being visible.

A little bit of research and I found out that this is all to do with how the text file is encoded and saved. So, what’s the solution? Very simple actually.

  • I opened the .html file in notepad.
  • Clicked Save As
  • In the dialog box, change the Encoding field value to ANSI
  • Save and transfer to server.

Simple. Not only did the bizarre characters disappear, but, I no longer get the warning for the W3C validator.

Web Developer

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Practice What You Preach!

22 Mar 2008 — Jez D

Morning,

It is one thing that I put hints and tips on this blog for all to see. But, if I do not actually follow my own advice, it makes me look like a hypocrit.

So, a few weeks ago, I took a good look at my own personal website and found it wanting in the areas of cross-browser compatibility, usability and acesssibility!My personal website - www.jez-d.co.uk

For the passed week I have spent my free time totally revamping the site, with focus on the above areas and W3C standards. I got rid of redundant elements and used PHP for delivery of content.

Anyway, you are welcome to take a look and make your own judgement – www.jez-d.co.uk

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Browser specific CSS

8 Mar 2008 — Jez D

So you want to have a different stylesheet for different browsers. Well, what I have used in the past, is a method of specifying a different stylesheet for Internet Explorer browsers.

You would need to specify the link to your CSS in the <head> section as normal:

<link rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” href=”css/style.css” title=”Main Stylesheet” />

This stylesheet, of course, will be used by IE – until you specify another stylesheet. So, after the link for the main stylesheet you add something like the following:

<!–[if IE ]>
<link rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” href=”css/IEstyle.css” title=”IE Stylesheet” />
<![endif]–>

Most browsers will treat this as a comment block. But, for some strange reason, IE checks to see if there are any instructions in it.

You can also enhance it by putting the version number after ‘if IE’. Example:

<!--[if IE 5]>
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Cross Browser Compatibility with CSS

6 Mar 2008 — Jez D

Morning people,

Have you ever had problems where your CSS looks great in one browser, but not the way you want it in the other?

So you change it and all looks great in the second browser, but rubbish in the first! Arrghh! If I had hair, I’d be pulling it out.

This is a common problem between IE6 and Firefox. What’s the solution then?

There’s two possible ways around this. The first, and perhaps most obvious is to create individual stylesheets for specific browsers (I’ll demonstrate this in another post) . The second is perhaps more appropriate if you only have a small amount of code that needs changing. Basically, you have to produce two versions of the same code. If you proceed your CSS line with *html it will only be read by older versions of Mozilla, IE6 and Safari. So, you create the same line as normal, and that will be read by other browsers. Example below:

/*read by Mozilla 1.0-1.4,IE6,Safari*/
* html #twocols{
position:relative;
top: 1em;
}      

#twocols{
width:80%;
float:right;
position:relative;
margin-right: 1em;
margin-top:.1em;
}

Here I have only duplicated the particular bit which is interpreted differently by the browsers. Not only does this hack work nicely, but it validates with validator.w3.org

.

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