By a roundabout route I happened on a post describing an Internet Explorer 6 bug (of course) in applying the :first-letter pseudo-element in CSS.

In IE6 there must be a blank between the selector and the declaration block.

/* does not work */
p:first-letter{property: value}

/* works */
p:first-letter {property: value}

Additionally, there appears to be a problem with IE6 (and IE7?) when separating selectors with a comma—include a space before the comma:

/* does not work */
p:first-letter, .extraneous {property: value}

/* works */
p:first-letter , .extraneous {property: value}

That explains a lot as I remove a lot of whitespace in my CSS files (and so may any compression tools) and unwittingly invoke the bug. 9am and I’ve already learned something new

To know more about why styles are disabled on this website visit the Annual CSS Naked Day website for more information.

Today, Joe Clark is saying “Captioning Sucks!” with a new website.

Why does it suck?

There’s not enough of it.

• Your complaints are ignored (if you can even manage to file a complaint).
• Captions are hard to read, mostly because of lousy fonts.
• Deaf people settle for less than 100% captioning.
• Broadcasters use the wrong kind of captioning (like scrollup or real-time captioning).
• So-called regulators let broadcasters get away with murder—because regulators and broadcasters play a game of musical chairs and swap positions over time.
• And finally… there are no standards.

Joe’s research project, the Open & Closed Project aims to solve that last problem and Captioning Sucks exists to raise awareness on just one of the issues the Project will address.

In November 2006 I published details on my CSS framework and even talked about it at Refresh Cambridge. To recap, it was the solution to the problem for only being able to reference one style sheet in an old Content Management System (CMS) in use at work. I added YUI grids to the mix for rapid prototyping and hence I called it a framework. Thinking nothing of it, I called it My CSS Framework. You probably have one too if you find yourself reusing old HTML / CSS snippets. You might have thought nothing of it too and just didn’t blog about it.

Since then, CSS frameworks have been in the news a lot. Just last week another was made available in the shape of 960. Since then, my framework has evolved to fit my changing needs. I’m unsure whether there’s anything new to publish though. I use Eric Meyer’s new reset CSS, my standard typography CSS and then, mindful of grid design principles, create a layout with as little code bloat as possible. I think demonstrating my own solutions to common interface components might be better instead.

A year and a bit on and My CSS Framework is now listed on Wikipedia. Wow. Funnily enough (and the inspiration behind this post) is that it’s been picked up in the blogosphere (in several languages) and mutated in name to “My (not really mine) CSS Framework” in an attempt to make clear the framework was not created by the reporting author. I wish I’d called it TSG CSS Framework now

With a redesign of the admin screens courtesy of Jeffrey Zeldman and Happy Cog I couldn’t resist upgrading as soon as possible to this latest version—and very nice it is too. I could have done without the PHP memory_usage errors but we got there in the end at 1.56am Sunday morning. Download WordPress 2.5 here.