pride
[may 23 2004, 21:59]
it's done. finally. my first website to pass each and every w3c-test there is. phew.
it all started when... well, basically when i created this version of the site. it was all really quick and dirty stuff by the time i started and, well, i never got around to cleaning up a little. this is why the popup remained.
i hate popups. ever since i knew how to do them, i avoided them whenever i could. of course, the 'other sites must be opened in new windows'-policy is alright. it's some kind of image. something that's not done by the same guy, something that doesn't deal with the same subject or something that just is somehow different, shouldn't be opened in the same browser-window. that's alright.
but other popups...
that's why, yesterday, i started to revamp everything. visually, little has changed. there is a new starting page (which features the really cute <fieldset>-tags) and some minor corrections in terms of content and design.
still, the most massive task remained the popup.
i wanted my site centered. letmebreathe should work with almost any kind of resolution (yes, even on a pda or a cellphone - although i doubt anyone will ever... well, however!). it should be centered just because it looks good. and that turned out to be the main problem.
centering things isn't hard, you would think. just some <center>-tags around it and you're done. but another thing i wanted for this update was w3c-compatibility. i wanted this site to be... right. that's why it became a lot mroe complicated than that.
centering divs horizontally isn't that hard. just put a
then there came the task of centering everything vertically.
in ye olde days, we used to center stuff by creating a huge table which consumed the entire browser-window. we than created one cell inside that table, made it center the content (horizontally and vertically) and put everything inside that table. w3c wasn't happy, they didn't allow
so, i decided, just grab a table, put everything in but use stylesheets to make it big.
long story short: in the end i had to tell all the standards-compliant browsers (which were not in so -called quirks-mode [which basically means, 'dear browser, do what you think is appropriate and don't stick to what i tell you']) to make the document as high as possible. that's because in standards-mode, browsers only take up as much space for an element as is really required. that includes the body, basically the entire page. thus, nothing was really, reliably centered...
in the end (after about two hours of research) it worked. more or less. i still tweak mozilla and the ie a little because both have their own way of dealing with things. i completely ignored opera (on purpose) because i believe it is a crappy, horribly broken browser. believe me.
the other adaptions were, seen as a whole, really marginal. turning all the <br>s into <br />s (because i wanted xhtml), the same with <img> and <meta>-tags... no big problem. i decided to clean up the stylesheet as well and what i got was something i didn't really think about when i decided to rebuild the page: print layouts.
if you print anything from this page, it'll look... good. not great (i'm still working on everything) but it'll look good. that's because your (hopefully standards-compliant) browser will use another stylesheet for printing than it does for showing you the site. that's really cute and allows me to add further stylesheets for handhelds and cellphones. somewhen. when i've got time.
so, the rebuilding process is now - more or less - complete and has, as usual, gone with lots of swearing and cursing (this time towards the ie- and opera-makers again), still, i think, the reward is nice.
i always wanted those two little buttons ;o)
charon
ps: and, if you're thinking why i wrote that incredibly boring, geekish stuff, i can tell you that i don't know either... i just had to talk about it and, well, it can't have been that boring, otherwise you wouldn't be reading this, would you? he? see?
song of the day: aqualung - strange and beautiful (i'll put a spell on you) - anyone got an album?
it all started when... well, basically when i created this version of the site. it was all really quick and dirty stuff by the time i started and, well, i never got around to cleaning up a little. this is why the popup remained.
i hate popups. ever since i knew how to do them, i avoided them whenever i could. of course, the 'other sites must be opened in new windows'-policy is alright. it's some kind of image. something that's not done by the same guy, something that doesn't deal with the same subject or something that just is somehow different, shouldn't be opened in the same browser-window. that's alright.
but other popups...
that's why, yesterday, i started to revamp everything. visually, little has changed. there is a new starting page (which features the really cute <fieldset>-tags) and some minor corrections in terms of content and design.
still, the most massive task remained the popup.
i wanted my site centered. letmebreathe should work with almost any kind of resolution (yes, even on a pda or a cellphone - although i doubt anyone will ever... well, however!). it should be centered just because it looks good. and that turned out to be the main problem.
centering things isn't hard, you would think. just some <center>-tags around it and you're done. but another thing i wanted for this update was w3c-compatibility. i wanted this site to be... right. that's why it became a lot mroe complicated than that.
centering divs horizontally isn't that hard. just put a
margin-left: auto and margin-right: auto into the stylesheet and you're done. don't be tricked by text-align, that's for inline stuff like text and images, not for the block itself.then there came the task of centering everything vertically.
vertical-align wasn't right and nothing i tried worked. but then...in ye olde days, we used to center stuff by creating a huge table which consumed the entire browser-window. we than created one cell inside that table, made it center the content (horizontally and vertically) and put everything inside that table. w3c wasn't happy, they didn't allow
height for a table.so, i decided, just grab a table, put everything in but use stylesheets to make it big.
long story short: in the end i had to tell all the standards-compliant browsers (which were not in so -called quirks-mode [which basically means, 'dear browser, do what you think is appropriate and don't stick to what i tell you']) to make the document as high as possible. that's because in standards-mode, browsers only take up as much space for an element as is really required. that includes the body, basically the entire page. thus, nothing was really, reliably centered...
in the end (after about two hours of research) it worked. more or less. i still tweak mozilla and the ie a little because both have their own way of dealing with things. i completely ignored opera (on purpose) because i believe it is a crappy, horribly broken browser. believe me.
the other adaptions were, seen as a whole, really marginal. turning all the <br>s into <br />s (because i wanted xhtml), the same with <img> and <meta>-tags... no big problem. i decided to clean up the stylesheet as well and what i got was something i didn't really think about when i decided to rebuild the page: print layouts.
if you print anything from this page, it'll look... good. not great (i'm still working on everything) but it'll look good. that's because your (hopefully standards-compliant) browser will use another stylesheet for printing than it does for showing you the site. that's really cute and allows me to add further stylesheets for handhelds and cellphones. somewhen. when i've got time.
so, the rebuilding process is now - more or less - complete and has, as usual, gone with lots of swearing and cursing (this time towards the ie- and opera-makers again), still, i think, the reward is nice.
i always wanted those two little buttons ;o)
charon
ps: and, if you're thinking why i wrote that incredibly boring, geekish stuff, i can tell you that i don't know either... i just had to talk about it and, well, it can't have been that boring, otherwise you wouldn't be reading this, would you? he? see?
song of the day: aqualung - strange and beautiful (i'll put a spell on you) - anyone got an album?