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Ongoing development :: Oct 18, 08:30 AM

Since my last entry most of my time has been taken up with developing a vast majority of the markup required to translate the design of the new site into modules and templates. With this the development team can start to integrate the content management system into a working site for their development workflow.

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve stumbled over a number of interesting blog posts and other essays regarding the use of sIFR, the first I will mention solves many of the accessibility and browser functionality which is lost when using sIFR for links. The second allows for multiply styles – colours in the example in one sIFR replacement.

The first of these is quite interesting however on this site we’ve made the decision to use the replacement technique for module headers only, leaving links and headlines to be straight html. This decision is partly based on not knowing at the out set this additional technique, the main reason however is not to over do the replacement of text so avoiding the heavy cpu usage when using multiple sIFR replacements on a single page.

The second technique like the first requires some tweaking of the original js files that drive the replacement. This is possibly of some use to the site as one of the requirements will possibly be the ability to embolden and emphasise text in the replaced elements, in the next few days I’ll investigate this further.

One other side note the IE development team blog released some new advice last week regarding the use of hacks in css to overcome current IE display issues. With the release of IE7 in the coming months the new browser will read many of the advanced selector methods used to hide style from IE correctly, therefore raising the possibly issue of sites breaking under certain circumstances.

To overcome these issues the IE team have advised the use of conditional statements to pass IE different css code where needed. I’ve only recently discovered this technique, it’s proved very easy to implement quite stable and avoids hacks within css files therefore allowing for easy maintenance and future removal of redundant code.