My towel has CSS printed on it, and I'm throwing it in
My attempts to tame CSS have come to naught.
Faster than the French decided in June 1940 that sauerkraut really does go well with just about any meal, I have decided to give up the fight to make a CSS-only rounded button.
Well, it's not that bad, but for an old Ada hack, the state of CSS is very distressing.
Angry in the Great White North is morphing again. My attempt to run the tabs vertically worked reasonably well until I tried to fix the spacing between the tabs. Suddenly, Internet Explorer and Opera and Firefox were unable to agree on just what a margin or a padding value meant to a list item.
Tabs were stomping on top of each other and illegible or spaced so far apart that people with lower resolution monitors would be lucky to see three or four tabs.
So I gave up. Folded like a cheap suit.
For the record, Opera and Firefox looked the same, but Internet Explorer was always the odd man out.
I grabbed a simpler tab-like implementation, which seems to work well in all browsers. The colours are all wrong, but they'll be corrected once I've had a chance to finish off the coding.
The compromise is that the tabs are more button-like than tab-like. I was using margins and borders to create the rounded tab effect originally, but lining up the elements turned into a nightmare. Lining up the borders of the tabs would cause the spacing between the tabs to alter, for no apparent reason. And the behaviour was different in each browser.
I was also committed to not use Java to implement the button/tabs, but only CSS. It's still pure CSS, but a lot simpler CSS.
It shouldn't be this hard.
Back in the early 90s, I was working on military and space projects. The computer language we used was Ada. Ada was a beauty of a language. Strongly typed with near bulletproof semantics, it still is the language for safety critical systems.
But what made Ada such a powerful tool was not the language itself, but the validation facility. The Ada Compiler Validation Capability, or ACVCs, were designed to strike terror into the hearts of compiler writers. Well, maybe not terror, but the ever growing body of static and dynamic test cases had to be properly handled by the Ada compiler in order for an Ada compiler to be labeled compliant. Every year, the ACVCs grew in size, and compilers had to revalidated. The ACVCs covered both verifying that the Ada compiler properly compiled and executed good Ada programs, but also that it rejected programs with errors in them, and with reasonable error messages. Every subtle semantic rule and interaction was exercised by the ACVCs.
Why don't we have something like the ACVCs for CSS? Why is it that Internet Explorer (now at version 7), Opera (version 9), and Firefox (version 2) can't agree how to render anything but the most vanilla CSS directives? If we could have a validation capability...but then the ACVCs had the US Department of Defense behind it. I suppose that Microsoft could simply ignore any attempt to create a certification for a browser's ability to handle CSS, since there is no one large consumer of CSS that can insist on it.
Unless of course, Microsoft itself created a CSS validation capability...now there's an idea.
I guess we're stuck with inconsistent implementations of CSS. That's too bad. Too much time and effort is spent on presentation instead of content. I know because I've generated no fresh content in a week. Well, back to real writing. I'll fix the colours on the weekend and put this user interface nonsense on the shelf for a while. Maybe until the next version of IE comes out.
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Comments
I trust you used the CSS validation service from w3c.org?
I'm sick to death of IE's haphazard interpretation of XHMTL and CSS. I don't even try to support that flaky POS. you would think that given the opportunity to release a brand new version they would have at least tried to make it standards compliant.
Iframe is deprecated, but that's the only clean way to import an external document into a page for IE, completely disregarding the way the object tag is supposed to work. On saskblogs aggregator, for the news import, I just tell IE users to download mozilla.
Cheers,
lance
Posted by: at December 22, 2006 12:21 PM
I must say I really like the format you have now. Especially the colours, which are various shades of blue on my screen -very easy on the eyes.
I took an immediate dislike to your last setup, but as I've stated before, I'm here for the excellent content and commentary, so I figured it was worth it if it meant that more people had better access to the site.
You do whatever you have to do.
Keep up the good work.
Posted by: up north at December 22, 2006 03:06 PM
ADA was my favorite too.
Posted by: murray at December 23, 2006 06:45 AM
You liked the blue? Really? I thought people would hate it. How many people liked the blue?
Posted by: Steve Janke at December 23, 2006 09:58 AM
Blue is a soothing colour. That's a good thing given the percentage of the articles here that are meant to get us riled up (imagine what our posts'd be like if your site was done in shades of red and violent oranges!).
Personally I did find it much easier on the eyes, although this grey isn't bad either.
And blue after all IS the colour of the CPC.
I'd vote for shades of blue -perhaps with a red border on Fridays (just kidding -I imagine that's a lot of extra work)- but I'm more of a lurker than a poster so I will defer to the will of the majority.
Posted by: up north at December 23, 2006 11:45 AM
I'm getting a grey background, which is OK but my eyes are fried from staring at monitors since 1978, so I actually like a white background.
I liked the cream background you had when you first started the redesign too.
I guess I missed the blue, I've been busy for a few days.
Esthetically, I like this layout the best so far.
As Up North said, I'm here for the content, not eye candy, but a good layout certainly helps.
Posted by: Selma at December 24, 2006 12:52 AM
Steve, of course MickeySoft is the odd man out: They designed it that way, damn their black souls. That's why any Web site written to look good in IE looks horrible in anything else. I promise that Mozilla and Netscape didn't add a "Microsoft compatibility" option because they wanted the extra work.
Posted by: SDN at December 25, 2006 11:35 AM
I gave up trying to accommodate IE in any web page. If you're running a windows platform on broadband it only takes about 2 minutes to download and install Firefox, and it'll display pretty much all it gets. If the tweek is easy for IE I'll do it, otherwise IE users can fumble around to their heart's content. Even FF's updates go smooth, something Microslop never figured out (Apparently the new Vista is as flea-ridden as any other MSOS). While IE may still drive the user percentage, those users are of little intellectual interest to me in any case, otherwise, the'd be using Firefox....
Posted by: Skip at December 28, 2006 01:29 PM
...actually green is known soothing colour...as in jade green, not puke/lime green.
I'm using Firefox and can't see a thing...basically the whole site is a dull grey (old 404 error code) colour.
Buttons on the left are light grey on grey.
Get back that whiteish background please. If you want you can use the crushed paper background I use on my site.
Posted by: tomax7 at December 31, 2006 05:09 PM
 
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