Eric Wendelin's Blog

Reviewing my bookmarks this month, I found some really great resources that I had to write about. In case you missed them, here are the best which (for the most part) went under-noticed. Enjoy!

HTML

You think you know HTML, don’t you? | kay lives here - An insightful opinion piece about front-end coding in general. Some good discussion is a bonus.

HTML Reference (beta) - SitePoint’s new HTML reference covering concepts, elements, attributes, compatibility and even microformats! You will want to bookmark this for future reference. A perfect complement for their CSS reference.

CSS

CSS Compatibility and Internet Explorer - It is made even more useful because you can see the selectors etc. that IE8 plans to support. Slightly exciting but also a bit disappointing. Good to know though :)

Popularity: 4% [?]

For many of us designing fluid layouts, which are generally based in “em”s (pronounced like the letter M) you end up not really knowing how many pixels an “em” is while you are deep in the DOM tree. This is especially confusing if you increase/decrease text size with your browser.

For this reason, I have created a simple Javascript function that you can use to poll any element on your test page and figure out what size an “em” is.

Popularity: 2% [?]

You already know that Firebug is quite possibly a web developer’s best friend. You also know that you can edit pretty much anything with it and see results immediately. We can add one more thing to that list today.

You may not have known that you can also edit the values in the layout pane as well! (You can find it on the right side of the HTML tab) This makes it even easier to adjust the layout of a block and see the results. As a bonus, if you press the up and down arrow keys while editing a value the pixel value will adjust by one pixel in that direction. One note on this though, you can’t specify values in anything other than pixels (sorry fluid layouts).

Popularity: 1% [?]

According to my poll about 1 in 4 of you readers have already switched to Firefox 3 and almost everyone else will switch after their extensions are compatible. I am considering switching myself but before I do I need to tweak the heck out of it like I tend to do.

Now after a bit of searching I really couldn’t find any good resources out there for tweaking Firefox 3 stuff so I thought I should create one and share it with you!

So here I have compiled a list of Firefox 3 only userChrome.css tweaks. Here are instructions if needed.

Popularity: 55% [?]

Reader Chuck recently asked about enhancing new labels for Thunderbird:

I’ve been trying to figure out how to change some of this stuff for a long time. My one question though - how do you change the label backgrounds for additional labels you have added(other than the default 5 that come with Thunderbird).

I realized that this is probably more common than one might think. So I’m going to share my answer with all of you.

This customization goes back to Personalizing Thunderbird’s chrome, but note that you can also do this with the Stylish Add-on for Thunderbird. In this case it’s not necessary to dig into your userChrome.css file, but if you want to than here are instructions.

Popularity: 2% [?]