Solving technology problems, one at a time
Web-based learning activities in our old LMS were displayed in a flexible-size frameset, – the Rustici SCORM Engine player window. The SCORM Engine spoiled us with its many settings Content that needed to be large
Continue readingSaba People Cloud provides for settings changes through the UI for theme styles and labels. This may not be suffiicient to achieve the workflow and usability improvements you need. To do more significant theme changes,
Continue readingWe all know the common CSS selectors that most of us use every day: Select by Classname: .classname {color:#000} Select by Element ID: #id {color:#000} Select by tagname: tagname {color:#000} And combinations of these: Select
Continue readingAmazon “aStores” are very easy to set up, but you will probably find you want to customize the navigation, particularly if you want to integrate the store into your own site. I’m in the process of doing just that, and decided to construct my own navigation system for the DesignSpace book shop.. The php script that creates the tabs for the store is based on the YUI (Yahoo UI) “Tab View Control” and can be easily adapted to your own site.
This is just a down and dirty approach but it is a good start for you to build from.
Sometimes, when you use javascript to make a change to some element on a page, you will get a Javascript error along the lines of: “element ‘n’ has no properties.” You check your page, and yes, the element is definitely there, and it is definitely named correctly, and your syntax is definitely correct. So where is the problem?
Well, it may be a timing issue. If your script executes before the element targeted by the script has been rendered, it will not find the element. This can particularly be a problem with frames or iframes. The solution is to move the function call to the bottom of the page, after the element has loaded.
Continue readingIt is common to use object detection to discriminate between browser capabilities (See Quirksmode: Object Detection.
However, sometimes it is necessary to detect whether or not a browser understands a particular CSS style property, and it is not obvious how to do this.
You can’t test for the existence of the property directly but you can test for the data type of the value of the property. If the data type is anything but “undefined”, the property is understood by the browser.
The example below shows a couple of rows from an automatically generated table of items. Each row has a corresponding editable version which shows up when the “edit” button is clicked. The original, non-editable row is hidden at the same time the editable row is displayed. If “display=’block” is used to display the TR, Safari will render it as a TD. To correct this, “display=’table-row” must be used on browsers that understand it.
Continue readingWhen building web applications I often use display styles to show or hide divs or table rows as needed. On one project, I found that the “colspan” property did not seem to work in Firefox or Safari. This was because I had incorrectly used display:block to style the TR element, instead of display:table-row. A demo is below, and the code follows.
Continue readingIn IE 6, the border of a block element will cover up a contained item which should appear on top of it, even if the z-index of the contained item is set higher than the
Continue readingIf you style an li tag as “display:block” IE 6 and 7 will display the list bullets, whether they are standard markers or images, but Firefox and Safari will not.
Here is an example of the way the list items should look:
The CSS “display” property is set to “list-item” (it could also be left out, since it is the default).
The out-of the-box Likert Scale question created by Perception is really just a slightly modified multiple choice question. The choices are arranged vertically, as shown in the example screen shot below.
I prefer Likert Scale choices to be displayed horizontally as shown in the image below.
