Open Source Web

For every web developer / designer the issues in earlier versions of IE can be a real pain. Even simple styling such as margins and padding can make a design look like it’s upside down.

The obvious hacks for CSS involve using a separate style sheet and the old school <!– if IE–> but I always manage to avoid these mainly because I like to keep all the CSS in one file to keep overall page size down and it’s also more easier to fix other issues when all the CSS rules are in one file.

IE  issues

The easiest way to target issues in IE6 is to use the _property hack.

_margin:20px;  /// this will only be used by IE 6

There is also a hack for IE7 which works in a similor way using the *

*margin:20px;  /// this will only be used by IE 7

Although these may cause CSS problems to validators they are still very valid fixes and I have never seen a drawback to using these.

Whenever I make a new website now I always think about what the urls will need to be like. Most off the shelf CMS platforms will have a plug in or option to enables similar functionality.  But if your writing the site yourself you will want to be able to convert URL from post Id’s to post names to Urls and back again.

I have used many methods to do this in the past but recently I found two really useful built in PHP functions. urlencode() and urldecode().

Alternatives to using urlencode() would be writing your own function to convert all the url unfriendly symbols, slashes, spaces etc. into HTML entities or just replacing them with hyphens.

Again PHP has an built in function for everyhting.

Learning new programming languages is fun but it can be difficult choosing which references and books to use. Most good text book will cost a small fortune and go out of date within a few months and probably wont cover everything you need.

For me the best resource comes straight from the source, for most languages you will be able to find a FREE and complete reference to develop with.

PHP Documentation – Download the complete reference in most spoken languages.

MSDN Javascript – Microsoft have a vast documentation library available on-line.

Mozilla Javascript Resource – Not great but it goes into a lot of detail, maybe too much.

Core Javascript 1.5 from Mozilla – Learn by example, much better than the previous Mozilla link

w3 CSS v1 – Full guide to CSS v1 from 1996 – 2009 in PDF format.

w3 guide to css 2.1 – Full on-line reference to css v2.1

w3 HTML 3 guide -  An awesome guide to HTML, very handy for SEO Tricks,

Action Script 3 – Official full guide to Action script 3 programming.

CS3 – The full CS3 shabang from Adobe, I haven’t found a decent Flash book yet so this is awesome.

Mysql - One of the less helpful guides but it is fairly complete.

WordPress Functions - The official function list, awesome for any wordpress project