We use a CSS technique called "clearfix" within several projects. This is implemented as a class (called "clearfix") that is applied to a parent element that contains floated child elements.
I wrote a post over at Code Couch that attempts to explain the reason for doing this in the first place, describes the CSS that we use and provides plenty of links for detailed reference.
Tina Holmboe is a member of the XHTML Working Group and has an interesting write-up XHTML — myths and reality that discusses the current state of XHTML and dismisses some popular inaccuracies.
Having hyped up the post, it is rather old news - although it is discussed in simple (simplistic?) terms which I find is better than overloading with jargon.
Here are some hilights:
Lack of support for XHTML is a fact of life on the web in 2008. Prior to the 3.0 series of Firefox the XHTML processor in Gecko was so poor that Mozilla's own engineers recommended against it;
No version of Internet Explorer up to, and including, IE 8 support XHTML at all, and a number of other browsers such as Lynx were never written to handle XML in the first place.
I wrote a post for another blog a while back that looked into how you can identify the appropriate doctype for your web page - and stumbled across this "lack of support" for XHTML in modern browsers. You can read the original post How to choose a doctype if you are interested.
Whilst XHTML remains a much more structured (and cleaner) choice to deliver content to the browser, I have yet to work on a single project where it is actually required.
XHTML is the default for use within the Grails framework - even though the worlds most prolific browser doesn't support it. Hmmm.
I stumbled across a very useful article recently and wanted to share it around. The article discusses the best placement of form submit/cancel buttons for a typical web form and backs this up with Heat Maps showing where the user spent time looking at elements on the page etc.
Check out the Primary & Secondary Actions in Web Forms blog post yourself.
There are a lot of very useful posts on that blog - all of them focused on useability and the "dark art" of UI decision making.
Dave Minter has written a blog entry Float like a wasp that goes on about the inadequacies and problems faced with implementing CSS and the frustrations of HTML. I think that he's got a point when he says:
You are not alone. None of the rest of us can fathom CSS either.
He has a hit-list of things he'd like to see made more simple... and they include the usual bug-bears that we have all experienced at some stage (some more than others, obviously).
There are solutions to all the things he would like to see... but the key thing is that these solutions are invariably not intuitive and require arcane knowledge (and the patience of a saint) to ensure conformity.
I particularly liked this quote:
One of my tips for fixing all that irks with CSS would be to buy two or three of those books describing machiavellian ways to conspire against the deficiencies of CSS (anything with "hacks" or "tips" in the title) and then beat up the standard until the easiest approach to implementing everything in the book could be covered in a pamphlet.
I, too, would like to see a more structure simplification (rather that the current direction of CSS which seems to be adding to the mess).
Here are some useful blogs, articles, books and forums that I think are representative of the sites that I use for front-end problems, solutions and inspiration. I hope you get some mileage from them!
