Tips, web design book reviews, resources and observations for teaching and learning web development.
After painful hours trying to get my new Linksys EtherFast Cable/DSL Router to connect both my Windows XP machine and my Mac OS X machine to the internet, I discovered that the Mac OS X instructions for using PPPoE with this router do not work. Do not select PPPoE, as instructed. Use DHCP instead. That works!
The Windows machine works fine with the same router following the PPPoE instructions.
In the ongoing debate about whether to use pixels or ems to size text with CSS, there has been the problem that pages with fonts set in pixels cannot be resized in Internet Explorer 5 on a Windows platform. However, there is a way to override this. Select Tools->Internet Options->Accessibility->Ignore font sizes specified on web pages. Then text can be resized as wanted just like on most other browsers. Keep in mind that most users are not likely to know about this. Hopefully people with accessibility problems know it.
You can find out who is linked to your web site by going to altavista.com and typing (without the quotes) “link:www.yourdomain.com” in the search box. The results will be a list of sites that are linked to the URL you typed.
We have previously explained how to find the preferences file for the Dreamweaver site definitions using a Mac. With Mac OS X and the new Dreamweaver MX, the site definitions have moved. Here is where to find them now.
/Users/<username>/Library/Preferences/Dreamweaver MX Prefs
This is the file that contains your FTP info and your passwords. Making a backup copy if you have to reinstall DW can save you a lot of time.
W3C standards call for the use of a ‘longdesc’ attribute for images or other possibly inaccessible page elements. The longdesc attribute in a tag links to an HTML file that gives a long description of the inaccessible element. But browser support for longdesc is still somewhat problematic. So many people are now using a workaround that involves putting a ‘d’ after the element. The ‘d’ is made into a link to the long description. This practice is understood by people who need the long description information.
If students empty the cache of IE 5 on Mac in an attempt to see changes to their pages, the browser sometimes refuses to load the images at all. If you Quit IE and then reopen it instead of simply pressing the refresh button, it may work.
If students are testing a page in progress by viewing in the browser and pressing reload/refresh numerous times, the page sometimes does not refresh because of persistent cache. Make sure the browser preferences for cache are set to “always” update pages and this will solve the problem.