I always have a problem when making webpages using input or select boxes in CSS because the focus is mostly making it for FireFox and IE, but for some reason the text inside text boxes/form input objects are usually never properly aligned (line-height).
I'm wondering if there is a common routine for making input boxes look like they do in FireFox and IE, in Safari, because they usually look horrible once you add a touch of CSS to the element. Trying to balance out the line-height on each browser usually never works out perfectly, is there something i'm missing to make the inputs in all browsers look the same once you style it? (mostly talking about the line-height of the inner text inside the input box).
ie. Is using em instead of px a better for cross browser compatibility?
What helps a lot is using some kind of boilerplate starting point, that resets all browsers to the same base CSS (for so far possible). Specifically I've enjoyed HTML5Reset, you could just take the CSS reset file and see if it helps you.
Related
The issue I'm having is options in a select box flow over the edge of the page (hiding the scroll bar). I'm trying to restrict the width of the options using CSS. Please say if there is a better way...
This worked fine in IE8, but not in IE9. Seems okay in Firefox as well. Chrome ignores it as well, but makes sure the options don't overflow off the page (like IE9).
I know the non-resizing of these was a bug that was fixed for IE9, but it is necessary (sometimes) to set a width limit.
http://jsfiddle.net/jdb1991/Vt8Bd/
Browsers implement select elements differently, often using built-in routines that are more or less immune to CSS. It is not even clear what you, or others using very long option texts, would like to happen—truncation, line-wrapping, horizontal scrolling, or what?
The problem is best avoided by using concise option texts. They are supposed to be visible names for alternatives, not novels. If very long names are really a necessity, use a set of radio button instead of select.
I recently made a new WordPress theme for a local travel company and they are now getting reports that two elements in my design are not in the correct positions in Firefox (seems specific to version 3.6) and Chrome for Mac.
A page where both issues are visible: http://www.totemtravel.com/blog
Issues:
The white flag with the logo on it at the top of every page jumps
several inches to the right to cover the area code of the first
phone number.
The search button at the bottom of the blog categories widget in the sidebar jumps to the right, out of the widget, and off the page content wrapper.
I think the issue has to do with where those browser assume the item should be before the relative positioning, but I need a way to make these all look the same across all modern-ish browsers.
I wont paste the pages of source code behind the theme since it can be easily viewed with Firebug or the Chrome inspector, but please let me know if any additional info would help.
1: The img for the white flag must have left:0. Not all browsers default to left 0. Firefox for example, is defaulted to left:50%. Another problem is your trying to relatively position a td element for the title "Totem Travel", this is invalid and I would recommend using divs here instead of tables.
2: This is due to the native CSS styling differences of the browsers. That is why people use CSS Reset style sheets, to zero everything out so you know for sure the "default" css is the same. Here's an example: http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/css/reset/. The effect this is having on your css now is that, the submit button is falling down to under the input as it doesn't have enough space - so when you are relatively positioning it it is off in the browsers.
3: Relatively/absolutely positioning everything isn't quite the best way to go about styling a website. You will find many inconsistencies like you are experiencing and there are better ways. I would recommend visiting some example themes on sites such as themeforest.com or elegantthemes.com and seeing how they do their CSS and HTML
I'm trying to make a custom checkbox, so I made something like that : http://jsfiddle.net/wQdUn/2/
The problem is that, on WebKit based browsers, the checkbox is toggled only when clicking on the content of the <span>, not on the box itself, while in Firefox I get the behavior I expect.
So I have two questions:
Which one is the right behavior (i.e. the one conform to specifications)?
How do I get the result I want in both browsers (and others...)?
Thanks.
Not sure about the first question, but if you make the span an inline block too, it'll work as you expect in WebKit browsers. See http://jsfiddle.net/wQdUn/5
For those who come to this topic form google:
Safari 6.0.4(8536.29.13) still got this problem, you need to set inline-block on pseudo-element to make click work.
Chrome switched to Blink as it's rendering engine, so this problem didn't happen on chrome any more(26.0.1410.65).
Right now, we are trying to achieve consistent formatting of textarea elements, across Safari/Chrome/Firefox/IE on Mac and Windows. I believe this may be a rabbit hole, since any combination thereof could produce formatting in a slightly different way -- maybe one combination adds a bit of padding to a div here differently than the others, another one breaks multi-line text there differently than the others, and so on.
Instead of using textarea (or div) elements, can we achieve pixel-perfect positioning using HTML5's canvas? Or using the Raphael JavaScript library? Or maybe some other JS library?
Mainly, by pixel-perfect, what I mean is any arbitrary text should get rendered in the exact same way (especially with respect to line breaks and padding) in any of the above-mentioned browsers.
(I'd prefer to avoid Flash-based solutions for the moment, unless that is the only solution...)
Send the text to the server, have the server render an image, display the image. Voilà.
I would say this is nearly impossible.
I would also say that there is no reason to have pixel perfect across all browsers because the overwhelming majority of visitors only view your site with one browser. And those who do visit your site in more than one browser (say at work and at home) are unlikely to notice elements that are off a few pixels or have slightly different border colors.
What we should be concerned about is that the content looks good in each browser.
That said, here's a great list of textarea tricks: http://css-tricks.com/6841-textarea-tricks/
One main reason that PDF exists is that browsers are not about pixel-identical layout but PDF is. Among other things, not even typefaces are guaranteed to be the same from one OS/browser to the next.
Even, if you don't let the browser position anything and you do all your own pixel level positioning, you still won't necessarily have the same fonts to work with. If you let the browser position anything, then you can have variations.
Would one solution be to begin your css with a clean slate? Give everything a known default?
For example, I start my css files like this so I always know what to expect:
*{
margin:0;
padding:0;
}
Is that what you're looking for? Similarly, you could change '*' to 'textarea'.
I'm not sure if it is possible, however one thing you may want to look into is using the web developer toolbar for firefox or the web developer add-on for chrome. There is an option to disable browser default styles. Check this and then style everything. The borders, border type, all margins, paddings, background colors, etc. Then reenable browser default styles and make sure it looks the same. If not, wash, rinse and repeat.
Also, if fonts play a part, you will have to embed them into the page since some operating systems may not have a particular font installed.
I'm writing a web app. It's only ever going to be used with IE8, so I'm not concerned with the behavior of any other browsers here.
So: I know how to custom-style a button using CSS properties e.g. background-color, border, and so on. However, when you apply styles that way, the resulting button looks like a blocky table cell, nothing like the nice, glassy-looking button that IE8 renders by default.
Is there some way to add a tint to the nice glass-looking button? I.e., it looks just like it normally does, but with a red outline instead of blue, and a red highlight on mouse-over?
Or is this something I'm going to have to do by hand with images? Again, IE8-specific methods are perfectly acceptable.
Thanks!
-dan
There isn't really a filter that will get you as close to the default in IE, though you can get pretty close using the button tag and standard css. It will not look the same in all versions of IE though.
Here's the filter reference though if you want to try other things.
Regardless of browser, one of the quickest, easiest, most widely tested methods for styling buttons via markup is Jquery UI's button It's a matter of adding a few tags to the class element, and you've got a button based on an link, button, or input field. For styling, you can handle styling via CSS, or via the very well done ThemeRoller option, where you can control everything from text size to background type via a simple gui interface--and you can change on the back end or even the user end on the blink of an eye, even via drop down.
One caveat, since IE is non-standards compliant, rounded buttons fail gracefully to square--with proper styling.
I realize that you have determined that you can use a proprietary solution for IE, and in your case it might be just fine over the long term. But in my experience, that's a really dangerous path to follow. What if the actual long term is longer than your anticipated "long term?" You're specifying that it's acceptable to be proprietary to a browser that's well behind the accepted standards, is already a version behind, and uses unsupported (by universal standards) solutions to solve problems. Conceivably, that version is going to get tougher and tougher to find, and if Microsoft holds true to their patterns, once you install IE9 it will effectively render your computer difficult of downgrading. And, I can't emphasize enough that IE's market share is dropping like a rock, which is scary considering basically 95% of the machines out there have it pre-installed. All it's going to take is one overzealous IT director with "security in mind" to render your programming efforts moot. Sorry for the rant, but IE proprietary code has bit me hard more than a few times...
I'd have to double-check, but you should be able to use a combination of a background color and use a transparent PNG or GIF as the "background image" to add the highlights.
All things being equal, I've rather embraced the flat, square button - finding ways to make it work well with the design - but then again I've always been a straight line, square edge kind of guy. :)
As others have mentioned, you do want to be mindful (within reason) of what you may have to handle. It's quite possible that before the next re-write you're going to have to deal with IE9 - writing code that works well in IE8 and IE9 would be the most prudent approach.
Have a look at http://www.webdesignerwall.com/demo/css-buttons.html and also http://css3pie.com/.
Combining those you can get nice looking buttons in IE as well..