I didn’t have much work to do at work yesterday, and so I took the opportunity to dive into Designing Without Tables Using Css (site). Now this book has it’s problems (namely that it’s actual lack of content when it comes to advanced designing without tables using css *grin*) but I needed to brush up on all of my CSS knowledge. So the first few chapters quickly go through the basics of CSS, which I skimmed through mostly, but I did pick up a few things a jot down a few notes. Once I got to chapter 5, where they give you an example of a site identical in design as princessleia.com, and teach you how to do it in divs. I pulled out my browser and trusty vim and started doing some CSS. The objective here was to make the page look the same in divs as in tables. Well I worked on this for quite some time, the book was helpful, but there are some issues with the placement of the footer that really started bugging me. One fix is a javascript hack, another is a different way of formatting the divs (which I should probably explore more throughly). Neither of these sounded like a good fix though. When I resize the browser the divs act in an unpredicatible manner. And I opened my page in Netscape 4, it completely broke. I’m going to need to do more searching online for solutions, maybe this book just doesn’t take certain elements into consideration, I’ll need to look into it more.
I’m really not happy so far with my experience with divs. I’ll do some more looking into it, but I’ll really need to take a step back and evaluate what I really am trying to acomplish. Tables are bad for accessibility, and as someone who has always taken pride in my pages being viewable to anyone anywhere, I was saddened by the realization that it’s probably a pain for a blind person to see. But now with this new hatred of divs by Netscape I’m going to need to work really hard to get this to work. Maybe I’ll redesign my site. I think it needs it, it’s had the same basic 3 column layout forever. And if all else fails I can keep the tables design, it works great everywhere I’ve tried, except for the ease of accessibility, and how many people really go to my site with a screen reader? And if they do don’t you think they’d be used to improper rendering and abuse of tables? But how many people really use netscape 4? We’ll see.
Now for more exciting stuff, new kitten pictures!
Caligula and his sister feeding.
10 week old Caligula
He’s so cutey! We get to pick him up in two weeks! Yay! I can’t wait.
Michael spent hours last night getting the caulking in the bathroom perfect. I must say it looks really great! The old caulking job was horrible, looked like someone had just smeared it around all the parts of the tub that needed it.
We took a nap yesterday evening because we were both sleepy, it was only for a couple hours, but I woke up from it around 11 completely awake. This probably means that despite all my attempts at becoming a normal person who is awake during the day I’m still nocturnal. I’m never as awake during the day as I felt last night! Sigh.
This afternoon we’re going to head out to Unos to have lunch/dinner with our friend Bob. We haven’t done that in a while, and with all these busy weekends, we could use a break.
I was thinking last night while lying in bed and trying to sleep about how much better I’m feeling now. We’re finally starting to get settled into our home, my work load has lessened a bit, we’re back online with an amazing net connection (using my irssi bot as an indicator, it hasn’t dropped at all in 2 weeks). I can work on my websites again, I can spend time talking to my friends again, even the few fr
iends I have “in real life” I spend more time with online than physically. Where would I be without the internet? Since the end of high school it’s completely shaped my life. Every state I moved to was at least partially because of someone else online, all my closest friends I met online before I met them in real life (if I met them in real life). And despite my lack of showing it while out with people, I’m quite a social butterfly, and I’m much happier when I have contact with my friends regularly like through IRC. How would I have regular contact with friends otherwise? Would I even be able to have the close friendships I have now? I think I’d be lonely.
Speaking of communicating with friends online, the irc server is doing very nice, right now:
[r2q5] -!- Current Global Users: 576 Max: 700
We finally broke our 666 max user count that we had had for so long, unfortunately like last time it was because of a botnet. Luckily the botnet didn’t do any harm this time, it was probably just some person messing around. Still that 576 real users count is awsome! I think we did gain a few small pockets of people from mircx’s shutdown. It’s times like this of growth that are so exciting about having this irc server %)
I guess that’s it for now, I am going to go back to playing with divs for a while %) *wanders off*