I was emailed a link this morning to view an online mountain biking magazine. I’m sure it would have been great, however, I couldn’t view it. All I was presented with was a blank screen. The magazine was built entirely in Adobe Flash (formerly Macromedia Flash). And I was trying to view it on my iPad (see previous blog!). Now, Adobe and Apple are in a dispute as to the security of Flash Apps and running on the Apple mobile platform (iPhone, iPad, iPod - this list goes on). Surely, with the proliferation of mobile Apple devices and the resent huge uptake of the iPad in the US, Flash must be on the downward side of the curve?

This aside, if any of our clients approached us to create an online magazine, the first thing we would take a look at would be accessibility - as we would see this as intrinsic to the establishing and growing readership. So, the last thing we would look at would be Flash - especially for the whole magazine.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m a fan of Flash. It’s changed and increase the way we view video online (YouTube) and when used effectively, there is no substitute - until HTML 5 arrives that is.

So, if there were only 14hrs to save the Earth, then I’d go with good old reliable and accessible HTML.

PS. Even more frustrating is that as it currently stands, I can’t use BBC iPlayer on my iPad either!

It’s always nice to find a fix for a Internet Explorer specific bug although not nice the amount of time it takes to find. This particular one relates to setting the height of a <div> containing a background-image which, not unsurprisingly works fine in FireFox.

Consider:

Which renders thus in IE7:

Note the whitespace beneath the blue image despite this image being 13 pixels high.

Now the solution is as simple as adding overflow:hidden to the divHeight class!

Simple but effective!!