One of the reasons that I love Firefox and Webkit-based browsers (Chrome, Safari) is the ability to effortlessly create rounded-corner elements using pure CSS:

.round	{ -moz-border-radius:12px; -webkit-border-radius:12px; }

As you probably already know, IE doesn’t allow you to create rounded corners without using images or endless hacking. Enter the CurvyCorners JavaScript project. CurvyCorners allows you to quickly create rounded corners within Internet Explorer.

The CurvyCorners JavaScript

<!-- SIMPLY INCLUDE THE JS FILE! -->
<script type="text/javascript" src="curvy.corners.trunk.js"></script>

CurvyCorners detects the usage of “-webkit-border-radius” and “moz-border-radius” on DOM elements and works its magic to duplicate the effect in IE using a series of small DIVs. There are no images involved. You may also identify specific elements to apply rounded corners to:

I’m just going to cut to the chase: Internet Explorer is rubbish. I don’t care what version you throw at me — 6, 7, 8…rubbish. Apparently Google agrees with me because they’ve released Google Chrome Frame, a browser plugin and META tag system that allows you to turn IE installs into a virtual “Chrome” install so that IE will support HTML5′s canvas tag and take advantage of JavaScript performance improvements featured in Google Chrome.

Step 1: The Plugin

The user must first download the Chrome Frame plugin at the Google Chrome Frame page. The install works on XP and Vista operating systems, IE browser versions 6, 7, and 8.

As you probably know, Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 was “officially” released yesterday. If you were caught off guard by this and haven’t had time to test your sites in IE8, don’t lose sleep; you can make IE8 render pages like IE7 using a simple META tag.

The XHTML

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=EmulateIE7" />

It doesn’t get much easier than that. Don’t use this functionality as a crutch for too long though!

A few weeks back I touched on how you could implement the Peppy and Sizzle selector engines in MooTools. Both posts showed how to remove the default Moo engine from use and instead make each respective selector engine the one and only. It doesn’t have to be that way. You could use all three engines within the page as well.

I was recently thrown a real curveball of a project. Instead of using a fresh MySQL database to pull information from, the customer required that we pull information from their new Microsoft SQL Server 2005 server. This isn’t the most desired method of PHP->Database interactivity but that’s what the project called for and that’s what I needed to do. Here’s how to get things going.