Here’s a sneak peek of a problem I’m having with the site redesign in IE 6 on Windows. It works fine on the other browsers I’ve tried (mostly readable in NS 4, ugly in Mac iCab but that’s OK), but on IE 6 it starts doing funky things with border and text position. I’ve been over the stylesheet lots of times and can’t find the issue…. Interestingly it only does it on the second and subsequent news items.
Day: March 14, 2002
More killer CSS resources
I’m very taken with A List Apart. They really have the sweet spot between coding and development—and between what the CSS spec says and how it is implemented. One complaint: there’s a lot of value in their series on transitioning to CSS from older forms of design (tables), but it was written in 1999 and a lot of the practical issues they mention have evolved with Netscape and IE 6 on the table.
Yesterday: Heads down in CSS
I spent all yesterday (when I wasn’t in class) working on the CSS redesign of the site. I was about ready to give up on being able to view it in Netscape 4 until I found this site, which offers a free stylesheet for a fluid three-column layout (fluid meaning it resizes to fill the available browser width).
I had to tweak it a bit because of the Manila calendar. Manila automatically renders the calendar as a table, so it doesn’t resize. This is a problem with small browser width as it extends past the edge of the navigation div. I had to make the left navigation fixed width to solve the problem. This in turn meant the middle and right divs overlap at some smaller browser widths. I’ll do some work in 800×600 today to see if I can isolate the problem.
But most of the structural work is done. Now I can move on to aesthetics — colors, border widths, font leading — oh yeah, you can do leading, aka line height, in CSS. This old digital typographer is thrilled.