peterm00re index

Friday, 31 May 2002
CSS frustrations...

Creating basic web pages like this one isn't hard at all these days. But creating pages that render decently in Internet Exploder 5.02, Opera 6.03, and Mozilla 1-RC3/Navigator 6.2 is not so easy. At least for an untutored amateur such as myself.

The last version of my site used tables for all of its formatting, and it rendered more or less identically in all three (or four) of the browsers I mentioned. We can sort of consider Mozilla to be the same as Navigator for practical purposes, despite their now-diverging code bases. That is, they both look about the same to me, and they both render web pages about the same as each other.

Not so with my shaky explorations into the brave new world of CSS-formatted web pages. Both IE and Opera render this page fairly similarly, with some spacing variations. But Mozilla/Navigator expands the height of the line below "PETE MOORE, NERD AT LARGE";, causing the ends of it to disappear behind my two "links" boxes. I tried adding a HEIGHT="20px" parameter to the table row definition, but it made no difference. IE and Opera would pay attention to my HEIGHT parameter, but Mozilla/Navigator would ignore it.

And to make matters more annoying, Macromedia Dreamscape 3 does a downright crummy job of working with CSS-formatted text boxes. That is, while my two “links” boxes display on the left and right sides of the page in a browser, in Dreamweaver's graphical editor they are both stacked on top of the left side of the page, covering up part of the center text and making it impossible for me to simply type normally. If I move the boxes, Dreamweaver cleverly and unhelpfully generates some automatic inline CSS code to plaster the boxes in whatever absolute location I drop them, ruining the layout of the page. What to do, what to do? Go back to Front Page (hawk, spit)?

Just for fun, I tried the HTML editor that comes as part of OpenOffice.org 1.0, the free, open-source office suite. I haven't looked yet at the effect it'll have on my HTML code, but the editor itself is not bad at all. Not quite WYSIWYG, unsurprisingly, but very usable. My “links” boxes are out of my way, and I can type normally, as I'm doing now. So let's see what it does to my HTML. That is to say, I prefer to use an editor that lets me decide how the raw code should look, so I can read it more easily when I need to tweak something. If I indent a certain way, or not at all, I want an editor to leave my code alone.

Hmph! It doesn't. It chooses how it wants to indent, and it removes any blank lines I put in for readability. On the other hand, I can actually type with it, unlike Dreamweaver with CSS. Would the new version of Dreamweaver fix that problem? I'll probably never know, because I doubt my boss will spring for an upgrade, since our company website is so basic. Oh, well... Better an imperfect editor (and I expect they all are, in one way or another) than a really broken editor. C'est la vie.

*******

Know what? The OpenOffice.org editor hid all my CSS code, making it impossible to edit it. And it has its own ideas about formatting text with the DIV tag, which are completely unacceptable to me. Forget it. I'll have to find a way to work with Dreamscape 3 for now.

29 May 2002
Welcome to the brave new world...

I'm trying to learn more about Cascading Style Sheets, or CSS. My last website was mostly tables, which actually work pretty well; but it's important to try and keep up with what's current. And CSS is definitely current. Not bleeding-edge, but pretty mainstream now, so here we go. So far I only have minimal stuff up here. But having a personal website is all about having fun and learning and experimenting, and sharing your journey with whoever wants to take a peek at it. So peek away. And as always, suggestions, criticisms, and downright abuse are welcome.