Sorry to be a pain. If I’ve got this right, the test blog should look exactly the same as it did last time you checked; it’s just much more intelligently designed. Or possibly more evolved.
I think it’s nearly ready for submission, now.
Guy #1: Dude, all this Groundhog Day shit is bullshit. It is impossible for something to not have a shadow. All things that move have shadows. If it don’t move, then it don’t have a shadow. Groundhog Day is bullshit.
Guy #2: Dude, you’re a dumbass. Only living things have shadows.
from OHiNY
[Sorry, I know most of you won’t be even slightly interested in this]
I’ve just had a major intellectual breakthrough about how CSS positioning works. Or, to put it another way, I’ve just realised that I’ve been being very stupid for a very long time.
I’ve read lots and lots of online CSS tutorials, and either none of them made it clear, or I was being dense. They often suggest that ‘absolute’ positioning is measured from the containing block – or sometimes they say that it’s measured from the edge of the browser window. The containing block theory clearly didn’t work. The screen approach seemed to work most of the time, but it meant that you couldn’t, for example, center the page on the screen if you were using absolute positioning – because it would always be a fixed distance from one of the window-edges.
In fact, absolute positions are measured from the nearest containing block in the hierarchy which has a ‘position’ property specified as something other than static. So if you just set the page’s ‘position’ tag to ‘relative’, you can then move the page around as much as you want and all things you’ve positioned with ‘absolute’ measurements will follow it. Similarly, you can take one area of the page and set it to {position:relative} and then use absolute positioning within that area.
I assumed, you see, that you’d only set the position property if you wanted to change the position of the block in question, not as a way of affecting the blocks contained within it. Now I know better. The CSS positioning system is suddenly much easier to use and much saner. I can’t believe I’ve been struggling along trying to design table-free webpages without grasping this; and I can’t believe that none of the tutorials I read made it clearer, since it’s the single most important thing to understand if you want to use CSS positioning.
I mentioned earlier that I thought it might be fun to enter a WordPress theme competition. Well, I’ve got a theme worked up that I’m thinking of entering. You can see it in action on my test blog here. As you can see, it’s a two-column variation on the Swifts theme with a different picture.
I’ve checked it on Firefox, Safari and IE for Mac, and they all look basically OK, but I haven’t checked it on Windows at all. So I’d be grateful if anyone using IE, Firefox or Opera on Windows could take a look and poke around, see if there’s anything you think might be wrong, and let me know. Cheers.
EDIT: well, I’ve just tried it on Opera for Mac, and it doesn’t work right. It’s startling how no two browsers seem to render the same bit of code in the same way.
EDIT: OK, I’ve sorted that out. Further comments still appreciated. If something looks wrong, it would help if you could give me a screenshot of it so I can see what the problem is.
The more time I spend thinking about web design, the more easily irritated I am. Take Spork. Look at that lovely, stylish, front cover: it manages to have something of a print aesthetic without being heavy-handed, and it’s clear, simple and eye-catching. Classy.
But then you click on the names, and the links open as new windows. Like I don’t have enough windows cluttering up my screen all the time as it is. Look, I never, ever want any link I click to open as a new screen unless I specifically tell it to.
And you just know that they’re only done it that way because someone didn’t want navigation buttons cluttering up his nice neat page layouts. Humph.