Scott Nellé.com

I was recently working on a project and thought it might be interesting to try out an em-based layout (where the layout of the entire site changes based on the font size.) I was hoping to preserve ideal line-length for my copy. The geek cred associated with em-based layouts was also appealing–earlier this year it seemed like they were all the rage. This trend may have been kicked off by the brilliant Mr. Dan Cederholm, a personally hero of mine in the web development community–as silly as that may sound.

It occurred to me, however, that there’s a fundamental flaw in the logic of an em-based layout. As a visitor increases the size of the text on screen, the layout will increase in width so that everything remains in proportion. Now I’m generalizing here, but if a visitor needs to bump up the text size to read it, it’s possible (perhaps even likely) that they could be older and potentially less technical than us web developers with our 20+ inch monitors. As the text size (and therefore layout width) increases, these users with their smaller monitors will run out of room to grow pretty quickly. This causes dreaded horizontal scrolling which no one likes, no matter what designers may have told you in the late 90s.

Roger Johansson acknowledged this flaw on his blog and suggested that by setting a maximum width in pixels you could prevent this issue. The problem that is titular to this post, though, is that this just doesn’t seem to work. It’s possible that it did work at one time, but I’ve tested many layouts online in addition to my own test case and found that in recent versions of Firefox the layout expands unchecked, causing horizontal scrolling. Perhaps this feature was broken during recent updates to Mozilla’s rendering engine. Unless I’m missing something em-based layouts are self-defeating as it stands. So are they anything more than geek-chic?

If there were such a thing as a regular reader of this site, he or she might notice that I’ve added a little blurb about my web host to the bottom of my sidebar. I’ll be up front in saying that It includes my affiliate link so that if anyone signs up through my site I’ll save a bit of money on hosting. That person will also save a bit of money on his/her hosting.

For a long time I left my affiliate link off the site. I was concerned about promoting a product that people were having trouble with (I’m sure searching Google for “Dreamhost Downtime” will yield ample evidence.) However, Dreamhost has been so reliable for me and for such a long time now, that I’m ready to shout their praises from the rooftops, so to speak. They also have the easiest-to-use control panel I’ve ever encountered at a web host, which is a nice bit of icing on the cake. So go forth and and take advantage of their value-priced hosting with excellent features, and feel free to use my affiliate link if you’d like to save yourself a bit of money. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

There’s been a whole lot of nothing new around here lately. I just wanted to point out the A List Apart 2008 survey (for people who make websites.) I took it. What are you waiting for?

Hulu is now live and streaming shows new and old from major TV networks. Watch every episode of Arrested Development right now. It’s the best show ever to be aired on television. You won’t regret it.

Now that it’s out of beta the increased load seems to be straining the content delivery network; the sound quality has decreased quite a bit. Still, there’s a bunch of content available and it looks really good. For the price (free) you can’t complain too much.

The Internet Explorer team has yielded to reason (or maybe a barage of letters and comments from angry web developers) and had a change of heart regarding the default rendering behavior in the next version of their web browser. The first sentence of the latest post on the IEBlog sums it up:

We’ve decided that IE8 will, by default, interpret web content in the most standards compliant way it can.

Thank you IE dev team! Now I plan to get back to thinking about the web instead of worrying about one piece of software.

The debate over Internet Explorer 8’s proposed version targeting continues, and issue #253 of A List Apart features two good articles about it–one on either side of the fence. Jeremy Keith’s article (he’s on the “nay” side) suggests that IE8 should launch as a beta with version targeting disabled to see just how much it breaks the web. This is a brilliant suggestion and I can think of no better way to evaluate the need for a version targeting system. In fact, now that it’s been proposed I think it would be foolhardy of Microsoft to approach it any other way.

As a bonus, and in defense of not crippling IE8 by default, Keith’s article offers this line which is solid gold:

If IE8 is going to differentiate itself from its predecessor by having better standards support, then surely we can assess how it will render websites by simply viewing those websites in a standards-compliant browser like, say, Firefox, Safari or Opera.

Nice one, Jeremy.

Today is the day that Microsoft will be pushing out Internet Explorer 7 as an automatic update. I’ve taken a few precautions to keep IE6 at least for the time being, but with any luck I’ll be able to let it go soon. I’ll be checking stats for some of our client sites at USM with an eager eye toward any sharp drop in IE6 usage starting today.

I must admit that there’s a part of me that will miss IE6. Over the years I’ve built up a pretty extensive knowledge of its bugs, and I’ve developed a great aptitude for fixing issues triggered by those bugs. Once its gone, all that knowledge will be of no use and I’ll have one less valuable skill as a developer. For the good of everyone else, however, I’m willing to make that sacrifice.

Update: I’m a little disappointed at the ease with which I dodged the “forced update.” All it took was disabling automatic updates. The more complicated instructions that were floating around only seem to have applied to server versions of Windows. I’m still interested to see how overall IE6 usage changes going forward. A quick and unscientific survey of stats for a handful of sites shows that somewhere between 40% and 50% of Internet Explorer users are still using IE6 or lower. Those numbers come from sites with a fairly general (not specifically high tech) audience.

The web community is abuzz this week with news of Microsoft’s proposed plan to implement a special version-targeting meta tag in future versions of its Internet Explorer browser. You can read all about it in the latest issue of A List Apart and you can read plenty on both sides of the coin everywhere from Adactio to Zeldman.

The short version of my opinion is that I dislike almost everything about the proposal, but that it’s probably the only way out of the grave that Internet Explorer has dug for the majority of web users and developers. There’s a longer version which I and many others have sprinkled all over the web in articles and comments, but I’ll focus on one thing that bothers me that most people aren’t talking about: the way it all came to be.

The Internet Explorer team, along with a handful of web standards advocates to lend credibility to the final outcome, got together behind closed doors and ruminated for a little while on the issue and then came forth with what many are calling a standard. That’s it. A small group of people decided that all developers must now include a new line of code in every web page that they build or the still-market-dominating Internet Explorer browser will render it wrong (by intention) hence forth forever. Without consulting a standards body or the throngs of affected developers, they essentially declared a web standard. That just doesn’t sit well with me, and I don’t know how it sits so well with some folks who have been fighting tooth and nail to advance real web standards for nearly a decade.

Kirk at Alt Tags has spent what I imagine is a tremendous amount of time putting together some great screencasts about installing, configuring, and using WordPress. These screencasts are great for anybody who wants to use WordPress for blogging or content management. There’s a wide variety of information available, so newcomers and experienced WordPress users alike will be able to learn plenty.

I’ve become a big fan of screencasts lately; Watching one is like piping computer information directly into your brain. If that sounds appealing, check out WordPressTraining.com.

Here’s a quick tip to keep the comments on your Myspace page from breaking your carefully constructed (or haphazardly thrown together) layout. This CSS will create a scroll bar for comments that are too wide for the comment column (images, videos, web addresses, etc…) To get it to work, stick it in the “About Me” section or anywhere else you can enter profile styles.

<style type="text/css">
/* keep comments in line */
table table table.friendsComments table table tr  {
display: block;
width: 430px;
overflow: auto;
}
</style>

This will work in Firefox and should work in Internet Explorer 7, but I haven’t tested it yet. It won’t work in IE6, but it also won’t make your profile look any worse–it has no effect in that browser. For an example of this CSS in action you can check out my profile on Myspace.