Stikis

Last week saw the release of Firefox 3 onto the web. So on ‘download day’, I joined the thronging millions to grab my very own copy. Now which site do you think I was first to visit with my prize? Stikis of course!

I excitedly typed in the address, logged in and arrived back at my last stikis page. Then… (cue sound-effect of nuclear reactors powering down)…nothing. Aargh, a compatibility bug in the script that hooks up the color patches. It meant that nothing on the page worked.

I know I should have downloaded the beta and tested it with stikis before the release date, but…well there was that pesky thesis to get out of the way and you’d expect Firefox 3 to work with stikis if Firefox 2 does…right? Wrong.

However, the bugs were fairly minor and yesterday I was able to make an update to the site that fixes them. An upshot of this was that Stikis now also plays nicely with Safari 3.

If either of these is your browser of choice, Welcome to Stikis!

Phew, that was good to write as a headline. Actually, IE6 support turned out to be much simpler than I anticipated. It mostly hinged on two things - my use of fixed positioning, and png graphics. Thankfully there are fairly simple fixes for these obstacles that allowed me to get IE6 working with stikis from just a couple of hours work.

For fixed positioning, I used conditional comments to insert a IE6 stylesheet and used absolute positioning instead (along with html, body {height: 100%} ). For png graphics, I used a combination of substituting gifs where I could (all the icons) and using some javascript to fix the shadows of the stikis.

There still seem to be some glitches - for instance, when resizing stikis, there’s a noticable lag as the contents have their size updated to match. Also, the expander buttons don’t seem to work properly.
However, as the headline says - IE6 support is *preliminary*. This means that it should work, but please, please tell me if it doesn’t.

Cheers, Jared.