Blowing my own trumpet

Ok. So I have been in the job for about ten weeks now and I have managed to bring something to the company.

What have I brought?

• Standards compliant development
• Accessible development
• More concerted SEO practices
• Use of SE friendly URL’s
• Favicons

A few weeks back, I was asked to do a presentation for account managers and senior staff about meta data. As a result of the success of that, I was given the added responsibility of quality checking new builds before they go live. This gave me the opportunity to turn around such things as developers using images instead of text for the entire main content of the site, and, failing to use title tags properly, or even body tags at all!

I was surprised about the way some developers were building websites. When I brought this up with a colleague, he explained that the main driving force was quantity not quality, thus, developers were forced to get a website completed as quickly as possible. That’s something I have learnt.

Next, I have to get them using semantic markup. Difficult task as I’m still new to the company and I am in fact, the most junior person there!

CSS IE7 Hack

So, you have a CSS class which looks just wrong in Internet Explorer 7 (IE7). This is quite simple to rectify.

Suppose the top margin is just right in all browsers except IE7, where it is too small. No problem. Set the class in the normal way, as follows, but use the value which looks best in IE7.

.gap {
margin-top: 1em;
}

Ok. Now we have a margin that looks great in IE7, but too small in other browers. So we need to change it without affecting IE7. We do this by redefining the above class in a manner that will be ignored by IE7, and we do it as follows:

html>/**/body .gap {
margin-top: 1.2em;
}

We need to include both sets of code in the stylesheet. IE7 hates this hierarchical way of declaring classes in CSS and so ignores it. The declared values for the class are re-written for other browsers.