CSS : Disappearing text or images in IE?

Disappearing text or images in IE?

IE has a very strange bug where text or background images sometimes disappears from sight. These items are still actually there, and if you highlight everything on screen or hit refresh they'll often re-appear. Kind of strange, huh?

This problem mostly occurs on background images and on text next to a floated element. To remedy the problem, simply insert position: relative into the CSS command for the disappearing element, and for some bizarre reason that'll usually fix the problem. If this doesn't work (it sometimes doesn't), assign a width to the offending element in the CSS and that should fix the problem.

Other Topics

CSS : Vertically aligning with CSS ,CSS : Positioning within a container ,CSS : Hiding text using text-indent ,CSS : The * HTML hack ,CSS : Minimum width for a page ,CSS : Same navigation code on every page ,CSS : 3-d push button effect ,CSS : Document for handhelds ,CSS : Invisible text ,CSS : Disappearing text or images in IE? ,CSS : Image replacement technique,CSS : Box model hack alternative,CSS : Centre aligning a block element,CSS : Class selector,CSS : Sticky Footer Layout,CSS::STYLING FORMS, mechanical Engineering, English books,Photoshop tutorials,Harry potter,Best 100 english books,Mechanical-old-question-paper,CSS : Id Selector

CSS : Invisible text

Invisible text

Sometime you may actually want to make text invisible. Invisible text can be especially useful for screen reader users, perhaps to assign a label to a form item or insert a heading ahead of a section. Don't want to change the visual appearance by inserting these? Make them invisible and no one using a visual browser knows that they're there.

You may also want to make text invisible if using a print or handheld CSS file, as some information may not need to be displayed on either of these mediums (see below for more on this).

To make text invisible you can use display: none - easy! This works fine for hiding text from handhelds (if CSS is supported) and printed web pages, but isn't so great for many screen readers. Screen readers are now becoming too clever for their own good, and some will actually ignore the any text that has the rule display: none assigned to it.

For screen readers users therefore, a new approach is needed: position: absolute; left: -9000px. This basically takes the text and positions it 9000px to the left of the left edge of the screen, essentially making it invisible.

Other Topics

CSS : Vertically aligning with CSS ,CSS : Positioning within a container ,CSS : Hiding text using text-indent ,CSS : The * HTML hack ,CSS : Minimum width for a page ,CSS : Same navigation code on every page ,CSS : 3-d push button effect ,CSS : Document for handhelds ,CSS : Invisible text ,CSS : Disappearing text or images in IE? ,CSS : Image replacement technique,CSS : Box model hack alternative,CSS : Centre aligning a block element,CSS : Class selector,CSS : Sticky Footer Layout,CSS::STYLING FORMS, mechanical Engineering, English books,Photoshop tutorials,Harry potter,Best 100 english books,Mechanical-old-question-paper,CSS : Id Selector

CSS : Document for handhelds

CSS document for handhelds

A separate CSS document can be created for PDAs and mobile phones, and only activated when one of these devices is being used to access your site. More and more websites are creating separate CSS documents for printing, so web pages automatically become print-friendly when users choose to print them. You can also do the same for handheld devices.
The following command is used to call up the CSS document for handhelds:

<link type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" href="handheldstyle.css" media="handheld" />

CSS commands in the handheld CSS file override any equivalent commands in the main CSS document. So, what commands should you place in this file?

Ideally, you want handheld web users to avoid having to scroll across. To test this, open up your website in a regular browser window and resize it to 150px in width. Then, open up your main CSS file and insert some new commands at the very bottom of the document. The commands you place here should adjust the layout of the website so that it doesn't require horizontal scrolling at a 150px width. Then, open up a new document, cut and paste these new commands over, and save it as handheldstyle.css (or whatever name you want to give it).

What your website offers to handheld web users should be quite different to what it offers on traditional web browsers, as the user experience is quite different. For further information, a book such as Handheld Usability is a great read.

Other Topics

CSS : Vertically aligning with CSS ,CSS : Positioning within a container ,CSS : Hiding text using text-indent ,CSS : The * HTML hack ,CSS : Minimum width for a page ,CSS : Same navigation code on every page ,CSS : 3-d push button effect ,CSS : Document for handhelds ,CSS : Invisible text ,CSS : Disappearing text or images in IE? ,CSS : Image replacement technique,CSS : Box model hack alternative,CSS : Centre aligning a block element,CSS : Class selector,CSS : Sticky Footer Layout,CSS::STYLING FORMS, mechanical Engineering, English books,Photoshop tutorials,Harry potter,Best 100 english books,Mechanical-old-question-paper,CSS : Id Selector

CSS : 3-d push button effect

3-d push button effect

Back in the early days of the web, 3-d buttons that appeared to become pushed in when moused over were all the rage. At that time, this could only be achieved through images and JavaScript, but now with the advent of CSS we can go all retro and re-create this effect:

The main CSS commands you'll need are:

a {
display: block;
border: 1px solid;
border-color: #aaa #000 #000 #aaa;
width: 8em;
background: #fc0;
}

a:hover
{
position: relative;
top: 1px;
left: 1px;
border-color: #000 #aaa #aaa #000;
}

Aside from these commands, you can insert any other commands to achieve the desired presentation effect - the only limit is your imagination!

Other Topics

CSS : Vertically aligning with CSS ,CSS : Positioning within a container ,CSS : Hiding text using text-indent ,CSS : The * HTML hack ,CSS : Minimum width for a page ,CSS : Same navigation code on every page ,CSS : 3-d push button effect ,CSS : Document for handhelds ,CSS : Invisible text ,CSS : Disappearing text or images in IE? ,CSS : Image replacement technique,CSS : Box model hack alternative,CSS : Centre aligning a block element,CSS : Class selector,CSS : Sticky Footer Layout,CSS::STYLING FORMS, mechanical Engineering, English books,Photoshop tutorials,Harry potter,Best 100 english books,Mechanical-old-question-paper,CSS : Id Selector

CSS : Same navigation code on every page

Same navigation code on every page

Most websites highlight the navigation item of the user's location in the website, to help users orientate themselves. This is a fundamental requirement for basic usability, but can be a pain as you'll need to tweak the HTML code behind the navigation for each and every page. So can we have the best of both worlds? Is it possible to have the navigation highlighted on every page, without having to tweak the HTML code on each and every page? Of course it is...

First of all, you'll need to assign a class to each navigation item:

<ul>
<li><a href="#" class="home">Home</a></li>
<li><a href="#" class="about">About us</a></li>
<li><a href="#" class="contact">Contact us</a></li>
</ul>

You'll then need to insert an id into the <body> tag. The id should be representative of where users are in the site and should change when users move to a different site section. When in ‘Home’ it should read

<body id="home">,

 in ‘About Us’ it should be

  <body id="about">

and in ‘Contact Us’

<body id="contact">.

Next, you create a new CSS rule:

#home .home, #about .about, #contact .contact
{
commands for highlighted navigation go here
}

This basically creates a rule that only takes effect when class="home" is contained within id="home", and when class="about" is in id="about" and class="contact" is in id="contact". These situations will only occur when the user is in the appropriate site section, seamlessly creating our highlighted navigation item.

Other Topics

CSS : Vertically aligning with CSS ,CSS : Positioning within a container ,CSS : Hiding text using text-indent ,CSS : The * HTML hack ,CSS : Minimum width for a page ,CSS : Same navigation code on every page ,CSS : 3-d push button effect ,CSS : Document for handhelds ,CSS : Invisible text ,CSS : Disappearing text or images in IE? ,CSS : Image replacement technique,CSS : Box model hack alternative,CSS : Centre aligning a block element,CSS : Class selector,CSS : Sticky Footer Layout,CSS::STYLING FORMS, mechanical Engineering, English books,Photoshop tutorials,Harry potter,Best 100 english books,Mechanical-old-question-paper,CSS : Id Selector

CSS : Minimum width for a page

Minimum width for a page

A very handy CSS command that exists is the min-width command, whereby you can specify a minimum width for any element. This can be particularly useful for specifying a minimum width for a page.

Unfortunately, IE doesn't understand this command, so we'll need to come up with a new way of making this work in this browser. First, we'll insert a <div> under the <body> tag, as we can't assign a minimum width to the <body>:

<body>
<div id="container">

Next we create our CSS commands, so as to create a minimum width of 600px:

#container
{
min-width: 600px;
width:expression(document.body.clientWidth < 600? "600px": "auto" );
}

The first command is the regular minimum width command; the second is a short JavaScript command that only IE understands. Do note though, this command will cause your CSS document to invalidate so you may prefer to insert it into the head of each HTML document to get round this.

You might also want to combine this minimum width with a maximum width:

#container
{
min-width: 600px;
max-width: 1200px;
width:expression(document.body.clientWidth < 600? "600px" : document.body.clientWidth > 1200? "1200px" : "auto");
} 





Other Topics

CSS : Vertically aligning with CSS ,CSS : Positioning within a container ,CSS : Hiding text using text-indent ,CSS : The * HTML hack ,CSS : Minimum width for a page ,CSS : Same navigation code on every page ,CSS : 3-d push button effect ,CSS : Document for handhelds ,CSS : Invisible text ,CSS : Disappearing text or images in IE? ,CSS : Image replacement technique,CSS : Box model hack alternative,CSS : Centre aligning a block element,CSS : Class selector,CSS : Sticky Footer Layout,CSS::STYLING FORMS, mechanical Engineering, English books,Photoshop tutorials,Harry potter,Best 100 english books,Mechanical-old-question-paper,CSS : Id Selector

CSS : The * HTML hack

The * HTML hack

If you need or wish to avoid linking to IE specific style sheets, one can use the * html hack. In a perfect world, the HTML element will always be the root element, so any * before html would not apply. Nevertheless, IE treats this as a perfectly legitimate declaration. So if we needed to target a certain element in IE, we could do this:

* html body div#sideBar { display:inline; } 




Other Topics

CSS : Vertically aligning with CSS ,CSS : Positioning within a container ,CSS : Hiding text using text-indent ,CSS : The * HTML hack ,CSS : Minimum width for a page ,CSS : Same navigation code on every page ,CSS : 3-d push button effect ,CSS : Document for handhelds ,CSS : Invisible text ,CSS : Disappearing text or images in IE? ,CSS : Image replacement technique,CSS : Box model hack alternative,CSS : Centre aligning a block element,CSS : Class selector,CSS : Sticky Footer Layout,CSS::STYLING FORMS, mechanical Engineering, English books,Photoshop tutorials,Harry potter,Best 100 english books,Mechanical-old-question-paper,CSS : Id Selector

CSS : Hiding text using text-indent

Hiding text using text-indent

Lets say you have an image you are using for your websites logo. This image will be inside an h1 tag, which is good for SEO, however, we also want to have our text title written in the h1 tags so the search engines can read it easily. Some may be tempted to use “display:none” on an element. Unfortunately, we would have to separate the image logo from the h1 tag if we used this technique. Using text-indent and negative values, we can get passed this like so.

h1 { text-indent:-9999px;/*Hide Text, keep for SEO*/ margin:0 auto; width:948px; background:transparent url("images/header.jpg") no-repeat scroll; }

This will ensure that all text is not visible on any resolution while allowing it stay inside the h1 element containing the logo. 

Other Topics

CSS : Vertically aligning with CSS ,CSS : Positioning within a container ,CSS : Hiding text using text-indent ,CSS : The * HTML hack ,CSS : Minimum width for a page ,CSS : Same navigation code on every page ,CSS : 3-d push button effect ,CSS : Document for handhelds ,CSS : Invisible text ,CSS : Disappearing text or images in IE? ,CSS : Image replacement technique,CSS : Box model hack alternative,CSS : Centre aligning a block element,CSS : Class selector,CSS : Sticky Footer Layout,CSS::STYLING FORMS, mechanical Engineering, English books,Photoshop tutorials,Harry potter,Best 100 english books,Mechanical-old-question-paper,CSS : Id Selector

CSS : Positioning within a container

CSS positioning within a container

One of the best things about CSS is that you can position an object absolutely anywhere you want in the document. It's also possible (and often desirable) to position objects within a container. It's simple to do too.

Simply assign the following CSS rule to the container:

#container
{
position: relative
}

Now any element within this container will be positioned relative to it. Say you had this HTML structure:

<div id="container"><div id="navigation">...</div></div>

To position the navigation exactly 30px from the left and 5px from the top of the container box, you could use these CSS commands:

#navigation
{
position: absolute;
left: 30px;
top: 5px
}

Perfect! In this particular example, you could of course also use margin: 5px 0 0 30px, but there are some cases where it's preferable to use positioning.

Other Topics

CSS : Vertically aligning with CSS ,CSS : Positioning within a container ,CSS : Hiding text using text-indent ,CSS : The * HTML hack ,CSS : Minimum width for a page ,CSS : Same navigation code on every page ,CSS : 3-d push button effect ,CSS : Document for handhelds ,CSS : Invisible text ,CSS : Disappearing text or images in IE? ,CSS : Image replacement technique,CSS : Box model hack alternative,CSS : Centre aligning a block element,CSS : Class selector,CSS : Sticky Footer Layout,CSS::STYLING FORMS, mechanical Engineering, English books,Photoshop tutorials,Harry potter,Best 100 english books,Mechanical-old-question-paper,CSS : Id Selector

CSS : Vertically aligning with CSS

Vertically aligning with CSS

Vertically aligning with tables was a doddle. To make cell content line up in the middle of a cell you would use

vertical-align: middle.

This doesn't really work with a CSS layout. Say you have a navigation menu item whose height is assigned 2em and you insert this vertical align command into the CSSrule. It basically won't make a difference and the text will be pushed to the top of the box.

Hmmm... not the desired effect. The solution? Specify the line height to be the same as the height of the box itself in the CSS. In this instance, the box is 2em high, so we would insert

 line-height: 2em

into the CSS rule and the text now floats in the middle of the box - perfect.

Other Topics

CSS : Vertically aligning with CSS ,CSS : Positioning within a container ,CSS : Hiding text using text-indent ,CSS : The * HTML hack ,CSS : Minimum width for a page ,CSS : Same navigation code on every page ,CSS : 3-d push button effect ,CSS : Document for handhelds ,CSS : Invisible text ,CSS : Disappearing text or images in IE? ,CSS : Image replacement technique,CSS : Box model hack alternative,CSS : Centre aligning a block element,CSS : Class selector,CSS : Sticky Footer Layout,CSS::STYLING FORMS, mechanical Engineering, English books,Photoshop tutorials,Harry potter,Best 100 english books,Mechanical-old-question-paper,CSS : Id Selector