I'm currently changing the look of select elements on my page and I noticed that almost every browser displays all the effects differently. That is not so bad alone but I also noticed that some browsers do not support some effects at all, for example Chrome does not support background image, rounded corners and probably something else I've not yet noticed.
I have seen some pretty impressive drop down menus on some websites where everything has been custom made, starting from the glows to the appearance of the arrow button and so on.
How is it done? Is it done with some Javascript/jQuery plugin?
Can anyone point me to some good resources?
I would suggest you go down the path of a jquery plugin. Doing a search for "jquery select box" returns a number of useful results, eg:
http://www.designdim.com/2011/07/10-important-jquery-selectboxdropdown-plugins/
I have tried out a number of these before, and some are more flexible than others.
One that I really like that is not in that list is Chosen, although it doesn't fully support IE7 and 8.
Related
It's just that I don't really know enough about XHTML, CSS, or Javascript and I'm trying to learn. I know what to do in order to get things to work or look the way I want them to but I'm guessing my methods are not the standard best way to get the results I desire; obviously not because it's not working across all browsers.
I am hoping for someone who is willing to spend a little bit of time with me to go over the code, make recommendations and explain why what I have is not standard for coding. I have some validation errors but they mostly are all in the javascript, which I didn't even write so I honestly have no idea if they are causing trouble or how to fix them if they are.
So my website is pretty simple. I just want to have a professional page where potential employers can see my resume and contact information. When I look at my website in firefox 4 or Safari 5.0.5 everything is perfect. The image of my name and the "contact" tab images both line up with the edge of the main container div. Also the text with the arrow picture line up about 50 pixels to the right so the arrow does not overlap with my resume picture. I use absolute positioning because when I try to use anything else, it gets all messy.
The Problem I am Having: My name logo, contact image tab and "please indulge with..." arrow picture seem to be about 65 pixels off to the left when I view my website in IE8 and Firefox 3.
My website is: nicholasdexter.me
Once again, I'm sorry that this question is geared towards me but I know you all are experts and I don't know where else to go for help. Thank you for reading!
Here is my style sheet: http://nicholasdexter.me/style.css
There's a lot of bugs in older browsers (particularly Internet Explorer 6 & 7). Also, some things just aren't supported in older browsers.
The trick is either to:
- Use something called Graceful Degradation/Progressive Enhancement, in which newer techniques are used, but are used in a way that it won't matter if there's support or not for those things. For example, shadows, if no-one can see them, who cares? If they do, great. The trick is balancing that out.
- Avoid those "new" techniques altogether.
This is nothing new here, and is even a pain for professionals. Microsoft evens hates IE6 now. http://www.ie6countdown.com/ So don't beat yourself up for it. :)
There are alot of resources out there that may help you find the right solution(s) to your problems. Here's one:
http://www.quirksmode.org/css/contents.html
Oh, and feel free to ask questions again. Front-End Development (coding web stuff) is a real challenge some days! :)
I'm currently working on a site, and somewhere in my mass of stylesheets, something is killing performance in IE. Are there any good CSS profilers out there? I'd like a tool that can pinpoint rules that are killing performance.
Before you ask, I've disabled JavaScript, opacity, and box-shadow/text-shadow rules. The page is still jumpy. :/ If I disable all CSS, it runs great.
I need a tool that can profile the page and report where the CSS bottlenecks are.
So, I finally got around to writing a JavaScript function that indexed all of my CSS classes on the page and then individually toggled them, while scrolling the page. This immediately pin-pointed the errant class, and from there, I was able to determine errant property. Turns out that border-radius on an element that contains many children (e.g. a body level div) performs incredibly poorly on IE9.
I've started a github repo for my CSS stress test: https://github.com/andyedinborough/stress-css
From there, you can install a bookmarklet to easily run the test on any page.
The Page Speed plugin from Google has a section that analyses your CSS and tells you about inefficient selectors, perhaps start there?
hth
Note: I know its a Firefox plugin, but should help optimize a bit :)
Hmm, never heard of such a tool.
If you find none, things to look out for manually will include
Any filter statements (the classic alpha=opacity and others - IE has a number of very advanced graphical filters that are extremely expensive)
Huge elements (like thousands of pixels large)
Huge background images - maybe remove them all for a moment?
I would strongly suspect the first point - alpha transparencies can be a terrible rendering bottleneck, especially on older systems.
I also have performance problems on a web project I'm currently working on. It runs well in Firefox, Chrome, even IE8. In IE9 it bogs down.
After some detective work I discovered that eliminating all box-shadow CSS lines improved performance considerably. I had shadows from banners, tables, boxes and tabs, each with just a subtle amount of shadow and blur, but apparently enough for IE9 to get all moody.
The Chrome dev tools used to contain a CSS Selector Profiler for doing just this sort of thing. You can see screen shots of it in this blog post.
The Chrome team pulled the feature in Chrome 30 stating that:
CSS selector matching is now reasonably fast for the absolute majority of common selectors that used to be slow at the time of the profiler implementation. This time is also included into the Timeline "Recalculate Style" event.
As such, I believe the CSS selector profiler is not as useful as it [might have been] used to and can safely be dropped. This will also reduce the fraction of developers trying to micro-optimize already fast selectors.
You could try to use an old version of Chrome to dig into the issue, but I'd recommend taking a look at the Timeline tab of the current version of Chrome dev tools with will show you how long Chrome has taken to calculate styles (where selector performance is affected), layout and paint the page.
Opera is experimenting with css profiling in its profiler.
It can be enabled following the steps on this page.
Then open the profiler, start profiling, and refresh the page you wish to analyze.
Stop profiling after rendering finishes, then the results will be shown.
I'm having a problem with CSS not displaying correctly between IE and Firefox... The big problem is that we have a ridiculous number of CSS files (and this isn't something that is currently scoped to fix), and I can't seem to find what style is being applied.
Any way, here's what I'm looking at: On the shopping cart page for our site, we have a table (yes, I know) where each row is an item in the cart. On IE, Chrome, Opera and Safari, this table renders fine - everything looks good, borders are all hidden, it looks great. On Firefox, however, while the outer border on the table remains hidden, lines separating columns/rows inside the table are displayed.
I don't have direct links to show the problem, but if you go to
https://store.petango.com/Roc-P6986.aspx
and click the "Add to cart" button, it brings you to the cart page (where you can see the lines showing in FFox, but not in IE).
For what it's worth, this is a third party E-Commerce package that we purchased, and on top of that we hired out our web design to a DIFFERENT third party web developer. Hence the jumbled mass of CSS files/confusion. Trying to look at the CSS for specific TD elements (in Firebug) is basically impossible to read it's so long, but I can't see anything obvious in there either.
I would be thrilled if this is just something stupid I'm missing, and there's a well known mistake that has been made in our CSS that lets it render fine in every browser but Firefox - any help would be greatly appreciated.
A bit of poking around in Firebug reveals that removing the border-collapse:collapse style from the ctl00_wpm_Basket_ctl04_BasketGrid table removes the borders. I'm not even going to try to explain this - the style should be completely unnecessary, as like many of the other applicable styles it's set and reset multiple times at multiple levels... I suspect you're encountering some subtle difference between how styles are applied in Gecko and other browsers; it's probably a bug, but I would encourage you to slim down the test case if you decide to report it...
this isn't something that is currently scoped to fix
It probably should be... Otherwise, you'd better get comfortable using Firebug.
"We fully recognize that IE is behind the game today in CSS support."
ieblog
i've created some pages using css, but on viewing the page through different browsers it appeared as irregular arrangement of contents..
You're going to have to be more specific than this.
Which browsers display the page 'correctly' and which don't? Some older browsers have... dubious CSS support, and some of the things that work well in IE8/FF3.5 won't work in IE6/FF1.
Which CSS properties are you using & having trouble with? I take it you're talking about position or float or similar since you refer to an "irregular arrangement of contents", but that doesn't narrow it down all that much.
Are some browsers displaying the page as if there's no CSS being applied at all? It's possible you've got your stylesheet link a little wrong, and some browsers are 'fixing' it for you and some are just not loading the sheet at all.
Unfortunately, you potentially have more than one problem. Browser interoperability isn't going to be as easy as doing a setting. You have to compare some of the browser compatibilities and change your code to get it to look perfect in all browsers (if indeed such a nirvana is achievable for all page designs).
One thing you could try is a CSS reset such as MeyerWeb. This will remove some of the defaults that the browsers do not share - therefore potentially giving you similar looking pages from which, you can adapt to look as you want them too again.
There are other methods, including comparing all the differences. But unfortunately, my point is that this isn't likely to be a quick fix without knowing more about the specific issues your having.
I'm trying to learn CSS. I've taken great pains to get everything right. My pages all validate and they look correct on Firefox and mostly correct on Chrome. However IE is all over the place. In relation to Firefox, the following is wrong in IE (in order of importance):
the main body box is pushed below where the left boxes end
the upper-right drop-down stuff (mouse over "Settings") is totally off in the weeds (it's off in Chrome also but in a different way)
"Recipes" tab is supposed to have no visible bottom border
search button is askew in relation to search box
logged out version: the upper-right login elements are askew
Logged in,
Logged out,
CSS,
Links, functionality, etc. are not guaranteed to work on these pages. It's just static snapshots to show layout.
Can anyone point me in the right direction for whatever I'm doing wrong?
You need to Reset your CSS (Dean, above recommends Eric Meyer's Reset CSS). I prefer Yui Reset CSS (I actually like their own Reset / Fonts / Grids CSS). As part of doing this you also need to use Standards Mode.
Finally, you need to be aware that some things will differ in browsers no matter what. So if you run into this situation, it's either work around it, or live with it.
What version of IE are you running? Sounds like most of your issues may be caused by the IE Box Model Bug.
I never start a new website design in css without putting Eric Meyer's Reset CSS in first.
It resets all the differences in all the browsers, so that you've got a even playing field to start from.
From there-out, everything should be the same in all browsers.