words are inadequate

Posted on May 23, 2004 by acb

to express my oipinion of CSS positioning rules. All I want is a box with two other boxes inside it, one at each side. This is how the two books on the right are displayed if you are using sensible software. Works perfectly well in IE; works perfectly well in Opera. Firefox insists on displaying the two inner boxes one above the other. I have failed to fix this for an hour now. Almost any other use of this hour would have been more profitable. In future, Mozilla users who don’t like the layout will be invited, in the spirit of open source, to code up themselves something which their browser can display as intended.

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8 Responses to words are inadequate

  1. Simon S says:
    May 23, 2004 at 11:31 pm

    The nature of this problem eluded me until I realised I had to look at your index page rather than the archive entry. I use Opera 95% of the time, and Netscape hardly ever any more.

    You may not want to know that on my screen using any browser the helmintholog graphic is truncated at the right hand end. I am displaying 1024 × 768.

  2. quinn says:
    May 24, 2004 at 3:27 am

    i feel so guilty for bringing it up in the first place! the graphic is the main thing i noticed.

    i think that’s coming from the overflow: hidden; value in #banner. at least, the problem goes away when i comment that out.

    i so understand where you are coming from, css has become such a bloody dark art, and in that way it has failed. it’s really unfortunate. they are the worst of all possible formatting tools, except tables.

    danny sent me the edit styles bookmarklet, which is a wonderful help:
    http://www.squarefree.com/bookmarklets/webdevel.html

    it throws up a winder and lets you see the effect of changes on the fly. you have to copy paste it out of the window to save it, but it’s still a lifesaver.

  3. Andrew says:
    May 24, 2004 at 10:13 am

    Topstyle, the almost incredibly wonderful topstyle, does this kind of live previewing, and I write everything in it. But it can’t for some reason use the gecko previewing engine. It’s supposed to be able to. There is a file you can downloaded to make it do so. I have seen it preview in Gecko in the past. But with Firefox 0.8 — why, you guessed! — it doesn’t bloody work any longer.

  4. qB says:
    May 24, 2004 at 10:20 am

    In Safari the books are one above the other. I shall display my total ignorance of all things to do with anything by suggesting that maybe you could just put a little table in there? With one tr and two tds and a bit of padding and spacing?

    I’ll stick to the day job, then.

  5. el Patron says:
    May 24, 2004 at 11:20 am

    I know I could do it with a table. That’s the whole joke about CSS snobs. But the (innumerable) books all say it can be done without tables. The specs say it can be done without tables. In many browsers it works fine without tables.

    [raises blodstained head from the table one last time. Looks around, then slumps with a final, despairing back onto the keyboard.]

  6. el Patron says:
    May 24, 2004 at 1:39 pm

    oh, I see what happened: there were “<thud>”s between every sentence in that as originally posted, and the software stripped them all out. Apparently you can’t even beat your head on the table in a rage on standards-compliant sites.

  7. rupert says:
    May 25, 2004 at 9:55 am

    I was reading about that in the Express. New HSE rules, apparently. All the fault of the Europeans. If you insist on including anglebracket thud closeanglebracket tags in your code, your server has to send a message to Brussels and a little man will come out, inject you with Chimay and drag you off to a home. Style sheets can no longer cascade, they must gently descend while flashing a yellow light and sounding a klaxon, and tables are to have rounded edges.

    All to be paid for by the plain people of England through a new property tax. Joan Collins is furious, and Jeremy Clarkson’s planning a TV series about it.

    R

  8. el Patron says:
    May 25, 2004 at 10:25 am

    I now I ought to blog abot this, but I heard yesterday that mortgage rates are going to rise, and I think it’s given me cancer instead.

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