OddThinking

When are you getting rid of the horizontal scroll bar visible in Firefox and Camino (but not Safari as it turns out) ?

When CSS works as advertised! Every time I try to debug CSS, I retire hurt. I decide to spend the same time writing some content instead.

I am strongly considering returning to the bad old days of table-based formatting. A horrible violation of the content/style dichotomy, but it works across browsers.

Silly Julian, why’d you use absolute positioning for such a trivial task?

Here’s a patch to fix your CSS:


--- style.css.old 2005-11-20 00:20:44.000000000 +0100
+++ style.css 2005-11-20 00:24:32.000000000 +0100
@@ -111,9 +111,7 @@

.menucolumn
{
– position: absolute;
– top : 0;
– left: 0;
+ float: left;
width: 140pt;
font-size: 80%;
padding-bottom: 0.2em;
@@ -167,10 +165,8 @@

.contentcolumn
{
– position: relative;
– left: 140pt;
+ margin-left: 140pt;
padding-left: 30pt;
– padding-right: 145pt;

    background-image: url('content-bkgrnd.gif');
    background-repeat: repeat-y;

Well, it would be, if <code> actually worked.

why’d you use absolute positioning for such a trivial task?

Because I am a CSS newbie, who is constantly out of his depth, and writes CSS by taking sample-code and adding trial-and-error.

Thank you very much for your efforts. I hope to to use them soon, but there are a few other things I want to do first.

My project plan:

1. Change the navigation to emphasize excerpts and Next/Prev links (done)

2. Change the beautiful colour scheme into one that is more boring, but less offensive to the readers.

3. Remove the unnecessary Header tags from the theme.

4. Investigate Aristotle’s relative-position suggestion to help the Firefox readers like Alastair.

5. Work out how to gently rib silly Aristotle, because his site‘s CSS complete fails to load in IE.

6. Migrate all blog entries away from MarkDown, which should enable easier editing in Semagic and remove the mystical comment corruptions (like the <code> complaint, above).

7. Blog about the process.

Now that you have changed the colour-scheme and fixed some padding issues around the back/next links, let me say nice work! My only gripe is the royal blue in the left margin is a bit intense for my poor eyes. Also, you might want to fix how the top heading box lines up with the article title (more CSS hackery I’m afraid, but it should be a little easier now, with the pointers Aristotle gave you).

I am hurtling along my project plan much faster than I anticipated.

Change the beautiful colour scheme into one that is more boring, but less offensive to the readers.

Done! May need some tightening up of the styles related to the Democracy plug-in, but I’ll fix that next time I actually use it.

Remove the unnecessary Header tags from the theme.

Done!

Investigate Aristotle’s relative-position suggestion to help the Firefox readers like Alastair.

Done! Thanks, Aristotle, your suggestions worked a dream.

Work out how to gently rib silly Aristotle, because his site’s CSS complete fails to load in IE.

Done!

Migrate all blog entries away from MarkDown, which should enable easier editing in Semagic and remove the mystical comment corruptions (like the <code> complaint, above).

What, you had Markdown available all along? That was never mentioned anywhere! Plus, your live preview never rendered Markdown. May I mention that I find live previews horribly annoying? This being unable to show you the precise rendering of the result is a major reason. The AJAX Comment Preview plugin OTOH is awesome. All this time, you had a cool feature, and noone knew it.

Work out how to gently rib silly Aristotle, because his site’s CSS complete fails to load in IE.

Huh? The CSS should be the least of your troubles. :-) The entire site is all application/xhtml+xml because it’s Real XHTML, and I want it parsed with “draconian” rules. (Serving XHTML as text/html is considered [pick deprecative lingo here].) Since IE does not understand application/xhtml+xml, it gives people a Save as dialog instead of showing them anything. And if I was conducting business with the site, I might even care about that. :-)

(I have long intended to test an idea by which it could be rendered by IE. However, I have no copy of Windows, I’m not sure I’d even want to install it if I had one, and getting close enough to a Windows-infested computer for long enough to conduct my experiments has not been any sort of priority.)

Aristotle,

(Based on your blog I am assuming you are not a wordpress user, apologies if you already know this)

IMHO this is one of the biggest problems in WordPress. Markdown can be used, but it is all or nothing proposition. Basically it’s turned on for all posts and comments, or it off. And when it’s on, there is no indication to the commenters, as you just found out. Most of the time this is OK due to the relatively forgiving nature of Markdown, but not always.

Lets hope that the next version of wordpress does something better here.

And yes AJAX Comment Preview is excellent, but unfortunately it conflicts with WP-Hashcash (the spam protection plugin).

Aristotle,

your live preview never rendered Markdown

Yes, this is one of the reasons that I have now moved away from MarkDown.

That was never mentioned anywhere!

Yep, that was another reason!

I believe that the Live Comment Preview should work better now. I’ll be keeping an eye on it. (In fact, I am even as I write this! The new style for blockquotes seems to be handled better too.)

If it continues to work well, I won’t upgrade to the AJAX solution. If not, I’ll take another look.

Alastair,

Markdown can be used, but it is all or nothing proposition. Basically it’s turned on for all posts and comments, or it off.

It was only yesterday, during the process of removing MarkDown, I discovered that there’s a hack to turn it off for comments!

Here’s the relevant quote from the PHP MarkDown Home Page:

By default, the Markdown plugin applies to both posts and comments on your WordPress weblog. To deactivate one or the other, edit the $md_wp_posts or $md_wp_comments variable under the “WordPress settings” header at the start of the “markdown.php” file.

Colour me impressed.

Yes I think they added that feature in a later version of the plugin.

I believe that the Live Comment Preview should work better now. I’ll be keeping an eye on it.

It just received Strike 1. I wrote a comment that included an alignment tag. Live Comment Preview displayed it perfectly, but once the comment was submitted, WordPress stripped away the “dangerous” tag, and the final comment was not correctly aligned.

Maintaing a formatter and surrounding infrastructure in one language on the server and another in another language on the client just has to be madness. That’s what the AJAX Preview does correctly. Plus it doesn’t make my textarea caret flicker nervously because the page DOM is being fiddled with as I type, nor does it make the page scrollbar jump around when I cut-and-paste a substantial section of my comment, causing the entire page to shift and buckle.

As far as I’m concerned, a Javascript-based Live Preview is no preview at all. There’s no guarantee that its view of the world will coincide with the server-side code’s. So I always ignore it.