Sean Walther’s Blog

Help: IE7 won’t load my JSON but IE8 will – Using a JSON Validator

I just ran into this issue, and found surprisingly little documentation.  My JSON request wasn’t returning.  I was using the jQuery “getJSON” method to send the request out.  Nothing was coming back.

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Tags: Chrome, Firefox, getJSON, IE7, IE8, Internet Explorer, jQuery, JSON, JSON Validator, JSONLint, Safari

Google Chrome 4.0: Extensions and Bookmark Sync

Today Google officially announced the release of Chrome 4.0.  The update features two major pieces of functionality, Extensions and Bookmark Syncing.  If you already have Google Chrome, just click on the “tool” -> About Google Chrome, and click on “Update” in the lower right corner next to the OK window.  Otherwise, download it from Google. › Continue reading

Tags: adblock, bookmarks, Chrome, Firebug, Firefox, Google, Google Chrome, IE, IE Tab, IE7, IE8, iPhone, Xmarks

How you can fix IE8’s slow “View Source”

I installed Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) on my main machine a few weeks ago, and have been using other browser’s “View Source” since IE8’s default View Source editor takes forever to load.

With all the work, I didn’t have time to figure out how to fix it, but YOU CAN!

IE8 uses an internal viewer by default, but you can easily change it:

1. Get into the Developer Tools screen (F12 or Tools->Developer Tools)
2. File->Customize Internet Explorer View Source (yeah I know, weird)
3. Set to Notepad (like it used to be) or “Other” and use your viewer (I used TextPad)

Now, can anyone recommend a better “View Source” application?  I haven’t looked into this, but it may be a great opportunity to improve efficiency doing HTML and debugging.

Tags: Developer Tools, IE8, Internet Explorer 8, NotePad, Textpad, View Source

CSS in IE8 will support “Tables”, fixes problems in CSS

There’s a great article at Digital Web Magazine, Everything You Know About CSS Is Wrong.

One of the problems that has always plagued CSS is absolute positioning, relative positioning, and the need to set things up like a “table”.  By that I mean setting up three divs to look like the following:

<div class="outerContainer">
<div class="textContainer">... longer text ...</div>
<div class="textContainer">... shorter text ...</div>
<div class="textContainer">... shorter text ...</div>
</div>

The problem here, being that if the first text container grows, we want the other 2 containers to grow with it.

Obviously, we could specificy a specific height for the textContainer class, and they would all match.  But what if the first container copy grows, or maybe the copy in the 2nd or 3rd container grows longer than the first container.

This becomes even more complex when specificying multiple rows of textContainers, where there are vertically spanning cells as well.

In traditional “non-css” HTML this was done simply through tables, very simply actually.  Now that everyone has turned to CSS to make page sizes smaller, make styling effective, and increase flexibility of layouts — we try to avoid tables unless we are presenting a .. Table.

Normally I would have created a clever background image that has a top, bottom (both divs above and below the textContainers), and a tiling vertical background to appear like all columns have the correct sizing (when in fact they don’t).  Effectively removing control over each textContainer’s background, and the main container’s background from the CSS and putting it into a series of images.  

It worked but we sacrificed flexibility.

Take a look at the article, again, Everything You Know About CSS Is Wrong, as they detail how IE8 aims to fix this behavior through a series of CSS display properties.

Tags: CSS, HTML, IE8, Microsoft, Table