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Automatic line breaks in narrow columns with CSS 3 hyphens and word-wrap
A problem that has always existed but has become more common lately as more people – thanks to the popularity of responsive web design – make their layouts adapt to narrow viewports, is the lack of...
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Make sure your HTML5 document outline is backwards compatible
This is just a short reminder of something I wrote about in On using h1 for all heading levels in HTML5: make sure your HTML5 document outline is backwards compatible. The reason is simple. Browsers...
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iOS orientation change and automatic text resizing
Most web developers who have viewed their work in an iOS device know that Safari for iOS likes to zoom in on the page and do weird things to font size when you change the device’s orientation from...
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CSS generated content and screen readers
As all widely used web browsers (unless you still consider IE7 as being widely used) now support the :before and :after pseudo-elements along with the content property, using those pseduo-elements has...
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Safer event handling with jQuery namespaced events
You’ve heard it many times before: make sure your JavaScript plays nice with other code, especially if you package it up as a plugin and share with other developers. Perhaps the most obvious thing to...
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Hiding visible content from screen readers with aria-hidden
Sometimes you need to hide parts of a web page, either permanently or temporarily. A common use case is content that becomes visible only after the user has interacted with a control on the page, for...
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An alternative to select elements as navigation in narrow viewports
A recurring problem when making sites fit in a narrow viewport is navigation. The most common approach on larger screens is to use a horizontal navigation for the top level items. Sometimes such menus...
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Beware of @import rules when concatenating CSS files
If you like to spread your CSS over multiple files, as many people do (but I don’t), it is generally a good idea to concatenate them before deployment to reduce the number of HTTP requests. There is...
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Using media queries to hide CSS3 from older browsers
When working around bugs and different levels of support in various browsers, a common approach is using conditional comments to target certain versions of Internet Explorer. Come to think of it, it’s...
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IP address-independent access to Mac virtual hosts from Parallels virtual...
Like many other Mac-using web developers I use Parallels Desktop for testing in various versions of Internet Explorer. It works well, including accessing local development sites set up as virtual hosts...
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Tell CSS that JavaScript is available ASAP
When you’re styling parts of a web page that will look and work differently depending on whether JavaScript is available or not, it can be very useful to use JavaScript to change or add a class name to...
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Use inherit to reduce repetition of CSS property values
Every now and then you will find yourself having to repeat the same value for a particular property in several CSS rules. Sometimes doing so is necessary, but there are some situations when you can use...
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Removing whitespace around text fields
Trying to be pixel perfect on the Web is like begging to be frustrated. I try to not worry so much about a pixel here or there, but sometimes you just have to get complete control to make things look...
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How to line wrap text in legend elements, even in IE
Back in 2009 I wrote about a way of Line wrapping text in legend elements. It involved using CSS hacks or conditional comments to target Internet Explorer, which was the most problematic browser in...
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Using JavaScript to check if images are enabled
Sometimes it’s useful to know if images are enabled in the user’s browser, so that you can adjust your CSS and/or JavaScript to make sure that important content is not hidden and that the page is still...
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Accessible custom checkboxes and radio buttons
Every now and then I’m handed a design comp that has customised checkboxes and radio buttons. This used to make me think “Oh no, not again” because I simply didn’t know of a reliable way to customise...
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iOS WebKit browsers and auto-zooming form controls
One thing about iOS browsers that can be pretty frustrating, both as a developer and as a user, is when you open a site on an iPhone or iPod Touch (not iPad) and want to enter some text in a text field...
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The mysterious WebKit placeholder overflow bug
A couple of projects I’ve been working on lately have triggered a frustrating overflow bug that took me ages to find the cause of. Sometimes a horizontal scrollbar would appear for no obvious reason.I...
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Media Query width and vertical scrollbars
Media queries are a great tool for changing a website’s layout depending on parameters like viewport width, but it can be very annoying when browsers do not do the same thing. An obvious example is...
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CSS background-position and percent
I was working on making an existing client site responsive recently and encountered a CSS problem I am unable to find a good cross-browser solution to. The problem involves CSS background images and...
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