gregdoolittle.com

two more features I’ve noticed since downloading Firefox 2.0:
resume last session: when you quit Firefox, you can leave your tabs open, and the next time you start up the application, it prompts you to find out if you’d like to open all the tabs you previously had open.
ESP: whenever you use a search box, Firefox provides a drop-down list of possible matches. pretty handy.

i had an idea a while back. basically i wanted to include variables in my CSS. the point was to extend the ease of updating a site’s style.

in a CSS document you usually use the same color value for multiple elements. when you want to update the color scheme of your site’s design, you have to do a find-and-replace for all occurrences of the old color, swapping it out with the new color. instead of updating every instance of a color, an image URL, or a typeface, imagine how easy it would be to do if you could just update your variables which you had declared at the top of your document.

i thought i had a great original idea. i had even tried implementing it with JavaScript, but to no avail. tonight i was brushing up on the SiFR type technique, when i came across “my idea”, implemented and documented by Shaun Inman. basically, he’s figured out how to do exactly what i thought i invented, and named it: CSS-SSC.

this is the basic syntax:


@server constants {
constantName1: constantValue1;
constantName2: constantValue2;
}

selector {
property1: constantName1;
property2: constantName2;
}

you can also import the constants from an external file:

@server url(constants.css);


if this interests you, read the full article. it looks like in addition to using this syntax for variables, you will also need to add a special PHP script to your CSS directory, and tell your server to parse your CSS files using the PHP interpreter by modifying the .htaccess file.

New version of Firefox just came out… Looks good so far… no major changes. I’d bet it’s more of a retaliation to Microsoft’s IE7 than anything else, (which was just released with the beta of Vista). IE finally added tabbed browsing. Firefox went along and one-upped IE7’s tabbed browsing with a tab-index for all the tabs in a given window (meta-tabbing?). Also when you open new tabs in Firefox, the browser keeps track of the order in which they were opened. So when you close each tab, the browser goes to the next freshest tab (instead of following a basic pattern of right to left). Basically, the tabbing system is much improved. There’s also a nice little dynamic spell-checker that automatically checks everything you type into any text field on any web page. Sort of the WWII in terms of browser-wars, but this time they’re not screwing things up for the people writing the code with proprietary html element support; they’re just racing to add designer/user features to their browsers.

They both have loads of security updates, so you might as well update if you can spare 2 minutes.
get firefox 2.0 (and some nifty plugins to go along with it)
get IE7