Just ran into a situation with a strange CSS overflow bug in IE6. The basic set up is a li containing a bunch of divs, one of which has a 0px height and overflow set to hidden (I’m going to be expanding it later in an accordion).

In this case, IE6 ignores the overflow setting on the div, and defaults to some kind of overflow:visible situation.

I messed around with a bunch of style attributes before finally trying to set overflow:hidden on the parent li. This worked like a charm.

So, if you’re ever in a situation where overflow isn’t being honored correctly, try setting it on a parent element.

Tags: ie6, browser bug, cross-browser

 a img { border: 0 } 

Can’t we make this the default, and declare borders in CSS (which is what we’re supposed to be doing, anyway)???

Tags: css, browsers, img

After 37Signals ran their Seed conference, the term "rocket surgeons" popped into existence. The loose definition would make it some kind of mashup between rocket scientist and brain surgeon, or someone that’s probably smarter than me and you. It’s slowly growing everywhere, and it’s interesting to see it spreading through my feed reader like some kind of virus.

Tags: meme

As anyone who has had the pleasure of doing web design and development through marketing agencies knows, Flash tends to be wildly popular among clients and wildly unpopular among, well, pretty much everyone else. Part of the reason for this is because Flash is so inherently un-Googleable; anything that goes into a Flash-only website is basically invisible to search engines and therefore, the world. That will no longer be the case, however, as Adobe announced today that it has teamed up with Google and Yahoo to make Flash files indexable by search engines.

Google, Yahoo spiders can now crawl through Flash sites

Score one for Flash. Will this cause Flash adoption to ramp up on major websites, or will it still lag behind HTML’s ease-of-development?

As we all know, one of the biggest arguments for Flash is that it looks the same and performs (relatively) the same in all browsers. “Searchability” was a huge minus; you’d almost inevitably need to create another HTML-based site to stay in the search engines. With that solved, Adobe takes another step towards becoming a really ubiquitous platform, although I still think they need to open source their development tools to really, really take over. (Will all this destroy HTML? Nope. HTML still has Flash beat in the learning curve barrier to entry; you still need to be a specialist to build Flash apps, but a generalist can at least dabble in HTML and build a web application.)

Here’s my big question of the day: if Google spiders deep within your Flash movie and finds some sort of content, how does it provide a link to it? Is deeplinking to content going to be a problem, especially when it may discover content that’s not really part of any state you’ve really considered? If there’s a page 5 levels deep in my HTML site, Google can find the page and a URL for it; that is not necessarily true of the same type of content located 5 “views” off the stage in a Flash piece. Looks like we’ll be embedding deep linking information for various program states into more and more of our Flash apps…

Tags: flash, seo, google