CSS

Back in the day, all the CSS of the sites I built were in a single file: style.css. Things were easy. I built the site; I organized my styles; I knew where everything was.

Of course, then I discovered the power of leveraging an open-source community. And now there are innumerable developers writing the CSS for my websites. To keep things manageable, each module of functionality has its own stylesheet.

Unfortunately, once you get in the habit of having multiple stylesheets for your website, you will eventually run into a weird problem with Internet Explorer: some of your styles won’t apply. At all.

And if you have sufficient Google-fu, you’ll eventually discover this is a little known bug: Internet Explorer will only load the first 31 stylesheets and will ignore the rest. And this isn’t even limited to our usual suspect, IE6. All versions of IE have this limitation.

The Full Problem
and why I was insane enough to load 993 stylesheets on one page

A few days ago, Jeff Burns wrote “Source Order: why I think Zen gets this wrong”.

His basic premise is that content-first HTML source ordering is an SEO-driven idea, is not backed by any accessibility studies, and goes against user expectations. While I respect his opinions, um… he’s wrong. :-)

After a month and a half beta period with only 5 bugs discovered (and squashed), the O-fficial Zen 5.x-1.0 version has been released. Yay!

Thanks to everyone who helped with new features, bug fixes and documentation suggestions! The help is greatly appreciated!

Steven Wittens was a co-creator of Drupal’s beautiful default theme, Garland. And he has a thought-provoking post about the current state of design in the Drupal community and his frustrations in trying to improve it.

I started this exercise with a simple bordered div which contained four divs that each had a background-image and that were positioned in each of the corners. This worked great in Mozilla 1 and Netscape 6, but not anywhere else. As I fixed bugs in each of the other browsers implementations, I ended up with this code.

This hack can be used to hide CSS from Opera (versions 5 and below):

html>body .myDiv { m\yProperty: myval; }

This hack can be used to hide CSS from Opera (versions 6 and below) and from Internet Explorer for Windows (versions 6 and below):

head:first-child+body