Had a gnarly problem this afternoon, while trying to set focus to a control in an IFRAME. Using JQuery, I had created the IFRAME with the JQuery plugin ThickBox. ThickBox provides functionality that can simulate a modal dialog using an IFRAME, loading a page from a URL into the IFRAME (check out the demo here - scroll down to "Inline Content"). The page loaded inside the IFRAME contained code to set the focus which was actually being called, but after the page loaded something else was stealing the focus. I began to look at the javascript code in...

It's not very often that I do a link blog, but I've come across so many great JQuery links in the past week or so that I had to get them all down:   First off, the JQuery UI wiki has a great list of Essential Controls, both in the UI library and links to plugins (via Delicious Popular Bookmarks). Steve Reynolds' Top 10 JQuery Plugins for Form Usability covers 10 JQuery plugins that make web forms more usable, such as tooltips, user name availabilty checker, and validation. Speaking of tooltips, BeautyTips...

I don't do much web development, but when I do I'm often amazed that Internet Explorer still seems to disregard some elements of the CSS standards as outlined by the W3C. To address this shortcoming, Dean Edwards has written a small, optimised Javascript library to make IE versions 5, 6 or 7 "behave like a standards-compliant browser". It makes IE understand various things like: pseudo classes parent > child adjacent + sibling attribute[value] - cool! max-height, max-width the "peekaboo bug" and lots more... Check out Dean's test page if you use IE but long for more. Or have all the developers that...

I've recently finished the excellent Defensive Design for the Web, authored by some of the people behind 37 Signals (Getting Real, Signal vs. Noise blog). The book is subtitled "How to improve error messages, help, forms and other crisis points", and is referenced in Steve Krug's Don't Make Me Think - one of the key reasons behind me reading it (I enjoyed Steve Krug's book a lot). At only 246 pages, Defensive Design is a short book which means it's a quick read (and not very expensive!). There's lots of illustrations, and the book is neatly divided up into digestible chapters,...

Flock might just be the package to make me switch browsers from IE/Maxthon for my home computer time. Flock is billed as "the social web browser" and integrates data from sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, and Delicious, listing all your friends in the one place along with the last time they updated something. It is open source, has a built-in photo uploader for Flickr, and works with the majority of Firefox extensions (it's actually built on top of Mozilla), among other things. I've tried Firefox in the past but just didn't see how it was any better than Maxthon, which basically...

I'm definitely CSS-challenged, so I was interested when I found the CSS Layout Generator, which allows you to enter how many columns, whether you want a header and/or footer, and colors for your page layout. It then provides the CSS and HTML, optionally validated for HTML or XHTML (link via Daniel Walzenbach, via Jason Haley). Tags: web, layout, design, css