blooblog

The Underscore Hack relies on Internet Explorer (5 and up) ignoring underscores at the start of a property name. To illustrate, IE treats _position the same as position, enabling authors to write rules only it can understand. This is especially useful in certain cases where IE's CSS implementation is broken.

This method will prevent the CSS from validating as pure, although it is allowed under CSS 2.1's syntax and grammar as a vendor-specific extension.

favicon.ico (short for "Favorites Icon") is the graphical icon that is displayed on the URL bar and bookmarks list on some browsers, originating with Internet Explorer. It's a nice, unobtrusive way to impress branding outside the page area. This site uses a site-wide yellow letter b.

This article describes how to create one on a Mac. For Windows, Linux, and others, the free png2ico utility can convert PNG files to the required format.

Guide to CSS3 Selector Support is an excellent reference for figuring out which browsers support what. This can be used to implement advanced rules for browsers that support it without breaking older browsers.

The W3C released a working draft yesterday concerning the Inaccessibility of Visually-Oriented Anti-Robot Tests. These tests are employed in a variety of situations, presenting a distorted image of a word in an effort to stop automated form registration used by spammers and service abusers. The problem is that these images make it impossible for people with poor vision to access the service. While Microsoft's Hotmail provides an audio alternative, it is still problematic for people without soundcards, the deaf-blind, and even hearing people.

There is currently no good solution at the registration stage. Calling the verifications "Turing" tests is a complete misnomer when they fail to verify real humans. I'd like to see everyone to be able to access a service, and abusers caught by behavioral heuristics. Preventative measures are nice, but in this case too many people are getting caught on the wrong side of the fence.

Joe Maddalone of Insert Title Web Designs has found a way to run different versions of Internet Explorer on the same installation of Windows (XP and 2000). No more rebooting to a second Windows installation, no more second computer, no more VMWare virtual machines; this is the time-saving measure web builders have wanted for so long.

I tried the method on IE 4.01 SP2 and was unable to get it to work. I've got it working with 5.01 SP2 and 5.5 SP2, both of which work great. I suspect the method only works on the 5.0 codebase and newer.

via Branchleft