Web Developer’s Field Guide

This site is pretty much a collection of links that I’ve found very useful over the last year, or so. First, and foremost, I must thank Vitaly.Friedman for getting the vast majority of them together all in one place for the first time. I used his version of this page for many months before taking on the not small task of creating my own. Why would I do such a thing?

Web Developer’s Field Guide

PNG in IE6 and IE7

Two related posts about the same problem. The solved mine 🙂

While working on a new site, I started playing around a little more with 8-bit PNG files, comparing them to GIFs. In a few cases the PNG was smaller (it didn’t used to be that way, but perhaps Photoshop CS2 does a better job of compressing PNG files or something), so used it. All was good until I started testing the design in IE, where the colors were all off. Here’s a breakdown of how the same graphic (placed as a CSS background image against a background color equal to its own background color) rendered between the two browsers:

Easy ReaderPNG color oddities in IE

In setting up the new vehicle details page for DDC, I noticed that the background color for the 24-bit PNGs did not match the css background color, but only in IE6.

Searching online, I found this is a known bug with IE that stems from a flawed interpretation of the PNG’s gAMA setting. It’s fantastic that the IE team added PNG alpha transparency to IE7, but apparently they kept the gAMA bug in IE7 to make sure browser compatibility specialists keep their jobs for years to come.

NetscrapsIE6/IE7 PNG gAMA bug makes PNGs appear darker

The tools used:
TweakPNG
Pngcrush

HTML Entity Character Lookup

Using HTML entities is the right way to ensure all the characters on your page are validated. However, often finding the right entity code requires scanning through 250 rows of characters.

This lookup allows you to quickly find the entity based on how it looks, e.g. like an < or the letter c.

Left Logic : HTML Entity Character Lookup

Log4net: simple way to use in your Asp.net application

Log the actions of your applications is very important especially when you develop new features or develop very difficult logical business.
But it is also important when users use your applications to understand the critical issues or problems.
To implement quickly the log operations Apache developed an opensource library for .Net developers.

Emanuele’s Blog: Log4net: simple way to use in your Asp.net application