Daniel Bergey » webdesign

Rounded Shadows in Chrome

admin — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 02:27:58 +0000

Google Chrome, the browser-as-a-modern-operating-system, came out of beta earlier this week.

I love that Chrome uses Safari’s WebKit engine. I love that the version it uses is more advanced than that which Safari uses, so you not only get to use fancy CSS3-esque features like box-shadow: and border-radius:, but it features the improved Web Inspector.

But I find it rather silly to show rounded corners and drop shadows if you have this problem (Safari also shown for comparison):


Safari 3.0	Chrome 1.0

Remember, Chrome and Safari use the same layout engine. This bug only shows up when you use box-shadow: and border-radius: together .. in Chrome.

When IE & FireFox can’t show either the shadows or rounded corners, they at least fail gracefully.

If anyone has found a way to make Chrome behave, I’d love to hear about it. I’d like to be able to recommend people to a Windows browser (other than the awkward-on-that-platform Safari) in which to view my work with optimal presentation.

IE Version Reporting in jQuery

admin — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 04:40:07 +0000

Lately in the course of programming events, it came to my attention that under some circumstances IE 7 identifies itself as both IE 6 and IE 7 in the same userAgent string. Worse, I discovered to my horror that jQuery reports it as IE 6 if the IE 6 declaration happens to be ordered last. This would never do.

The following code snippet will refine jQuery’s browser detection (tested in 1.2.6, patch submitted for 1.3), and makes sure that if two or more IE version declarations are present in the userAgent string, jQuery reports the highest of them.

// Ensure that we report the highest IE version present in the userAgent string if ( jQuery.browser.msie ) jQuery.browser.version = (userAgent.match( /ie ([\d.]+)/ig ) || []) .sort().pop().replace( /[^\d.]/g, '' );

To use it, you can either paste it into your jquery.js just after the browser detection stuff (harder), or include it as a script plugin after your jQuery script tag (easier).

Disclaimer: I’ve done some rudimentary testing, but you’re responsible for testing it in your own web project.

This all comes about for several reasons: the True IE 6 obviously won’t be mentioning IE 7 because it didn’t exist at release time, but the True IE 7 might want to pretend it was IE 6 for compatibility with older pages. There’s also apparently a situation wherein an extra-long Windows registry entry will overwhelm IE 7 to the point where it falls back to reporting itself as IE 6.

If similar situations arise after IE 8 (final) is released, this code should take care of those, too. I say “should,” because I obviously don’t know what IE’s going to do in the future. (Sometimes I don’t even know what IE’s doing right now.)

July 4th Notes

admin — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 04:02:08 +0000

I finished a consulting project yesterday that had been taking up most of my free time for the past couple of weeks. It has been nice to relax so far this weekend without that constant worry: “Isn’t there something else productive that I should be working on?” And for the first time in quite a while, I let myself sleep in late this morning — with the unfortunate result that I forgot to drink coffee until like two o’clock. Headache City.

Coming from an historic peace church, I’m not much for patriotism and the holidays thereof. But I’ve always liked watching the fireworks, and this afternoon I found myself — quite inspirationally, mind you — whistling Stars & Stripes Forever. Sometimes things just stick with you.

A family member gave us a gift card to Cracker Barrel¹ recently, and it was a fun Fourth-y place to eat brunch, even though it’s somewhat stressful to take a 15-month-old to a sit-down restaurant. Afterwards, I picked up Practices of an Agile Developer and Dreaming in Code at the nearby Books-A-Million², though I am now annoyed to see that it looks like I could have gotten them both for half what I paid, had I purchased them from Amazon’s Used section. I’m glad I got them, though. Hopefully I can find time to get through Practices this weekend.

Jennifer is sitting in her chair next to mine working mapping out our debt snowball³. I’m hoping she finishes soon so we can go crash.

Oh yeah, and I hope to make this blogging thing a regular deal.

Or, colloquially, The Cracker Barrel. ↩
And wow: both Cracker Barrel and Books-A-Million could do with a website overhaul. That’d be a fun exercise; maybe I’ll play with some ideas sometime soon. ↩
In Excel, her favorite. I’ve yet to convert her to Numbers. ↩