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We all know Facebook has captured the attention of internet users. In fact, this interesting social networking giant has encouraged the handful of people who hadn't yet dabbled with the net to jump on and 'network'.

 

Facebook currently has 175 million registered users, who log in and view things others in their network decide to share - including photos, videos and dialogue with others they are connected to.

 

Among the successes of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his team of tech geeks have been their ability to educate the masses on certain web technologies. We web developers and marketers have been trying to add the acronym 'app', short for WEB APPLICATION (aka web software), into the dictionaries of public and business for many years now, and Facebook has managed to do this seamlessly.

 

By offering interesting applications, from games to useful tools, to their users, Facebook has brought this 'app' term to the fore.

 

The beauty of Facebook's set-up for developers and entrepreuners is that it is open source. This means that developers like us can develop apps and earn fame by promoting it to Facebook users. What Zuckerberg and Facebook gain from this is they keep developers with smart ideas using their platform rather than encouraging them to create their own and potentially compete with the social networking website, which began as a way to get Harvard campus students communicating online, and hasn't stopped growing since.

 

We at KayWeb have been receiving a growing number of requests from people who want to develop Facebook Applications (Facebook Apps). Some just have good ideas and aren't interested in the potential financial rewards, but most are businesses who are trying to take advantage of the interactivity Facebook provides by developing an application that could provide the gateway between the social folk on Facebook and the products/services their businesses provide.

 

In the last month, KayWeb has received 18 proposal requests for Facebook Applications for businesses, and this list will continue to grow!

CSS or Cascading Style Sheets is a stylesheet language used to describe the presentation of a document written in a markup language. Its most common application is to be used in HTML and XHTML respectively. It can also be used in XML.

Uses

CSS can be used to define colors, fonts, layout, and other aspects of document presentation in a web page. It is designed primarily to enable the separation of document content (written in HTML or a similar markup language) from document presentation (written in CSS). This separation can improve content accessibility, provide more flexibility and control presentation characteristics, and reduce complexity and repetition in the structural content (such as by allowing for tableless web design). CSS can also allow the same markup page to be presented in different styles for different rendering methods, such as on-screen, in print, by voice (when read out by a speech-based browser or screen reader) and on Braille-based, tactile devices. CSS also allows authors to move much of that information to a separatestylesheet resulting in considerably simpler HTML markup.

Sources

How to Insert a Style Sheet

When a browser reads a style sheet, it will format the document according to it. There are three ways of inserting a style sheet:

External Style Sheet

An external style sheet is ideal when the style is applied to many pages. With an external style sheet, you can change the look of an entire Web site by changing one file. Each page must link to the style sheet using the tag. The tag goes inside the head section:

href="mystyle.css" />

Internal Style Sheet

An internal style sheet should be used when a single document has a unique style. You define internal styles in the head section by using the

Inline Styles

An inline style loses many of the advantages of style sheets by mixing content with presentation. Use this method sparingly, such as when a style is to be applied to a single occurrence of an element. To use inline styles you use the style attribute in the relevant tag. The style attribute can contain any CSS property. The example shows how to change the color and the left margin of a paragraph:

This is a paragraph

 

Multiple Style Sheets

If some properties have been set for the same selector in different style sheets, the values will be inherited from the more specific style sheet. For example, an external style sheet has these properties for the h3 selector:

 

h3
{
color: red;
text-align: left;
font-size: 8pt
}

Syntax

The CSS syntax is made up of three parts: a selector, a property and a value:

selector {property: value}

The selector is normally the HTML element/tag you wish to define, the property is the attribute you wish to change, and each property can take a value. The property and value are separated by a colon, and surrounded by curly braces:

body {color: black}

To make the style definitions more readable, you can describe one property on each line, like this:

p
{
text-align: center;
color: black;
font-family: arial
}

You can group selectors. Separate each selector with a comma. In the example below we have grouped all the header elements. All header elements will be displayed in green text color:

h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6
{
color: green
}

With the class selector you can define different styles for the same type of HTML element. Say that you would like to have two types of paragraphs in your document: one right-aligned paragraph, and one center-aligned paragraph. Here is how you can do it with styles:

p.right {text-align: right}
p.center {text-align: center}

You can also define styles for HTML elements with the id selector. The id selector is defined as a #. The style rule below will match the element that has an id attribute with a value of "green":

#green {color: green}

A full definition of CSS can be found here.

CSS bug fixing

 

This is one of the things that a good web designer has to go through each time he or she codes a page using CSS for layout. Following Web Standards is the way to go and it should be an obvious choice when you take your job serious. Today I want to share some of my thinking process and the steps I usually go through when I'm at this phase of the
process. But before jumping on the bandwagon to fix things consider these criteria...

 

Make sure your markup is well structured

 

Make sure your markup is well structured, in other words use the appropriate markup for the appropriate content. Use headings for titles, paragraphs for blocks of text, ordered and unordered lists to sum things up in list form or for your navigation, fieldsets in combination with legend and label elements for forms... Last but not least, use tables only for
what they're meant for, tabular data.

 

Fixing for IE

 

Ok, your code is well structured and your page validates. The page looks fine in browsers that follow the standards like Firefox and Safari, but you still need to fix a few things for IE. How do you proceed? Here are the steps I usually follow. It comes down to analyzing and trying to isolate the problem...

 

Isolate the problem via XHTML

 

You can try to disable certain blocks of code in your XHTML. Use comment tags and put certain blocks of XHTML coding in comments. View the page and see if the problem is still there. Do this block by block starting with the bigger ones: left column, right column, content, header etc. At a certain point chances are you see your problem disappear.
If you commented out a big block of content, uncomment smaller nested blocks of content now to isolate the problem until you have as less code in comment as possible.

 

Isolate the problem via CSS

 

Isolating the problem via XHTML is not always an option and so you can also try to disable certain properties of styles or certain styles all together to see what happens. Some styles might interfere with other styles. Some styles need to be more specified before they have effect because they've been overwritten by another style etc. Everybody has his or her own method to try to solve things and we all have our favorite tools. Mine is Adobe Dreamweaver and even a notepad has done wonders for me. There are also a number of plugins for Mozilla Firefox that you can use to debug your css like CSS Viewer, FireBug and Web Developer Tool.

 

In general, CSS is a great way to present your web page. SEO will also benefit on your CSS use, it will no longer need to crawl unwanted codes like because you wont be using tables unless there is a tabular data to present. SEO will be so efficient on your web page. So i urge every web designer out there to use CSS every time they design web pages. After all it is the road to enlightenment.

Those who know web know Microsoft's Internet Explorer, in any version, is slow and hopeless. It has now been revealed the most widely-used internet browser has a SERIOUS security hole that leaves computers exposed to hijack attempts.

 

Anti-virus software maker Trend Micro has confirmed that the said 'hole' helps criminals trick you and I into entering websites that contain code which can steal our passwords, as well as more serious information such as financials.

 

Trend Micro security researcher Paul Ferguson told the Associated Press that this flaw has not been repaired by Microsoft.

 

Microsoft, according to the same news network, is "investigating the flaw and is considering fixing it through an emergency software patch outside of its normal monthly updates, but declined further comment".

 

Quite frankly, this is not good enough.

 

I will encourage everybody I know to switch browsers immediately. There are viable options out there that won't only help your security; they will also speed up your daily business on the internet.

 

The best option at the moment is Firefox (please click here to download), which is developed by the Mozilla open source community and has been leading innovation in the browser game for many years now.

 

Other viable options include Google's Chrome (please click here to download), which has less features than Firefox but is getting better day by day. It is now out of beta testing mode.

 

And Apple's Safari (please click here to download) is also a solid performer and is available for both Mac and Windows.

 

The move by many web users to the above options has Microsoft quaking (Firefox already has 20% market share according to recent statistics).

 

Internet Explorer would be far less dominant if it wasn't a default on all Windows computers, which is also a reason that some major PC manufacturers are now doing deals with the likes of Firefox and Google to include their browsers as defaults.

 

* Feel free to read Internet Explorer review by respect IT review website, CNET. Click here.