CSS - Cross Browser coding tip
Friday September 22, 2006
I discovered this CSS coding tip a while back but forgot about it and hadn’t used it until recently. Temporarily add a meta refresh to your page while you’re working:
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="7;url=http://localhost/">
You no longer need to constantly refresh the page to see your changes. Dead simple and can save you time and frustration.
I imagine this is a fairly common scenario; this has happened to me more than a couple of times. Your working on some CSS and everything is going great in Firefox, Safari or Opera. Then you remember you haven’t hit refresh in IE for a while. Shit, there are some layout bugs to fix.
It’s much easier to catch the IE bugs and squash them as and when they occur. If you wait until the end you may find there are multiple issues and inter related problems. This makes debugging more difficult and often leads to the temptation to use browser specific hacks or filters. Its better to determine the root cause of the problem and correct or work around it.
Screen real estate is pretty cheap nowadays and many people work with a dual monitor setup. Its fairly easy to keep a few browser windows open and visible as you work.