• Totally fluid, as in it resizes in both axes in accordance with changing content size.
• Each corner needs actual transparency to sit on gradient backgrounds.

There are hundreds of methods posted online about how to do fancy corners on boxes using CSS, but quite a lot of them just don’t have transparency involved, or worse still use a hack here and there or use a sprinkling of absolutely positioned, empty divs.

So what to do about the boxes having exhausted quite an extensive Google search and not finding a method that really suited me? Make one up of course. For those of us still stuck supporting IE6 as well as a raft of other browsers and their various editions, while offering a text resizing facility on the site, this meant it has to be remarkably robust.

The following method is the one I made for four corners only, with no border fanciness. In fact the graphical requirements were so simple that actually all the corners are the same GIF file as a ball, used much like you would a sprite:

/* White boxes */
div.box {
width: 100%;
margin: 0 0 10px 0;
overflow: hidden;
background: url(../images/common/corners.gif) no-repeat top left;
}
div.box div {background: url(../images/common/corners.gif) no-repeat top right;}
div.box div div {background-position: bottom left;}
div.box div div div {
background-position: bottom right;
padding: 6px 0;
}
div.box div div div div {
padding: 0;
background: #fff none;
position: relative;
}
div.box div div div div div {
margin: 0 8px;
top: -6px;
}
div.box div div div div div div {
margin: 0;
top: 12px;
}
div.box div div div div div div div {
top: -6px;
overflow: auto;
background: none;
width: 100%;
}
div.box div div div div div div div div {
top: 0;
width: auto;
padding: 0;
}

And then the XHTML:

<div class="box"><div><div><div><div><div><div><div>
<strong>Some sample content<br /><br />
Additional lines.</strong>
</div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div>

Resulting in something like this:

Because I haven’t used floats or any form of containment yet this box will just happily expand to fill the width it is in, and will grow with the content inside it just like a div tag ought to. However you might like to float the outer div or give it a width in EM or percent to make use of this fluid-ness. It can be easily adapted and expanded for many cornered box purposes, since with a bit of additional markup I made one with a solid rounded corner border all the way around.

So I took this opportunity to start up my old computer, which is running a pretty much clean install of Windows 98 updated as far as it was supported, all on a Pentium 4 with 512mb of RAM and the high-end Geforce 2 GPU: astronomical power compared to what 95 and 98 were intended to work with normally. And then there is Internet Explorer 6!

I was a little bit astonished to discover that despite my fears that the new CSS would collapse in a heap, everything was generally rendering exactly where it was meant to be. The only issues were superficial ones, such as transparent PNGs rendering as grey which were easily fixed. In the end I did make an effort to ensure that users browsing with IE6 do have a reasonable experience.

Above is a shot of a couple of the images I’ve produced for new site features.

You can find that related posts plugin at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/similar-posts/. Another plugin by the same authors is one that shows a list of the most recent posts. In the old design I had this functionality hardcoded into the theme footer but now it can be done with a single line of PHP.

This involved forming an interface based on the style of their website and creating actionscripted animation for button and label motion, as well as learning a bit about SLR cameras myself in the process! I await to see if this demonstrates suitable skills for the position.

Update: the company was suitably impressed by this demo however my application was too late before they had to hire another person.

However here are a couple more screenshots of a general basic layout and more button-y bits since the last lot of menu icons!

Other plans include a bigger better blog post preview image, related posts links, using the excerpt field of posts and some form of proper search function that includes AJAX-ed suggestions.

It’s pretty easy to find how to send alternative headers and a the source data from a PDF file: for example http://uk3.php.net/manual/en/function.header.php Additionally, there is plenty of information out there if you want to use ‘Content-Disposition’ to force the client’s browser to behave as if the file was a download rather than load Adobe Reader in the window itself.

However this was all fine until we discovered that Adobe Reader’s usual behaviour of displaying the first page and loading the document as it is being read was broken. This system is intended for some fairly large documents and the browser was choosing to download and cache the entire file before displaying anything. I knew immediately it would be something to do with the headers.

There is very little I could find that expanded on this issue, so using an online tool that can be found at http://www.askapache.com/online-tools/http-headers-tool/ I examined what response would be sent by accessing a PDF file directly from the server. Using this I could replicate the header in PHP and as I guessed, the issue was resolved:


header('Accept-Ranges: bytes');
header('Content-Length: '.$filesize);
header('Connection: close');
header('Content-Type: application/pdf');


Individual vine leaf vector graphics: