Styled Scroll Bars

Although IE only styled scroll bars can look ‘pretty’, I’ve lost patience with them because they are a proprietary, non-web standard addition which needs to be dodged round to ensure W3C CSS validation. And since IE only has 87% or thereabouts of the browser market these days and coloured scroll bars only work in DTD Quirks mode … why bother.

Here’s how I include them when desired, in a way that permits validation. Firstly, use a free visual scroll bar styling program like this online tool or this one and obtain the scroll bar css. Then convert it to javascript (HTML Kit has a nifty plugin that does it with a click of a button), save it with a .js file extension and link it in the head of your markup document/s.

<script language="JavaScript" xsrc="js/css.js" mce_src="js/css.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

Web design and SEO

At 45 Berea Street, I found a well-written article which summarises important points for effective search engine optimisation which Sibagraphics already employs in its site design. The article emphasises the need to implement search engine strategies from the ground up … through site structure, valid coding, useful metatags and page content.