A Three Column CSS Layout Using Just an Unordered List

Posted on by Rob Larsen

Why do such a thing? For fun, of course- and to expand on a point I made today at work…

Some background- I’m working with a new guy who is not so savvy to modern HTML/CSS layout techniques and today, while talking to him about some potential techniques he might use for an upcoming site, I remarked – “With CSS you can make practically any element do whatever you need it to do, so don’t always assume you need to wrap things in a DIV* to make a layout work.” The point related to the dangers of DIV-itis and my desire** to pare down markup to its absolute (meaningful) minimum. But it also illustrates a basic idea that, once fully understood, opens up all sorts of options for problem-solving.

So, anyway, chewing on the exchange on my way home from work I was struck with the idea of doing a simple three column layout using nothing but an Unordered List. My original comment was about a UL used as a menu and tweaking it to behave like a bunch of divs (which was his original idea for the menu) or something, so I thought it might be interesting to go all out use a UL for the entire layout, tweaking the LIs in a whole bunch of different ways to suit my needs. If that doesn’t illustrate my point, nothing will.
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Did you know- 8 Bit PNG transparency is just like an old school transparent Gif

Posted on by Rob Larsen

Don’t believe me? Check it out:


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Automatically Track Outgoing Links in Google Analytics with Javascript

Posted on by Rob Larsen

I’m currently reading the O’Reilly Google Analytics book, so of course I’m going to sandbox some stuff (albeit not here at this site.) One of the first things I seized on was the ability to track outgoing links by calling the urchinTracker() function onclick. Taking a few minutes out of my morning I put this together:
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The difference between javascript's getElementById() and getElementsByName()

Posted on by Rob Larsen

The above question is one I’ve gotten in my logs a couple of times. I don’t actually answer it anywhere on the site, so I figured I might as well answer it here. For some strange reason, in my mellowed old age, I’m all about helping and I haven’t written about web technologies in about a month, so it can’t hurt.
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JSON Feeds For Fun and Profit Part 2 – Callbacks with Twitter

Posted on by Rob Larsen

In my first exploration of the JSON data interchange format, I used it in its most basic way possible. I attached a script (from delicious) to a page and simply used the built-in object created by their implementation to generate an unordered list of my recent del.icio.us posts. While it showed how easy it is to use the O, a handy, structured, Javascript Object, provided by JSON, it didn’t really illustrate how to manipulate the page with new data after page load. That is, after all, a very now thing to do, so it’s kind of important. This article will examine how to dynamically load a JSON feed and how to get data out of Twitter and into a usable form using a callback.
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