Teaching blog
Posted on December 09, 2002 @ 13:50 in Research
Eew... it's been an awfully long time since I posted: a week! End of the year business, deadlines approaching (or having passed with a whoosh), preparations for teaching a course in the new year.
I spend most of yesterday afternoon working on the layout of the blog I have set up for the students of my course next trimester. Have a peek at the teaching blog and let me know if it somehow displays strangely for you. Not everything is functional yet, most links are still going nowhere and the posts are just filler ;-) The design is based almost entirely on percentages and should resize perfectly with screen size (tested from 640x480 to 1600x1200) and should respond well to changing the font size in your browser. Of course, tested with different browsers: Mozilla 1.1/1.2, IE6win and Opera 6. I'm thinking of trying to add Netscape 4 compatibility as a test later, but let me know if this also works on Macs and Unix/Linux, because I took some, so far hypothetical, precautions to have it display okay there as well.
Actually, most of the layout was already done and I really spend yesterday afternoon trying to work around a margin/padding bug in IE6win. It's not a major bug, but I've tried everything I could think of and the only thing that happened was that things got worse and worse in IE. The sign of a solid browser is that you can use different approaches (put margins, paddings and assorted other layout stuff in different places) and still achieve exactly the same layout. Mozilla does this perfectly, but if you start shifting around margins and paddings IE just totally looses it.
In terms of rendering it should not matter whether I give a heading a 1% bottom padding or the following paragraph a 1% top padding, but for IE that matters a lot. Mozilla (and Opera btw) simply render exactly the same 1% gap between the one and the other, but IE starts shifting elements around the screen when you hover over them or simply misplaces them altogether when you move the 1% padding from one element to the other. It's so amazingly frustrating, because you know you're writing decent code and this one bug prevents your design from looking pixel perfect and you simply can't find a way to work around it... arggh!
Comments and Trackbacks
No comments or trackbacks for this entry yet.
Post a comment
Comments and trackbacks have been closed on this site. My apologies.
Since MT-Blacklist inexplicably stopped working I had no other recourse than close comments and trackbacks to stop the spam. I've been meaning to correct this for quite a while, but life got in the way... in a good way I should add.