Unclickable dialog box in Internet Explorer 8

Someone handed me a site that needed some fixing. It was a calendaring and contact management site. There was JavaScript and AJAX all over the place, popping up dialog boxes and reloading page content. It was pretty slick to see, but the code was so chunky.

One of the things I had to do was add a new dialog box. I copied an existing one, cleared out the content, and started adding my own–a form. That was weeks ago. It’s worked great since then.

Then someone started using it in Internet Explorer 8...

Basic HTML5 layout

The powers that be are inching closer and closer to finalizing the HTML5 specification. It’ll probably be some time after that before we get a respectable degree of browser support, and even then there will continue to be new cross-browser compatibility issues to worry about.

For the time being, we still can play around with some of the elements that have a good shot at making it through the draft. I present to you 5 new HTML elements. They will act exactly like the current generic <div> tag, but will make it easier to specify that nature/purpose of the element without having to use classes and ids...

The proper HTML form

There are many ways of coding forms into web sites. Often, in an effort to line up text fields and labels and improve the overall look of the form, developers will resort to using tables for form layout.

In principle, I am opposed to using tables for anything other than tabular information. That leaves me with this simple code for forms.

<form method="post" action="destination.ext">
    <fieldset>
        <legend>Section Name</legend>
        <label for="field_id">Field Label</label>
        <input type="text" name="field_name" id="field_id" value="" />
        <button type="submit" name="button_submit" value="true">Submit</button>
    </fieldset>
</form>

Read in full