Please remain calm, do not be alarmed… DON’T PANIC service will NOT return to normal after the switch… I may actually start posting here again!

Stay tuned… or tune in… or whatever you need to do

Update: Having just updated the database I’m now all switched over. With the exception of a minor outage courtesy of a duff plugin everything went very smoothly.

<xsl:comment>[if lte IE 6]<![CDATA[>]]>
   &lt;link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="styles.css" /&gt;
<![CDATA[<![endif]]]></xsl:comment>

The comment must be structured inside an <xsl:comment> block which, when rendered to the browser, becomes a standard html comment and the greater than and less than brackets on the stylesheet link itself must be entered using their respective character entity codes “>” and “<“.

Firefox is an invaluable, time-saving tool regardless of weather you’re designing standards compliant visions of pure css beauty or, at the other end of the scale (more on that in another post) , customising templates for enterprise CMS products targeted exclusively at corporate environments running Internet Explorer.

So why is Firefox so invaluable? Well, firstly it renders pretty reliable standards compliant output which is a good starting point but more important is its extensibility. The combination of this open extensibility and some very smart web developers willing to contribute has led to a tool-set that no other browser has been able match, not that many (if any) seem to really be trying.

Firefox add-ins that should be in every web designers toolkit:

• The Web Developer Toolbar by Chris Pederick
  Access to a vast array of information about the way pages are constructed, allowing browser features such as css rendering, javascript, images and cookies to be turned on and off on-the-fly. The ability to edit live cached versions of pages and there related files, instantly seeing the effects and the ability to re-size the browser to precise screen resolutions as well as providing direct access to validation services. In fact, so many features I couldn’t possibly list them all here and do them justice.

• FireBug by Joe Hewitt
  Such a powerful tool it still blows me away to think how I ever managed without it. Firebug allows you inspect any object or element on a page telling you, among many other things, which styles are being applied or over-ridden. A full javascript debugging environment providing detailed error information and links directly to the source of the errors as well as letting you add breakpoints and watches and editing on the fly.

And a couple of less developer oriented add-ons I have found useful on a daily basis:

• ColorZilla
  An eye-dropper colour selection tool that runs from the status bar.

• FireFTP
  A complete, full-featured FTP client inside Firefox.

• Stylish
  Allows you to create custom style sheets for websites you regularly use that override the default styles for the site. Handy for fixing browser bugs, accessibility issues or just plain ugly sites!

• IE Tab
  Allows you to switch the current page to Internet Explorer inside Firefox. Great for quick comparisons.

And finally, in the interests of fairness and to show my openness on this subject, if you’re absolutely determined NOT to use Firefox (you poor poor fools! ) then here are some (lesser) solutions for the IE oriented among you:

• XRay by WestCIV
  XRAY is a bookmarklet that works with both Firefox and IE6+ that, through the wonders of Javascript, exposes the box model properties of any element on a page.

• Web Accessability Toolbar by Vision Australia
  I haven’t actually used this toolbar much, but it appears the folks in the AIS team (Accessible Information Solutions) at Vision Australia have done a pretty good job at implementing something very similar to the Firefox Web Developer Toolbar.There’s access to validation, window resizing and the ability to switch CSS, Javascript, ActiveX and Images on and off. As with the Web Developer Toolbar you can highlight key elements on the page such as tables and divs although here you are also able to identify and highlight a raft of other elements including lists, tab-order, access keys and headings.

  As the toolbars primary focus is on accessability rather than development it also comes with some pretty nifty features such as a colour contrast analyser, gif flicker checker, the ability to switch to greyscale.This is actually a REALLY powerful tool and a vast improvement over some other attempts at a web developer style toolbar for Internet Explorer.

The issue seems to occur because the html comments in the xsl template, along with their contents, are not rendered to the browser.

The answer is to structure the conditional comment using xsl comment tags, which translate into html comments when the page is rendered, as follows:

Well anyway…

I’m in the market for a new laptop and as such I’ve been out on the interwebs diligently doing my research, trying to find that ideal (read: perfect) candidate. I have fairly simple criteria, needing a higher than average spec machine (cutting rather than bleeding edge), large fast hard drive, plenty of ram and a WSXGA screen… that’s 1680×1059, with a decent GFX card.

First up, you have no idea what a tough ask the screen seems to be! Most manufacturers, Apple included, seem to limit this resolution to the 17″ models which are, to put it mildly, rather less than portable and hardly “laptops”, anything in the 13″ – 15.4″ realm is generally limited to the lower 1280 x 800 WXGA resolution which just doesn’t cut it when you live in pallete intensive applications like Photoshop, Fireworks and Visual Studio. I would also like the exterior to be reasonably attractive… or at the very least not ugly!

With the above said I can already hear the cries of “Buy a Mac!” coming from every corner. It seems most of my colleagues are indeed using Macs when not at work but I have long since accepted my fate as a Windows user, and to my surprise, with a few glaring exceptions Vista really isn’t as bad as I imagined it would be (No really!).

The unfortunate downside to looking for a Windows based machine however is the total lack of focus on the hardware design. When compared to the latest Apple hardware, with it clean sleek lines, beautifully beveled edges and spectacular attention to detail I find even the nicest looking PC’s are left desperately wanting.

Compaq‘s have been trying to copy the Apple design formula for a while now with absolutly no success, the HP and Toshiba lineups are, well, neat and tidy (read: boring!). Acer and Asus have both tried branding partnership with Farrari and Lambourghini respectively, the results of which are amusing if nothing else. Sony seem to be trying with their Vaio’s and as for Dell… lets just say if you put lipstick on a pig… it’s still just a pig. Dell have made one move in the right direction however, with their new XPS1330 but they seriously need to start applying that design thinking across their mainstream laptops and not just the ultra portables.

So what did I settle on you ask? I caved and I’m going with a Dell Vostro 1500. It’s not pretty, even among some of it’s competitors, but the bang for buck ratio is good, it meets most if not all of my other requirements and it was a more favourable option than its ugly step-sister the Inspiron 1520 with it’s clown makeup… I mean “colour faceplates”.

I’ll let you know how it works out!

I’ve been running the beta version alongside version 1.5 for a couple of weeks now (which while a little clumsy, was no where near the pain-in-the ass multi-IE is) and I gotta say, I like it… a lot! It’s clean, it’s fast, and most importantly… it hasn’t broken anything yet!

Extensions and themes are now collectively referred to as “Add-ons” and managed through a unified control panel, and at time of writing a few have yet to be upgraded for compatibility with Firefox 2 (nothing that can’t be fixed with the use of the the Nightly Tester Tools add-on which allows you to force compatibility), but most of the main extensions work out of the box and the new UI theme is so nice that for the moment at least I don’t want to change it!

The options control panel has changed a bit too and it took a little while to find everything again but on the whole it looks like all the changes are for the good and I would certainly recommend the upgrade. So what are you waiting for? Go get it now!

Look out on November 1st (CSS Reboot day) for the first stage of the new design, with the portfolio to follow soon after. Sneek peek below: