January 6th, 2006

Neko (lofulah)

CSS, part 2.

Well, so it's possible. Here's the example:
Original page (source) is http://www.keithjbrown.co.uk/vworks/design/design_2.shtml, where he shows how to translate a page from tables to CSS.

However, I had to go a further step to add a variable min-height, based off of the upcoming events box... if there were more events, we add more to the min-height. Less events, less min-height.

Now the annoying thing is, now my page renders completely differently on every single browser. Close enough to what I want for most, but the variations are quite.. iffy. I think the issue here is the fact that I used the 'em' value, instead of pixels, as I had been doing. Why? Because min-height would be pointless if someone changed the size of the font, which you can easily do on Safari, and that breaks it like a little girl breaking her doll by dropping it off a truck on the beltway.

...Granted, even with using 'em' instead of 'px', increasing/decreasing the size more than once will break the page. Or at least make it look ugly.

So maybe I'll stick with pixels.

Also, another funky thing: Safari adds random spacing above and below my main chunk. I can't figure out why. It's caused by the use of 'p' tags, but I need p tags! Having no 'p' tags = de ugly. It doesn't happen in other browsers, so I don't see why it should be happening in Safari. WTFmuch?


Yeah, OmniWeb doesn't understand min-height at all.

Opera has left-side-bar displaying issues: notably, the repeating background arrow doesn't repeat, and the entire thing is offset to the left by 8 or so pixels.


You know, maybe I should just give up and go back to tables. They're ugly, codewise, but they seem to work. Very well, actually.

You know, I think I'll go to bed. And we'll see from there. XP I hate scrapping work, and making the past, oh, several days worthless, but... since tables work so much better (it renders the same way, more or less in just about every single browser... :P fuck that, ne?)
Neko (lofulah)

CSS, part 3

So the conclusion I arrived at?

Leave most of the work intact. The icky parts that look better in tables are displayed as tables by default. However, if you want CSS, a simple ?style=CSS will enable CSS for you.

It's probably a waste of space, but this means that if, before hell freezes over, someone actually manages to come up with browsers that support CSS correctly all around, it'll look perfect.

Right now, my focus is on patching any and all security holes and converting the coldfusion stuff to PHP. Most of it's easy, to the point where I could probably write up a perl script to parse coldfusion, write it out to PHP, and be done with it. But the problem with that is, stuff's going to get missed, and then I'll have to track it down later. But CSS pretty-fying will have to wait. I've got a week left before all hell breaks loose again.

Le sigh. I'm thinking of resigning my position. This probably looks pretty good on my transcript, but... I dunno. I'm not going to have the time once school starts, to make sure everything runs right and stuff. I've promised myself that I would try (even harder, yeah, I know I said this before. I know.) for straight A's. That it's possible. Even for someone like me, who sucks at taking exams, and is insanely careless when it comes to... just about everything. 'cept coding, which I can play perfectionist at, if I understand the syntax and language.

Heck, I'm not even sure I'll be able to keep the job at T.I.S. Brian (Bryan?) said he'd welcome me back, but... I dunno. I'm afraid I might be giving too much of my time to non-school things.. that that's why I'm failing.

On the brighter side, senpai told me to stop worrying. Posting that locked, so I don't forget. =^^= Senpai, I love you. Even if you probably don't read this.